The Great Spring

  From the time the announcer introduces me, I can’t shut up. My whole heart is in this book. I want everyone to know this—also that I will die someday, just like my mother, just like them, and that this book is the closest thing to being in the classroom with me. Someday I won’t be around to stand in front and say, “Class, take out your notebooks and fast writing pens.”

  The people staring at me look awfully young. “How many of you are still in high school?” I keep asking. No one raises a hand.

  “I’m teaching you what you should have learned in high school—how to trust your own mind, have confidence in your own experience—so you don’t vote for the wrong person, like so many of us did last time.”

  I didn’t care that it’s not politically or socially correct to talk politics when I’m trying to sell memoir. We have to get out of Iraq. We have to close Guantanamo. I’m so ashamed of what our country has become. My grandparents, whom I loved, loved this country. I wanted to love it again too. “You should write so you know who you are and what you think. So you can stand up. ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and writing.’”

  Some of my books sell out. That night I trade the bookstore the flower arrangement a kind friend sent to me at the bookstore for a calendar of Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed house outside of Pittsburgh.

  On the way back to the hotel I stop at a sandwich shop. Jim White, a poet I knew a long time ago, said that after a reading you have to either drink, eat, dance, or fuck.

  When I enter the lobby later, the bellboy runs up to me. “The numbers have all changed. Barack won.”

  “Well, of course he did.” I stop and point at him. “Now remember, you promised to vote. We need you.”

  “I will. I will.”

  A few minutes later I’m standing in my room, looking out the window. Already I’m beginning to love my country again. I envision a closed prison in Guantanamo, an Iraq at peace, a world where I belong. The snow outside continues to fall.

  I’m too restless to stay in my room. I shoot up in the elevator to the ninth floor, where they have a free computer to do e-mail.

  A young girl with an accent is at the terminal. I sit on the big leather lounge chair eating a slice of green melon they have left out for guests. It is good. I have another and then another. They are free. I eat them until I get a stomachache, and the computer is still occupied.

  12

  Writing as a Visual Art

  A show of Richard Diebenkorn’s work had been mounted at the Harwood Museum of Art, a fifteen-minute walk from where I was conducting a writing workshop with sixty students at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico. The Harwood used to be the town’s library, where I taught English classes to my ratty high school students from the nearby hippie school in 1974. We would straggle down Randall Lane past the wild asparagus growing among the ditch weeds in March and huddle together in a circle on small wooden chairs trying to figure out similes for mountain and apple and horse.

  The Harwood was also where I wrote the novel Banana Rose. I brought a lunch box each day for break under the elms out back, sitting on a wood bench overlooking the south of town. Soon after the novel was written, the Harwood became an art museum, and the town built a public library near the courthouse with funds from bond investments.

  All of this was irrelevant to my workshop students from all over the country, who’d been writing full-out for three days. One student from Chicago wrote of working in the women’s penitentiary and of a prisoner who had tried to shoot herself but missed and killed her son instead and was incarcerated for murder.

  I closed my eyes after hearing her read. The inconceivable hell we human beings live with.

  Another young woman began: “I’m wondering what my father’s life was like living in Korea during the Korean War. He was seven years old in an orphanage. His job was to bury kids who died who were younger than him. He was given a single pair of shoes and three years later had that same pair, and I know at ten his feet were not the same size.”

  Again and again I encouraged: “Give us a picture. Don’t keep your life private. Share it. Make it vivid.” And they certainly did that. The course was entitled Living Color: Writing as a Visual Art.

  How was I to seduce these writing students, so deep into words on the fourth day of class, over to visit this abstract art exhibit? I wanted to share this visual delight with the class.

  I was proud of my small town of Taos for pulling this show together. The curators had worked diligently for four years. The University of New Mexico produced a coincident beautiful art book that cost fifty dollars. And after September 9 the show would travel to San Jose, California, and then to New York University in the Big Apple, the final nod on what’s good.

  Early in his career in the fifties, Diebenkorn, based in California, spent two years working on an MFA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, using funds from the GI Bill. The Harwood gathered all the paintings he’d done during that period. They had to borrow work from Stanford University, the Norton Simon Museum, Oakland Museum, Oklahoma City, and private collections, including one oil, ink, and gouache from Milan, Italy. The stipulation of the insurance company that covered the paintings, worth easily up in the six figures, was that the Harwood had to provide a guard at the exhibit at all times.

  I’d already made four visits to the show. On my last I sidled up to the guard on watch, a hefty local boy in uniform with a crew cut, and asked him what he thought of the paintings. “Well, I’m with them every day. At first I thought they were nothing. But they aren’t nothing. They are something. Look at that black—I can see red and blue and pink in it now.” He shook his head. “I won’t forget this, I’ll tell you. I’ll remember it.”

  In an hour I needed to transport these students out of our classroom and out of the mind of writing to the silent mind of paint. What did Richard Diebenkorn have to do with them? I had to make it relevant. We planned to drive in a procession of twelve cars the less than a mile distance around the plaza, bearing right onto Ledoux Street.

  I reached for something seemingly far away and reeled it in, hoping to give them an opening, an entrée to Richard Diebenkorn. I began my tale: “Two years ago I found myself living in Palo Alto for six months, not knowing anyone. I heard that a woman in town conducted a weekly writing group and they did the practice methods I taught.

  “‘Do you think I could come?’ I humbly asked one of the group members on the phone.

  “I received directions and in my great loneliness turned right, then left onto La Para to the home of Helen Bigelow, who was conducting these Thursday evenings for free.

  “Six women, mostly in their sixties and early seventies, one, I think, in her eighties, sat in a circle. Helen’s husband, Ed, who also wrote with them, pointed to a corner of the couch. I flopped down.

  “Helen said ‘Go’ and everyone plunged into their notebooks.

  “‘Wait; for how long?’ I beseeched them.

  “‘Don’t worry about that.’ Helen waved her hand. She looked vaguely familiar, but everyone was galloping along, so I dove in too. We wrote page after page. I kept looking up for some signal to stop. After about fifty minutes, with no sign from anyone, they began to wind down.

  “I looked at Helen again. Was she that student from years ago?

  “We went around the circle, reading aloud all the pages we’d written.

  “Then the woman opposite me pulled out a joint from her bra, lit the tip, and passed it around. I was stunned—I hadn’t smoked in years; when it came to me, I took two long draws and passed it on. Then I took another two on the second pass.

  “Again Helen said ‘Go.’

  “Are you kidding? My brain was on the ceiling. Off everyone went with pens on paper.

  “After we all wound down, we were beckoned to the dining room table for a dinner of salmon, salad, and bread. Every week Helen served a meal. This had been going on for how long? I tried to calculate the years since she mi
ght have studied with me, but at that moment I couldn’t add or subtract.

  “At 1:00 A.M. I drove the less-lonesome streets home, but not sure where the lane of traffic began or ended.

  “These women were not part of the dot-com world of Silicon Valley (my partner, who was managing a start-up, was the reason I had moved there). They had deep roots in California and had known Ken Kesey, who had lived with a group of friends in small bungalows in the sixties on Perry Lane.

  “I went to the group every week for a month,” I told the class. “On the fifth visit Helen greeted me at the door.

  “‘I’d like to show you my oak tree,’ she said, and we went to the rear of the yard.

  “Our heads tilted back as we looked deep into the dark sky. The oak was massive, at least two hundred years old.

  “‘You know,’ she said, ‘you have been my teacher all of these twenty years since that one time I studied with you in the late eighties.’”

  “‘Let’s have lunch,’ I said.

  “She suggested we meet the day after at a wonderful café on California Avenue.

  “Lined on the counter was a chocolate soufflé, a peach kuchen, blueberry crisp, a high layer cake. We perused the menu and chatted. I was happy.

  “‘So what are you working on?’ I asked.

  “‘A memoir about my father, who was a painter,’ she flicked her eyes a moment from the menu.

  “I was filled with hesitation. I could switch the subject or hear about what I presumed was her father’s weekend watercolor hobby. I jumped in: ‘So what kind of painting did your dad do?’

  “‘My father was David Park.’ She looked straight at me with those blue eyes.

  “‘Your father is David Park? You’re kidding.’ David Park was a great painter.

  “‘Are you sure?’ I stupidly asked.

  “‘Of course, I’m sure.’ She laughed.

  “I flashed on the walls of her living room. Some ordinary pictures, then over on the far wall was a large oil portrait of a woman, so strong, so powerful, I’d see it out of the corner of my eye and turn away—it made me nervous, like hanging an original Jackson Pollack in my family’s split-level house—the contrast would make the house collapse.

  “‘That’s your father’s painting of the woman?’

  “Helen nodded. ‘It’s of my mother, Lydia.’

  “My mouth hung open. ‘You knew Richard Diebenkorn? Wasn’t he your father’s student?’

  “‘Yes, and then they became close friends, along with Elmer Bischoff. I was twenty-seven, with three young girls, when David died. I remember so clearly going over with my mother to Dick and Phyllis’s home. Over the fireplace was a new painting, still wet, by Dick. I stopped dead in my tracks. It was gorgeous. I told him so.

  “‘I want you to have it, Helen,’ he said.

  “‘Oh, I can’t.’

  “‘Please, I really want to give it to you.’

  “‘I kept refusing. Only later—when it was too late—did I realize he meant it. His best friend, his great colleague, had just died and he felt helpless. It was something he could do. He could give a painting to David’s daughter.’

  “David was an important, influential painter, one of the leading artists of the Bay Area Figurative movement, but he was not world famous. He was on his way, but he died too young, of cancer, at forty-nine.”

  The class was mesmerized. I decided to push further.

  “A couple months ago I was in New York for a conference. On the one evening the Whitney was open late, I dashed uptown. Dusk settled over the city as I showed my ticket to the guard and moved over to the stairs. I can’t remember what floor—maybe on the fourth or fifth—I headed for the permanent collection. I was hoping to get a gander at some Edward Hoppers, but I was seduced into the pleasure of seeing one painting after another by world-class mid-twentieth-century artists. After a while I stood in the doorway of a large room. A Willem de Kooning was across from me. A Joan Mitchell kitty-corner. And then I entered and turned around to my right. Oh, my God. There it was. One huge David Park took up the whole wall.” I spread my arms wide to show the students.

  “A man rowing away, one oar in the water, one out. From the man’s back emanated a stark sadness and vibrancy all at the same time. In the foreground three men on a yellow shore. All in black swim trunks. Their faces were almost the way a kid would draw them—a line for a nose, a straight line for a mouth, and the eyes were two round orbs, unformed hollows seeming to look inward to loss and grief and outward to infinity. The three men looked stunned, as though realizing something that was never realized before. While all around, the water was exploding in black, yellow, green, brown.

  “I lowered myself onto a bench. David Park, Helen’s father. We had finally come face-to-face.

  “My eyes moved to the upper right. His signature up there in small letters. Not cursive, a printed capital P, small a-r-k. And then the number ’58.

  “Sitting in front of Four Men—then standing, putting my nose close to the paint, then standing back, again sitting down on the bench, leaning forward, elbows on knees, head in hands.” I did these motions in class. “All other paintings faded. I was pulled into one large existence. Time was spread out in the painting. Here was summer in eternity.

  “I called Helen across the country from a corner pay phone right after I left the museum.

  “‘Oh, Natalie,’ and I could see her, seeing that painting in her mind. ‘It was David’s first one-man show in New York City. The inaugural opening of the Staempfli Gallery. We all flew out—me; my sister, Natalie; David and Lydia.’

  “‘The Whitney purchased it at that show. It was the most money David ever got for a painting. We were all so excited. We went out to dinner to celebrate.’

  “I had to ask. ‘Helen, how much did it sell for?’

  “‘Oh, Natalie, they were such innocent times. It was sold for a thousand dollars.’”

  I paused a long moment, standing in front of the class. “David died two years later.” The students held their breath. “So it’s time to view the man who was David Park’s best friend.”

  The class flew apart.

  Through words and story I seduced them over to no words—to color, form, and space. They were hungry now to discover face-to-face the abstract art of Richard Diebenkorn, better known by close friends as Dick.

  13

  The Lineage of Literature

  Sitting in the third row, fourth seat in Mr. Cates’s tenth-grade English class, I held The Ballad of the Sad Café, the seventy-page novella by Carson McCullers, in my young hands.

  It was an October day in Farmingdale, Long Island, but the peach trees were blossoming in Georgia in the wide and painful terrain of this book. From the very first paragraph—how can I say this?—every dark word on every white page penetrated my mind, clearing it of superfluous thoughts. My early life disappeared into the language of “Miss McCullers,” as Mr. Cates called her, and my aching heart found a larger aching, a bigger, more hollow, echoing receptacle. I was Miss Amelia; I was Cousin Lymon; I even became cruel and dejected Marvin Macy. I empathized with each character. I have never forgotten them or their names.

  Miss Amelia, who never married, except for ten disastrous days to Marvin Macy, lived alone above the café and general store where she sold her famous homemade brew and some staples, such as meal, snuff, and animal feed. Six feet two inches tall, with muscles like a man’s and eyes slightly crossed, she was a shrewd businesswoman, had a passion for lawsuits, and enjoyed curing people of whatever ailed them. She developed her own remedies and administered care in her back office for no fee at all.

  At almost midnight on an April evening, with five locals sitting on Miss Amelia’s porch and the street deserted, a lonely little hunchback appeared down the road. He was childlike, ugly, and destitute. For no apparent reason Miss Amelia moved him upstairs to her three rooms, where no one else had ever been.

  That meeting of the two of them began the tale. The entry o
f Marvin Macy, gone for many years, just out of the state penitentiary for robbery and suspicion of murder, completed the strange triumvirate.

  When Miss Amelia and Marvin Macy finally greased up to fight each other, first exchanging blows and, after half an hour of punches, locked into a wrestling hold, the terrible test of strength neared a climax.

  Reading about her hoarse breaths, her strong hands at his throat, I felt frightened and jolted. I had never encountered anything like this before: the sheer physicality of the two, a man and a woman, faced off in something having nothing to do with love, except as an energy twisted to a force of dead rage and power.

  This was a lot to take in for a young suburban girl. I reeled from the fight. My eyes squeezed shut; I gritted my teeth and something screamed in my head. Yes, yes.

  I’ve since been told, Don’t get stuck on the finger pointing to the moon when you want the moon. But even then, after reading The Ballad of the Sad Café, I didn’t want the moon. It was enough to have the finger that knew to point. I needed words in and of themselves, those glittering beings that woke this neglected kid from her sleepy haze so long ago. Someone, finally, was talking to me.

  Every day I saw the sadness of my mother, the weariness of my hardworking grandparents, the meanness of my World War II– veteran father, and the desolation of the men he served shots to in his bar. This was not a pretty world, but it was a different part of the world rendered real by Miss McCullers. She had written The Ballad of the Sad Café when she was twenty-five years old. How could someone of that age know these things? But it’s not always age that teaches us; sometimes the wounded heart of a person who knows how to write is enough.

  She also showed me this: to love is a frightening thing. We are pulled two ways: to stay closed and protect ourselves versus our boundless need to meet our nature. If we look at the state of the world, shutting down seems logical. But to truly live we have no choice but to keep unfolding, even in the face of devastation.