Chapter 27
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG CHARLIE AND I TALKED IN THE CEMETERY, but it was well after midnight when he dropped me off in front of Henderson House. He hugged me goodbye under the streetlight and promised to write while I was in England.
I slept a few hours, waking up hungover in more ways than one.
My roommate Karen White and I headed off to Danville, Virginia, staying with her family for a night.
The next day her father drove us to Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C.
Karen was sophisticated, artsy, and outgoing. She acted as tour guide.
Had it not been for her, I likely would have done my usual thing and isolated.
When we arrived in London that June, Wimbledon was starting.
We got ground passes and I saw my idols up close.
Bjorn Borg, Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, John McEnroe.
We watched the musical Hair, and a ballet of Romeo & Juliet starring Rudolf Nureyev.
My Davidson student classmates and I attended lectures while I obsessed about Charlie.
Days went by, and I can still hear my shoes squeaking over the polished floor inside Hartland House as I’d check my mailbox constantly.
Our first weekend there, Karen and I took the train to Edinburgh, passing a cheap bottle of wine back and forth as we watched the scenery go by.
The sound along the tracks reminded me of bored fingers tapping on a snare drum, starting a tune that never finished.
I looked out my window at the North Sea breaking in white foam over shoals and craggy coastlines.
Sleeping in our steerage seats, we woke up while rolling into the station, stumbling out into the cold, drinking hot tea from paper cups.
We stayed in a youth hostel, and toured Edinburgh Castle, walking steep winding streets, stopping in pubs to drink a brew or two.
Prowling antiquarian bookshops, I found a beautiful 1860 edition of Chaucer’s Poems bound in tan calfskin with marbled page edges.
I don’t recall what it cost, but more than I should have spent.
The money I’d saved from working at Peregrine House wouldn’t go far.
I knew that Charlie taught Chaucer. I couldn’t wait to give the book to him after returning to Davidson at the end of the summer.
As I continued writing him letters, I didn’t mention the gift, wanting it to be a surprise.
Frequently visiting the college mailroom, I was reminded of waiting for Dad’s check to arrive.
I’d do the same thing when it was my birthday, hoping he’d remember it for once.
By the middle of June, I was all but certain Charlie didn’t intend to write despite his promise.
Each day I noted in my journal “still no letter.” I was deeply hurt and despondent.
All it did was rain, and I hated the food in the cafeteria.
As I walked through the line one day and asked what the strange-looking meat was, the server pointed to her tongue.
After that I informed the dining staff that I was a vegetarian. But if the meat looked good, then I wasn’t a vegetarian. It was unsurprising that the dining room workers got annoyed with me.
“Are you or are you not a vegetarian?” I was asked one day.
I spent as little time in the library as possible, rarely reading the material assigned.
I’d skim enough to make what seemed salient comments.
In a pub across from the college on Woodstock Road I’d sit at the bar by myself every night after dinner.
I’d drink a pint or two of Harp lager while smoking Dunhill cigarettes and writing in my journal.
Sometimes I’d wander into the Eagle and Child where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis once gathered with their literary group the Inklings. Dusty, smoky air was all that remained of them now. I’d look around, wondering what would become of me. The way I was going, probably nothing.
I’d write poetry every day, not realizing that it was preparing me for the life of a novelist. I was training myself to pay attention, to experience the details of every moment. In a journal entry I described a process that’s the same today:
“Tonight, I took a walk in the fog and stood beside a fence post for 30 minutes or so looking at trees.”
Carrying a journal everywhere became a lifelong habit and is more about focusing than remembering details.
I’d make myself look at something as if I never had before.
I willed myself to do it until the metaphors and images would come.
It required energy and courage. How much easier it is to zone out and not be present.
I learned early on that the biggest enemy of creativity is fear.
If I’m filled with dread and looking for excuses to distract myself, nothing dynamic is going to happen on the page.
The characters don’t cooperate. Everything feels forced or stalled.
I often tell people that writing isn’t a job or even a craft. It’s a relationship.
What we create reacts the same way something real does.
If you dread seeing certain people and find excuses not to, why should they bother showing up?
I know I wouldn’t. The same is true of writing.
Creating is an invitation to a private viewing of reality that must be honored and enjoyed.
Stories aren’t made up but transmitted through us.
Carrying my journal everywhere, I’d describe what I was seeing.
Sheep flowing away from the roadside reminded me of the frothy white wake from a speeding boat.
Poppies looked like paper flowers, a field of them reminding me of big blood drops and splashes of paint.
When I was supposed to be listening to the visiting lecturers, I was drawing caricatures of them in my journal.
As Charlie continued to ignore me, I began socializing with both my dons, playing tennis with one, and having meals and a motorcycle excursion with the other.
I watched the countryside go by through cracked goggles, deciding “the world will not end with a whimper but with the flip of a kickstand.” I didn’t feel safe on the wet, narrow streets, and practically froze to death.
Each day I continued checking the mail hopelessly, the rain unrelenting.
Someone told me it was one of the rainiest summers on record, and I don’t remember seeing the sun even once.
When the rain would pause, the skies glowered, the world soggy.
I’d walk the streets of Oxford for hours, the puddles wicking up the legs of my jeans.
“No letter. A bad day. God help me,” I wrote in my journal on July 24.
I wasn’t sleeping well, often awakened by loud laughter as the pubs emptied. Cars sped by on Woodstock Road, trains clattering in the distance like overloaded tea carts. Motorcycles reminded me of bumblebees rumbling in a bass octave.
By mid-August it was time to return to the U.S.
Karen, our friend Aida Doss, and I were booked on Freddy Laker’s Skytrain out of Gatwick Airport.
The tickets were cheap, but we had to wait under a huge tent with dirty carpet on the ground.
We were there three days in forty-degree weather. I had no blanket or pillow.
We didn’t sleep at all, smoking cigarettes and shivering.
I opened the bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream sherry I was carrying home as a gift.
I didn’t realize I could buy it in America, but it didn’t matter since we drank it all.
I was out of money and had to borrow from Aida.
I felt “dirty, poor, and low,” I jotted at the time.
When we arrived in New York after midnight, I sat on the cold marble floor of the Eastern Airlines Terminal until morning.
From there it was on to Charlotte, then Asheville.
By the time I got home on August 13, I’d not slept in days, and the first thing I did was call Ruth.
The next afternoon she took me for another lunch at Pizza Hut.
Having heard nothing from Charlie the entire summer, I gave her the book of Chaucer’s poems I’d bought in Scotland.
“I felt strange about it because it can never really be hers. It will always be Charlie’s,” I noted in my journal.
While I was home Ruth sent me a leatherbound copy of the devotional Streams in the Desert, and an album of Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major that became our special piece of music.
We’d play it whenever we were together. I hadn’t mentioned my eating disorder that had been going on several years by now.
I was beyond discouraged. I decided to tell Ruth about it, and the next day spent two hours with her.
“I’m still no better,” I admitted uncomfortably, and she didn’t act disappointed or disgusted.
She didn’t understand that I was suffering from depression and felt I had no control over anything.
It should have been obvious when looking at my family history.
But we both decided my problem was “spiritual.” I constantly begged God to do something.
The eating disorder was wretched and dangerous. Nothing I tried made any difference.
I returned to Davidson for fall term of my senior year and heard nothing from Charlie.
I didn’t seek him out. His message seemed clear enough.
Then I ran into him on campus one day in the fall, and we spoke briefly.
I told him my feelings hadn’t changed. He made it clear he intended to do nothing about it.
If he was causing me discomfort, I should “keep away for a while.”
It never occurred to me that a professor seventeen years older shouldn’t get involved romantically with me.
Charlie wasn’t going to ask me out while I was a student, but he didn’t mention that.
It would have been inappropriate. I was under the impression that he had no interest. The best thing would be for me to return to England after graduation and forget about him.
While at Oxford I’d decided I wanted to go there for graduate school.
I was a semifinalist for the Rhodes Scholarship and the early winter of my senior year learned I didn’t get it.
For one thing, my application had misspellings, a faculty advisor informed me.
Also, I’d decided not to play varsity tennis at Davidson, and that wasn’t helpful to my cause. I wasn’t the right stuff.
I continued working on my so-called novel every spare moment.
By now it was three hundred pages long, and I’d written several drafts.
Most of them I no longer have. In some cases, I recycled the paper, never imagining that anything I was doing would matter almost half a century later.
I wrote as if obsessed with no goal in sight beyond graduating with honors.
While working almost full time at Peregrine House, I took classes and continued with my book.
My only social life was the restaurant, and that was true for a lot of people.
We had regulars who came in daily, sometimes for lunch and dinner.
One of them was music professor Don Plott, handsome with a full head of white hair, reminding me of Lorne Greene from Bonanza, one of my favorite shows when I was growing up.
Don also was the conductor of the Oratorio Singers, a chorus that performed with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra.
Whenever there was an evening concert, he’d stop by Peregrine House on his way home, looking divine in tails.
He’d stay until we closed, and a few of us would drink beer with him.
His wife had died six years earlier, and he was highly sought after by unattached women.
I attended several of his concerts at Charlotte’s Ovens Auditorium, awed by the sight of him in the spotlight conducting.
Once I appeared backstage to give him red roses.
I wrote a glowing review for the Davidson College newspaper.
Having done as Charlie suggested, I was trying to put him aside.
There was no point in continuing to chase him, and Don and I started getting flirty.
One night after an Oratorio concert, he stopped in Peregrine House as usual, looking splendid in his black cutaway and white shirt.
We sat at the table drinking beer as he smoked a pipe while touching me with his leg every other minute.
When it was time to leave after midnight, he asked if I wanted to go home with him.
I could watch him clean his pipes was the way he put it.
I knew that wasn’t what he was really thinking about. I wasn’t either. I agreed, and climbed into his BMW, headed to his home on Hillside Drive but a few minutes away. We didn’t get around to cleaning a single pipe while making out for several hours, going only so far, but it was plenty.
“What have I gotten myself into?” I wrote in my journal on February 26, 1979. “I’m having a ‘fling’…” I added that the entire time I was with Don, “I wished he was Charlie.”
The next day at Peregrine House, Don came in for lunch. I was working the cash register when he approached the counter, my earrings in his outstretched hand. He had a mischievous smile on his distinguished face, and my friend Suzanne Frye saw what was going on.
The instant Don was seated and out of earshot, she took me aside and asked, “What the hell was that?”
“Don and I had a moment,” I whispered.
Delighted, she said the encounter had been good for both of us, and she was right.
It did wonders for my self-esteem until I realized that Don wasn’t acting right anymore.
He’d untie my apron when I walked past, making salacious remarks, none of it in character for him.
His behavior rapidly deteriorated, and soon enough I found out why.
He had a malignant brain tumor. While he was recovering from surgery, I went to see him. His beautiful head of hair was shaved, and he had a hard time with his memory. He joked that he’d taken a shower and then sat under the hair dryer.
“I’d forgotten that wasn’t necessary anymore.” He touched his bald head.
I told him how much our relationship meant to me, and that I deeply cared for him. I thanked him for helping me in ways he’d never know. Don would die less than two years later. I never regretted going home with him to help clean his pipes. It was a moment in time that will live on forever.