Chapter 15 #2
I walked into the bookstore and browsed the season’s new titles, seeking consolation in all the other books on the shelves similarly built on stolen goods.
Here were novels based on real fathers, real wives, real neighbors.
Here were books exploiting the misfortune of entire nations.
Here were books clearly drafting on other books’ obsessions and structures.
Here were covers aping the covers of huge bestsellers.
But in the end, the bookstore didn’t offer any comfort.
If anything it only made me feel worse. Pity the writer in a bookstore, surrounded by all the more successful books than their own.
All the covers embossed with gold-foil awards, the anthologies filled with other writers’ names.
I couldn’t enjoy a bookstore anymore. Long ago, I’d become a professional.
I was sitting in the living room after dinner one night, drinking whiskey, when Phil came down the stairs holding the Tree Book.
The look on his face was unclear. His leg still made the descent awkward, and his expression was mostly one of physical concentration.
Each step demanded both feet on the platform.
I envisioned him reaching the bottom of the stairs and walking directly over and punching me in the face, but instead he hobbled to the kitchen and poured himself a whiskey.
I could hear the ice crack in the tray. He came back into the living room, smiling peaceably.
“It’s wonderful,” he said, taking an armchair across the room, placing my book on the coffee table. “You’ve done something special with this one, Arthur.”
“You can be honest,” I said. “You don’t have to be nice.”
“I’m not lying,” he said. “I think it might be your best one yet. It’s masterful. The section on Merle and Candy especially. They’ll be so happy when they read it. I can’t wait for that.”
“Masterful” was a word reviewers used to mean “competent.” But Phil wasn’t that cynical.
He wasn’t offering double meanings or coded insults.
Of course he would lie. Everyone would lie, confronted by the author of a book they didn’t like.
It was the only decent thing to do. But even if I couldn’t wholly believe Phil, I was beginning to relax.
He wasn’t violently angry. Having assumed the worst, and seeing now that the worst wasn’t happening, I wanted more.
I wanted praise. False or true, it didn’t matter.
“You’re all over it,” I said. “You can see that, I assume.”
“I guess so,” he said. “In which case, I’m flattered, truly.”
“I used a lot of your ideas, your phrasings,” I said.
“They aren’t my ideas,” he said. “I keep telling you that. Ideas all come from somewhere. They came to me from somewhere else, too.”
“They seem to come to you pretty easily,” I said.
“But they don’t come from inside me, that’s the thing,” he said. “They all come from outside, in the world. They impress themselves on you. We’re just like the paper the ideas are written on. We aren’t the hand doing the writing. Are we?”
“Well, I guess some people are better paper than others,” I said.
“In all seriousness,” he said, “I’m honored that you found something in our conversations that inspired you. And thank you for the dedication.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. But something in the transaction seemed wrong. He’d twisted it up again. Somehow, yet again, he’d flipped me into the position of authority, acceptor of gratitude. I’d become the giver, him the receiver of the generosity. He’d made me the opposite of a thief.
“You’re not interested in writing your own book about trees?” I said. “Tree dreams? This book might make it a little harder for you.”
“There are a lot of books out there about trees,” he said. “It’s all in the style, anyway. You have a very fluid style, Arthur. I’d read anything you wrote. The world doesn’t need more academic books about trees, anyway. I’ll leave that to someone else. I have my hands full teaching.”
“You have important things to say,” I said.
He sat quietly, faintly smiling. “I just don’t feel the need,” he said.
His maturity was galling. He was so capacious, so deep.
Was he telling me the truth? I wondered.
I wasn’t sure. This might be yet another punishment he’d devised.
He was roasting me in the fire of his kindness, branding me with his red-hot poker of forgiveness.
Did he see me as such a deluded idiot that I wasn’t even worth confronting?
I’d stolen his entire life, and yet he carried no grudge.
He didn’t even seem to notice. I imagined him laughing at me, or even worse, shaking his head in pity.
I wanted to talk to Sarah but she was nowhere to be found.
That was the day I started writing this book, the book about Sarah, and Phil, and me, and what happened.
Who is it for, exactly? I don’t know. I didn’t know then and I still don’t know, even as I’m coming to the very end.
l know who this book isn’t for. It isn’t for Sarah, that much is obvious.
If she could read it, I’d be living in a different world, changing diapers somewhere in the sun.
It isn’t for Phil, either, as he lived the whole story alongside me.
There’s nothing in here that he doesn’t already know, nothing that would bring him to care any more about the fact I betrayed him, which is not at all.
Maybe it’s a book for me, a way to reach a deeper understanding of who I am, and how I should feel about everything I’ve done. Maybe this book is a method to get myself to sleep. Maybe it’s for the children I may or may not ever have.
Or maybe I’ll never know who the real audience is.
Maybe it isn’t for anyone at all. Does a writer ever truly know their readers?
I don’t think so. The whole idea of a book is predicated precisely on the writer not being there at the end.
A book exists wholly to facilitate this absence.
As meaning becomes portable, the writer is able to disappear, leaving the book as their surrogate.
How strange it would be if I were standing there watching you reading these words. How deeply no one would like that.
The Tree Book was a fall publication, which is traditionally the most prestigious season.
Fall was the time when the heavy hitters launched, the Deepak Chopras and James Redfields.
The hardcovers were beautiful when they came, chlorophyll green, with embossed golden veins running across the jackets like lace.
The book was dedicated to Phil and Sarah, each on their own line.
I had a reading at the local bookstore in Ashland, as I did for every new book.
Only three years had passed since the publication of the Light Book, which for me was a short turnaround.
I was probably oversaturating the marketplace, sending my book onto shelves already clogged with my own remainders, but what could you do?
The timing was never ideal. Here at home, anyway, I could always count on enough people coming out to fill the seats.
I got there early, and helped Jane, the owner, unfold the chairs. The usual digeridoo music played softly on a boom box near the register. Cars passed quietly outside.
“Sorry about your mom’s house,” Jane said. “Those people. Such a crime.”
My mom had sold the house. The new owners had promised her they wouldn’t change anything, said they loved the house exactly as it was, but of course, as soon as they’d taken possession, they’d knocked it down and built themselves a McMansion.
It was the kind of thing one expected from people with that kind of money. We should’ve known.
“They just wanted the view, I guess,” I said.
“It’s a shame,” she said. “That house was so beautiful. I can’t even walk on your street anymore. Where did all your mom’s work go?”
“Storage,” I said. “She’s taking offers for her archives now. It’ll end up somewhere.”
“And what are you working on, Arthur?” she said. “May I ask?”
“Too early to say,” I said.
She knew enough not to press any further.
Soon, the regular crowd assembled. There were Barn people, childhood people, my friends Jerry and Lisa and their kids.
Phil was there, too, sitting in the back, a fresh copy of the Tree Book in his lap.
He was buying a copy even though he had the advance galley at home, which was to say, he understood the ritual. This was a shakedown.
When the time came, Jane rose and did her introduction. She went all out, naming all my regional awards and reciting my most potent blurbs. Here he is, she said. Our prodigal son, who wandered afar and came back home to roost.
I went to the podium. The audience’s eyes were soft and warm, their smiles fixed. They were all proud of me for my accomplishments, small as they were. There was nothing I could do that would make them disappointed or angry.
I’d moved out of Phil’s house into an apartment downtown, both of us understanding the time had come for me to go.
I’d begun looking at listings in other states.
I had friends in Seattle and San Diego who thought I should try out their towns.
Depending on the teaching gigs I could drum up, my decision could still go in various directions.
Regardless, I was ready for new landscapes.
In the afternoons, I walked in the woods and noted the newly fallen snags, the fresh burrows, and the abandoned nests of the paper wasps.
I saw the fruiting bodies of the fungi inside the trees, and the many holes and cavities in the bark left by the woodpeckers.
I joked with the trees sometimes. I imagined them sending out desperate missives to the solar system, seeking help against humanity.
They were trying to contact extraterrestrials to come defend them.
Don’t blame me, I said. I wrote you a book.
One day, I came to a persimmon tree with some old fruit left on the higher branches.
Even deep into the fall, the persimmons seemed to glow from inside, emanating some inner light.
On one branch, a robin was eating from a broken persimmon, gorging itself.
The persimmon was like a split-open sun, orange bits falling from the robin’s beak with each take.
I watched the feast until a hunk refused to come clean and the robin lost its balance, flapping off to another branch.
The bird sat there, looking around. It had no idea how to find its way back.
The Tree Book ended up doing decently well.
The reviews were not rapturous, but not bad, either.
It was an adequate outing, a little better than average, leaving the door open for another book, which was all I could ask.
Had the book been more successful, I might have drawn some correlation between my sins and my success, but the equation didn’t hold.
I couldn’t say I’d made any great subconscious deal with a devil.
Cause and effect remained obscure, as ever.
The anniversary of Sarah’s death approached and I thought about driving to the Wy’East Lodge and visiting the scene of the miracle.
I also thought about visiting the site of the crash.
But both places seemed a little morbid. I preferred instead to commemorate her life by visiting a place we’d been happy together, a time when we’d both felt blessed.
I decided to pay a visit to Candy and Merle’s meadow.
I drove the highway I’d driven with Phil and Sarah once again, over the Siskiyou Pass, into northernmost California.
The trees were covered in snow from an early freeze, and soon the base of Mount Shasta appeared, the peak hidden in a low, hanging belly of clouds.
I headed off the highway and began climbing the foothills.
I parked at the edge of the meadow and clambered up onto the airy expanse.
The snow was a perfect field of whiteness, the silence immaculate.
Again, the clouds were breaking apart in the sky, becoming giant pillows, pregnant with light.
I trudged across the blank meadow, leaving a delicate wreckage of footprints.
I found the spot where we’d listened to the trees drinking, or I was pretty sure it was the place.
It was hard to tell with all the snow on the ground.
I wondered how the meadow was doing under there, how healthy everything looked.
I assumed the seeds were kindling, the shoots preparing themselves to stiffen and grow.
In spring, the grasses would return, the yarrow and the Scotch broom coming back into bloom.
What a system, I thought, so fragile and yet so indomitable.
My thoughts turned to Sarah, as I made an effort to remember her in full.
I thought about her voice, her skin, her eyes.
I summoned all of her being the best I could, though I was a little chaste in my imagining.
For a moment, I felt like she was almost there with me, standing in the meadow, or maybe watching from above.
I could detect her ongoing love and forgiveness in the air, or if not forgiveness, her understanding.
She possessed a magnanimous understanding of the world now, I assumed, so wide it almost precluded me.
I was only one small part of her consciousness anymore, a tiny piece of the ongoing life of the mountain.
For a moment I felt like I became the mountain. I felt the heavy clouds coiling around my flanks, mist rising off my forests. I felt blizzards and long spells of sun and salmon spawning on my back and birds making their nests in my branches. And then, as quickly as it came on, it was over.
When I opened my eyes, the sun was just breaking through the clouds and raining down onto the snow. The world turned into a burning sheet of whiteness. I couldn’t see anything as the light ricocheted on the icy ground, into my retinas, pressing fossilized silhouettes of the trees into my mind.
I loved you, I thought. I love you still. I’ll never stop loving you, my dear.
And then the world dimmed, leaving only afterimages on my eyes.