Strays

I’ve been trying to write something about the time Andrew came home from work with the shocking news that Adam Howe, his best friend from when he was living in Provincetown, had killed his mother and set her body on fire in front of the house where she lived and where Adam was ordered by the court to live under his mother’s supervision due to various arrests for domestic abuse. Of course, the story would hit the press soon enough—the way it is when any murder, particularly matricide, pierces through a small town’s hold on illusions of being safe.

While I had complicated feelings about the relationship between Adam and Andrew (they screwed around occasionally), a sudden flourish of curiosity outbid whatever I wanted to feel and and I jumped out of bed and said, “I have to write the book,” which I imagined might have been Truman Capote’s impulse, when, in 1959, he read a tiny article in the New York Times with the headline WEALTHY FARMER, 3 OF FAMILY SLAIN, and decided to write “In Cold Blood.” All this, without knowing that Adam’s sister, Jenna, was actually looking for someone to help her write her version of the story. And so, for the last two years, I’ve been helping Jenna on a book tentatively called Compatible With Life. And I’ve been trying to write something about what that experience has been like, but I can’t get past what I’ve just put down here, which, of course, feels like, to quote Wm. Maxwell, “I seem to have lost touch with the place that stories and novels come from,” or, in my case, where essays come from.

I love the books written by Sigrid Nunez. Among other pleasures, her fiction includes mentioning real books or real people, which always hits me as a relief from the usual turn in the mind of having to suspend disbelief.

Whenever I’m driving, I listen to a lot of the music I used to listen to when I was a teenager: Laura Nyro, Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Richard and Mimi Farina, Judy Collins, Jean Ritchie, Joni Mitchell, Fraser and DeBolt, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Nina Simone, etc., etc. All of which confirms the fact that when I hear that music again, I can always remember where I was and who I was with, if I was with someone, when I first heard it. And how now, new music (Esperanza Spalding, Robert Glasper, Hiatus Kaiyote, Forager) will, in time, bring back the same one memory of me in a car driving in the dark.

Yesterday, Ralphie found a dying baby rabbit very still, but still breathing, in the backyard that someone (something?) had wrapped part way in a paper towel, which reminded me of my highschool biology teacher, Mr. Chaimus, telling us he wanted to be wrapped in a shroud before being dropped into the earth. When I went back today, the rabbit had finished dying and wasn’t moving and instead of dropping it into the earth, I buried it in a flower pot where the dirt was looser, friendlier, and closer to the light from the sun.

Years ago, when I was teaching in the MFA program at Goddard College, I had a student named Peg who insisted on working with me the entire two years because she was dying, which was okay with me because she was such a fiercely committed writer that I wanted to stay with her anyway. Her letters to me were inspired (particularly on the subject of Rilke, where she was teaching me) and she was funny and came through her writing as someone who was already broken in places before the cancer broke her. I lost track of Peg. There were some letters after she graduated, but they stopped a long time ago and I’ve lost them and have to wonder if she’s lost, too, in the stars.

Another time, another advisee (as we called them at the progressive writing program), called the program director after graduating and told her that she wanted to sue the school because whenever she tried to write something, she couldn’t get the sound of my voice out of her head. What’s even more remarkable is the fact that the program director called to warn me that there might be a law suit coming. Of course, that never happened, and I heard through some grapevine I can remember that the advisee stopped hearing my voice in her head because her own voice got louder.