Grief's Country Page 8

  He prayeth best, who loveth best

  All things both great and small;

  For the dear God who loveth us,

  He made and loveth all.

  Anyone who has come through the preceding six-hundred-line psychedelic nightmare must find this homily utterly inadequate, even contradictory. This quatrain is a lid clamped down on a wild and untamable genie. Possibly, as he walks away, his evening plans wrecked, the Wedding Guest thinks, “Bullshit.” Perhaps his new wisdom, not to mention his sadness, rests in his understanding of how much of our life lies beyond the perimeters of meaningful storytelling and homely beatitudes.

  The plot of the Mariner’s story is circular, as is his voyage: his ghost-ship circumnavigates the globe. The story itself is circular, an endless loop, eternally begun again. And finally, the meta-story of the Mariner forms a larger circle: there is no end to his traipsing around the world, watching for the next proper auditor and telling his tale in order to be temporarily released from his curse. No ultimate redemption from circularity waits—none that we know of, at least. There is only the story, rising up and wanting out. The Mariner casts it out like a fishing net, dragging some poor sucker into a kind of bondage. Telling the frightful story is his way of establishing kinship, affirming himself as human and rejoining the tribe—but just for a time. When the story ends, the Guest goes home alone, newly isolated, forgoing the party. And the Mariner, homeless and estranged, keeps on moving, in search of a version of the story that will cause the chaotic to cohere. His life will clarify like still water, and he will be released.

  As I stood in the cabin on that sun-struck May morning, a scrap of clear thought wafted across my mind: Jesus, now I’ll have to write about this. And so I do, but not the full story. I can never reach the full story; I get to the brink of language and see only deep space before me. Mark Doty writes of mourning his beloved, “There are times I feel I’m translating, in my head, from one language to another; I’ve become a citizen of grief’s country, and now I don’t easily speak the old tongue I used to know so well.” But maybe the problem, as any speaker of two languages knows, is that some things don’t translate; there are no words. Like the Mariner, I try to tell what happened, but when I try for the meaning, what comes out is something lame, like “He prayeth best, who loveth best.” So I move on, telling and telling it, hoping to hear the words I need.

  . . . and when they go, everything

  goes—the earth, the firmament—

  and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.

  —Sharon Olds, “Everything”

  “Write a poem in the voice of a widow whose husband has drowned”

  (a prompt by Maura Stanton)

  What does a widow’s voice sound like?

  A low wind?

  A lowing manatee?

  A lowly inmate laughing like a loon?

  The hinges of a door everyone keeps forgetting to oil?

  A bird of prey?

  Something drowning?

  “Invent any story you like.”

  If you wind up with one you don’t like, write another.

  Use your imagination, that’s what we’re here for.

  Did her husband perish in pursuit of a great fish?

  Does the fish really have to be white?

  Was he trying to swim the English Channel?

  Trying to save a child who had not waited a full hour after lunch?

  Is he a hero? A fool? A victim?

  Maybe it turns out he didn’t drown at all:

  Did he fake it and run off with a green-eyed bartender?

  This widow, was she a real ballbuster?

  Did she marry him for money? Power? Fame? Security?

  Do you imagine these are different?

  How long was she married to this drowned man?

  Would you believe four months? No?

  What would you believe? What serves your story?

  Use your imagination, but make the story plausible.

  No one will buy him fiddling with a bird feeder hung out over a high bank.

  The isolated cabin? Been done and done.

  Do not have the widow discover one slipper below the feeder.

  Or if you must, please don’t put the other one below, by the water.

  Knowing how much is too much, such an important part of the writer’s craft.

  “This is an exercise in empathy.”

  Can you get inside the head of this woman?

  She might be from another planet, where husbands are specters and water is deadly and the years gape like mouths and something is always screaming.

  Do you care about the widow?

  Do you blame her for not searching for him harder? Sooner?

  Do you care about the husband?

  Do you blame him for his preoccupation with bird feeders?

  Do you care about the fish, the kid, the bartender, the English Channel?

  Do you care about the water?

  How deeply do you care? How deep is the water?

  “How does the widow feel about this particular river or lake or ocean?”

  First, let’s get specific: is it river, lake, or ocean?

  What is its name, in what indigenous language?

  Does she refuse to look at it?

  Does she want to drain it dry?

  Does she see it as her enemy?

  Does she see it as an angry god?

  Does it tempt her?

  Does she want to marry it, marry it, marry it?

  How do you feel about water?

  Does it ever scare you?

  Does it ever tempt you?

  How well can you swim?

  Can you imagine drowning?

  Can you imagine a husband?

  Can you imagine a widow?

  Can you imagine?

  Can you?

  Heartbreak Hotel

  Once I went with Bob to San Antonio, where he had a conference. While he conferred, I wandered, scrutinizing the Alamo and hunting down Mexican ceramics and folk art. I’ve always been especially drawn to the calacas—the skeletal figures in two and three dimensions, dressed spiffily and placed in all manner of tableaux: a red-frocked singer fronts a band, a happy couple dances. Weddings and marriage constitute a common trope. The shifty irony embedded in the art form fascinates me. I can never figure out if death is being mocked by ordinary human life, or if death is having its day, mocking human pretensions and institutions.

  I bought a Christmas scene enclosed in a box, glass on its front and top. Six figures celebrate a fiesta de Navidad, four dressed elegantly, two inexplicably naked in their bones. All of them extend one hand, as if grasping an invisible glass. A clock hangs on one side wall, a radio on the other. Lining the back wall are portraits of saints, the Holy Virgin, and the birthday boy himself, along with a large decorated wreath. A skeletal dog lies under a table spread with plates and bowls of food. Along the back wall are candles—and a skull, so that the dead can contemplate themselves, I guess.

  As I move into the fall after that first dreadful summer without Bob, Christmas begins to look a lot like this.

  *

  Of our eighteen years together, Bob and I spent sixteen in different time zones, so summers and Christmas counted heavily—the two seasons when academics can break loose. But Christmas was initially a site of struggle. He would have been happy to have nothing to do with the American version of The Holidays for the rest of his life. I convinced him that Christmas is like Christianity: not inherently loathsome, only rendered so in practice. So we agreed to reclaim it. Gently but firmly we pushed families away and took our own direction. When Bob was in his second Gold Hill cabin we found a tree stand among the junk piled up in a storeroom, bought a tree, and decorated it with pine cones edged in gold spray paint. With white lights it was perfect shabby Martha Stewart.

  I can’t imagine a way to endure this year’s holidays. The homes of family and friends are readily available to me, and also impossible. I would be doubly trapp
ed, by my grief and by someone else’s routines, possessions, floor plan, kindness, traditions, and holiday cheer. I cannot bear any of it. So in late October I put Bob’s travel agent to work. The Caribbean, I say; maybe Jamaica.

  Why? The Caribbean is not my place. My notion of a beautiful beach is Lake Michigan, and wonderful weather is between sixty and eighty degrees. I hate the whole concept of a resort, and I have never owned anything like the requisite wardrobe—or body. I dislike sitting in the sun. Rum and tequila sicken me; in warm weather I drink gin and tonics, strong, sharp, and icy. But I went to Negril twenty years ago and what I crave now is what I experienced then (minus the unfortunate reaction to a brownie containing preternaturally potent local ganja). I want exactly that feeling of being not where I belong but in Neverland. I remind myself that Neverland is one of the imperialist fantasies that have preyed insidiously on those islands, but I don’t care. I want to bury myself in something wholly unlike my reality until the freaking holidays go away.

  It is late to be booking for Christmas, but the agent knows the situation and finagles me ten exorbitant days at the fabled Jamaica Inn in Ocho Rios. I try to make a fiction of the trip, to think of myself as some kind of romantic refugee from darkness and horror into dissipation and mindlessness. My imagination has always saved me; maybe it will fly me right over the worst and land me in a new story.

  *

  The night before I am to leave brings what midwestern meteorologists call “wintry mix”—precipitation combining with temperatures hovering around freezing to yield rainy snow, snowy slush, slushy ice. My flight is delayed and I miss my connection, which is in Memphis, of all places. There will be no getting out of the country tonight. Memphis is gray and damp. The Holiday Inn near the airport turns out to be a strangely cavernous, grim place with what seem unusually long hallways reaching in many directions. There seem to be few guests, who all apparently know each other; the lobby echoes with talk and laughter. My room is at the far end of one of the long, empty corridors. I drop onto the bed and feel myself float away from my body and dissipate. I’ve escaped my life all right, and now I’m in a Stephen King novel.

  It’s just a motel room, I tell myself, yanking my spirit back. The thing to do is get out of here. I consider the options on a dark near-Christmas day in Memphis. The blues seems appropriate. But a woman traveling alone, utterly ignorant of the city, probably shouldn’t head down to Beale Street for the evening. So what else is in Memphis?

  Surprisingly, it takes me a few moments. Then I grab my second wind, hike to the lobby, go outside, hail a cab, and say, “Graceland.”

  The car radio reports that an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President Bush at a Baghdad press conference two days ago. The driver and I emit simultaneous chuckles. On this trip I am reading Anne Lamott’s Plan B: “I feel that we began witnessing the end of the world in Slo Mo once George W. Bush became president.”

  The end of the world, oblivion: what a comfort.

  *

  It’s true: the first thing that strikes you about Graceland is how small it is. You are expecting Tara, and it’s more like the biggest house in a ritzy 1950s suburb called Tara Hills.

  The weather and perhaps the holiday season have kept the tourists away except for me and a group of Japanese visitors. They are working with a translator, leaving me essentially alone to wander and ponder. The house is glaring in its sheer ugliness, beginning with the white living room with royal blue and gold drapes and huge peacocks etched into the glass panels flanking the opening to the music room. I feel my northern middle-classness sharply: to Elvis, this was elegance. Gladys’s bedroom, white with heavy royal purple portieres and bedspread, was his way of crowning his mother queen of his universe.

  My audio tour headset features the princess of this weird kingdom, Lisa Marie herself, who shares reminiscences about particular rooms. In the living room she says she knew her father was coming downstairs by the jangling of his bling. In the kitchen, dark with ugly patterned carpeting, she fondly recalls him and his minions cooking up a storm in the middle of the night. What was she doing awake? I wonder. She tells her stories as if they were episodes of Ozzie and Harriet, as if her years in a vacuum-sealed funhouse operating in its own time zone constituted your normal American childhood.

  After the luxurious whiteness of the front rooms and Gladys’s bedroom, the rest of Graceland reminds me of Disneyland—every room a different world. A half flight of stairs down from the kitchen is the Jungle Room, a porch that Elvis enclosed and turned into an ugly little explosion of exoticism, all carved wood and faux animal hide. Whether we’re in Africa or Asia or South America is irrelevant: we’re Elsewhere, and it’s carpeted in a sickly green. Lisa tells me that it later became a recording studio—hence the carpet on the ceiling. Downstairs, on the basement level, are two rooms that constitute a man cave of sorts—Elvis’s playrooms. A black and yellow migraine of a room harbors the bank of three TVs that Elvis used to shoot out on occasion. The room across the hall is mostly taken up by a pool table. What strikes me about both rooms is that, although they are already in a basement, Elvis has taken pains to make them seem even more enclosed and bunker-like. The TV room has mirrored walls, which supposedly enlarge a small room but to my eyes simply make it more claustrophobic: I’m trapped there with myself in an endless reiteration of that very room. The poolroom’s walls are covered in pleated print fabric, floor to ceiling, like one big curtain keeping something hidden. Possibly the décor is meant to suggest a private men’s club, or maybe it just hides the furnace. If the front rooms announce the King, these lower spaces, disconnected from each other visually and emphatically self-enclosed, point to someone else, someone who wanted more than anything to hide. I can’t breathe down here, but I get it.

  I head outside, where the rain has let up. There are a passel of Elvis outbuildings to wander—Daddy Vernon’s office; buildings full of cars; the racquetball court now lined with gold records and awards; and the reliquary of memorabilia that I will recall mostly as the Hall of White Jumpsuits, though it also contains the baggy gold blazer I always considered his coolest item. I head for the Meditation Garden. Given the fountains, the towering granite Christ, the proliferating bright plastic flowers, the religious figurines, and the large pictures framed in sharp red and blue, it is hard to imagine anybody meditating here for an instant. There is a quartet of graves—Vernon, Gladys, Elvis Aaron, and next to him his twin, Jesse Garon, stillborn a half hour before his brother. Does it mark you even in pre-consciousness, to be linked to a dead body as you float in the amniotic sea? What did it mean to Elvis to be a surviving twin, those who are said to pass through life with the constant sense of someone missing?

  Jesmyn Ward writes of “grief constant as a twin.”

  I’m trying not to think about how much Bob would enjoy this, how we’d process it all, how it would become part of our common frame of reference.

  Instead, I am trying to imagine my way into the strange life of this place. The official narrative here is insistently triumphant, but I always see the Elvis story as a classic American tragedy. It feels utterly weird to be here, where no one I know could possibly imagine I am. But something surreal in the place also feels right. Not Disneyland or Dreamland, and utterly sans Grace: more like Nowhereland. Making all my nowhere plans for nobody.

  Are you lonesome tonight?

  *

  Early the next afternoon my plane lowers into sunny, vibrant Montego Bay. A driver from the Jamaica Inn is there to retrieve me. It’s a nearly two-hour drive; I am a day late, and having driven over yesterday to fetch me, he is not happy about this, as if I could have managed better. On the road to Ocho Rios along the north coast, there are white egrets near the water, goats everywhere. A town called Lilliput. A shop called Da Endz. The shops—huts of corrugated tin, mostly, with Coke signs—remind me of West Africa. The driver notes points of interest: “Discovery Bay,” he says, pronouncing the italics. “Where Columbus landed.” And then its perfect
complement, Runaway Bay, an escape route used later by enslaved Africans, the maroons who headed for the hills whence they organized their resistance.

  For about fifteen minutes after arrival, my spirit lightens. The Jamaica Inn is stunning—long, low blue and white buildings with open-air patios and arresting tilework facing a perfect little half-moon bay. Built in 1950, the inn is for grown-ups. It is haunted by legendary guests: Noël Coward, Katharine Hepburn, Errol Flynn, Ian Fleming. Perhaps in honor of the latter, portions of Dr. No were filmed here. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller honeymooned here. At one end of the wide white beach is the restaurant and bar, at the other, on a hill, the spa. My Veranda Suite consists of three spaces: a sleeping room entirely swallowed up by a huge, heavenly bed on which each morning the maid leaves a white towel twisted into the shape of a swan; a bathroom; and a patio/living room, walled on three sides, open to the beach on the fourth. Breakfast is dropped off here every morning. Beyond, a wide white strand, and then the curling, unnaturally turquoise surf.

  “All wise people say the same thing,” Anne Lamott promises me: “that you are deserving of love, and that it’s all here now, everything you need.” Possibly this is what I was thinking when I booked—that I would treat myself as if I were a person deserving of comfort. Now I look around at this exquisite world, unreal and alien as Graceland. What is it I need? Why am I here? What exactly am I planning to do with ten days?

  I am going to write, of course, but I don’t, because I can’t manufacture sequence or sense or even interest. Being waited upon by silent, impassive black people makes me just as uncomfortable as it should. Even the other guests make me anxious when I walk the beach. I imagine how I look, what they think I’m doing here, how pitiful and humiliating my aloneness is. On the night of the beach barbecue party for all guests, I hunker down, eyeing the blazing bonfire, fearing that someone might come to fetch me. I feel highly visible and completely invisible. One day I submit to the spa and get an expensive facial that leaves me greasy. I don’t even visit the bar. Occasionally I go up to the restaurant for a meal; more often I order room service, along with fifths of Tanqueray at monstrous prices. A friend has given me an ancient iPod, which I’ve loaded with pulsing classic rock to chase out the wailing in my head. Reading has continued to prove the single reliable antidote to waves of despair and sickening flashbacks to the night of Bob’s death, so I finish Lamott and plow through the other books I’ve brought. Usually water calms me, but when I watch the big, roiling breakers, I keep thinking of Edna Pontellier on the winter beach at Grande Isle. I wonder how far I’d have to swim before I was too tired either to keep going or to turn back.