Each and All by John Kuti
Chapter 17
While Laura waited for truth, Tom and Amanda, of course, had no interest in the truth, because for them, it simply meant having an honest response to life. Truth is always searching for its meaning. Honesty has its own, built-in.
Engaged to be married, the young couple began the process of turning dreams to hope and possibility, possibility into what was about to be born into the world. A shared life comes when two people know absolutely that the person they love is, and will always be, on their side. Alpha male and alpha female become leaders of a pack that stakes territory, defends it and passes the territory and its knowledge on to the next generation.
Tom was right, his father was a wolf. So was his mother, so was he, and so was his future bride. The confidence and optimism that they found in their union was the absolute opposite of the tentative pessimism that had made Ian and Laura see the territory of their lives as nothing more than threatened parts of their own individual psyches. Neither Tom nor Amanda could understand what was happening to her parents.
Laura’s suffering was clear. Her connection to everyone else was apparently opaque. That Ian had spent so many hours, not with Laura, but talking to Sharon was confusing and upsetting to Tom and Amanda. When Ian was at the farm, it seemed they were always together. Amanda was angry with her father for his inverted priorities, and she was frightened by the thought that he might be putting in place a possible new relationship to replace the one he was helpless to change or restore. Amanda expected her father’s loyalty to her mother as she had expected hers to him. Tom expected the same of his mother, and didn’t like what he was thinking. Finally Tom couldn’t help it and spoke to his mother.
“Why are you spending so much time with Amanda’s dad? It isn’t him who needs help.”
“He needs it very much, just like I do. This is a hard time for both of us. We need each other very much right now. Laura has made it very clear that neither one of us is going to be able to help her.” Sharon answered.
“But dad’s only been dead, eight weeks.” Tom said, nervously, accusing her of some kind of disloyalty.
“I always told you that there were no pat answers for how to deal with sex and money or being a parent. Well, there is something else. There’s also no pat answer for how to deal with losing someone you love. Are you worried about appearances or are you worried about me and Ian and Laura?” Sharon said, and Tom could see she was holding onto her anger. Tom felt young and foolish. As usual, his mother knew just how to give him an intellectual shake.
“I’m sorry.” he said. His mother with her cool, clear ferocity always made clear when someone crossed into a place she thought they didn’t belong. Ian was part of her territory she would defend without question, just as he was. Tom saw the fire in his mother’s eyes, and he knew, if he continued, he would feel the heat long before the light. He beat a hasty retreat.
Still, he and Amanda worried that the emotional triangle of their living parents included some unseemly and dangerous possibilities. The only way they could stop obsessing was to turn their attention to themselves. They began to actually plan their lives together. It wasn’t just Tom’s plan anymore. They both had to learn how alpha wolves share power.
Amanda’s questions about Tom’s plan to start a farm on Vancouver Island had to be addressed and answered. Tom understood that there was a big difference between a dream and reality. The first question to ask was the one his mother had taught him, ‘Do the people you care about actually want your help?’ In imagining a new reality, it was hard to believe that people wouldn’t embrace opportunity, but Tom knew very well that people who lived without hope for a long time saw opportunity as nothing but another unattainable dream. The first thing they had to do was to go to the community they wanted to join. They decided their honeymoon would be close to Tom’s birth mother on Vancouver Island. Tom needed to graft himself back onto his own roots. Amanda had to see how well she would take to completely new ones, and how well another culture would take inside her. For both of them, it meant so much more than just starting a family; it meant becoming part of a completely foreign family. She hoped it wouldn’t turn out like the Kosovars. Tom had had the same experience when he was adopted by the Van Fleets. Since she moved to the farm, Amanda felt she knew something of what that meant too. Sometimes she actually thought of Ian and Laura as her birth parents; Eugene and Sharon as the parents who had given her life.
The biggest problem about becoming part of another culture would be all the money Tom had to bring with him. Money was power and opportunity, and it would be a difficult issue as they were becoming part of the community that had neither.
It was Amanda who helped Tom realize how much they would be asking; not only of themselves, but of the people they had never met. It was a sobering realization, and they decided that going to college on Vancouver Island would be the best way to learn what might be possible to realize of their high hopes. The first thing they had to do was make themselves available for adoption by Tom’s people. Their plans and dreams sometimes frightened them with the uncertain possibility of a harvest they might never see. The Van Fleet farm was like an old Apple tree producing bushel after bushel of sweet, heavy fruit, while the farm in their dreams was a sapling with only its first heavy blossoms.
The Van Fleet family was also anxious about their feelings for Arthur and Laura Lee, the book Laura had written with Eugene. The only reason Sharon had allowed the blue original letters to burn with Eugene was that Laura had made copies of them all and given a copy to each member of the family. It was the first time they could read the letters and not have to remember them from when Eugene had read them aloud or were retold by Sarah. Laura had also read a number of the completed stories in the Van fleet homeschool as she had finished them, and Amanda had made a copy of each as it was finished to share with the whole family. The consensus was that they loved the way Laura had changed them from letters to short stories. Ian had asked Laura’s permission to show them to her publisher friend David Orser, and he had done that, but Ian had heard nothing in response.
After Smitty came and went the next Friday evening and their emotions had settled into something less intense than what they had experienced in their first meeting, Laura actually felt stronger. They decided they would again leave each other a question every time they met. Laura’s question to Smitty that day was about whether people actually changed. Smitty’s question to her was to think about the one thing she would never want to change about herself.
Smitty and the sun were long gone as Laura waited for Ian. They had discussed his quitting his job and giving notice to his firm, and that was the week he was going to do it. The only income they would have would be what Laura was paid at the farm. Laura was surprised when she saw two figures coming down the beach in the moonlight, and when she realized it was Anthony Holtz walking beside her husband, she could feel her spirits lift on the breeze. Laura embraced Anthony before she even spoke to Ian, telling Anthony how surprised and happy she was to see him.
“I come bearing great news. Orser is going to publish Arthur and Laura Lee. He called me today and sent me the manuscript. I’ve been devouring it ravenously on the drive from Toronto, and I was shocked. It is so good, it made me jealous, and there are few books that do that. Congratulations, dear heart.” Anthony announced.
“It’s going to be published.” Laura didn’t sound surprised.
“It is, as you knew it must be.” Anthony replied soberly.
“I thought it would feel different.” Laura confessed as Ian arranged chairs and they all sat down on the deck.
“How did you think it would feel?” Ian asked.
“I thought I’d feel scared. Anthony is right, it just feels somehow inevitable.”
“Exactly.” Anthony agreed, “That it was written on the deathbed of a man who couldn’t speak, and was written as a moral guide for a family of fourteen adopted childr
Both Ian and Laura were shocked to realize that Anthony was absolutely right.
“Just me and my sob stories. I would have once killed to be my own publicist on that tour. How’s that for irony?” Laura said pointedly.
“And you can be the petulant artist you deserve to be.” Anthony added with a grin.
“I’ve been practicing, haven’t I?” Laura said to Ian.
“I don’t think that’s quite fair.” Ian disagreed.
“How did you learn to write like that?” Anthony inquired, “It’s as if you been doing fiction all your life instead of hyperbolic old press releases.”
“That’s why I know fiction.” Laura said ironically.
“We are the creators of our own characters.” Anthony agreed. “It’s an absolutely beautiful book, dear heart. You’ve done something almost impossible, found poetry in adolescence. The last person to do that was poor old Salinger.”
“Thank you. Did you come all this way just to bring me the news?” Laura asked.
“I did. More to the point, I want to talk to you about being a writer. You obviously know how to write, the only thing I can offer you is hosannas about that, but being a writer is different. It isn’t what you imagine, even though you’ve worked so closely with so many writers.” he explained.
“How do you mean?” Laura asked.
“Being on a book tour is having to go through your whole life in sound bites and having everything you say completely misunderstood. Will you tell strangers that Eugene was your first love or not? Where you young lovers? Does his wife, know? Were you a virgin? Will you tell strangers about how you felt when he died? How does your husband feel about Eugene? Is it true that you had a nervous breakdown when he died? You will be asked hideously personal questions, and they will be asked over and over and over again. Unless you’re going to live like old J.D., you’re going to have to decide how you’re going to deal with that kind of intrusion in your life.”
“Well, what’s new? I’m so glad you came to cheer me up.” Laura replied, actually sounding frightened, knowing what he said was absolutely true.
“That’s actually the other reason I came. I’m told you are having emotional difficulties. For anyone else, I’d advise drugs. For most artists emotional problems are currency. It’s how you gain access to your own heart. It’s what you decide to sell to strangers. Life is an emotional problem and artists don’t have any solutions, but they do have a way to create a certain resonance.”
The light had actually returned to Laura’s eyes because what Anthony said meant something to her. Moths started gathering around the porch light.
Anthony went on, “Now, onto what’s really important. Me. I have to share with you the better details of my life since we parted company, and I was no longer your client. It’s been miserable without you. No one knows how to have any fun. They’re all these earnest young things who cry too easily, or not at all, and always expect me to try some inspired seduction. Young professional publicists are anything but inspiring. Without you to get people to listen, my book is slowly vanishing like a tree falls soundless in a forest.” Anthony explained.
“I’m indispensable.” Laura teased.
“On many levels.” Anthony agreed, and Ian nodded that he concurred. He was trying to stay out of the conversation because he saw Laura was so engaged.
“Since our escapades, I’m now seen as the Mike Tyson of poets, dangerous to himself and others. Everyone expects me to be urbain and insane, barely in control of my mouth and my libido. I’m supposed to take apart every talk show host like they were overdone squab. My favorites are those people who have never read a poem in their lives and are supposed to ask me about my collected works. All they really want to talk about are my issues, my sexual adventures and proclivities. When I find out an interviewer hasn’t read my book, I feign incredible outrage and demand to know why the poor schlub doesn’t have a better personal assistant, better support and more time to do the basic task required in the difficult job of being a talk show host. How can anyone with a job that is nothing but talk, be given no time to read? I love stupid interviews.”
Anthony went on. He told more outrageous stories of things he had done to people on the book tour after Laura retired and Laura was secretly glad, and secretly disappointed that she wasn’t there with him through it all. Ian heard Laura laughing for the first time since Eugene died. He had made himself useful and opened bottles of wine as the three of them sat in the moonlight and told stories. And it was like the best of the best of the good times the city could offer, bright and intelligent, irreverent and self-mocking, and always dripping with irony.
Past midnight, they were all quite drunk and Laura impetuously asked Anthony if he would like to stay with her on the boathouse during his visit. Amanda’s bed was there. She didn’t think of the risk of being alone with one of the most notorious womanizers in Canadian arts, nor did she think about their little private, personal history. The thing that surprised Laura after she asked Anthony to stay was that she wanted to ask Ian to sleep with her that night, only that night, but she didn’t know how to say that part without hurting him, and so she didn’t say anything about it at all. He was staying with Amanda in their old cabin when he was at the farm. Still, it was all such fun and such inebriated excess. Ian finally said he would go up to the house to explain to Sharon that Anthony wouldn’t be sleeping in the guest room. It was then the party broke up. Laura kissed Ian good night and her mouth opened so that his followed hers, and his eyes opened in surprise as he felt her tongue.
Laura and Anthony watched him walk away in silence. When he was gone, they talked together for hours about what it meant to be a writer, what it meant to be in pain, what it meant to live in the imagination. By the time they both went to their beds, Laura had no need to worry about Anthony’s advances because they were both so very wrecked.
When they both woke up the blazing light of the sun, it was anything but pleasant, except for the tangled memories of their talk. Laura made Anthony breakfast before he went to the farmhouse where he had left his bag. Before he left, Laura learned that he had planned to stay the weekend and learning that, she told him that she would prefer it if he stayed the rest of the weekend in the guest room at the farm. Hell was other people, sometimes even the people you loved. Neither of them knew when he left that morning that Sharon would talk him into teaching the family home school the following week. Laura didn’t know that Ian would come back that afternoon and tell her that he would finish his last cases by the end of the week and that he would be free to supervise the building of their house.
It was a big and busy weekend for Ian because he wanted to carefully explain the plans that had been drawn for the new house to everyone who he thought might be able to help, as well as everyone who might be able to make good suggestions. Tom was almost as easy to talk to as his mother, and the close attention he gave to the bigger issues like heating a big house using only wood heat was much appreciated. He also suggested that Ian go to visit the property and think about microclimates, about where the sun would be at different times of the day and at different times of the year. It was all very helpful. The orientation of the house would have to be decided before the foundations could be set. When they were finished talking about the house plans, Tom asked Ian how Alan felt about the new house.
“We’ve had a great time designing it. He is going to take a break from working at Wayne’s store and come on weekends to help with the work. He loves the house.” Ian explained enthusiastically.
“He must be very nervous about what’s going to happen to him.” Tom replied.
“I had to bring it up. He was afraid to do it himself. It’s a funny thing, and it may sound terrible, but it’s like taking in a puppy; pretty soon you can’t
“I know the feeling, having once been a lost pup myself.” Tom admitted.
“He doesn’t want to live in the boondocks with us. Wayne has asked him to come and live with him and Charles. We have become really close, but he really does belong in Wayne’s world. They have so much more in common than their sexual orientation. He’s a city boy through and through. It’s really hard because we both know that if we don’t go back to live in Toronto, it will be hard to feel like we’re family. If you two move to the West Coast, I worry that we won’t see you very often, and that’ll be pretty hard. We’ve had Amanda for seventeen years. We were hoping you’d settle somewhere close.”
“I know it’s hard. It’s really hard for me to let go of my family here. Why did you decide you wanted to be in a cabin in the woods? You could do that near us. I can’t imagine wanting to be alone like that, even if it was just me and Amanda. For me, you are your connections.”
“Laura and I have both had very connected lives in a weird and impersonal way. Maybe we need some time alone.” Ian replied, and he could see Tom didn’t understand what he was saying.
“It’s going to be pretty hard for me and Amanda to live so far away.”
“You’re going to have to be prepared for your in-laws to be pretty regular visitors. Maybe we will be able to talk your mom into coming with us sometimes. Some connections are like fat ropes, they can’t be broken, and they’re heavy. This place has a lot of big fat heavy ropes.”
Laura had been the next person on Ian’s list of people to show his plans. Listening to him talk was seeing the house being constructed in her imagination as it had been constructed and deconstructed, and reconstructed so many times in his. She could barely absorb all the details, all the excitement, and his description of every room was overwhelming. Laura didn’t know how much his joy would infect her as she listened and looked and thought about the imaginary house that was soon going to be so real. It was definitely going to be a very cool place to be.
“You seem to see everything so clearly.” Laura replied, amazed at his confidence in it all. Laura’s cynicism about the future was not letting go and Ian could see it.
“Now we have to talk about furniture. If we are renting the condo, we will need a lot of stuff.”
“I just can’t help you with those kinds of decisions, don’t you understand? Laura insisted, “Besides where is all this money coming from, if you quit your job?”
“I think from the Van Fleet National Trust.”
“That family is swallowing our lives. Are you sure you want to do this?” Laura said impatiently.
“Do you really want to go back to city life? Were we ever really happy? We don’t have much to show for all those years.”
“I know; lives of quiet desperation. But it’s the only life we’ve ever known.”
“So what? Why can’t you see the possibilities? Why can’t you see that our future is there for the taking, and it won’t be empty; it will be full to bursting.” Ian answered passionately.
“I’m sure it will.” Laura said, sounding anything but convinced. It was impossible for her to describe to Ian how she had lost the will to have and to hold and to be who she was, or even begin to accept who she wasn’t. She needed a lot more than a room somewhere, even a very nice room with a spectacular view, even in a house decorated with an exquisite sense of wealth and taste. Without Laura’s help in making decisions, from that moment on, Ian’s life became very busy indeed. He had to create Laura’s new life from his own imagination and from what he knew of hers.
When Laura passed on the chance to make decisions about furnishing their new home, Ian turned to Amanda. Knowing how busy she was with her own life, Ian was reluctant to ask her to take days to go shopping with him in Toronto; he knew the idea of asking her to go back into the city would not be an easy sell. He decided to do it as an addendum to his presentation on the house plans.
Tom excused himself from having to go through the presentation again and left Amanda alone with her father at the table in the coffeehouse where he had spread out all plans. Amanda was much more interested than her mother. She loved the idea of customizing a house to suit their particular needs. She loved making suggestions and when she was well into the dream, she realized how much she would miss if she let her father do all the shopping himself. There was also something about renting the only home she had ever known in Toronto that was also unsettling and unpleasant. The thought of someone else living in her room made her uncomfortable. All memories have a sense of place and, until that moment, she did not realize it was impossible to go back to her old life. It was not just the rooms they lived in, it was the parks, the architecture, and all the things she had done. She’d grown up in the city and the condominium in Toronto was going to be the abandoned web of her old life. Seeing the imaginary house on the table in front of her made Amanda realize that her new life was really beginning, and it would be many years before she again had a sense of place that was truly a part of her. It was a hard realization.
As Amanda watched and listened and interacted with her father the way he they had done while they were restoring her Riviera, she had to let go of the past in a way she could never explain to anyone, even Tom. She had to grow up. There was no choice. It was a new world, whether she liked it or not, whether she loved enough or not.
When Ian brought up the idea of her helping choose furniture for the new house, her first instinct was to be absolutely thrilled, but as he explained all the things they would need to buy, she realized how much time would be involved. Her busy life would become absolutely hectic, as hectic as her father’s would be until the new house was finished. And that would mean less and less time to spend with Tom.
“How much time would this take?” Amanda asked, seriously.
“Probably a couple of days of a week for the next couple of months. I know it’s a lot to ask, and I know you’re going to have to talk to Sharon about taking so much time away, and there’s your school, but I would really love it if you and I could do this together. It’s not a chance we’ll ever have again.”
The guilt and the opportunity were too much to resist. Amanda sighed and agreed. She didn’t know it would be the most fun she would ever share with her father. It would also be the time she came to know Alan and the strange mixed feelings of having an instant brother. Ian was more than delighted about it all, and he too had no idea how much fun choosing furniture would be.
When Amanda asked Sharon for permission to be relieved of her duties while she went shopping with their father, she was surprised at how enthusiastic. Sharon loved the idea. As far as she was concerned, this was the chance of a lifetime.
“Can you imagine how much fun you’ll have?” Sharon enthused, “It’s what having money is all about. Things can express who you are. That your father wants you there with him to make those choices is wonderful. That new house is going to be part of both of you, even if you never live there.”
“I never thought of it like that. I just thought it would be fun, like when we worked on the Riviera.” Amanda replied.
“Just look around our place. Every thing you see was a choice. Somebody in the family thought something was beautiful and made it a part of our lives. Material possessions have a history and create a little resonance inside everyone who knows their story. That’s why so many of the things we own have little cards about the history they had before they came to our family. I like to think that you can adopt things, just like people.”
“That’s really interesting. I’ll remember that when we do our own house, me and Tom. Did your husband feel that way about material things?”
“Eugene? He was more enthusiastic about things than anybody I’ve ever known. The interesting thing is that he was just as enthusiastic about people. With most people, it’s usually one or the other. I think this place all started with his love for cars and car enthusia
“That’s funny.” Amanda said, and then she asked Sharon her big unspoken question.
“What was it like being married to Mr. Van fleet?”
“It was funny, busy and sad, sometimes, and we both had strong opinions that we defended pretty hard. We contended a lot. We were contenders. Do you think that you and Tom are like me and Eugene?”
“I don’t know. He seems so much like his father, but I don’t know if I can live up to you.” Amanda confessed. “You’re a hard act to follow.”
“I hope the emphasis is not on the hard. Love isn’t what you do with it. Love is what it is. You can’t compare Tom to his father or yourself to me. We loved each other very differently. It’s never the same between people. Look at Eugene and your mother, they loved each other very differently. I used to be anxious about comparing myself with your mother, but I got over that one. I realized their love lived in a room that didn’t connect with the one I shared with Eugene. Love can’t be compared. It’ll only make you crazy, if you try.”
“You think that’s what’s wrong with my mom, comparing her love to yours?” Amanda asked pointedly.
“No. I don’t think your mother is comparing her life to anything except the person she can’t imagine herself being.”
“I don’t know how you can be so strong. It’s really hard to be as young as me and Tom and be sure your love is going to last for the rest of your life.”
“Love makes illusions out of life, and then destroys them. The illusions can be beautiful, but they eventually have to come down. And the reality of love is beautiful in a way that’s never been written in a love song.”
“But I love, love songs.”
“Don’t we all. Except maybe your mother.”
Monday morning was the first time Laura left the boathouse since Eugene’s funeral. Anthony had felt the full force of Sharon’s persuasive ability and he had agreed to teach in the home school that week. Sharon made him sit with the photo album of all the great teachers who’d come over the years, and it was difficult for him to turn down the opportunity to be in the company of some truly great minds. Bloom, Updike, Marsalis, Fry, McLuhan were among the very famous teachers. But there were other great teachers whose names Anthony didn’t even recognize. Fate had given him the opportunity, and Sharon made sure he realized that, if he declined, he would be turning down the chance to pass the best part of himself to children who were just forming their lives. She told him she couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t share the best part of themselves with children who wanted to learn. She told him she thought it was artistic arrogance to think that teaching children was somehow beneath an artist’s calling. She was hard to resist, as so many others had learned, and so Anthony finally agreed to teach school, in spite of his lifelong determination never to presume to try to teach anyone anything.
It was Anthony himself, who came to the boat house very early in the morning, banging on the glass sliding door, looking in at Laura as she slept. When she opened her eyes, the glare of the new morning made Anthony a shadow that almost frightened her.
“Get up.” he insisted, “I need your representation. I need your support. God help me, I’m teaching school this morning. This is my first day of school, and I need someone to hold my hand. Get up! The subject is poetry, the kind that doesn’t sway on your chest.”
Laura slept nude and when she got up; she didn’t even consider that Anthony was seeing her poetry in motion.
“Anthony, I don’t want to go to school.” she protested.
“You are going. All your friends will be there. This is not an option. If I have to come in there and dress you myself, you’re going.”
Laura realized the state of her undress, but didn’t care as Anthony came into the room and started looking around for clothes for her to wear. He picked up the blouse and the shorts she had left on the corner of the pullout sofa and threw them at her.
“This is not negotiable. Put on your clothes. You’re going to school. That’s final.” It was funny, but Laura wasn’t laughing.
“Anthony, why are you doing this? Why would I want to go?”
“Because I asked you; and because you can’t stay in your room for the rest of your life. You have to start somewhere and listening to me speak honestly about art and poetry for the first time in my life is something I think might be pertinent to you, personally. I’m going to be speaking directly to you, if you’d like to know. It’s the only way I can do this justice. I’m going to tell you what it means to be an artist, and that’s what you are, dear heart, whether you want to admit it, or not. Now, get dressed.” Anthony insisted.
Laura, sat and waited while he stood over her, looking down expectantly until the silence was finally too much to bear, and she got up and without the smallest embarrassment at him seeing her naked, she put on her clothes. He was going to be speaking directly to her. What could he possibly have to say that would make the least bit of difference? Yet, for all that, it was the thing that made her agree to go. She really wanted to know what he would be saying about being an artist that could possibly be pertinent to her life.
“Can I brush my teeth?” Laura asked, and Anthony smiled, knowing that she had tacitly agreed to come.
Both Anthony and Laura were surprised that the farm had literally shut down during the mornings the year’s special teacher came to the home school. There were more than fifty people in the coffeehouse when Anthony came in with Laura. Anthony expected seven or eight young children, and so he was more than a little surprised. He was much less nervous about talking to adults than he was to children, and so the full room settled him. Laura sat with Ian, Amanda, Sharon and Tom.
Anthony cleared his throat and began. “I’d been expecting to speak to young children, so I’m not sure my first metaphor will be something adults will appreciate, but here goes.” For the first time in Laura’s memory, Anthony’s voice actually had tension in it. It didn’t last long.
“One of my grandchildren used to collect a toy that was called a transformer. It was a starship that would turn into a truck, or a truck that would turn into a robot. Inside the basic structure of its design was the ability to become something completely different. Artists are not transformers; they are the engineers who design them. Artists are the ones who can feel the way human beings are made, the way life and nature exists, and the way those things connect, and can be shaped and reshaped in the most intricate, painful and sometimes beautiful ways. Artists are the emotional engineers who create designs that can transform life. But that leaves the most important question unanswered; ‘How do transformers really work?’
“The first thing an artist understands is the transformation of the mundane into the meaningful. A painter takes ordinary oil and pigment, a brush on a flat surface, and if you are very good, you can turn something that means almost nothing into something that means as much is the human heart can hold. If you are a sculptor you turn clay, stone, steel or wood, the commonest things in the world into something absolutely unique and individual, and like nothing anyone has ever created before. Looking around your beautiful home, I’ve been privileged to see paintings and sculptures that are transformers of the mundane to the meaningful, the truly beautiful reality that begins in imagination.”
“Moving from one place to another through space and time is the most ordinary thing in the world, but a choreographer can make that something that is indescribably moving, if you’ll pardon the pun. Musicians can take a simple scale of notes and create symphonies, folksongs and rock ‘n roll, and the transformers of music are the only ones who use the one language all human beings share.”
“I agreed to teach you this week because I knew this room would be filled with engineers who understand and respect transformers. I’m not a painter, sculptor, choreographer, or musician like so many in this room, but I understand how words can transform the world. The transformers of words can arrange them in
“Writers all know Lou Gehrig’s disease. Writers know how hard it is to choose words that take the mundane facts of life and make people understand how precious it is, and how important it is when someone speaks and someone listens.”
Anthony was looking straight into Laura’s eyes. For the rest of his introduction he didn’t look at anyone else.
“What happens when someone speaks words that matter, writes them down so they will never be lost? What happens when someone tries to find exactly the right words to make someone want to listen and hear the unspeakable sound of an individual’s heart? It takes an engineer who understands how to change mundane life to something meaningful.”
“Transforming the mundane to the meaningful is only the first way an artist tries to understand how change happens. For me, there’s a second transformation very much like the first, but it’s more abstract and much more difficult to define. It’s not like changing wood, paint or words into something else, it’s changing the idea of things. It’s changing the simple to the complex.”
“The Japanese created a kind of poetry that I think is the best example of that. It is called haiku. In seventeen syllables, in one natural breath, haiku tries to find the infinitely complicated meaning of life in the simplest things we see every day. It’s changing the idea of a butterfly sitting on a bell into the idea of how a simple thought connects to the universe. It’s knowing the bell is going to ring and everything will change for the butterfly when that happens. It’s knowing that the bell is going to ring and knowing the butterfly doesn’t. We’re like butterflies sitting on a Temple Bell. An artist is an engineer who transforms a butterfly and a bell into you and me perched on the enormous potential feelings we can experience in life. Changing the simple to the complex is more than transforming the mundane into the meaningful; it’s understanding how we can transform the meaning of life itself.”
Anthony went on talking about poetry and how it can transform the feelings we have about ourselves and others, and even about our place in the world. He said that the power to transform one thing into another, to transform ourselves and others, is the ultimate goal of poetry. He said that every experience we have, every feeling is a chance to transform the world in a way that can never be defined, but experienced in just the way a butterfly experiences the Temple Bell before and after it rings.
“For the rest of the week,” he said, “I’m hoping each of you will bring to class a transformer that has changed your heart or even your life. I hope we can use the rest of the week to understand what it means to be an engineer of the heart. I’m hoping you won’t think that you’re being shortchanged, but I’d like us to leave right now and think for the rest of the day about our best transformers and any questions you might have about them. I’m hoping the first engineering problem we might all address is transforming the ordinary things I said today into the extraordinary feelings you might each have about a work of art that has made you someone different.”
“Thank you for coming. As always, it was a pleasure to hear myself talk.”
Sharon got up, went to Anthony and actually embraced him as people gathered around, and it was a very long time before he could free himself from the crush of people. When the crowd finally began to open like a flower, Laura went to Anthony again, and everyone was shocked when she took him in her arms and kissed him passionately, the right on the mouth. He didn’t know what to think. He was not alone.
Everyone agreed that the week was moving and transformative. People came with their individual transformers, and it wasn’t surprising that most of the Van fleet children brought a written work of art, and most were stories of Arthur and Laura Lee, the ones Laura and Eugene had written. Still, almost everyone was surprised by the poem or story some individuals chose as the most profound transformer in their life.
Amanda was amazed to learn that Tom’s transformer was a little book called Love and Provence about a young couple who went to France and lived in a village called Gigondas, had their first child and became part of the very old culture there.
For Sharon it was a little poem Eugene had written in the last week of his life.
When words don’t come.
Where words can’t go
I am…you are.
She said that it reminded her that there was no way to say how you love someone. She went on for some time about moments they had shared that were beyond words, beyond description, beyond anything they could have described. She said his little poem had helped her get over her pain, anger and bitterness at how someone like him could have been afflicted with the most terrible disease imaginable. She said the last line said everything and nothing, because the only way to know who you are, the only way to know someone else is just to experience it, like a sunset or a sour pickle.
Laura missed everything because she refused to go back and listen to Anthony speak after the first day. Amanda tried to describe what happened each day, but she wasn’t really listening. Amanda asked her mother if it was the letters of Arthur and Laura Lee that was her great transformer and she said that it was, but she had no idea of what that transformation had done. The one thing it hadn’t changed was the underlying fear that had always been with her, that her life had no real meaning; that it was all just a theatrical improvisation as George Marshall had so forcefully made her realize.
Finally, she recognized that it was fear that kept her imprisoned in the boathouse. But it wasn’t the world she feared so much as her own vulnerability, her vulnerability to her own feelings. Life was an autoimmune disease. Her fear was literally taking over her own body, leaving her conscious of nothing more than its pain.
Laura remembered Eugene’s little poem
And nothing really matters
If everything that matters
Is spoken silently
It reminded her of Freddie Mercury’s Bohemian Rhapsody and she put Queen on the spectacular stereo Tom had installed on the house boat and put it on repeat so that the one song played over and over and over again from the time she got up until dusk when she would turn it off and watch the sunset. Interestingly, it kept people away from her, the house boat and even the beach, but attracted the interest of all kinds of animals, from rafts of ducks and geese to a single coyote that came every day around noon and sat listening for over an hour while Laura had lunch on the deck.
Wednesday night was Eugene’s birthday. The family celebrated as they did all birthdays with a big cake and singing in the coffeehouse. Amanda was sad because it made her realize her own mother and father had only her to celebrate who they were. Tom saw her look and she didn’t explain when she told him that she wanted to go for a walk by herself and stop to visit her mother. She left everyone and went out into the darkness alone.
It was moonlight and crickets and loud Katydids singing her down the lane to the lake, the grey moon dust on everything, like the grey moon dust of love, like the grey moon dust of memory on her hands, her face and her body. Amanda felt so sad. She couldn’t help her mother. She felt so sad because she couldn’t imagine what her mother was going to do with her life. She felt so sad that she was all Laura had, and she was just a face on a train that was passing through. Leaving home forever was something she never understood before that moment. She was sorry, sorry for herself.
She got to the beach and took off her shoes and held them in the fingers of one hand. She walked into the little black waves with the silver crests that broke a few inches from shore. The water was cool like the air
Laura was surprised to see Amanda alone, and to see how sad she looked. Amanda was invariably transparent where her mother always seemed invariably translucent.
“Sit down. You look upset. Can I get you some tea?” Laura asked gently.
“That would be nice.” Amanda replied and sat down next to the place where her mother had been sitting. Laura came back and sat beside her while the kettle boiled.
“Can you talk about it?” Laura asked, softly.
“I don’t know. It’s his birthday party and he just died. Everybody is telling stories about him. All you’ve got is me. It made me feel so sad to know that I’m all you’ve got.”
“All? You were born to be beautiful. Just to have you love us makes me and your dad the luckiest people on earth.” Laura said. She took Amanda’s hand.
Amanda stared straight ahead, unable to look at her mother because she knew she was now a woman and would be going away. She couldn’t look at her mother because she thought that she would see the truth.
“Easy come, easy go, will you let me go? We will not let you go, never.’ We’re little rich girls, everybody loves us.” Laura said softly, and it made Amanda laugh.
“Are you going to move from the boathouse when the new house is done?” Amanda asked.
“Maybe.” Laura answered honestly and they sat and watched the moonlight on the water for a long time.
Some mornings are like porcelain with shine, clarity and the hard brittleness of cool reality. Some mornings are like clay, wet and smooth, uninformed and as cold as hope before it becomes reality’s vessel. It was either mud pies or Meisen. Laura’s morning was like porcelain.
That day around noon, Amanda came running down the beach to the boathouse. She handed Laura her cell phone and breathlessly explained that Tom’s sister Christa who was now living with Bridget Brown was going to call in a few minutes. Sharon had sent her the manuscript of Arthur and Laura Lee and Christa had called to say she wanted to talk to Laura about one of the stories. Amanda left her mother holding the phone, explaining that she had work to do at the farm. Ten minutes later, the phone rang and it was Christa’s lilting voice speaking over Bohemian Rhapsody. Laura turned off the music and told Christa how her breathing meditation had helped her so much.
“Everything is precious; nothing is important. That’s gotten me through a lot of my worst times.” she explained.
“Every child lives that mantra. My mother’s prayer, that it’s possible to be thankful for every experience is kind of the same thing, but that one is too hard for me.” Christa replied.
“Me too.” Laura agreed. It seemed that they were experts on the inability to deal with pain, and it was an instantaneous bond.
Christa got to the point of her call asking Laura to reconsider the story in which Emily Dickenson refused to stand up in church and be counted among those God had chosen to be saved. She explained that she thought it was more than just rejecting the fact that God saved some and doomed others, that she would rather go to hell than accept that there was such a heartless God.
“What do you think she was saying?” Laura asked.
“Maybe she was outraged that anyone would presume to say they knew what God knew or wanted. Maybe she just sat there because no one could possibly know if they were among those who would be saved. I think that’s what your story should be about, having no way to know the truth about anything, especially salvation. What made her poetry so special was she tried to tell the truth, even when there was no way to describe it.”
“It’s hard to write a story about someone dealing with an inexpressible truth.”
“I think you should talk to my dad.” Christa replied, and the words made no sense to Laura. She was stunned into silence.
“Here’s my dad.”
The voice that followed wasn’t Christa’s. It was, and it wasn’t. It was very much a deeper in tone, almost like the voices of women who undergo sex change therapy. But what gave Laura chills all over her body and blew the air from her lungs was the voice had Eugene’s inflections; all his cadence, the light ch instead of a j, the Dutch lilt like a Kingfisher in flight. All Laura could hear was her memory of Eugene’s voice roaring in her ears from decades before.
“This is so wonderful. This is so wonderful.” the voice said. And the word wonderful had a long accent on the first syllable exactly as Eugene used to say it. Laura was fighting her fear and confusion like she had fought to get back to the surface when she had almost drowned. Was she talking to a crazy woman or a dead man? She couldn’t speak or even breathe as she listened to the voice, so much like his voice, until finally she understood what his voice was saying. It didn’t tell her he was fine and happy and glad to be released from his pain; the voice was telling him what it was like to be beside her while they wrote Arthur and Laura Lee. The voice said things that only Eugene would know, things that happened when they were alone together. And finally the voice told her that she had become the person he loved since she was fifteen years old. The voice told her that everything she was was there in the beginning and would be there at the end, and that what they were would stay forever young. “There is no end to it.” Laura heard the voice say, and it wasn’t a joke anymore. And then the voice said the words that turned the bizarre moment into a Gothic nightmare, a bloodcurdling moment of terror that turned her spine to a spear of ice hanging in the wind from a high, high roof.
“Arthur and Laura Lee is our baby. I know about the other one… It’s okay. It’s….”
Laura almost strangled in shock as the voice told her the secret she had never shared with him. In panic, she pushed the buttons to disconnect Eugene and then screamed at what she had done. She screamed at the dead screen like it was the horror of seeing the dead boy in the snow, like it was seeing Amanda’s eyes the night she was raped. Laura screamed and stared at the phone in her hand, and if her fear could have dissolved her and made her lose her mind, it would’ve done it that moment.
A moment later, she realized what she had done. She had hung up on someone she loved, someone who loved her so much he might be speaking to her from beyond the grave. And knowing that, almost believing it in that moment, was indescribable, inconceivable. She had hung up! She wanted him back! She wanted to know if he was real. As terrified as she was, she wanted to know. She had to know if it was really him. As she tried to push the buttons to somehow restore the call, the phone flipped out of her hand and over the deck railing into the shallow water. She literally ran to pick the phone from the water and the sand, and when she pressed the button to turn it on there was nothing but a dead screen.
Laura looked at the phone the way Christa had looked at the Walnut urn that had carried her father’s ashes, with tenderness, loss and horror that connected to a kind of reality she couldn’t even imagine. Her heart was pounding on a coffin lid. Laura had had him in her hands, and cut him off. She had hung up again and all that was left was pure sorrow. ‘Goodbye everybody I’ve got to go. Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth.’
And then Laura mourned. It hit her like a tidal wave. Laura cried. She cried like she had never cried in her life; she cried like people cry watching their home burn to the ground. It wasn’t tears of anger, frustration, or self-pity, it wasn’t even the tears of guilt or compassion she had shed so rarely in her life. As Laura cried, she watched her past consumed. She cried for her youth and the dead boy in the snow, and her parents, and her first husband, and Amanda, Ian then Eugene, her beautiful Eugene. Laura cried and s
Ian had come from Toronto to drive Anthony back the next day. Knowing that Laura slept like a stone, he waited until early Friday morning to sneak into her bedroom. He could see by the nightlight that always burned by her bed that she was fast asleep. He put down the box of photographs he had chosen from the albums they had collected over the years, took out a tape dispenser and began to assemble the collage of his little family’s life. This was her life. This was their life. It took him almost an hour and every time she shifted in her sleep he thought that she would wake up and he would be busted. But he was gone when she opened her eyes and saw all the photographs assembled on the sliding Walnut pocket doors. Her heart sank like a hot knife in cold butter. She couldn’t help the dry smile that forced its way to her lips. Finally when she stood up and went to the wall, she couldn’t imagine what he expected it would do. Did he think she would see the direction of her footprints in the sand, if he laid out all the ones that had come before? Did he think he needed to remind her of who she was? Did he think he needed to remind her of who she would always be? She knew the answer to all those questions. What she didn’t know was why it made her so afraid.
Ian let her stay alone with the wall of photos for the rest of the day and spent the time talking to Anthony who had decided to stay the weekend painting.
Later in the afternoon Ian found Laura sitting on the down sofa in the living room of the houseboat with her feet up on the big Walnut coffee-table. She smiled in the soft light of the room and it made him feel hopeful that the pictures had mattered as he had hoped they might. He sat down beside her and she immediately put her arm around him and kissed him sweetly on the neck. He used the remote and turned off Bohemian Rhapsody.
“We’re mushy tonight.” he said in delight.
“You’re so sweet. You try so hard. The pictures were such a surprise.” she replied.
“I just wanted to remind you that wherever you are, it should include the people who love you.”
“This has been so hard for you. You’ve always given me the space and time I needed. I never appreciated it enough, but I don’t know why, but I can’t let you come back to our bed just yet. Remember when Amanda was afraid to go out of the condo even when she knew she had nothing to fear, well maybe it’s genetic. I’m afraid. I’m so afraid, and I just can’t explain why; and why it won’t stop. I don’t know how long you’re going to have to wait. I wish that I could be strong and brave and take my part in our lives, but wishing can’t make it so. Smitty says I shouldn’t feel guilty for asking you to be a little more patient. I hope you will wait for me. I want to wait for me.” Laura asked him in a weak, quiet voice.
Ian held Laura close and didn’t say anything. He kissed her hair and the two of them sat and watched the big beeswax candle burning in the center of the coffee-table. “I’ve always known why I love you, why you are my life, but I never understood why you picked me when you could’ve had any man you wanted.” Ian said in a quiet conversational tone.
“You’re safe. You made the world safe. I know you wouldn’t ever hurt me because you have such a gentle heart. I’ve known bright and handsome, powerful and creative men, but you and Eugene are the gentle ones. That’s why I love you. That’s why I picked you. That’s why I treated you both so badly. I was always afraid I couldn’t live up to your standards. I have never been gentle. I’m so sorry I had so little to give back.” Laura confessed.
She told Ian about her conversation with Christa and the haunting impression of Eugene that had given her the shock of her life. She also told him she wanted to go back to Toronto; that she didn’t want to sell the condominium. Ian didn’t know what to say.
“What about the new house?” he asked, and was afraid of her answer.
“You should build it. I’ll come when I can, but I don’t think it’s going to be my home.” she replied flatly.
“I hope that isn’t true.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I think I’ll stay the weeked before I go back.
“I guess it’s good you made a decision. I’m just sorry. I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry I’m such high maintenance.” she told him sincerely, “I need some time.”
When they went outside, they were both stunned to see an enormous flock of trumpeter swans floating in the water near the boathouse. They stood silently staring at the pure white grace, the silent gathering, the perfect beauty floating on the still water before them. Ian whispered to her, “seventy seven.”
He left her with a kiss and an embrace, but the kind people share beside a coffin. Laura had broken Ian’s heart, broken his dream of a new future, and he didn’t understand what had happened.
Amanda came and tried to talk to her mother and went away looking afraid. Laura looked absolutely normal, except for how her eyes and voice had changed. They had both lost the timbre of life. Laura waited for Smitty’s Friday visit to tell him that she would be all right, that she wouldn’t need therapy any longer. She knew that he would disagree, but she was sure, absolutely sure she could get through the rest of her life. ‘If I’m not back this time tomorrow, carry-on, carry-on as if nothing really matters.’
Smitty came at his usual time near dusk, and they sat quietly after she told him her decision. She did not tell him about talking to Eugene, or what she intended to do when she went back to Toronto. She asked if they could just sit quietly, so she could remember the last time with him filled with the peace that saturated the shoreline opposite Haystack Island. They did that and they both seemed to appreciate that there really was nothing more to say. After the sun and the last color of the day were gone, they saw a small group of people coming towards them across the beach. In the moonlight, it was possible to see that each person was carrying a bottle of wine.
Once again breaking the farm rules on alcohol use, Tom and Amanda, Sharon and Ian, and Anthony Holtz had come for a nightcap, and while Ian opened the bottles of dandelion wine that Bridget Brown had sent with him for Amanda’s hope chest, Tom and Amanda took firewood from where it was piled on the deck and built a bonfire on the beach. Laura didn’t know how to protest, and so she just quietly watched as everyone gathered on the sand around the blazing little fire. No one made small talk in the silence under the stars and moonlight.
It was Ian who finally spoke. “There are endings and beginnings, and it’s hard to tell one from the other, but what we are, gathered here, is bigger than anything I ever imagined could exist among people just trying to love one another. It’s funny how gratitude and sadness can get so mixed up together. ‘Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy caught in a landslide, no escape from reality?’ Thanks to Laura, Bohemian Rhapsody is stuck in my brain like my feelings for all of you. I don’t know what else to say.”
“There’s nothing to say.” Sharon added.
Everyone was quiet after Ian’s little speech because there was no escape from reality or fantasy’s landslide. The faces in the firelight, flickering in the moonlight were lovely. Time and the warmth of the fire drew them closer, and then Amanda began to sing,
This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine.
This little ligh
I’m going to let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine,
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine…
Laura understood immediately what Amanda was trying to do, marshaling the greatest power on Earth. Amanda had told her the story of when Sharon had her family sing for her to make her realize what it meant to belong to something bigger than herself or choose to turn away from that belonging.
“Amanda, I know what you’re doing. This won’t work.” Laura said, sounding very beleaguered.
Then Sharon started to sing with Amanda,
This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine.
This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine.
Then Laura screamed at the top her lungs, screaming for them to stop, and they did stop and everyone stared at her, and there was a terrible fear among them. Laura was about to get up and leave but was instantaneously caught in the landslide of her heart when she saw each of the individual faces of the people she loved in an old impossible light, saw the feeling in their eyes, and how each was so very different, so absolutely different one to another. None of them saw her as she was, not one, and each of them obviously cared so much. She was loved, undeniably loved for the person they would never really know, and the paradox hit her, and with it the perfect irony that to belong was to be longing. Being with people you loved was the reason you were sometimes most alone. To belong was to be longing. That was the arc of time’s pendulum swinging over the gathering places of the heart. Life was a deaf mute choir singing the background music of life, and she could hear the music begin to move inside her like the blues; blue water, blue sky, bluebirds of happiness, blue-eyed like a poor blind animal, and Laura could feel the music move up the length of her spine, slowly with feeling, and when the blue light reached her skull, it burst inside her like a star imploding heaving off supernovas of light. It was expressing the inexpressible, a ball of snow melting in her hands by a fire. It was like nesting dolls inside one another, each one different, each one smaller, until the last one was opened, and it was the one that held everything. It was me and mine and ours, and she understood. Everything is precious; nothing is important. And this was where she belonged with her inexplicable longing. That longing was our shared affliction, the universal Lou Gehrig’s disease that could bind us together even as it could tear us apart. She was among the luckiest people on earth.
Laura wanted to laugh or cry, but all she could do was look into the faces of the people she loved. She was smiling, grinning like a fool, and somehow the realization that she was doing that flooded her body with a warmth she had never felt in her life. She could feel a part of each of them inside her, and it touched her so deeply she had to look away to the island of her youth, to the island where love abides. She was smiling, she couldn’t stop smiling, grinning at the ordinary incommunicable miracle of love. And that was when Laura started to sing.
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