Chapter 15
Time rolled on. Or flowed. Or rose. Or fell.
Or what? Maybe it expanded in globe after globe like the ringing of bells at the center of the universe.
Not to sound like an idiot, but what is time, anyway?
We see its effects every day all around us.
We see it in the mirror, lining our faces and shrinking our bones.
We see it desiccating our fruit, jacking up our skylines.
But what is it that makes these changes happen?
Does time cause the changes? Or does it only bear witness? Who knows?
In any case, over the next months, the Tree Book got done.
I don’t know exactly how, but one day I called it good and sent the draft in to my editor and my editor was pleased.
She said she was pleased, anyway. Editors are experts at making writers feel okay about their work, even special if the case demands it.
But the way she said it this time, I believed her. In the end, I always did.
“I think it’s an important book,” she said.
“You’re kind to say that,” I said.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t think it was true.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “It’s great, I believe you.”
She said she had a few small edits to suggest, which turned out to be quite significant edits, and which were also extremely smart, elegant, helpful edits.
She pushed me to simplify the language in certain passages, to extend certain metaphors, to consider some counterexamples.
She didn’t advise any structural changes, but her notes ended up touching almost every paragraph.
I had to climb back into the bramble of the writing, burrow underneath the surface like a mole, but this time, with a guide along, it became easier.
It took about three months of back-and-forth, during which time the days lightened.
It became spring and then summer again. The dogwoods turned pink, and then green, and the magnolia blossoms opened and fell.
Cherry petals filled the street’s gutters like fuchsia snow.
There was a certain tree that astounded me, every year an eruption of seedpods.
It was a golden rain tree, I discovered.
My sleep was still fragile, but I fell into a pattern of a night on, a night off.
I was prescribed an antidepressant, which made even the bad nights more tolerable.
In some ways, the passage of time was a curse, I thought, sealing us from the past, but in other ways, it was a blessing, allowing us to forget, which was also to heal.
I wasn’t the first one to discover this notion, but it was a fact.
The more time that passed, the less I thought about the miracle.
I came gradually to classify the crash that followed as a tragic but random event, no more significant than any other accident, which was to say profoundly significant to those involved, but not meaningful in any larger, theological sense.
Much as my edits were smoothing my book, time was smoothing the events in my mind, knitting Sarah’s death into the larger sequence of my life.
The communication on the mountain was a remarkable illusion I’d experienced.
“You slept okay?” Phil said, over coffee one morning.
“Adequately,” I said.
“Are you going to the store today?” he said.
“I can,” I said. “Do we need anything?”
“We could use milk,” he said. “No big deal. I can stop on the way home, too.”
Our lives were becoming routine. Our respective griefs still waxed and waned, going in and out of phase, but we were both getting stronger.
There were weeks when Phil had trouble climbing out of bed, and days I fell into a stupor, but together we slogged along.
Whether we were helpful to each other was hard to tell, but at least we witnessed each other, and that was something.
Maybe there was no real helping either one of us, anyway. We simply had to live through it.
“I thought I was a pretty experienced person,” Phil said one night, sipping a gin and tonic, watching the News Hour .
“I thought I had a pretty solid idea of what suffering was like. I’ve been through some things in my life.
But I had no idea what was out there, Arthur.
There are oceans that I never understood existed.
It makes me realize I don’t know anything at all, really. I’m barely starting to map it.”
“Better hurry up,” I said. “Not much time left.”
We both laughed.
The book went to copy editing. The manuscript came back filled with red marks and I made the necessary changes, accepting most, quibbling with a few.
Following the next round, I signed off and the final wait began—nine months until the book was printed and bound and entered the world as a commodity.
In that window, it lived as an object of pure potential, undefined, and thus redolent with hope.
Traditionally, this was the most enchanted passage of the publishing process.
The hard work was over and all was possibility.
No one had read the book yet, and thus, in theory, everyone in the world might love it.
But this time around, the floating, optimistic sensation was troubled.
The thoughts of Sarah, and all that might have been, still ate at me.
And then there was Phil, who still needed to read it.
I’d come to love the Tree Book when I read it to myself.
I could open to any page and find the rhythms pleasing, the transitions graceful.
The prose had a sinuous, loping quality, at least in my mind, but when I read it through Phil’s eyes, something became clouded.
Throughout all the revisions, all the reconfigurations, his voice had remained intact.
It wasn’t everywhere, but it was present in the most important sections—his metaphors, his phrasings—to the point where at least between he and I, the debt was self-evident.
The title alone, A Leaf Is Not Green , was more than homage.
I’d been telling myself I’d fix those passages as I went along, make some alterations to obscure the source, but somehow I’d never gotten around to it.
I’d never been able to find better ways of saying anything, and thus, the undigested bits had never been digested.
Reading them now, so late in the game, I was haunted by Phil’s intelligence.
To think of Phil reading the book brought on a vague dread.
The galleys arrived six months before publication.
This usually marked the ultimate high point of the experience.
To see the sentences typeset on actual paper!
To smell the ink sunk into the pulpy fiber.
To feel the crisp edges of the perfect binding.
It always dignified the writing in ways one didn’t expect. It was a physical book now.
But this time, even as I fondled the fresh-cut paper and smelled the glue, the experience was vexed. I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. Phil had to read it.
I left a copy on his bed without any instructions. I didn’t want to lead him in any direction. I wanted to allow him his own experience with the text, inasmuch as that was possible. I figured I’d give him a few days. It wasn’t a very long read.
The wait became a marathon of self-reflection.
As I ate lunch, as I walked the streets, I had to admit to myself, over and over again, that I’d taken everything from Phil.
I’d taken not only his wife, but the memory of his wife.
When Phil thought of Sarah now, he was forced to relive those final, unhappy hours in the car, learning their life together had been a lie.
He had to understand their love had dissolved and she’d chosen to move on.
He had to wonder about his own inadequacies. At least I’d wonder if I were him.
And I’d taken his very thoughts. The evidence was in his hands even as I wandered the park or browsed the stationery store.
Were he ever to publish a book of his own, he’d be second in line now.
My book would forever eclipse his. His theories about tree sentience and photosynthesis now lived under my name.
I could imagine him telling the story to some confidant someday, how I’d arrived in his office as a friend, full of kindness, seeking advice, only to transform into a demon, a vampire who’d come and sucked his life dry.
Maybe he’d post insulting revelations on the web about me and ruin my name. He might even threaten to sue me.
Sitting in the park, watching the merry-go-round spin, I turned over my crimes in my head, wondering where they fell in the grand scheme.
To steal a wife? I thought. No wife is ever stolen.
A wife is a person, with her own agency, her own desire.
She chooses when to leave or stay. And to steal an idea?
What was an idea? An idea had no mass, no measure.
Phil’s ideas had simply resonated with me.
I’d recognized in them something I’d already known.
I’d never claimed them as my property or excluded anyone else from having them.
I’d thanked him profusely in the acknowledgments.
I barely thought of myself as a person, anyway.