Thursday, February 19, 1998

"Do you suppose he did it on a sunny afternoon? Perhaps the colors were too bright, and the laughter of the children too flat, and the alternating pitch of the sprinklers made him livid. I imagine it transpired in the summer—it would have been more picturesque that way, like the title of some old Hemingway novel I never read."

Sunday, March 1, 1998

There was something about their love, about him, that she couldn't quite reach—some soft-stirring, lulling darkness that informed his affections with a sense of rushing wings and time slipping through a fault in her understanding.

Tuesday, March 31, 1998

There was an awful sense of interiors to those memories, a wretched intimacy—ones he had shared, those he had been denied. Everything was so small.

Sunday, April 12, 1998

It's childish to nurse a grudge if you have it in your power to be the one not to. Very childish. Actually, it's worse than that. Children are forgiving.

Saturday, May 2, 1998

He remembered a time when the whole realm of possibility had sprawled before him like the promise of an orchestra tuning its instruments before a fanfare—doubtless, timeless, undiscovered.

Tuesday, May 19, 1998

The room was empty, save for a few articles of furniture, and some wall art he hadn't been able to scrub away completely. Sunlight assaulted the flat and unadorned surfaces, blanching everything until it took on the quality of memory.

Wednesday, July 8, 1998

There was a tension about her, some lateral disturbance, as if her very atoms were opposed, as if they were going to rend her to shreds at any moment.

Monday, July 13, 1998

The sky was a singular gradient of indigo, resistant to the burnishment of the sinking sun, its infinitely fine shifts untroubled by the yellow profanities of the city lights.

Friday, July 24, 1998

I see her in the train station every morning. She walks by me as I read the paper, waiting for the train that will take me away. I don't think she remembers. I sometimes fancy that she looks away, that our eyes roll around each other, seeking not to set, but I don't think she remembers.

She doesn't remember.

Thursday, August 6, 1998

Last night I dreamed I was staying at a hotel with Mother—shades of Fitzgerald and Bowles. We had separate bedrooms (it wasn't that sort of dream), and Mother had gone out for the late morning-early afternoon. For some reason, I was alternately convinced that I was in Philadelphia or New Jersey, although it occurs to me now that what I saw from the balcony of my bedroom could only have been found in the Pacific Northwestern United States, or perhaps Scandinavia.

What I saw was a vast and quiet sea in the middle distance, gradating beyond the horizon; sunlight, blue sky. Far, far below me (for the elevation of my room was great), a beach extended from the hotel and met the water, its sand scalloped in places. I could see the bathers quite clearly, for all my height—blankets, children, umbrellas.

Immediately to the right of this beach, the sand ended in an abrupt snake of a line, and a dense forest began, tree upon tree, like heads of dark broccoli. Here and there the foliage was interrupted by a house, a group of houses, a misplaced cul-de-sac—no roads, nothing to connect them. I had a memory of flying over Germany.

As my head circled back in the direction of the beach, my eyes fell upon an unbelievably tall tree, straight and wide, directly before me, a hundred-odd yards away. It had not been there before. It was devoid of vegetation, and its top was flat, so that it resembled nothing so much as a vertically exaggerated stump. Atop the stump sat a lone hiker, cross-legged.

My eyes followed the length of the tree down from her, little ledges resolving themselves along the circumference of the trunk, and other hikers seeped into my vision, traversing the narrow inscribed paths. There was a thrill in watching them, my breath catching on their missteps; but nobody fell.

I gradually became aware that the tree was now quite nearly below me, my balcony looming vertiginously, as if the building had grown wider at its base and was leering. Taking in the full measure of what I saw, I thought of boardwalks and seaside carnivals; world's fairs; great, empty, people-scattered places captured forever in two o'clock sunlight.

Behind me, past the breeze, in the bedroom, the phone rang. I knew it was Mother. One world flushed into the next. I woke up, having remembered, mostly. For a change.

Thursday, August 6, 1998

Looking out the window on the train this morning, I saw a sky writer learning his trade: insensible loops, scattered numbers strewn across the sky.

Friday, August 7, 1998

Every morning, when I'm waiting for the R6, there's a woman on the platform. She waits for the passengers of one train to disembark, and then the other, her face grave. When no one is left, she unfolds her little stick and begins her lonely descent down the stairs. Her eyes don't look blind, like they do on television sometimes. I'm almost always convinced she has an expression on her face. I look at the care with which she has put herself together. Perhaps someone has helped her? Perhaps she's somebody's mother. I hope she has someone. I feel like reaching out to her, but that's because I'm ignorant.

Sunday, August 9, 1998

As he walked in the quickening dusk, the sky seemed stagy. Peculiar that he couldn't quite place his own impression, but that is how it felt: put on. As if there were something behind it, up close; as if its depth were illusory, a trick of elaborate air ducts, electrical conduits, mechanisms he could neither devise nor divine. It was there, all around him—this sense of deliberate things, of energy traveling below him, reticulating; an entire world mapped out on the inside of a cylinder, turning, radiating forever just beyond his fingertips.

Friday, August 14, 1998

What makes a life?

I've seen her twice, on the way home from work. Once she was with him: the man—her lover, her husband? He twisted her arm back, menaced her loudly. Her flat tones, her drawling protestations, her broken white-trash voice—I was repulsed, and I crossed the street to avoid them.

This afternoon, I saw them under the overpass where the train intersects the street. He stood on one side, she on the other. He was in his usual mode. She was weeping, and in that instant that I looked on her, I felt the weight of the world. All the fight had left her, and her tears had washed the ugliness from her face. All I could think about was a little girl, who dreamed of other things once. And the feeling—was it shame or regret?—I couldn't shake it. I couldn't save her.

Thursday, August 20, 1998

"Well, my dear, the summer ceases, even as I have only just begun to linger in its warm embrace. In its dying light the world is fresh and young, and I am afforded the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the people and places I have loved. I can't help but look forward to the newness of things in the fall, the pleasant sensation of puzzles and possibilities. I have missed my friends, and will be glad to have them back. In a strange way, I even miss the people I have yet to meet. I can feel them in my blood already, hovering just beyond my intuition, waiting for me to find them. And I am always waiting to be found. That thought—of new things, new people—always draws me toward the future. What will the next month bring? The next semester? I like not knowing. What is your life like these days? Draw me a picture. I love your drawings. What's winter like in the summertime?"

Friday, September 11, 1998

"Stay," he asked very quietly. The word fell out of his mouth so gently that it sank without impress in the darkness of the room. The memory of violence in the void between them—little screaming sunspots of silent, awful things—stood vigil, livid, waiting to erupt. But there was no eruption. With a sense of something perhaps greater than the both of them, something that might break irreparably, she extended her hand to meet his; a gesture to match his thought.

Thursday, September 17, 1998

"Everyone has a certain comfort level. I haven't found mine yet. Something I remembered today: there was a shopping mall that we used to go to, my mother, my sister, and I, when we lived in the old house. There was a department store at this mall, name forgotten, and it had a restaurant that overlooked some sort of atrium or similar enclosed space on the floor below. I used to order a fish sandwich—two batter-fried wedges, toasted white bread cut into triangular halves; perhaps with fries and a pickle. Memory fails me in some respects. There was something like a children's tchotchke that came with the meal, a little cardboard construction in the shape of an oven, I believe. It was all so simple, and yet it meant so very much. Life was good in that quiet time, during the afternoon, when the rest of the place was empty, save for a few old ladies. It must have been hard for Mother; we were so young, and she must have been lonely. Why must we always hurt until it's too late for anyone to save us?"

Saturday, September 19, 1998

To be blessed with so pernicious an ego: in times of humility or censure, he would care for them quite a lot, and would not chafe against their unintentional lapses; he was generous. But in other times, swollen with success and well-being, he would inevitably recur upon his less noble impulses—unyielding, inconsiderate, easily incensed.

Friday, September 25, 1998

It was a cool day in late September. In the classroom, with its walls the color of a consumptive's pudding, its discreet drop ceiling, its blonde hardwood floor, the temperature hung delicately above the stillness of a chill. Every chair, its seat accounted for, occupied its place in sequence along the perimeter of the room, forming a theater for the lectern and its attendant activity.

He sat in the corner by the window. Thus situated, it was his good fortune to have a margin of sunlight, clear and bright, fall across his lap. He would now and again rest his hand in his sun-soaked pocket, and let the warmth suffuse his fingertips, his palm, in a convective embrace. His other hand was engaged in the friction of writing.

Sunday, October 11, 1998

He exhaled softly. "His priorities have been confused."

Some names were powerful. They would return to him unexpectedly, in an image or a sound; letters on a page; sometimes a face. The memories were always suspended before him, blurred and still, as if caught in passing. They defied his attempts at further resolution. They defied him altogether; it seemed he would never be rid of them.

Monday, October 12, 1998

"Sometimes you'll find out that something's been missing from your life, and you'll start searching for it, and everything'll become...." His voice trailed off.

"Confused?"

He smiled, relieved. "Yeah."

Sunday, October 25, 1998

There are some people you must stay away from. You will love them too much. You will destroy yourself just to move them. If you are fortunate, you will never meet them.

Tuesday, October 27, 1998

"Night falls early these days—what, with the tricks white men, long dead, have played with clocks and diurnal variation. I was walking back to my apartment and I looked up at the sky. The moon, half formed, was shrouded in a cold veil, and I wondered if that's what lured ancient explorers across undiscovered waters—that vision of some celestial enchantment, silver and remote, soft and inviolable. I know now why Diana was the lunar deity. No one writes about the moon like that anymore. What we see in it is a flash of white teeth, like a Cheshire cat's grin, thin and sharp."

Tuesday, November 3, 1998

He sat next to the window, but more than glass separated him from open space. There were the trees—wide branches crisscrossing in layers, dipping, dappled; beyond them, a squarish building, three stories, red brick deepened to brown; and there, high above the bricks and leaves, framed in a small space of unfiltered light: a flag idling in the wind, now and again lifted aloft, set against the sprawl of the sky. The sun shone fixedly, unperturbed by clouds.

Saturday, November 14, 1998

"And suddenly, life is a series of lost metaphors. The old correlations no longer seem to work. We peel layers back like so many hours—or do the hours cleave in sheets? Tangent becomes substance, and there is a very definite color and shape—almost a flavor—to quantities heretofore remote and inviolable. Mystery, apprehension—what's the difference? Phantom memories of a Saturday morning linger like fingertips against cold windowglass, and the very air we breath smells like yesterday."

Friday, November 27, 1998

Today I woke up and two years ago seemed like yesterday, and last year never happened.

Sunday, January 10, 1999

"I wish I hadn't told you that. I was coming off a bad time and you caught me on the rebound. I lacked discretion. Who I am now, I wouldn't say that."

"Sometimes you say too much."

There was an expression on his face that I couldn't quite place—a tension wavering between anger and grief: disappointment.

Sunday, January 24, 1999

"Will you let me sing to you? I would like to sing to you."

She felt then that he said it with the full conviction of his blood, his childhood, everything he had ever known and come to love. "Yes.... Yes."

He sang her a lullaby, sad and sweet, words repeating like a prayer; a gentle incantation, soul-saving and graceful. She fell asleep leaning into him, allowing the easy motion of his breathing to come between herself and the world.

Monday, February 1, 1999

"Why do they do it? They lead lives of unremitting inconsequence and silliness punctuated by bouts of frustration and self pity; antics, manic behavior, laughter falling into the void, lost to history; while I lie down, hoping to dream beneath the starlight. Such cool, unpitying radiance, that which descends from above—silent, violent, surpassing intent with its insoluble rush toward dissipation. And still my lips move, trying to form the words, the prayer, that will save me, make me relevant and never a relic."

There lived a princess in a high tower. The queen had placed her there. The queen was not her mother. Her mother had passed on long before, and her father had taken another wife before he, too, slipped into that other life, to dream of other things. And the princess, she did dream too, in this life, in that high tower.

Sunday, February 7, 1999

"Whenever you form an initial impression of someone, take it about two clicks further into selfishness and perversion and you probably have a fairly accurate appraisal."

"You sound bitter."

Thursday, February 18, 1999

"It's not that he doesn't make mistakes; it's that his priorities, his interests, his activities are different. His mistakes seem unrelated because there's no direct basis for comparison. But the underlying fallibility is there."

Sunday, February 21, 1999

"You completely reinforce each others' insecurities. The way in which you relate to one another is entirely about things going unsaid. The basis of your supposed friendship is a shared delusion of emotional security."

Tuesday, February 23, 1999

"Life was somehow more straightforward when its mysteries weren't so obvious. I thought I had a personality in those days."

"Well, we all have dumb friends. Friends who appeal to some nebulous sense of fun, camaraderie."

Monday, March 29, 1999

It was a bright day in the cold air. The sunlight captured the hills like a bad painter's brush, and ten o'clock was anathema to thoughts of the afternoon.

If I could go back to May of that year, I would go back to April; and if I could go back to April, I would relive November; but I would not repeat February.

Sunday, April 11, 1999

She finished his thought: "And everyone's a little uglier than you remembered."

"I can't believe how powerfully romantic I made it out to be. All inflated. All in my head."

Friday, April 16, 1999

"They're not the right people," he said quietly. His eyes fell, he took a drag on his cigarette. A moment passed, perhaps containing the memory of other moments, other times. "Better you than them."

"This has all been a massive write-off." He dragged on the word "massive," drawing out the first vowel.

Thursday, April 29, 1999

He saw a light, doubled and distorted, through the blinds. He was unsure if it was—perhaps it was the moon. Suddenly the idea of frosted light bulbs, of warm electricity and lampshades, of interior disarrays and evenings of solitude, comforted him. How to make the moment last? Where did people go when they went away? What did they remember?

Friday, June 4, 1999

"Presuppose insanity in all situations."

"That's not the nicest way to go about things."

"I know." And he said it with equanimity, and maybe a little sadness, as if knowledge was love.

Saturday, June 12, 1999

"Well, look at it this way: no one thinks she's an extraordinary person. She mostly elicits shrugs, damnations of faint praise, colloquial shrugs—'She's a good kid ... nice'—that sort of noncommittal nonsense ... bullshit. And the truth is, she's so much worse even than that—toxic and petty—but no matter; that's off-topic. My point is that you excite people—incite them—you raise the bar. You're totemic, a trademark. She's ... strictly public domain."

"Common law?" A hint of a grin.

Laughing: "...Yeah."

Wednesday, June 16, 1999

His attention moved from object to object around the room, and the delicacy and deliberation of these impossibly inconsequential artifacts of life—care and haste mingling sweetly, warmly, in his memory, quickening like blood—moved him. He had to sit down.

Tuesday, June 22, 1999

"Actually, you'd be surprised. People with a superiority complex are a lot easier to deal with than people with inferiority complexes, in a number of cases."

Tuesday, July 6, 1999

"Oh—I was definitely flattered." Head nodding, an oblique stutter of the eyebrows: high sarcasm. "He flattered me flat."

Sunday, July 18, 1999

"I'm not so bad."

Said with such a profound lack of affectation that it breaks your heart.

Sunday, July 25, 1999

And suddenly, I wanted to be far away from this place. I remembered the scent of my grandmother's perfume lingering in the bright foyer of her great house on a Saturday morning. That sense of potency, of power and possibility. We didn't concern ourselves with "tomorrow" and "yesterday" and "forever" in those days.

Sunday, August 8, 1999

Peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the lamplight. The smell of your lip balm mingling with the odor of cheap carpeting and the scent of your laundered linens. A sad song that made me remember all the times I ever couldn't cry, when I should have.

November that year reeked of death.

Tuesday, August 10, 1999

If you're ever walking down a crowded sidewalk along a busy street on a day just like this, and you spy a single margin of sky, hinted with clouds, blue and bright, against and between the tall buildings that reflect and color the sunlight—walk toward that fine tower of empty, open space, entertain no hesitation.

Sunday, October 17, 1999

"Everyone's neuroses are grating on me," he said, doing a desultory three-sixty in the swivel chair. His right hand idled in the air.

Thursday, November 4, 1999

Massaging his temple with his left hand: "There will be fallout from this."

She smiled, stroked his head gently. Touching his chin, she brought him up to face her. "Does it really matter?"

Grateful for her good sense, he felt his eyes moistening. He took her hand in his. "No." Almost a smile in return.

Thursday, November 18, 1999

"You look at people, and you determine that they will be a part of your life someday: 'You. You will be a part of my life someday.'"

Wednesday, December 15, 1999

Her smile, a genial narrowing of the eyes. "He wears thermal underwear." And that was enough to neutralize him in my mind.

Thursday, February 24, 2000

"Do you ever feel like a shithead? I feel like I just don't measure up sometimes."

"You're not a shithead."

"There are people I let down in these small ways everyday. A phone call I didn't make, a criticism I offered too quickly, affection I didn't respond to."

She leans into him, holds him. But remains silent. He can feel her so close right now, almost breaking through the surface tension of his sadness.

"And maybe it's because I just don't think about them—about other people—enough. Everything I do, I do it for me and through me, like I'm some great instrument or vessel set out into the world, with everything warped to suit that purpose."

Breathing. She strokes his head. Warmth, darkness, closeness. He exhales loudly—not so much a sigh as a deflation.

"I believe in some things," she begins quietly, with evident conviction. "I believe that there can be consideration and even love between people. I think the problem is that we start to temporize, become paralyzed—"

"Afraid—"

"And we start putting things off, and it's as if every person has a little universe inside them, where everything oscillates at a very specific frequency, and we start missing people, overlooking things, because what we need to be doing, where we need to be going, is always just five minutes behind or ahead of us ... like a hologram."

In the darkness, he laughs softly. "Like a carrot on a stick."

She smiles. "Or the prospect of the farmer's swift kick."

"Will you help me?"

"I'll help you. But I won't second-guess you."

Smiling quietly. "So wait: I'm a donkey now?"

"You're MY donkey."

Sunday, March 5, 2000

"How much 'in love' were you?"

"I feel stupid talking about this."

"It's okay. I'm sorry. I don't mean to make light of it. It's just my way."

"I understand. You know, it's really pretty dark."

"Love."

"Yeah."

"Ugly."

"And beautiful. Terrible."

Monday, May 22, 2000

"Every year, new friends, like the first snowfall."

"But some stay with you."

"Like autumn leaves, then."

Saturday, July 22, 2000

"Why are you acting this way? I don't understand you sometimes."

"It's not important." He pauses, maybe searching for the correct phrase, the correct expression." Again: "It's—" exhales loudly, shrugs.

They lapse into the silence of unsaid things. Too many unsaid things. Somewhere in the deep structures of the brain, a surfeit of emotions has triggered aphasia.

Silence invents its own choreography, turns to brooding. This sentiment, unspoken, shared, will atomize, will blow over. But its fragrance will persist: "I don't understand."