Departure

Goodbye

The longest part of the journey

is said to be the passing of the gate.

— Marcus Terentius Varro

CHAPTER 1.

We used to drive past Levittown, a vast and in its day unique tract of identical houses placed row on row with military precision. From the parkway you could look down on the undulating sea of peaked roofs and pastel siding, and to me this was an impressive vista, so impressive that for years I aspired to live there.

I reasoned that once inside the development the uniformity would prove so baffling that no one could ever find me. I would live in one of those houses with my family, and there would be no police dossier on this house, no need for emergency vehicles. It would be luxuriously boring, complete with credenza and carport, and no voice would ever be raised except to announce the badminton score.

According to this scenario my three children should be grown by now, my husband graying and melancholy, and I should be redecorating the living room and battling alcoholism.

And I would have been content if all this had come to pass, but in reality my childhood ambition had over the years disintegrated to the point that on this afternoon I awoke as though from a dream at the age of thirty-five to find myself squatting in an olive grove in the Aegean Sea taking lessons from a person named Paraskevi on how to recognize edible weeds and cut them with a paring knife so as to keep the central root intact while excising its hanging clump of dirt.

On an island my usual tendency is to search out the perimeter, always asking myself, How do I get off this thing? Yet here I was on an island, out of work but not on vacation. The ground under my knees sloped drastically to the sea. For an instant the world seemed cockeyed, like a photograph clicked off by accident when the camera was falling to the floor.

Quick: What are you doing here?

I am blowing up the past. Running an experiment to see if I can change who I am by abandoning what I know. I am weeding an olive grove.

I chalked up my uneasiness to time warp because glancing at my watch I realized that back in my previous life I was in the middle of a Monday morning staff meeting, watching the men puff up and snort and the women hunker down and scowl, and I didn’t belong there any more than I did here in a weed patch. Don’t look down, I thought, suddenly feeling high up. Don’t look down, don’t clutch up, don’t make lists, don’t say don’t. And a voice, possibly Zeke’s, said, Take heart, you she-goat, for you are in an exclusive club. You are a person who can get spooked picking dandelions.

Only two months since I had left Washington, and already I found myself mentally retracing my steps backward, exploring the map of decisions that led me here.

Zeke was the one who told me about decision maps. But typically, he doesn’t much care about them, whereas now I can hardly get the idea out of my mind. I start my map with warts, or Levittown, or a certain cloud in the sky. Sometimes with a vision I had, other times with a vision my mother had. The basic idea, according to Zeke, is to look at where you are in life and to trace your way backwards using your decisions as stepping stones. Depending on where and how you define your position, you find different decision-roads that led you there. You find out that even where chance has intervened, you still had to make a decision. And if you had a vision, or heard a voice telling you what to do, you still had to decide whether to do it or not. For Zeke this is a simple game, it shows that character is destiny. He can say, I did this because of that, and that because of that, and bam, bam, bam, this is who I am. Then he can continue stirring his chemicals. Not me. Oh, no. It’s never been that easy for me. Plus I don’t just kill time, I maul it, mutilate it, stomp on its little face. I massacre time.

Paraskevi was a sturdy woman about my age yet not of my generation. She was a weaver, she was a wife, she was kind to strangers and she did not have this crying need to stand outside her country, her village, her family or herself. She was not amusing, and she did not adopt positions. She took care of her husband, she worked at her loom along with her mother, and she minded her own business. She existed.

Paraskevi had invited me to go gather weeds, known in Greek as horta . She found me incompetent from the start, however, when I showed up at her gate with one plastic bag and a table knife. No, no, she said, you need at least four bags, here, take these, and a sharp knife, look, I have an extra one, take this.

Before setting out we stopped in at the grocer’s, because Paraskevi had some purchases to make.

The dark little store was lined floor to ceiling with cans and boxes and sacks. The grocer fetched the items while a customer recited from her list.

A man sitting off to the side on a rickety chair nodded encouragement as Paraskevi asked for several kinds of chewing gum. He was the extra guy, the one in a Greek shop who keeps the proprietor company, a kind of permanent retiree who observes, comments on the action and absorbs excess emotion. Sometimes the extra guy is consigned to a corner or lost amid the merchandise. Sometimes he has a seat of honor, and even an ouzo and a dish of olives. The extra guy greets the public, commiserates, or simply studies the human condition. He’s more liberal with his advice than the proprietor (Beans, eh? I’ll tell you what you do with those beans, my girl, you cook them slowly-slowly with meat broth and garlic and onions, then you put in a few tomatoes, understand?), unless he actually is the proprietor, allowing a relative to run the place while he takes a load off his feet. His standard lines are " Och, ti na kànoume ? (What’s to be done about it?) and Po po po" ( Och, ti na kànoume ?). Without an extra guy to soften hard edges and elaborate, a business transaction can be a dry and blunt affair, a mere mechanical exchange. Of course in ancient days this guy was called a chorus.

Outside the store a group of children were playing ball, and Paraskevi summoned them all over to her, about eight kids from five to twelve years old. Wordlessly she began pulling out the gum from her skirt pockets. She distributed it in a businesslike manner, frowning contentedly, and the children, although still shining from the thrill of their ballgame, were respectful and subdued. I was struck by the restrained mutual pleasure involved in this ceremony.

As we crossed the village, each time she saw a child she would signal him over and then she would frown at the sky and reach way down into her pocket as if she weren’t a hundred percent sure what if anything were in there. Then she would pull out a piece of gum, place it squarely in the child’s palm and walk on briskly as though she had just put a letter in the mailbox.

It took half an hour or so to get to Paraskevi’s favorite horta patch. But today it was necessary to make a side trip. We took a right turn off the road and climbed a hill on a goat path, crossed a Shakespearean meadow and entered a cool pine forest. Paraskevi pointed out marjoram, mushrooms and squirting succulents. See, she said. Smell, she said. Feel, she said. All the while watching me dubiously, somberly, as though I were a slow student cramming for an impossible exam. She pointed out arbutus, almond trees and shy pink cyclamen. Chamomile, thyme and mountain tea. All that was important, useful. Because Paraskevi had no time for diversion, she was a busy woman.

Finally we came to a hidden white chapel, small as a shed with a cross on its dome. Paraskevi strode in and I followed, surprised by the grandeur of the interior. There were frescoes, gilded candelabra, lighted votive candles and a holy fragrance of incense and pine. Paraskevi set to work filling some candles with oil from a can she found at the side of the church, and urged me to take a look around. I was interested in the objects people had hung on one wall — an ear, an eye, an arm — symbols of what needed to be healed or had been healed. There were also plaques as well as handwritten notes of thanks.

There was no sound except the wind in the trees and the occasional bird. Paraskevi had lit a candle and was standing motionless before it, her wide, full face with its sharp nose aglow in the orange light. The word Paraskevi means ‘preparation.’ In her thick wool stockings, skirt, jacket and scarf, she was as solid and well proportioned as the church itself. She was regarding an icon with her craftsman’s intensity, as though scanning for a dropped stitch. It seemed to me that such seriousness and devotion could only be rewarded.

CHAPTER 2.

There was a time when I had no future. I remember it fondly. My mother hoped she had produced a bohemian in flowing robes and earrings rather than a mental case in pleated skirts and chains. She said look, I sent for this catalogue, it’s a fine arts school in Mexico. I said so what. She said you could go there, you could live in the mountains, speak a foreign language, write, read. I said Mother.

But you told me you wanted to study literature, she said.

But in New England, not Mexico.

"Oh, I see, New England ." She pronounced it like Coney Island . "New England , the seat of the American cultural establishment."

I looked at her in her spare and tasteful apartment. Mrs. No-white-before Memorial Day, Mrs. Proper Teapot, Mrs. Spectator Pump.

Mother, I said, why the hell don’t you go to Mexico and study art if you think it’s so great?

I’m only looking out for your interests, she said with a sniff.

And it’s true, because if it had been up to me I’d have gotten a job in a shoe store rather than go to college, which I was afraid would be like high school, only worse. All that awful bureaucracy: the student council, the senior class, the infinite clubs and cheering squads, how did they stay interested in those things? The eager dog-like boys. The docile girls in their pastel outfits, which I couldn’t afford. And as much as I secretly craved company, my memory was turned off during those years, and it is hard to be a normal friend when you have no past whatsoever.

Bypassing college was out of the question; my mother would have thrown herself in the river. Yet I was too frail for adventure. Childhood had been exciting enough. If I had to go to college I would go to the safest one possible, a cozy neo-classic hiding place in the seat of the American cultural establishment.

So I packed off for Pedimental U. and had my fill of op cits and rah-rah. It wasn’t too bad, because the fashion changed and they had some weirdos and fags and creepy intellectuals. I sent my mother a quotation from Emerson: Let us not rove; let us stay at home with the cause. She sent back her own: Port out, starboard home. And perhaps she was right.

The season of the happiest days, the days of no future, ended one afternoon when I was on the train to Boston. It was a gray day in winter, the intimate kind of day when people speak in quiet voices. I had just experienced the facts of life and was on my way to share them with some cute boy; there wasn’t a happier or more charming girl in the United States of America than I.

At one of the stations a stout man in a heavy overcoat and hat was a shade late. I was sitting backwards toward the rear of the train, and I could see him when he was getting out of his car and starting to make a dash for the train. He grabbed his briefcase and trundled as fast as he could. He disappeared into the station and emerged on the other side red-faced and careening, but he was really too stiff and old for this sport and the train pulled away, leaving him heaving a big sigh all alone on the platform.

And after I watched the man shrink into a statue, a post, a stump, and a spot, I no longer cared about charming the boy in Boston, I no longer cared for cozy days in winter, I no longer cared for my youthful allure. I, too, was diminished — but also fevered and panicked like a criminal in a nightmare.

Sometimes I wonder if the body doesn’t have its own logic and life experience. Because you can be over and done with something, and years later, decades later, the body will seize up with sadness or panic at some reminder of it. In my case it’s a sudden heavy sorrow that evolves into fear of that very sorrow. It happens rarely, but every time, it takes me a while to understand what is going on, why I feel breathless and heavy of heart, like I’ve been socked. The body seems to have gotten it before the mind. So that although I told myself it was the flu coming on, later I knew it was the re-ignition of my dead memory. My father in his usual mad dash, my father missing the train, my father missing the train with me on it, my father dying all alone. I hadn’t let myself think about that for five years.

There was an old Saturday Evening Post cover depicting a suburban train station where mothers in hair curlers were waving bye-bye from their cars, and fathers were waiting on the platform behind their newspapers for the train to New York. The train was just pulling in and one man was still sprinting to make it. He was wearing a derby and what was known as a covert coat and he had a little cigar in his mouth and a Barry green scarf around his neck, because this was our local train station and that was my father, even Norman Rockwell singled him out as an oddball. Everyone who saw the magazine cover knew it was him because of the eccentric clothes, the cigar he smoked at the time, and the fact that he was always the last one on, he had to make a suspense thriller out of getting on the same commuter train he took every weekday morning of his adult life.

Sometimes I dream about rushing to meet him on a train and missing him and being glad and also unspeakably sorry.

I tried to blank out by gazing with unfocused eyes at the view outside the train. But when the past threatened to occupy the present, the present immediately sought refuge in the future. And as I stared out the window at the grimy passing town I saw a strange fact: I saw that after graduation I would go to the city, any city, obtain what is known as a good job, live in a place full of windows with trees outside, and undergo a series of complicated love affairs. This I saw with the Levittown side of my brain.

But with the other side I saw that I would then grow disenchanted with all of that activity and remove myself to a rational and quiet life.

In other words I found myself looking at something I both wanted and wanted to reject. There was no question of skipping the intermediate step, the regular life. On the contrary, I was eager to begin it — except from that moment on I was at the same time relieved that this regular life would eventually play itself out.

In later years I would call up this little reverie every so often just to take a look, because it contained the elements of a paradox that was odd but comforting. Eventually I came to feel I was emerging from a sketch made years earlier. Thus do I massacre time.

After college I went to Washington and gratefully accepted good wages in exchange for making the small appear large, the sorry appear worthy. I worked for a newspaper, and then I worked for a consulting firm. I sat in a gray cubicle over the top of which my boss would peer and sometimes throw me bread. I thought it was great. I promoted candidates, ideas, issues. State-of-the-art thinking. A rational, quiet life was the last thing on my mind.

In fact, I became what was known as a news junkie, meaning I would read eight or ten newspapers a day and watch all the TV news and then I would know the combat capability of various guerrilla groups, how the President’s wife selected her drapes, who was likely to win the Louisiana primaries and that a man in Nebraska chopped up his wife and fed the pieces to the dog. I knew Deng from Chou from Zhao, Kameini from Khomeini, the OMB from the CEA and M1 from M2. I knew the PLO from the FMNL from the F15 and the F111. I knew all about the Druze, Contras, Kurds and Sikhs, although I was a little vague on the Khmer Rouge and my local city council.

I didn’t actually do anything with all my stored up names and facts and opinions, any more than a baseball fan actually does anything with all the statistics he has accumulated — except to enjoy them with his fellow fans. I would say, There will never be a ground war in Europe, and my friend and fellow fan would say, The bomb (or the Cold War) has actually enhanced world stability. And I would say, Recession isn’t necessarily so bad if it’s cleverly orchestrated, and my friend would say, There’s no quick fix. And I would say, Don’t blame the victim, and my friend would say, Isn’t that racist? And I would say It’s going to be another Vietnam, and my friend would say, As long as it’s subtitled because I can’t stand dubbing, and I would say, A man in Nebraska chopped up his wife and fed the pieces to the dog, and my friend would say No, no, he chopped up the dog and fed the pieces to his wife.

And this would be a hands-in-the pockets sort of discussion, because neither of us was actually touched by any of the subjects, including the possibility the planet might be blown up. Maybe I had an opinion on M2 or the B1 bomber, but the main reason for bringing them up was to establish that I was interested in Big Things and Big Events, and to establish that I would go to some lengths to further that interest, so that one might think I had a stake in Big Things and that therefore I was — well, Big.

My mother did not think I was Big, only misguided or bored. She called me up, she said, I have a wonderful idea. I said oh God.

You’re still traveling light, she said; now’s the time to quit your job, go up to Annapolis, find a sailboat that’s going around the world and sign on as crew.

Perhaps I am getting on your nerves, I said.

Not at all, I just don’t think you’re cut out for the nine to five life.

You think I’m cut out for hauling a jib sheet around a submerged winch in a 20-foot sea off Tierra del Fuego.

You won’t be in your twenties forever.

I said, Look, with all due respect, this is the first time in my life I’ve had any financial security.

Sssakes, for what reason do you need financial security?

Mother.

She, who insisted on being wealthy even when she couldn’t afford a winter coat. She, who never taught me the domestic crafts because she thought my staff would see to the house and grounds. She who told me pea soup and bread were avant-garde. My mother had become slight and delicate over the years, and when I embraced her it felt as though a stream of water were passing through my arms. Soon she would be retired and alone.

I mumbled, Well, you know, making a living, it’s what people do, and after all I earn a good salary.

She said, And what will you do with this salary, buy a racehorse?

That was the second-to-last thing she ever said to me before she died of a heart attack, the last being, "Never, ever wear shoes lighter in color than the hem of your dress!"

CHAPTER 3.

Just out of my twenties and after a series of complicated love affairs I met a dark and sinewy enigma, the fateful inculcation of Jack Kerouac and Jude the Obscure, and this was Zeke the Poet.

I met him at a party. Standing around in a graceful athletic stoop, he seemed to be disconnected from the proceedings, as though he were either the host or a crasher. Someone said he was a friend of a friend. Someone said he was artistic. Someone said he was from out of town, in more ways than one. The reason I had all that information was that I asked, and the reason I asked was that I thought this man could upset my life definitively. I was not going to kill time with this man.

The way he narrowed his eyes when I introduced myself, I thought at first he might be thinking, So, this is the one they all say’s a total jerk. But it was only his relaxed half-smile beneath attentive eyes.

He had a way of switching from languid swimmer to mighty miler, although what he had been was a safety and a halfback. He was serene and detached, unless he had adopted his intense, pointed look. He had dark hair and dark eyes and a formidable nose. Although he was thin, he had big strong hands and shoulders. From my dead mother’s point of view he was a crack bridge player and a knowledgeable drinker and just the right crowbar to ease me out of the okey-doke. From my point of view he was deep and ingenuous and inevitable. I had to excuse myself at one point and escape to the bathroom and say no, no, no. Because I wanted him so much I felt it showed ridiculously. I stood in the bathroom with my forehead against the wall, trying to understand this rush of desire, almost wishing I lived in another era, when there might have been no question of fulfilling it. Because the feeling itself was so pure and strong, like real healthy hunger as opposed to mere appetite. I didn’t love Zeke, I only wanted him. But this was a new kind of wanting, I flatter myself to think it was my eventual love for him, a love looking back at me from a place I hadn’t reached. The truth is if he had snubbed me I’d have gotten over it in a day or so.

When he took me out for a brandy, I thought he was studying me as though he’d known me years earlier and wanted to see how I had turned out. The next day when he looked at me it was as though he were with me, following my every thought.

Zeke was a poet of the laconic school who supported himself both as a fish wholesaler and a photographer, and when he shot a Congressional hearing after his morning deliveries I could see him on the evening news, crouched with his cameras amid the well-groomed officials, and when the TV lights hit the fish scales on his sport coat the effect was nearly blinding, I said, Oh Zeke, my Zeke, you are more dazzling than Liberace.

Yet he was not all flash and effect, for he was a country boy, someone who knew about skillpots and arrowheads and ground hogs. Previously he had worked in Chicago as a bus driver, and before that he had taught English in South Carolina, laid sewer pipes in Virginia and flipped hamburgers in an all-night diner in San Francisco. He assured me he was quite simple, he said, I’m a wing-T man, and if you want to know what that is you can call him up and ask him.

But he was easily troubled by a poem or a thought, and he could lose his temper over a few printed words and then become morose for a couple of days. Apparently he was furious with Descartes and did not believe in the objective world. I was afraid to ask him what he meant by that. But I knew one consequence was a low tolerance for socializing.

Why do you say, ‘He who is happy has not yet heard the news’? I asked him one night in the car after a long silence. This was after I had stayed for ten days in his house in Virginia, after we had spent a weekend or two in Annapolis, after some advancing, reversing, backing and filling, and after he had finally moved in to my apartment in Glover Park.

He said, I don’t say that, Brecht or somebody said it. I’m only agreeing.

We were on our way home from a dinner party at which I felt Zeke had failed to be impressed by my social circle. When I say impressed I mean touched, not awed. Zeke simply was not affected by the wit and wisdom of my acquaintances. He seemed politely, even humbly, not to recognize them.

Don’t you like to enjoy yourself with other people? I asked him.

Of course I do, said Zeke.

Finally I said, Well, don’t you think So-and-So is terribly clever and smart? And Zeke still didn’t say anything.

I kept goading him, talking about how bright this person was. I was going to insist that Zeke agree, because the man in question was just over the threshold of a brilliant political career and he had been regaling us with stories as well as making some terribly original remarks about not only horserace politics but what you call Substantive Issues, like monetary policy and America’s image abroad.

Zeke wasn’t going to criticize but I forced him, he finally said, Yes, So-and-So is very intelligent but he’s… not a real person.

I said, Are you crazy?

He said, I mean he only invests himself in the mechanics of life, the working parts.

So, fine.

So, fine. But all those Sunday Supplement people, to me they’re like characters in a parlor comedy, one of those plays where people enter and exit and enter and exit and all they seem to do is go through doors, and on this side of the door they say something clever and on the other side they disappear, they don’t exist.

And I started to say something infinitely cutting but I stopped short because I was afraid that although he was devoted to me, Zeke also included me as a character in his parlor-comedy analogy. And I knew he would have denied it if I’d pushed him, but I thought, what’s the point? Because I saw myself more or less that way, going in and out of doors carrying a mask on a stick. So I merely waited for an opportune moment and then I said his favorite philosopher was a Nazi.

Now, Zeke is basically homeless. He says that is why he is so domestic, why he cannot eat standing up in the kitchen or tolerate an allen wrench in the silverware drawer. Zeke’s idea is to make camp, to make camp well. Being a poet, Zeke knows everything. He knew that I, too, was a homeless person, but he didn’t let on because I didn’t know it yet and he was too polite. He only said, one time near his homeplace in North Carolina when I was mooning as always over the farmhouses dotting the rolling hills, You might just as well forget about settling down, because you aren’t going to be at home anywhere. And I knew he was right. I’m always looking out the window.

What a genius my mother was. For it was true, I hadn’t remained in my twenties forever. Shortly thereafter, the interim life that I had foreseen on the train to Boston started to unravel.

I was on my way to a meeting being held by a certain trade association, which wanted to know how to position itself on a proposed Constitutional amendment. Should it be for or against? No, wrong: should it be perceived as for or against? Because it was the dawn of perception. Perception came from television. On the evening news they preferred Jones is perceived to be electable to Jones could win the election. Or better: The perception is that Jones could win the election.

And since at heart everyone wanted to be blessed by the cameras, the lights and the glow of transmission, we said what the TV reporters said. Even in private conversations you would say, The perception is that Jones is electable. Perception, obfuscation. It was the dawn of using impact as a transitive verb. Of adjectival nouns and passive construction. There is the perception of electability here, which could impact funding for the remaining eighteen months of the campaign.

In print it was the dawn of whoa-boy journalism, which — although nobody gives me the credit — I inspired. Yes. It was I who said whoa boy to a reporter who was getting fresh one night — I’ll even tell you exactly where, it was in the back seat of a yellow cab heading out Connecticut Avenue. Not two days later the same reporter — recently transferred from sports to State —used whoa boy as a single-phrase paragraph to indicate that the preceding, lead quote from a U.S. congressman was so forceful and erudite as to be way over the reporter’s head. Soon other reporters in the Washington bureaus were saying whoa boy to express their amazement. Within two years it was out in the suburbs, then all over the country. Five years later it was dead, except in places where men still wore long hair and sideburns. But during its lifespan whoa boy impacted the media nearly as much as images and perceptions.

So although I was rightly considered a lightweight, I had a few more pounds to my credit at the moment. Plus I had taught two or three candidates to pretend they had a basketball between their hands during televised interviews, and thus to appear expressive and by extension creative or at least living, and all this within the bounds of a medium close-up. I also taught them and their various advocates how to avoid answering questions by sticking to a one-two-three agenda, and to repeat simple phrases that later became known as sound-bites.

You think I’m gloating. Wrong. This is why I’m in exile.

The fact is I really was a lightweight, and had no business with these people. If it hadn’t been clear before, it was on this day when my mind was clanging with urgent unfinished business which I knew I would not bring to anyone’s attention. The urgent business was that when I got off the metro that morning I saw a man standing on 15th street, a man of about sixty years, wearing a three-piece brown suit, white shirt and gold tie, holding out an impeccable straw hat for coins. He stood stiffly, politely, speaking only to those who spoke to him or gave him money. It was the first time I’d ever seen a man of his dress and comportment wanting money on the street. And then there was his face: I want to say there was something noble about it. Strong African nose, aristocratic upper lip, firm jaw, steady eyes. Something told me to stop, ask him what was the matter, could he use a job, couldn’t we figure this thing out.

Yet I didn’t obey my instinct — I passed him by. I couldn’t stop and chat because, you see, I was on my way to this meeting at the trade association to decide whether they should be for or against the Constitutional amendment. I forgot to say, the trade association was in charge of promoting kiwi fruit. You may ask yourself what difference it makes what a trade association promoting kiwi fruit thinks about amending the United States Constitution. To which I would say, that just shows how little you know about Washington.

This small event, seeing a gentleman on the street needing money, represents a sad truth of life, the likes