Travel Writing Read online

  “Shit,” I thought.

  Then one day he said out of nowhere, “What kind of cigarettes do you smoke?”

  I pointed to the pack in front of me.

  “You ever smoke cigarettes in a hard pack?”

  “No.” I thought it an odd question.

  “Go buy yourself a hard pack of Virginia Slims. Put three hundred bucks in twenties in it. Leave it on the bar tomorrow afternoon.”

  I did it. I read my paper, drank my beer, and walked out leaving the tip and the cigarette box on the bar. I came back the next day and waited over an hour. I had to go to the bathroom and turn my tape over. I was wet under my arms. Finally I said, “Do you have something for me?”

  “Nope,” he answered.

  “What do you mean, ‘Nope’?”

  “I mean I don’t have anything for you,” he said.

  “You want me to come back tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Nope. I won’t have anything then, either. I told you: I’m not a drug dealer.” He smiled at me.

  “You are a drug dealer. You sold Lisa Kim drugs.”

  “I thought that’s what this might be about. You taping this, maybe? Let me get good and close and say this loud and clear. Ready? I am not a drug dealer. I did not sell Lisa Kim drugs. I did not give Lisa Kim drugs. I do not do drugs.”

  “Then give me my money back,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Nope’?”

  “I’m not going to give you your money back,” he said.

  “You’re kidding. You’re a thief,” I said.

  “There you go. I’m a thief, but I’m not a drug dealer, and now you know the difference. It’s a cheap lesson, really, and an important one for a guy like you. Might save your life someday. You don’t want to go fucking around with those guys. Now I think it’s time for you to go, and don’t come back, either. You’re getting to be a real pain in the ass.”

  There was nothing to say. I gathered my change and headed for the door. His last words to me were, “I thought the Virginia Slims box was a particularly nice touch, didn’t you?”

  7

  …

  The Long, Cold Spring

  THE PETER CAREY debacle was embarrassing, but not as much as I would have imagined. It was as if I had plumbed the depths of humiliation, and they weren’t all that deep. Besides, like Brueghel’s Icarus falling into the sea, no one even seemed to notice, and since I had something of a head of steam, a couple of days later I read over the notes I’d made on Annie Pritchard and took Art for another long walk. The more I thought about it, the more I came to feel that she had not known that Lisa was using heroin before we met. She might have discerned it, she might have deduced it, but she didn’t know it, and her pretending to proved to me only that she didn’t, and indicated she didn’t even suspect it. She wanted to never be surprised by anything, but she was covering; and if she didn’t know or at least suspect, then why not? She was the kind of person who would suspect, maybe know, something even if it were not true. Did this mean Lisa wasn’t using heroin? But we knew that she was.

  I went home and wrote Tanya:

  I am trying to find out who gave Lisa the drugs because I think that person was at least partly responsible for her death, but I’ve hit a dead end. Can you shed any light on this at all? Do you know of any friends or acquaintances, old or new, who might have given her the stuff? Do you know of anything curious or suspicious that took place in the last weeks or months of her life?

  Tanya, I know Lisa was difficult, and I know you have mixed feelings about her (I do, too), but I don’t believe she should have died. Help me if you can.

  It was Memorial Day weekend, and Art and I drove around the lake to my family’s summer home. It’s an old cottage built in 1908 on a high dune a quarter mile from and overlooking Lake Michigan near South Haven, Michigan. My grandfather, who was a Presbyterian minister and moved frequently in his career, bought it in 1926 and returned to it each summer. My father, who was also a minister and who also moved frequently, bought it from my grandfather. My mother still spends her summers there. My brother and sister-in-law spend vacations there, too.

  It is a simple house that is beautiful in its simplicity. Built on a hilltop out of cement blocks made with the sand dug to lay the foundation and molded on the site, the house is a thirty-foot square that is cut in half. One half is a living room, and the other is cut in half again into two bedrooms that no one sleeps in. This blockhouse is surrounded on all sides by a continuous screened porch (continuous except in one rear corner where two small side by side bathrooms are located) that is six feet wide on the three sides used for sleeping and twelve feet wide on the one used for living. There’s a fireplace and a skylight in the living room, a peaked roof made of exposed cedar shakes hand cut on the property from trees felled to clear the lot a hundred years ago, and a lower level beneath the wide porch that consists of a kitchen, a dining room, and a study all in a row with windows on three sides.

  I had come to open the cottage for the season. I had come alone; it was a long, cold spring, and Lydia had looked at the weather forecast and decided to stay home. Just as well; I needed some time to think about Lydia and me. Of course I didn’t do it. In fact, I avoided doing it all weekend long.

  I had come to this place, this summer village, every summer of my life; it’s the closest thing to true home for me. It is where I know Carolyn O’Connor and Steve Lotts from, and half a dozen important people in my life. Most people there know me and some like me; it is the place where I don’t need to explain very much. Once, years ago, during that summer I spent in England, I dragged David Lehman down to Bournemouth on a hot weekend. I did not know why until I got there, until I walked out to the end of the long town pier late at night, stood with my back to the land listening to two German guys playing a guitar and singing, and realized that I’d come to look at Lake Michigan.

  It was cool and drizzly, but I worked hard and kept warm. I washed and cleaned the fridge and all the kitchen cabinets, wiping away a winter’s worth of dust and mouse droppings, swept and scrubbed the tile floors on my hands and knees, washed windows, and when the porch had dried, I rolled out rugs, moved furniture, set up beds, and lugged mattresses.

  By late afternoon the weather had begun to clear. I put on a heavy sweater and a windbreaker, pulled up a big wicker chair to watch the sun play on the lake and drank a Belgian beer I had brought for the occasion. I was thinking about my father. He always took his vacation the month of August, and he worked every day of it painting, repairing, or building. We would say, “Jeez, Dad, some vacation.” But he would always say something about how working with his hands was therapy for him because he never got to do it. His one indulgence was a plunge into the lake just before dinner, just at this time of day. He would soap his body all over and swim hard out a hundred yards and back. Sometimes I went with him.

  Thinking there might be a sunset, I took Art down to the beach. Despite the late sunshine, the air was cold and the water colder. It would be weeks before anyone would swim in this lake. Even Art was content to wrestle a stick on the sand. We headed along the shore. O’Connor’s cottage was brightly lighted and full of people. Some of them were having drinks on the front deck in heavy sweaters and jackets. Someone called my name. It was Carolyn. She leaned over the railing to speak to me. “Where’s Lydia?”

  “She didn’t come. I’m just opening up the cottage.”

  “We’re having a wine tasting. Come join us.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Bunch of people I brought up from the city. You know some of them. Let me get you a glass.”

  I probably should have known that these people were going to piss me off because my mood had soured as the day had waned, and I was feeling a bit like Ishmael, ready to step into the street and knock people’s hats off, but I was enticed by the light and the warmth of the house and by the wine, as well. I stood at the back of the deck and watched the sun go down. I went ins
ide by the fire. A wry, slow-talking Hoosier I’d enjoyed a time or two in the past seemed to be performing tonight. I stood outside a group of people who kept turning their shoulders to me. Their gaiety seemed artificial, their wit acrid and sarcastic. I didn’t like it.

  I went into the kitchen. There was a little architect I vaguely knew sitting on the counter, one leg folded beneath him and a sweater tied loosely around his neck. He seemed to be with Carolyn. He was giving her and two other women instructions on how to drink wine. “Let’s see if it has legs,” he said. They all held their oversized glasses up to the light and swished the wine around in them.

  “Now, the bouquet,” he said. He held his glass beneath his nose and fanned the scent toward himself, then plunged his nose in. The others imitated him.

  “Christ,” I thought. I went out, found Art by the fire, put my glass down, and let myself out the front door. It closed and then opened again behind me.

  “Pete?” It was Carolyn.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I’m in a shitty mood.”

  “We’re going to have some dinner later,” she said.

  “No thanks.”

  “You okay?”

  “I’m okay.” I went home and opened a bottle of red wine of my own. I cooked some spaghetti carbonara thinking about Carolyn. I was disappointed in her; what was she doing with that prissy little phony? I was disappointed in myself. Why was I so black? I built a big fire, ate in front of it, finished the wine, and spent the rest of the evening listening to music and reading. I slept on the porch in the open air beneath lots of quilts and blankets. The next morning I lay in bed on the porch with Art curled beside me, reading for an hour, then took a very hot shower and started working. The hard work was done, and the urgency was gone. I played tunes and took my time. It was sunny and I worked outside. I raked leaves, swept the walks, swept and washed down the patio, put the patio furniture out. In the afternoon I moved inside. My mother had asked me to clean out my dad’s old storage closet, which we had all been avoiding since his death. It was stuffed with boxes, tools, and lots of personal junk, so I turned the Cubs game on the radio and opened the door.

  I thought it would be hard, but it wasn’t hard. It was nice. It was a lot like seeing him again. And there was all kinds of stuff in there: the world’s oldest chain saw, a World War I army helmet with mouse-eaten netting inside, three of the mice who had eaten it (one mummified and two skeletons), a wooden Don Budge tennis racket with a triangular opening in the neck (for aerodynamic effect? whip action?), an ancient unworn pair of tennis shoes still in their box, never even laced, pristine and brittle after however many Michigan winters, a white enamel bedpan connected somehow to my grandmother by a famous story I can’t remember, two moth-eaten squirrels stuffed and mounted on a shellacked tree branch. There was a pint of cherry vodka. There were about thirty mason jars of nails, screws, nuts, bolts and washers all neatly sorted and labeled, proving the irrelevance of saving things; I threw them all away. There were six plastic fireman hats purchased for some silliness or other, worn once, stacked and stuck away and four handmade coffee mugs wrapped in the South Haven Tribune dated August 1956; a gift never given? “And why not?” I wondered. There was a treasure trove of tools: hammers, screwdrivers, box wrenches, monkey wrenches, pliers, vise grips, chisels, a hand drill, a hacksaw, a level, and a rusted tape measure. And at the very back of the top shelf against the wall and wrapped in a single fold of canvas was a .22 caliber rifle with two boxes of cartridges. This last item quite surprised me; who could have put it there? My grandfather? One of my uncles? Surely not my father who had been so opposed to violence his whole life. But if he did not put it there, at least he had left it there, and against what? Raccoons? Nazis during the war? Angry blacks from Detroit or the South Side of Chicago? Intruders in the night? What secret fears had occupied his heart as he lay here in the dark?

  I took the gun out and dusted it off. It seemed brand-new, and I wondered if it had ever been fired. I opened both boxes of shells. None seemed to be missing. I attached the barrel with its single screw. I loaded the rifle. I sat on the front porch and held it across my knees. I cocked it, held the stock between my feet, and put the barrel in my mouth. I tasted the hard, cold metal. I thought of all the people for whom this had been life’s final sensation. I thought again, as I had so often since Lisa Kim, of all the things that lay within my power to do, including this one. I leaned it against the doorjamb and from time to time that afternoon I walked past it. It was a little exciting to see it sitting there so still and lethal.

  I went into town and bought a piece of trout, a couple of red-skinned potatoes, some locally grown asparagus and a bottle of white wine, grilled the fish and asparagus, boiled the potatoes, drank the wine, and read myself to sleep, the rifle still leaning in the doorway. The next day, before I locked the cottage and drove back into the city, I unloaded the gun, took it apart, and put it back where I had found it. I couldn’t think of what else to do with it.

  Lydia was sitting on the couch again Tuesday evening when I came into our apartment from walking Art after work. No radio, no television, no magazine, catalog, or book. Her arms were crossed. “Would you mind telling me what’s going on around here?” she asked. I recognized Lisa’s letter lying on the couch beside her and felt my hip pocket; I must have taken it out with my wallet and left it on my dresser. I could think of nothing to say perhaps because I did not know what was going on. Fortunately, the questions that Lydia asked me were all rhetorical and did not require responses.

  “You were screwing the Korean chick, weren’t you?” she said. “In fact, you were with her that night. That’s why you were late. You were following her. You were in love with her.”

  “No, no,” I finally sputtered.

  “No, no?” And with that she produced her coup de grâce: There in her hand was another letter, the one I had recently sent to Tanya Kim. I would later find when I picked up the envelope from the floor that it was stamped RETURN TO SENDER; I had omitted the street name. (I am a little embarrassed to admit this, but I sent it again to the right address the next day.) The letter had been opened, and now Lydia unfolded it and read, “‘I know you have mixed feelings about her (I do, too).’ For God’s sake, Pete, why do you have any feelings about her at all?”

  I probably should have said something right then, but what was I to tell her: the truth? Well, you see, I’ve become hopelessly entangled in the life of a dead woman I never met although I do know her parents, her sisters, her old friends and lovers, and I have stalked her through letters and yearbooks and school hallways, and I have made love to her in my dreams. It seemed unlikely that Lydia would respond positively to candor. Besides, she went on to say, “And if you weren’t screwing her, if this is all just . . . God, I don’t even want to think about that. That would be too weird.”

  So the truth was out of the question, which left only the untruth, and I just didn’t have the energy to start lying, so I didn’t say much of anything. Besides, I was pretty sure that she would blow sky-high, and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. You see, Lydia was heavily armed with self-protective devices. Early in our relationship, one had been her aversion to commitment, but later another was commitment itself. When we got back from Mexico, signed a lease together, and opened a joint bank account, she made an announcement (and that’s what it was, an announcement) that if I ever cheated on her, she would pack her bags, leave that day, and never look back. So what happened next was quite unexpected.

  Lydia crossed her arms again and turned away to look out the window. Then she turned back. “Look, Pete, none of that matters. What does matter is that there’s something going on with us. I feel like I’m standing on the shore and you’re going out to sea and all I can do is just watch.”

  “Well,” I said, a bit uncomfortable with her sudden familiarity, “what about ships passing in the night?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Once when it was I who was feeling insecure, I to
ld Lydia that I felt like we were ships passing in the night, and she said, “That’s my definition of a perfect relationship: ships passing in the night.”

  “Pete, that was years ago. That was before Mexico. That was before I knew how to have a relationship. I was scared. I was just a girl.”

  “And all that’s changed?”

  “Of course it’s changed. I love you. I want to know what’s happening.”

  “Oh Jesus,” I said; suddenly the room felt small and hot. “I can’t talk about this right now. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I must have sounded shrill or desperate because she backed right off. “I need time to think. I need time to myself.” This I just blurted out. I really hadn’t even thought it before, and had she ignored or dismissed it, I might have never mentioned it again, but she didn’t.

  “Well,” she said, “you have this canoe trip as soon as school’s out. That’s ten days of time to think.”

  “I need more. Maybe after that I’ll go up to the cottage for a while.” Although I wasn’t looking at her, I felt her stiffen.

  “How long is a while?”

  “I don’t know,” I said with more annoyance in my voice than I wanted. “A few days, a few weeks.” Then to myself but not to Lydia I said, “Give me the summer. Just give me until the end of the summer to figure things out.” None of this had I planned or even thought about, but instantly it felt like the perfect, the only, the essential solution to a big problem I had only been vaguely aware of until a few minutes earlier.

  “That’s fine. Take all the time you need. Do whatever you need to.” We both wanted very much for this conversation to be over, and now it was, and we didn’t know what to do. “Well,” said Lydia, “I’m going to make some tea. Want some tea?”

  “I think I’ll walk Art.”