Barefoot to Avalon by David Payne
At the house, George A. cleans it in the sink and puts it in the oven with an apple and an onion and rosemary for remembrance, and we pour drinks at the Dutch bar and wipe the dusty glasses with our shirtsleeves and sit down before the fire in wicker rockers whose white paint is old and chipped now and shows the even older brown paint from our childhoods. George A.’s cheeks, I recall, are flushed with windburn, he has hat hair, and his brown eyes are relaxed and happy, and we fall into conversation and he tells me he’s been reading about the old traders, Bernard Baruch and Jesse Livermore, and their campaigns and maneuvers in the markets. What is this squiggly line, the Dow, that tracks across a page from lower left to upper right and sometimes upper left to lower right? It’s like an EKG that takes the pulse not of a single company but of many companies and the workers in them and the shareholders and the customers who buy the companies’ products, a measure of the vital force of the whole society. For me hearing about the Dow is comparable to being slathered with molasses and staked down to an anthill, yet George A. is aroused and happy as he shares this, he’s in a stream of passion, and I find myself leaning forward, listening closely, asking questions. George A.’s discovered his libido and is following its gradient, and I see who my brother’s turning into and has in some sense been since the beginning.
And in 1980, straight out of Carolina, George A.’s hired by Merrill Lynch and becomes the youngest broker in the Buckhead office in Atlanta. In the race to Avalon, he’s pulled ahead now.
Me, I’m with Nell in New Haven. In her aging Pinto, we made the journey north and rented a one-bedroom downtown over a dentist’s office, where the window sashes rattle when the delivery trucks rumble by on Howe Street. For a bed we spread a carpet remnant on the bare wood floor, and over that, a quilt, and over that our sheets and blankets, and when one of Nell’s classmates remarks upon our poverty, how hard it must be to live this way, we exchange knowing looks because we don’t feel poor, I don’t, we’re on a treasure hunt that no one has the map to, living outside and underneath the money system and stronger for our independence.
Nell starts class and gets a job at Yale Infirmary, pulling double shifts on weekends, and I take the Pinto and head east on 95 through Old Saybrook and New London, following the seagulls to Rhode Island, where I lump fish in the holds of trawl boats in Point Judith. After my first day, I wash up in the fish house bathroom and sit down on the wharf, unwrap my deli sandwich, and read until the light fails. Then I lower the passenger-side seat and go to sleep there in the Pinto. And on Tuesday, I get up and change my T and go to work again, and the same on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And on Friday afternoon, I get my paycheck and hightail it to New Haven, where Nell meets me, smiling, at the door and makes me undress in the hall and drop my clothes into a plastic trash bag and then she joins me in the shower. And after we make mincemeat of each other on the bedroom pallet, we hop back in the Pinto and take the Wilbur Cross down to the Merritt and on into the city and go to CBGB or the Mudd Club and light’s breaking on the Bowery or White Street when we come out, holding hands, a little drunk, not clear where the car is, but unworried, sure we’ll find it, and we’re happy, proud to be together. I know I’m proud to be with Nell, and when I see men looking my look back says, Eat your hearts out, motherfuckers. She’s following her dream and has a plan of positive engagement.
Me, my dream is still intact, too. The positive engagement part is where I’m having trouble. That fall as fall deepens and I sit there on a piling in Point Judith with an open book surrounded by that beauty and that destitution watching the slantlight fall across the water, lighting the dazzle in rose and gold tones, it comes home to me that things aren’t really working, that lumping fish with my best forty hours weekly isn’t making me a better poet or a writer, it’s making me a better lumper and if I get another berth and develop my touch at the winch, eventually a good winchman is what I’ll be, who once dreamed himself a poet. And going back to school to teach creative writing—that isn’t what made me leap beneath the elms and maples once upon a time. If what I have allotted to me in this life is forty hours a week times fifty weeks a year times fifty years—100,000 hours—I want to spend mine in the writing lap lane not on the pool deck with a bullhorn, coaching other writers.
That Friday night when I drive home, I tell Nell I want to write a novel and she says, I think you ought to try it. So instead of driving to Rhode Island Monday morning, in the bedroom I set up a card table, an ancient one with spots and water rings that I lifted from Four Roses. Nanny Rose used to put together her big jigsaws on it—she liked the ones with ten thousand pieces. Mine, as I assemble it, begins to feel as if it has a million. It’s about a Taoist monk, an orphan, who grows up practicing qigong in China and comes to New York searching for his father, an aviator with the Flying Tigers who’s become a famous Wall Street trader. And now I’m on the phone with George A., asking about bear raids and head-and-shoulder patterns, and the campaigns of those old traders, things that held no interest until George A. broached the subject and got that job that everyone’s so proud of him for getting. Ahead now, he’s coaching me the way I once coached him in the runs to Avalon. I’m starting to have fun, too—God, what fun. I’m like a runner who’s struggled at the quarter mile and then one day I try a marathon and find out it’s my distance.
And when Nell comes back from class, I read her my pages and she encourages me and laughs at the right places, and when I’m lost, she talks through it with me, and if the answer doesn’t come out of that conversation, it usually comes the next day. And I’m getting up at 5, 5:30 in the morning now, making coffee and willing the water to heat faster so I can sit down at my Smith Corona and start banging on the keyboard till the little table’s shaking, and sometimes I laugh or speak my sentences aloud for cadence, and suddenly it’s lunchtime and I’m still in my boxers and my T-shirt and haven’t shaved or bathed or eaten, and where’s Nell? Apparently on her way to the Infirmary she tiptoed past and I didn’t even notice.
I’m twenty-four and happy and don’t understand when Nell starts coming in at night and says she’s tired and wants to take a shower and isn’t in the mood to hear my pages, and when I reach for her in bed sometimes she nudges up her shoulder and lies there with her back turned, and when I ask what’s wrong, she answers, Nothing, in a way that means the opposite, and, wondering what the problem is, I lie there staring at the ceiling thinking of the scene I left unfinished, and an idea strikes me and I leap up and write it down on a half sheet of foolscap.
My story has started to become as real to me as life is, and it doesn’t occur to me then that much of the energy I’ve invested in her is now being diverted into this other project. Instead of driving to the city to go clubbing, in the evening when my writing concentration wanes, I want to go to sleep as soon as possible so I can get up refreshed and go back at it in the morning. Our balance is off. Nell’s putting out too much qi and getting back too little. In the economy of our relationship, Nell feels like exploited labor, and that’s why she isn’t in the mood to listen to my pages. And the second piece is money. Nell’s going to class all week and pulling double shifts at the Infirmary on weekends, emptying bedpans, while I’m at home in boxers writing. You’d think that I—who saw that invoice at the cabinet shop and quit because of the unfairness and was resentful when Margaret bought George A. the Datsun—would understand this. I don’t, though. And when I ask Nell what the matter is, she answers, Nothing, so either she no more understands than I do or finds it too threatening to say, I need a contribution from you, David, the way I couldn’t say I want the shotgun to George A. And I love Nell and think she loves me, but everything that matters now is happening beneath the surface, and because we don’t understand it, I don’t, it blows up crookedly.
One night at a big party, I—who feel rejected in the bedroom—get lit and hit on another woman and make out with her in a stairwell. Nell sees us leave the party and doesn’t come home till the next
–Let’s drive out to the beach and talk, okay? she offers.
But I’m too mad, too hurt, and keep on walking. Nell scratches off, and when she doesn’t come home that night, I say Fuck it and start packing.
And suddenly there we are on Howe Street, me, with my Smith Corona and a box of pages and the plastic garbage bag I have my clothes in, and Nell—looking solemn and subdued and furious and doubtful—holds out her hand for me to shake, and I start crying like an asshole right there on the sidewalk and Nell shows me no mercy, as I, in piggish pride and ignorance, force myself to do the thing I least want to do and turn around and leave her. And it’s not about that other woman, it’s not about Nell’s former boyfriend, who’s realized he’s gay and come out in the meantime. It seems to be about that, but it’s really the imbalance.
The real end comes a year later in New York, where I’ve moved in with Terrence, a UVa boy who worked with me on the Bald Eagle and is in the art world working in a gallery and will one day own one. At 99th and West End, we share a 1-BR in an elevator building where I sleep in the living room on a foam rubber mattress I roll up in the morning and write facing the courtyard listening to the disembodied sounds of people fighting, people fucking, and oboists and opera singers doing scales, and the sunlight hits the windowsill for fifteen minutes daily, and at dusk I run laps around the Reservoir and pick up a slice or some falafel on my way home. Over time, it hits me that leaving Nell was the worst mistake I’ve ever made, and I come down with a lovesickness that in its depth feels almost religious. When I call her, though, she cuts me very little slack, but I persist, and if my lack of attention played a role in our original demise, suddenly the taps are open and she’s getting torrents and she thaws toward me a little and a little more, and then one day in the middle of the afternoon she shows up unannounced at the door of my apartment with this beamy smile I know and I arch my brows as if to say, Is this what I think it is? and by way of answer, she pushes me, two-handed, backward into the apartment and we toss down my pad and get reacquainted, and after that we start to see each other often.
And the critical moment comes one morning as I’m walking Nell down to the subway. Nell looks smiley, bleary-eyed and queasy, and I imagine I look pretty much like she does, like two people who’ve been up all night drinking and screwing and Nell’s unwashed hair has fuck-knots in it, her phrase, and we aren’t holding hands or anything because we don’t want to make too big a deal of what’s happening, because it is a big deal, we’re into each other again, how far is unclear, it’s serious, though, seriouser and seriouser. And we’re standing by the stairs on 96th, the wide ones that lead down into the darkness and the tunnels and the platform and the speeding silver cars and the whole world that’s down there under this one, and Nell’s about to turn and go and as we kiss goodbye she tells me she’s ovulating or thinks she may be from certain signs she knows to look for, she felt it last week and so she’s a little worried, not really worried, just a little, because we didn’t use protection last night, see, because Nell didn’t bring her diaphragm, our usual method, and I didn’t offer to get a condom though there were probably some there in the bathroom, but it was late, we’d had a lot to drink, we’d reached that state where you’re so trembly with desire that you can hardly keep your knees from giving way beneath you, and we were stupid as a fence post or a pair of fence posts and we what-the-fucked it, and all this seems like accident and slackness but looking back none of it seems slack or accidental. And as we stand there on 96th at the down stairs to the tunnels and the world that’s under this one, it seems to me that we’ve agreed to something in the shadow contract, to what I’m not exactly sure, and that if we haven’t signed, we’ve opened the negotiation, Nell has when she drops this little piece of info, and she isn’t freaking or accusing, she’s smiley and hungover as she tells me, but she’s also worried and studious of my reaction, and I say, Really? Really? and my hangover’s gone, I’m smiling and trying not to, because I don’t want to make a big deal of it because it is one.
–We’ll figure it out, Nell, I say. Call me when you know, okay?
–Okay.
And she goes down the stairs now and as I head back up to 99th Street, the odd thing is, I don’t think I’m that displeased about it. In fact, I’m not displeased the least bit.
The next thing I know Margaret’s calling . . . In Atlanta, George A.’s had another breakdown, the biggie, where he strips and shreds his credit cards and announces that he’s been tapped out for a mission to Tehran to rescue the hostages at the embassy. The police and paramedics wrestle him and bring him to the psych ward, and Jack and Margaret come, and, soon thereafter, Cammy, who takes one look at him and faints—so Margaret tells me. The doctors in Atlanta finally make the diagnosis: manic-depression, or bipolar I disorder as we later learn to call it. Margaret’s crying as she tells me on the phone, and I think I’m crying as I listen or just saying, Oh, no . . . Oh, no, Mom, because, you see, it’s not a one-off and the luxury of that illusion’s gone now. When there’s one bead on the string it’s one thing, but when the second bead appears the second bead implies a pattern and the nature of patterns is repeating, and after two there’s three and after three there’s four and patterns go on till something stops them . . . And what stops them? We don’t know this, me and Margaret, but now I know the answer’s nothing, nothing stops them, and then death does, and what we do know is the dark history among the Roses, and the cup we hoped would pass has come back around now and George A. is the one who has to drink it.
In Atlanta, George A. goes on lithium for the first time, and when he’s stabilized Margaret brings him back to Mandala in Winston-Salem. Meanwhile, I fly home to North Carolina and drive down to Atlanta with a U-Haul. Entering his apartment is terrifying—burns in the carpets and Formica and fast food wrappers and notes scrawled in the disordered hand of the mad exegete and maybe now is when he puts those colored stars and exclamation points beside those passages in One Fish Two Fish. Much of it I throw away, and the rest I pack up to bring home for him the way George A. will for me much later.
When he’s released from Mandala, George A. returns to Jack and Margaret’s—they’ve moved from Clemmons into Winston. He puts away his business suits, the charcoal and the navy with the subtle pinstripe proudly purchased after Merrill hired him, and takes out his brogans and the Red Man hat with sweat stains. Having waited for what must have seemed a decent interval, Cammy returns his ring and calls off the engagement. George A. says he doesn’t blame her, but his expression’s hard to look at as he says it. Having pined for Nell for much of the last year, I have some idea what he’s feeling. Yet in another way I don’t. He’s like someone who’s been dazzled by a brilliant light, who now, gazing at familiar objects, must think a moment to recall their names and uses.
I stay with him for a while and we walk and talk in Buena Vista the way we did five years before in Clemmons. There we are on Georgia Avenue and Runnymede and in Hanes Park beside the tennis courts and ball fields, and as we go I don’t know what else to do so we talk about the hostages. I ask him who he thinks they are and who is holding them and what or who or Who is proposing he go on the mission and why he has to shred his credit cards and license, the outward props and markers, to undertake the rescue.
It will be years before I meet the psychiatrists and therapists who’ll tell me that national security issues are a staple of psychotic fantasy and that if neurosis is like a house that’s disarranged, psychosis is a house razed to its foundations. If George A.’s psyche’s razed, it’s unapparent to me as we walk and talk there. He seems tentative, but recognizably himself and invested in these conversation
After I fly back to Manhattan, Margaret sits him on the sofa and informs him of the diagnosis and George A. puts his face in his big hands, she says, and sits there with his shoulders shaking. And after she leaves for work, he goes upstairs and shaves, takes off the Red Man hat and brogans, picks a suit and shines his shoes and drives downtown to Dean Witter Reynolds and talks his way into an interview and nails it. When Margaret comes home, he greets her, beaming, and says he has a new job, and that may be my favorite story of my brother.
George A. will work there for eleven years, the rest of his career, and go from making cold calls to become a top producer in the Winston office, and after his death, on two or three occasions in a restaurant or at the theater, some former client will seek me out to tell me George A. made them more money than any other broker ever made them and was the best they ever dealt with. These testimonials always please me and leave me wistful, as though offered for a stranger. Looking back, it seems to me we shared the deep intimacies of childhood and, in adulthood, our sicknesses and troubles, but when George A. was well, and I was, I barely knew him and he barely knew me. I expect that I, like others, gave George A. the ice-cream soda of my best attention mainly in his sickness, which is another way I acted out the family pattern while trying to escape it.