Extra Innings (28 page)

Afterwards we three meet in the nave, and realize we have all been aware of the same thing: how extraordinary it is that it is now possible for three women to come together to celebrate Mass, legally, in an Episcopal church. The institution itself proceeds into the modern world with the speed of a hippopotamus, as T. S. Eliot observed, but as Galileo insisted, in another context,
‘I pur si mu oue
.' Nevertheless, it does move.

We have dinner with a good friend who is HIV-positive and has been living with the specter of AIDS for years. His symptoms are not yet major, so few of his fellow workers, or even his family, I believe, are aware of the cloud that hangs over his life.

For some sufferers, this is the worst part of this plague: in order to be treated humanely they must hide the truth from the misinformed or pusillanimous persons around them. They must approach the darkness alone instead of in the company of friends and family. Only at the last, when it is too late, when extreme illness turns one in upon oneself, creating a hermitage of one's pain, do the disapproving and the frightened ones come, carrying their fears for themselves in their faces, almost useless to the one who is dying.

We say goodbye to our friend and urge him to visit us this summer in Maine. He says he will come. But we doubt we will see him there. We feel honored to be among those he took into his confidence. We are his fellow travelers, even at a distance, moving with him for part of the way, into the dark wood. He has permitted us the journey with him toward the chasm.

The last three days of festivities before we leave. Each year the PEN/Faulkner Foundation awards prizes for the best American fiction of the year. This time I was one of the judges, so we are included in the ceremonies in Washington that surround the event. It is significant that we will leave the city, not from the humdrum daily life of the apartment, but from the luxurious hotel suite we have been assigned for the weekend.

On Friday evening, judges, winners, supporters, and literary friends meet at Lael and Ron Stegall's house on East Capitol Street. A few years ago Sybil and I went there to buy books. Another time we acquired our prized library steps from their house sale, so we know the place well. We walk from the Capitol Hill Hotel, through the heavy-with-rain leaves of the huge trees on that lovely avenue. My feet in their unaccustomed party shoes hurt badly.

But I forget my discomfort in the presence of so many people I know. Faith Sale has come down from New York, fresh from the triumphs of two of her authors, Alice Hoffman and Lee Smith, and Harvey Simmons, whom I knew when he was an editor for the Eakins Press, and an old friend of the Stegalls, is here. Leslie Katz, owner of the press, published well-designed letterpress books, which Harvey always sent to me, to my great pleasure. Then Harvey disappeared from the publishing scene. Now he reappears (to me), having been for the last twenty years a Cisterian brother in New York. He tells me that the order's prime source of income is the sale of fruit cakes at Christmas time. How large is the community? I ask. ‘Down to twenty brothers and five priests, from sixty,' he says. He is a spry, bearded, almost elfin man with a cheerful mien, full of loving memories of ‘Mr. B.' (Balanchine, of course) and his friendship with the great choreographer while he was working on books by and about him.

Elena Castedo, a South American novelist and now a board member of PEN/Faulkner, throws her arms around me and kisses me when we are introduced. I am startled, trying to decide why. She probably has heard I am a founding board member, but I am unused to such instant effusiveness.

Standing near by is this year's first-prize winner, Don DeLillo. He too looks startled. I move over to talk to him. He does not throw his arms around me. In fact, he is leaning against the wall and looks cornered when I approach. I congratulate him, he thanks me for my choice of
Mao II
. Then he points to a large abstract painting on the wall, full of colors that whirl, a mass of chaotic figures. ‘There's the first chapter,' he says, unsmiling.

His novel is a searing account of the futility and irrelevance of writing fiction. Bill Grey, its hero, is a Thomas Pynchon—like writer who has published two books that have attained cult status. He becomes hermitic, wanting only to work without the intrusion of the world, while outside, having made of him a mythic figure as important as his work, the world waits eagerly for another book (in this he resembles Harold Brodkey). Years pass without its appearance (J. D. Salinger?). He has been writing and rewriting it in his cell, surrounded by walls of files of everything he has ever written.

The absurdity of mass culture (‘The future belongs to crowds'), the fatuous world of the book and the writer, the media that feed on it, are DeLillo's subjects. When a photographer breaks into his seclusion she tells him she loves writers but is afraid she cannot speak their private language. Bill Grey says:

The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I've grown a second self in this room. It's the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I'm allowed.

And later:

I'll tell you what I don't exaggerate. The doubt. Every minute of every day. It's what I smell in my bed. Loss of faith. That's what this is all about.

Yes.

Sybil has read the book, and liked it well enough. But she claims it is a writer's book, and that it is significant that the three judges are all novelists themselves. She is probably right. For it is a well-known maxim (Le Rochefoucauld? Montaigne? Twain?) that we most admire in others what we know to be true of ourselves.

Next morning Richard Wiley, fellow judge and novelist, Allan Gurganus, runner-up for the prize and my longtime friend, and Sybil and I have breakfast at Sherrill's, the Hill's oldest eatery, where the waitresses are all over fifty. One is so frail and old she has to hold on to the counter when she comes around to serve. They all have the surly dispositions of the waiters at the forties Broadway restaurant called Lindy's, another place where longevity bestowed upon the help all the privileges of incivility. The food at Sherrill's is plentiful, cheap, and rather poor. Hill dwellers are so used to the historic place they prefer it to glitzy newer restaurants with pretty young waitresses and good food.

We ate and talked for two hours, of the Iowa Writers Workshop, where I taught after Richard and Allan were classmates there, and of other PEN/Faulkner events we had all attended. Allan told a story about the last gala, which took place during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. The honored writers were asked to talk about their heroes. Two famous black writers confined their remarks to black movie actors who never got the fame they deserved, and jazz. Allan decided to talk about the matter on everyone's mind. His hero was Anita Hill.

The audience gasped. Afterwards, an official of the affair asked him, reprovingly, if he knew that Senator John Danforth's daughter was on the Gala Committee. Others, like Hodding Carter and Susan Stamberg, congratulated him. Apprised of this, the official informed Allan that his was ‘the best talk.'

After breakfast, Richard and Allan go off to see a demonstration on the Mall in support of aid to the cities. For the last time, we go to the apartment to empty it of trash. We strip it of everything, down to the penny that had dropped behind the bed. We turn off the refrigerator, leave the keys on the counter, and shut the door. We are gone, leaving for the last time our home away from home, I with relief, Sybil with reluctance.

Saturday's
Washington Post
has a sad story about Lowen's, a toy store on Wisconsin Avenue that is closing after almost fifty years in business. One employee has worked there for thirty-seven years. In the shadow of Toys R Us, the world's largest toy store, as it calls itself, the small, beloved Lowen's could not survive the competition, the rent rises, the recession. Small, it would seem, is both beautiful—and fatal.

The central event of the PEN /Faulkner Award ceremonies. Again we ‘dress up,' although I long to wear my comfortable L. L. Bean clothes, and walk to the Folger. The judges and the winners sit on the platform, I explain to the audience how we came to choose the five books. Then, with the example of Allan's story clearly in mind, I interrupt what I am saying to protest the censorship of grants to so-called sexually offensive art by the NEA's acting director.… We give the winners their prizes; I am openly very pleased to give Allan his. We hug a long time in full view of all the assembled notables.

At seven next morning we rescue our overladen van from the garage and leave the city. In the late afternoon we stop for coffee at a Dunkin' Donuts shop just inside the Maine border. Two old men, one black, are talking to each other about the work they do on their computers. I cannot resist joining the PC fraternity, asking about their instruments. As we leave, we hear one man tell the other: ‘We'll be home all weekend. The grands are coming over.' Now we know we are close to home.

In Saco we stop for a late supper. There is a place to eat that Sybil remembers vaguely. We are fortunate to find it, since the entrance and parking are far off the road. There is an obscure sign that says ‘Kerryman's
PUB
.' We enter through a dilapidated door into what resembles a back alley. Inside the pub is fine, a large room with booths, artificial flowers and plastic decorations, and food so plentiful that one portion would feed two heavy eaters. Most of the patrons are middle-aged Mainer locals dressed in the familiar L. L. Bean uniforms: jeans, heavy sweaters, sneakers. Add peaked caps for the men who have driven their wives here in their pickup trucks, and you will recognize the people we have dinner with.

We are even closer to home. We share a beer and talk about the contrast between this comfortable, poorly lit, unpretentious place and the lavish houses and expensive restaurants we have been frequenting in the past few days. I think of the elaborate, pretentious food catered for the PEN/Faulkner event,
expected
to be served by the people who pay a goodly sum to attend. Much of the money collected will go to pay for the awards and the judges, the hosteling and feeding of these persons, and the lady who arranges the affair they are attending, a kind of incestuous and circular round of finance and events.

I fantasize: What would happen if we called it all off one year, gathered in a publike place somewhere in an ordinary section of the city, wore our easy old clothes (especially the shoes!), had beers and the $5.95 blue plate special, and gave all the money collected for the affair to the homeless who live on the cold corners and grates of Capitol Hill.

Aha! My feelings about the elaborate affairs accompanying fund-raising at Washington's PEN/Faulkner have been satisfyingly echoed by the Hospice of Hancock County, the county that encompasses Sargentville. A nicely offset invitation arrives this morning announcing that there will be no gathering this year. It requests the pleasure of my company at an Imaginary Candlelight Dinner to benefit Hospice patients and their families. ‘The dinner will not be held anywhere at any time so you need not attend,' it reads. I am relieved of buying a ‘new outfit for the dinner,' ‘I don't have to eat another chicken dinner,' ‘I won't need a sitter,' and ‘I won't have to go to the hairdresser.' For each of these savings a contribution is suggested. ‘I am pleased to accept your invitation to stay home.' With pleasure I check that box, and write a check.

Early next morning we
are
home. This time it is permanent. We make a walkabout, inspecting everything we have left, and find nothing out of order. My unlocked car sits placidly in its place where it has been waiting for us for two weeks. I say nothing to Sybil, because her joy in being here is somewhat less than mine. But I think about what I heard at the gala on our last evening in Washington: The morning after Friday night's party at the Stegalls' on East Capitol Street, they left their house to do some errands. No car. It had been stolen.

The quiet of the Cove swept over me this morning, the absence of people, the feeling that I was in sole possession of sky, water, meadow, and woods at our end of the peninsula. Two days ago, making our way north through the state, we thought we might stop for lunch at Barnacle Billy's in Perkins Cove to have a first taste of lobster. But it was not to be: Ogunquit has turned into a clone of Provincetown, Lake George, Taos, Carmel, the Hamptons, and other such overcrowded and overbuilt tourist places. We make a slow, ten-mile-an-hour trip through the main street, down the road, and into Perkins Cove. But stop?
Park
? Impossible.

Inexorably we make the loop because we cannot get out of it, catching a quick glimpse of the sea on our way. We are shocked by the number of people on the street and in the fancy, shoulder-to-shoulder shops. This is mid-May, and already the Cove and the town are fashionably crowded with tourists. I remember what this town was like when we summered at Moody Beach, the extemporaneous excursions to Barnacle Billy's for a lobster.…

Standing on our sun-filled deck this morning, within sight of no one, the silent, calm sea spread out before us, I wonder:

How long before creeping tourism moves up the coast and reaches us? How long before we too become ‘fashionable'?

I am reading Julia Blackburn's account of the last years of Napoleon's life on St. Helena. My ignorance of the subject is so abysmal that I thought Napoleon died on Elba. Not at all. He returned from his exile there, was defeated at Waterloo, and was sent into a second exile by the British to its island, St. Helena, in the South Atlantic Ocean.

The little general led a curious life there, isolated from everything and everyone but a group of sycophantic French aristocrats and army officers. Once, from France, a friend sent him a crate of books. Blackburn writes: ‘He is so eager that in the middle of the night he cracks the lid off with a chisel and reads without pause for several days until he is exhausted.'