The End of the Book (23 page)

“To marriage.” I raised a toast.

“Yes, singular, not plural.”

“I should object to that,” I said. “If it weren't for your third marriage, I wouldn't be here.”

“To your first, and my third. Cheers.”

We clinked glasses and sat down on sofas across from each other.

“Tell me why you're here?” my father asked.

I didn't want to get into it, but I was fresh from my banishment so couldn't help opening up. Though I didn't say we'd been thinking about moving to California, I did tell him that Dhara had been rejected for a job she'd wanted, and that I was on thin ice at work. I said that Lucy had re-surfaced after many years and I'd met her a couple of times behind Dhara's back. “Somehow she seems to know. Maybe she's been checking my cell phone,” I said.

My father sipped the wine. “Blech!” He winced.

I took a taste. “Seems fine to me. What do the sommeliers say? Earthy, with cherry and pepper notes?”

“I'll soldier on, then.” He swilled the wine in his glass. “Let this be our unholy communion.”

I didn't know what he meant by that, but later I'd remember it as a kind of harbinger. “Anyway, Dhara is thinking the worst. But I've done nothing wrong. Lucy and I have some common interests, that'll all. She's into books; I'm into books. There's not much more to it than that.”

“You're meeting an old flame, whom your wife wants expunged from the record, if not the earth,” my father said. “You're telling yourself she's a friend, forgetting how you used to lust after her with the desperation of a starving polar bear. And the memory of that lust or love, animus or intimacy or whatever mad concoction it was, still lies within you, like a dormant virus. Merely seeing her again might trigger a full-blown disease. Your wife has reason to worry.
You
should be more worried than you are.”

When I wasn't willing to admit that he might be right, he cited his own life as an example. “I had to reach this state of bodily and psychic deterioration to have the long view and be able to say I made mistakes. Someone else's story would have done me little good, but perhaps you will be wiser.”

Over the years I'd come to know the cautionary tale that was his life, but usually from my mother or relatives. I couldn't remember hearing it in my father's own voice, at least never at length. He had been at the University of Chicago for a year before coming home to marry his high-school sweetheart in Marinette, Wisconsin, the summer he turned nineteen. He and Gladys lived in Chicago through college, and he stayed in the city another four years writing catalogue copy for Montgomery Ward, just around the river bend from this apartment. In 1957 they moved to Ann Arbor, where he enrolled in the graduate literature program at the University of Michigan, and within three years Gladys had given birth to Michael. It was around this time that my father fell in with the Students for a Democratic Society, who were just springing up on campus. Their internal education secretary was a political science master's student from New York named Rachel Gold. She smoked Tiparillos and kept a copy of C. Wright Mills's “Letter to the New Left” in the pocket of her thrift-store blazers. When my father got his first tenure-track job he left his wife and son and set up house with Rachel a short walk from the Oberlin College campus. “But don't cry for Gladys,” he said. “She and Michael were better off without me.” They moved home to northern Wisconsin, Gladys settled down with a paper-mill worker, and Michael grew up plotting his escape from the same small town his father had once fled.

Rachel would come to know a similar restlessness. In 1966 she became pregnant with Eric, and a few months later married my father at the Lorain County courthouse. After the positive reception of
Sherwood Anderson: Volume One
, she made him go on the market. “I was happy at Oberlin—best job, best students I ever had. We lived forty miles from Clyde, Ohio, Anderson's hometown. Even in 1968, with the world blowing up, I could still feel what it must have been like to live in a place like Winesburg a hundred years before. Maybe I dug in against the pull of Rachel's wanting to get to the action.” But the best he could do was Indiana University. And Bloomington was no Berkeley.

Rachel lasted a year and a half in Indiana. “She brought the war to the home front, all right,” my father said. “You should have heard the way that woman could curse and carry on. She was a hard-liner, and I was a floater. She wanted me to do teach-ins, join the strikes and protest marches, and when I would only go so far she called me a closet conservative.” He met my mother at the IU library, where she worked in Special Collections, and though he didn't say as much, I was thinking she provided a refuge from the Rachel wars. Unlike Gladys, she had an advanced degree and was devoted to books; unlike Rachel, she understood the Midwest and could see both sides of an issue. Her temperament, too, fell somewhere in between, and for a while she provided a grounding force. Not the “twin flame” of my father's revisionist memory—she was sensible, orderly, repressed; he was obsessive, scattered, unrestrained—but the best match he found in a checkered romantic career.

The marriage lasted longer than any other: twelve years. I was born in 1976, the country's bicentennial, Sherwood Anderson's centennial, and the high point, my father claimed, in my parents' married life. Around fifth grade I started acting up in class and spending a good part of the day out in the hall. I didn't remember why I'd chosen that year for insurgency, but my father reminded me that 1986 was when a twenty-three-year-old graduate student named Sarah Roselli, “a dead-ringer for Rachel, with that same wildness about her,” took his “Origins of Modernism” class. “I was fifty-five, same age as my father when he died of a heart attack unloading lumber at the Marinette docks. I'd been working on
Sherwood Anderson: Volume Two
for nearly twenty years, and I was wearing the golden handcuffs of tenure, marriage, and family. And I kid you not: on a chain around her neck Sarah wore a golden key.”

My father's star had faded long before. He had the worst teaching evaluations among the literature faculty; he hadn't presented a paper or gone to a meeting in a decade. A traditionalist, he was on the losing end of the culture wars within the department, and the younger faculty saw in his affair with a graduate student a chance to pillory a member of the old guard. They had taken the fight all the way to the Standing Committee on Faculty Misconduct when Sarah urged him to hedge his bets and apply to other universities. Central Illinois made an offer; Sarah promised to follow him to Normal; and once again he chose to start over. But that summer, after my mother and I had packed the house and moved to Indianapolis, Sarah left a farewell note, moved back to her parents' in the Chicago suburbs, and eventually joined the Peace Corps. “Served me right,” he said. “Worst mistake I ever made.”

After we finished the bottle of wine, he turned in. I tried calling Dhara, but she wouldn't answer. I turned off the light in my father's apartment and looked across the balcony toward Dhara's and my place. I watched her go into the kitchen and make a cup of tea, work on her computer for a while. I tried calling again; she lifted the phone, saw it was me, put it back on her desk. When she went to sleep I lay down on my father's yard-sale sofa, which still smelled faintly of a stranger's dog, and watched the lights of the city play across the ceiling.

I figured my punishment would last twenty-four hours, but by Sunday morning two nights had passed and my wife still wasn't speaking to me. I tried getting into our apartment, but she'd put the chain on, and wouldn't reply when I begged her to come to the door.

I called Lucy back that morning with no intention of going out with her, but we were catching up, having a casual conversation, when she mentioned she would be attending a fiction reading that night—“Kind of offbeat, might be fun” —and did I want to come along? I was annoyed with Dhara, who was always accusing
me
of overreacting, when
she
was the rigid, irrational one. I told Lucy if I could make it, I'd meet her at nine just inside the entrance of the bar. I did keep trying Dhara into the afternoon, and when she continued to ignore me, I sent a text:
I'm sorry. I'm ready to throw myself at your feet. But first, won't you unchain the door?
When she didn't reply, I sent another:
Please answer me. I love you. Let's go out to dinner and talk
. By late afternoon my patience had worn thin:
The punishment does not fit the crime. This isn't about me; it's about California. Seriously, can't you be reasonable?
Around seven o'clock, as I was getting ready to send another text, my father grabbed his valise off the desk and announced that he was going out to dinner.

“Would you like some company?” I asked.

“I'm meeting someone, as a matter of fact.”

“A woman?”

He laughed himself into a coughing fit. “You have quite a sense of humor,” he said. “I'm having dinner with a book collector. Our conversation would bore you.”

“At least let me walk you to the cab.”

Before I put him in the taxi, he shook my hand, held it for a surprisingly long moment, and said, “You're a good kid. If I haven't told you that before, shame on me, because it's true. Take care, won't you? Take good care of yourself, I mean.” He so rarely stumbled over his words that I felt at a loss, as well. “Okay,” I said, and as he was struggling into the backseat, I added, though he probably didn't hear me, “You, too.” I watched the cab disappear up State Street. My father's white hair floated like a low cloud in the corner of the window.

Lucy met me at the Speakeasy, a bar and event space in Ukrainian Village that was so dark I put my hand up to make sure I didn't run into something. We settled into a booth, and the waiter suggested a pitcher of Goose Island, the beer special that night. I hadn't ordered a pitcher since graduate school, but told him, “Why not?” The room was crowded, the house music too loud, and I had trouble hearing Lucy. I kept asking her to repeat herself, and often nodded when I had no idea what she was saying.

“I've never seen so many people at a fiction reading,” I all but yelled into her ear.

“I'm impressed that you can see at all.”

“I can't, but it's like being outside on a pitch-black night and hearing the cicadas. You don't have to see them to know they're everywhere.” The beer arrived, and I filled our plastic cups. “Maybe there's hope for our generation, after all.”

“We'll see,” Lucy said. She explained that “Lit Up” was part reading, part drinking game. Some in the crowd were literary, but most were here for the five-dollar pitchers. All kinds of writers—good and bad—from around the city came and put their names in a hat. The organizers picked three readers—randomly, or so they claimed—and each got up to thirty minutes. “I don't know why people want to put themselves through it,” she said, “but the drinking part goes like this: Anytime you hear a cliché or stereotype, you're supposed to take a sip of beer.”

“So the worse the writer, the drunker you get?”

“That's the idea,” she said. “One reason I wanted to come is that lately they've been getting ringers. A National Book Award finalist who lives on the North Side got up there a couple weeks ago, and hardly anyone drank through his entire reading.”

“I'm surprised he didn't get booed for letting their beer get warm.”

“But how better to win nonreaders over to books than showing a captive audience what great writing sounds like?”

Soon a spotlight fell over the fedora-wearing emcee, who laid out the ground rules and introduced the first reader. By the time he sat down, our pitcher was empty and we'd ordered another. How he'd managed to pack so many animal-related clichés into one story that wasn't a beast fable was a feat in itself. I drank to
elephant in the room, fighting like cats and dogs, frog in his throat, hog heaven, took the bull by the horns, ate like a horse, wolf in sheep's clothing, every dog has his day
, and the coup de grâce:
hotter than a fox in a firestorm
. Before the second reader came on, Lucy leaned so close that her mouth touched my ear as she said, “If the next guy is that bad, I'll be drunk as a skunk.”

We laughed, but should have been worried, because the second pitcher was gone by the end of reader two. Her story, set mostly at a hospital over the month the protagonist's mother is in a coma, featured a sampler of TV-movie tropes: the arrogant doctor, the sadistic nurse, the bratty kid sister, the midlife-crisis father, the degenerate boyfriend. The story ended with a turn that would have made O. Henry blush: the coma victim waking up and saying that what pulled her through was hearing the words, “Be positive.” The nurse had the final line: “Ha!” she exclaimed. “That was just me telling the doctor your blood type:
B positive
.”

By the last reader we were too buzzed to order more beer. We did play along with cups of ice water, but the hush of the crowd and the lyric rhythm of her sentences made it clear that “Lit Up” was closing with a real writer. The story was told in a series of monologues, letters a woman wrote but never sent to the various love interests in her life. Piece by piece, a portrait emerges of an agoraphobe, holed up in her garden apartment checking job sites but applying to nothing, imagining whole lives with former lovers and various men she's met online. By the end—at some indeterminate time in the future—a family member she hasn't seen in years has come to check on her. The bell rings. But she's ill and bedridden now, under self-imposed house-arrest. The unsent letters pool on the floor beneath her. And we're left to wonder will she or won't she answer the door. I couldn't help thinking of George Willard's mother, drawing her final breaths in the last place she wanted to be.