Chapter 6
The Barn was a literary institution located in downtown Ashland, founded with the mission statement of “engaging readers, supporting writers and creating grassroots community around the written word.” In practice, that meant putting on workshops, hosting readings, organizing weekend salons, throwing occasional free-form parties, and generally offering the readers and writers of the region a place to congregate.
For some of us—the writers of the Rogue Valley with any publishing credentials whatsoever—it also provided occasional teaching and mentoring gigs, a much-needed stream of supplemental income.
The Barn had originally been housed in an actual barn, but that hadn’t proven practical during winter months, so they’d moved the headquarters to C Street.
The door was located midway down the block between Fifth and Sixth, and led to a narrow stairwell that rose to a shallow landing that opened into a warren of rooms that smelled like herbal tea and old paperbacks.
There was a tiny kitchen in there, a little office for the bookkeeper, and two fairly spacious classrooms, the larger of which was organized around a grand, faux-walnut conference table, the smaller of which was strewn with mismatched reading chairs, a Persian carpet, and a corduroy couch that folded out into a bed.
It was in this smaller, frowsier classroom that Sarah and I began meeting twice a week, sometimes more.
As a regular Barn instructor, I had a key to the office and a calendar that told me there was no programming on Sunday, Monday, or Thursday nights.
Around dusk, we’d arrive separately, always careful to lock the door behind us and never turn on a light.
In backpacks, we carried our supplies for the evening, usually peanut wafer cookies, or sweating bottles of rosé, or Sarah’s favorites, whiskey and Pringles.
We unfolded the hide-a-bed and, as the sky outside dimmed from periwinkle to inky blue, we lay and told each other our days’ news.
We went over our phone calls, our dental appointments, our naps, recounting whatever interesting or semi-interesting thoughts had crossed our minds, and asking each other the questions no one else asked. And, of course, we made love.
For that summer, the Barn became our private beach, turquoise water stretching in every direction.
On the powdered sand, I learned Sarah’s life from the beginning.
I heard all about her childhood summer camp in Puget Sound, her teenage lovers, Dylan and Trent, her friend Melissa, who’d crashed her car on crystal meth.
I heard about her parents’ friends and her neighbors’ dogs.
I heard about the books that had formed her, running backward from Marguerite Duras to Dawn Powell to Sylvia Plath to Judy Blume to the Black Cauldron series by Lloyd Alexander, which was incredible, because at the bottom of my own reading life was Lloyd Alexander, too.
What a moment that was, discovering we’d loved the same childhood books.
In our faraway bedrooms, possibly at exactly the same moment, we’d turned the same pages and dreamed the same dreams. Gradually, the star of her inner life was becoming brighter.
She heard my stories, too, all the old myths, burnished and round.
She heard about the enigma of my dad, who’d left when I was two, and our move to southern Oregon from Santa Cruz as part of the greater countercultural diaspora of the 1970s.
She heard about the entry and exit of Mary, my mom’s abusive wife, and about my early twenties, spent wandering Europe and North Africa, sampling hash and hitting all the beatnik stations.
I even told her about my illumination on the banks of the Nile when I’d decided to become a writer, no matter if it meant a life of complete penury.
I told her about the dishwashing and janitorial jobs that had followed, and my rave phase, and my former girlfriends, trying always to express to her just how solitary my life had become to make room for the writing.
“What was your first kiss?” she said.
“I don’t remember,” I said, kissing her shoulder, her elbow, her armpit.
“Are you kidding me?” she said. “How can a person not remember that?”
“I just don’t,” I said. “I don’t remember having sex the first time, either.”
“What?”
“It was so fast,” I said. “It might not have happened at all the first few times.”
“I find that ridiculous,” she said. “You should choose a time and stick with it.”
“I remember kissing a girl named Julie Strunk in eighth grade,” I said, turning her over and kissing the small of her back, the curve of her ass. “We went to a dance together. I could’ve done a lot more with her. But I didn’t like her that much.”
“I didn’t think that mattered to boys,” she said.
“To some boys it does.”
We learned each other’s histories in that room, but most of all, we learned each other’s bodies.
I saw Sarah from every direction, above and below, in front and behind, from off to the side.
I saw her belly button indented in its lovely pillow of flesh, her face swollen from sleep.
There were images that became instantly iconic in my mind, like stained glass in my cathedral of memory.
Her body moving on top of me as I fingered her asshole, her pushing her weight onto the tip my finger, my finger sliding deeper into her, and feeling the pressure of my cock pressing behind her inner walls.
Her on her knees, twisting to catch my eyes as her hand reached back to cup me between her legs, pulling at me from the root.
The wide-screen tangle of her pubic mound as I nosed the coarse hairs aside, trapping them between my lip and gum, seeking the wet blister of her clit.
In that room, I came to know all of her—the taste of her lips, the taste of her sex.
But best of all, I came to know how to make her laugh.
“Do you want me to put my pud in you now?” I said, her ankles latched on my neck.
“Oh, God,” she said, “don’t say that word, please.”
“I’m going to put my pud in you now,” I said.
“Stop it. Seriously.”
“Oh my God, this feels so good on my pud.”
We had to stop, we were laughing so hard. We couldn’t go any further, we were crying. She said she hated it when I said that word, but in reality she didn’t mind the idiotic boy stuff. She liked it.
We didn’t think very far ahead. Inside that room, the future didn’t exist, and the room itself didn’t exist once we walked outside.
To talk about any of it would only do it harm, reveal its utter impossibility.
And so we stayed silent, even to ourselves.
We were building a secret between each other, and as long as the secret remained unstated, we were safe.
We were more than safe, we were happy. Our daily lives remained beautifully the same, unimpinged upon, but our secret shed new light onto everything, imbued every moment with fresh, bright suspense.
How long until we got back to our room? How long until we could meet again and strip naked?
During those summer months, I was still seeing Phil every week, too, as terrible as that sounds.
I wrote in the morning, spent the afternoon with Phil, and met Sarah at night, as if all the different pieces of my life had no relation.
Such were my powers of compartmentalization.
As far as Phil knew, Sarah was taking a memoir-writing workshop, something she’d been threatening to do for years.
If she and I played tennis together, or attended a lecture, as we sometimes allowed ourselves to do, he helped us with the scheduling.
He had no suspicions whatsoever, which was a further measure of his goodness. He saw only good in those around him.
He and I usually met on Thursdays and hiked into the canopy above town, wending our way through the white fir and weeping spruce, passing birders and hikers along the way.
As we ambled the trails, he pointed out the many different species of plants and trees we encountered, and told me about all their special adaptations.
He told me what was native and what was invasive, not that he particularly cared about that. He was pro-immigration in every way.
On our walks, he revealed things to me I never otherwise would have known, introduced me to words I never would have heard.
He was an excellent teacher in that way, overflowing with information.
But it was more than that, too. He passed along more than facts.
He was passing along a whole way of seeing.
The reason he observed the natural world so deeply, I came to realize, was because he looked at it with such deep love.
“You must have the bird in your heart before you see it in the bush,” John Burroughs said.
Phil had the bird in his heart. I walked away from our meetings filled with new insights, brimming with new understandings.
And then I went home and transcribed his lessons almost verbatim.
“The madrone is such a remarkable tree, isn’t it?
” he said, pausing at a twisting trunk on a ridge overlooking the Rogue Valley, snowless mountains visible in the distance.
“I mean, look at this guy. His branches are so gnarled, but his skin is so satiny. And the wood. Feel it. It’s so cool.
So smooth. Like the back of your arm. Really, the madrone is among the most individualistic of trees, don’t you think? ”
“There’s a lot going on with this guy, all right,” I said.