Groundwork, p.45
Groundwork, page 45
3/28/90. CEILING IN 3R: It WAS falling in! The painters who restored that apartment to an acceptable condition confirmed Paul’s gloomy prediction. It was just a matter of time before it fell on our heads.
6/17/92. FLOODING: The basement is flooding. Lloyd’s acute remark that either we fix the flooding or stock the basement with trout hit home. The estimates for repair are running between $100 and $850, depending on what must be done. We agreed that lower was better than higher and that we should begin low with Roto-Rooter. The gentleman from Roto-Rooter, a friend, acquaintance, or at least a person KNOWN to Lloyd, is Raymond Clean, a name that inspires confidence, considering the nature of his work, and, who knows, may have inspired Mr. Clean’s calling in life.
10/15/92. WINDOWS AND CRIME: Joe, the window man, was formally accused of absconding with the secretary’s one hundred dollars and not answering his telephone. He may have left the country. Theo and Marguerite have also accused him of essentially NOT FIXING their balances, since they ceased to work again after one week. There was some speculation among the members as to how far one could get with $100. We may have to look for him in Hoboken.
12/3/92. Beyond the walls of 458 Third Street, the weather was cold and damp that night, and winter was upon us. We ended the meeting on a wistful note. Marguerite told stories about Cyprus, a definite longing in her voice. In that exotic place the weather is warm and the light brilliant and clothes dry on balconies in ten minutes.… And that is how it stands with us. There’s always another place where the sun shines, where clothes dry fast, where there are no window men, no maintenances, no workmen’s compensation, or flooded basements …
1/14/93. WORKMEN’S COMPENSATION: This issue of whether or not to cover officers of the co-op injured while performing their duties came to a head. We won’t. Let come what may: fingers broken at the typewriter, necks strangled in a telephone cord while conducting co-op business, broken legs, arms, and heads from too much wine at a meeting. We’ll have to live with it, the way people used to. We’ll call it fate. We’ll save about fifty bucks, and fifty bucks is fifty bucks is fifty bucks.
20A. 300 Eighth Avenue, Apartment 1-I; Brooklyn. A one-room studio on the ground floor of a six-story apartment building, located in the back, with a view of an air shaft and a brick wall. Larger than the maid’s room on the rue du Louvre, less than half the size of the Varick Street hovel, but equipped with a toilet and bath as well as various kitchen appliances built into one of the walls: sink, stove, and minibar fridge, which you rarely bothered to use, since this was a space for work and not for living (or eating). A desk, a chair, a metal bookcase, and a couple of storage cabinets; a bare bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling; an air conditioner in one of the windows, which you would turn on when you arrived in the morning to filter out noises from the building (COOL in summer; FAN in winter). Spartan surroundings, yes, but surroundings have never been of any importance as far as your work is concerned, since the only space you occupy when you write your books is the page in front of your nose, and the room in which you are sitting, the various rooms in which you have sat these forty-plus years, are all but invisible to you as you push your pen across the page of your notebook or transcribe what you have written onto a clean page with your typewriter, the same machine you have been using since your return from France in 1974, an Olympia portable you bought secondhand from a friend for forty dollars—a still functioning relic that was built in a West German factory more than half a century ago and will no doubt go on functioning long after you are dead. The number of your studio apartment pleased you for its symbolic aptness. 1-I, meaning the single self, the lone person sequestered in that bunker of a room for seven or eight hours a day, a silent man cut off from the rest of the world, day after day sitting at his desk for no other purpose than to explore the interior of his own head.
20B. Windham Road; West Townshend, Vermont. A two-story white clapboard house (circa 1800) on the crest of a steep dirt road three miles outside the village of West Townshend. June through August, 1989 through 1993. For the modest sum of one thousand dollars a month, you escaped the tropical heat of New York and the confines of your too-small apartment for this refuge in the hills of southern Vermont. A grassy, quarter-of-an-acre yard in front of the house; dense woods just beyond the yard that stretched on through several miles of wilderness; more woods on the other side of the dirt road; a small pond nearby; an outbuilding at the edge of the yard. Except for a sink and a cheap ancient stove in the kitchen, there were no amenities of any kind: no washing machine, no dishwasher, no television, no bathtub. Telephone communication via party line; radio reception touch and go at best. Freshly painted on the outside, the house was falling apart within: warped floors, buckling ceilings, squadrons of mice in the closets and bureaus, hideous, water-stained wallpaper in the bedrooms, and uncomfortable furniture throughout—lumpy, sagging beds; wobbly chairs; and a cushionless, understuffed couch in the living room. No one lived there anymore. The now-dead former owner, an aged spinster with no immediate heirs, had bequeathed the house to the children of various friends of hers, eight men and women who lived in different parts of the country, from California to Florida, but none in Vermont, none anywhere in New England. They were too scattered and uninvolved to do anything about the house, could not agree on whether to sell it, improve it, or tear it down, and left the oversight of the property to a local real estate agent. The last tenant, a young woman who had turned the place into a marijuana farm and had made a thriving business of it by employing a tough biker gang as her sales force, was now looking at a stiff prison term. After her arrest, the house had remained unoccupied for a couple of years, and when you and your wife rented it in the spring of 1989, on the strength of a single exterior shot of the house (so pretty), you had no idea what you were getting yourselves into. Yes, you had told the agent you were looking for something remote, that rustic was a word that did not frighten you or induce any qualms, but even though he’d warned you that the house was not in tip-top condition, neither one of you had imagined you would be walking into a tumbledown shanty. You remember the first night you spent there, wondering out loud if it would be possible to endure an entire summer in such a place, but your wife absorbed the shock more calmly than you did, telling you to be patient, to give it a week or so before you decided to jump ship, that it could turn out to be a lot better than you thought. The next morning, she launched into a furious campaign of scrubbing, bleaching, and disinfecting, opening windows to air out the stuffy rooms, discarding torn curtains and disintegrated blankets, cleaning the blackened stove and oven, removing trash and reorganizing the kitchen cupboards, sweeping, dusting, and polishing, her Scandinavian blood boiling with the righteousness and devotion of her frontier ancestors, while you went across the yard with your notebooks and typewriter to the outbuilding, a cabinlike structure of more recent vintage, which had been trashed by the marijuana girl and her biker friends and turned into a dump site of broken furniture, ripped screen windows, and graffiti-covered walls, a place beyond hope or salvation, and little by little you did what you could to clean up the mess, to get rid of the broken things, to wash the cracked linoleum floors, and within a couple of days you had installed yourself at a green wooden table in the front room and were back to work on your novel, and once you began to settle in, to occupy the house your wife had rescued from filth and disarray, you discovered that you liked being there, that what at first had seemed to be a ubiquitous, unalterable squalor was in fact no more than a state of weary dilapidation, and you could live with crooked floors and ceilings that were falling in, you could learn to ignore the house’s defects because it wasn’t your house, and little by little you came to appreciate the many advantages the place had to offer: the silence, the coolness of the Vermont air (sweaters in the morning, even on the warmest days), the afternoon strolls through the woods, the sight of your little daughter romping naked through the yard, the tranquil isolation that allowed you and your wife to pursue your work without interference. And so you kept going back, summer after summer, celebrating your daughter’s second birthday there, her third birthday, her fourth birthday, her fifth birthday, her sixth birthday, and eventually you began to toy with the idea of buying the house, which wouldn’t have cost much, far less than any other house for miles around, but when you considered the expense of restoring your summertime ruin, of rescuing it from imminent collapse and death, you realized that you couldn’t afford such an undertaking and that if and when you had the money at your disposal, you should leave your too-small co-op apartment on Third Street and find a larger place to live in New York.
21. Somewhere in Park Slope; Brooklyn. A four-story brownstone with a small garden in back, built in 1892. Age 46 to the present. Your wife left Minnesota in the fall of 1978 to enter the Ph.D. program in English literature at Columbia. She chose Columbia because she wanted to be in New York, had turned down larger, more monumental fellowships from Cornell and Michigan in order to be in New York, and by the time you met her in February 1981, she was a veteran Manhattanite, a committed Manhattanite, a person who could no longer imagine living anywhere else. Then she threw her lot in with you and wound up settling in the urban hinterlands of Brooklyn. Not unhappily, perhaps, but Brooklyn had never been part of the plan, and now that the two of you had decided to look for another place to live, you told her you were willing to go anywhere she wanted, that you were not so attached to Brooklyn that leaving it would cause you any regrets, and if she wanted to return to Manhattan, you would be happy to start looking with her there. No, she said, without pausing to think about it, without having to think about it, let’s stay in Brooklyn. Not only did she not want to go back to Manhattan, she wanted to go on living in the same neighborhood where you were now. Fortunately, the real estate market had collapsed by then, and even though you had to sell your once overpriced apartment at a loss, the house you bought was just within your means—or just beyond them, but not by so much as to cause any lasting difficulties. It took you a year of dogged looking to find it, followed by another six months after the closing before you could move in, but then it was yours, a place finally big enough for all of you, all the bedrooms and studies you needed, all the wall space you needed to shelve the thousands of books you owned, a kitchen large enough to breathe in, bathrooms large enough to breathe in, a guest room for visiting friends and family, a deck off the kitchen for warm-weather drinks and meals, the little garden below, and bit by bit, over the eighteen years you have lived there, which is far longer than you have lived anywhere else, three times longer than your longest run in any other place, you have steadily repaired and improved every inch of every room on every floor, turning a somewhat shabby, down-at-the-heels old house into something sparkling and beautiful, a place that gives you pleasure every time you walk into it, and after eighteen years you are long past the point of thinking about houses in other neighborhoods, other cities, other countries. This is where you live, and this is where you want to go on living until you can no longer walk up and down the stairs. No, even more than that: until you can no longer crawl up and down the stairs, until they carry you out and put you in your grave.
* * *
Twenty-one permanent addresses from birth to the present, although permanent hardly seems to be the right word when you consider how often you have moved during the course of your life. Twenty stopping places, then, a score of addresses leading to the one address that may or may not prove to be permanent, and yet even though you have hung your hat in those twenty-one different houses and apartments, have paid your gas and electric bills there, have been registered to vote there, your body has rarely sat still for any length of time, and when you open a map of your country and begin to count, you discover that you have set foot in forty of the fifty states, sometimes just passing through (as with Nebraska on your train trip to the West Coast in 1976) but more often for visits of several days or weeks or even months, as with Vermont, for example, or California, where you not only lived for half a year but also visited from time to time after your mother and stepfather moved there in the early seventies, not to speak of the twenty-five or twenty-seven trips you have made to Nantucket, the annual summer visits to your friend who owns a house on the island, no less than a week each year, which would tally up to approximately six months total, or the many months you have spent in Minnesota with your wife, the two full summers you lived there when her parents were in Norway, the innumerable spring and winter visits throughout the eighties, nineties, and aughts, perhaps fifty times in all, meaning more than a year of your life, along with frequent trips to Boston starting when you were in your teens, the protracted rambles through the Southwest in 1985 and 1999, the various ports where your tanker docked along the gulf coasts of Texas and Florida when you worked as a merchant seaman in 1970, the visiting-writer jobs that have taken you to such places as Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Ann Arbor, Bowling Green, Durham, and Normal, Illinois, the Amtrak jaunts to Washington, D.C., when you were doing your National Story Project for NPR, the four months of summer camp in New Hampshire when you were eight and ten, the three long sojourns in Maine (1967, 1983, and 1999), and, not to be overlooked, your weekly returns to New Jersey from 1986 to 1990 when you were teaching at Princeton. How many days spent away from home, how many nights spent sleeping in beds that were not your bed? Not just here in America but abroad as well, for when you open your atlas to a map of the world, you see that you have been to all the continents except Africa and Antarctica, and even if you discount the three and a half years you lived in France (where, temporarily, you had several permanent addresses), your visits to foreign countries have been frequent and sometimes rather long: an additional year in France on numerous other trips both before and after the time you lived there, five months in Portugal (most of them in 2006, for the shooting of your last film), four months in the U.K. (England, Scotland, and Wales), three months in Canada, three months in Italy, two months in Spain, two months in Ireland, a month and a half in Germany, a month and a half in Mexico, a month and a half on the island of Bequia (in the Grenadines), a month in Norway, a month in Israel, three weeks in Japan, two and a half weeks in Holland, two weeks in Denmark, two weeks in Sweden, two weeks in Australia, nine days in Brazil, eight days in Argentina, one week on the island of Guadeloupe, one week in Belgium, six days in the Czech Republic, five days in Iceland, four days in Poland, and two days in Austria. You would like to tote up how many hours you have spent traveling to these places (that is, how many days, weeks, or months), but you wouldn’t know how to begin, you have lost track of how many trips you have made in America, have no idea how often you have left America and gone abroad, and therefore you could never come up with an exact or even approximate number to tell you how many thousands of hours of your life have been spent in between places, going from here to there and back, the mountains of time you have given over to sitting in airplanes, buses, trains, and cars, the time squandered fighting to overcome the effects of jet lag, the boredom of waiting for your flight to be announced in airports, the deadly tedium of standing around the luggage carousel as you wait for your bag to tumble down the chute, but nothing is more disconcerting to you than the ride in the plane itself, the strange sense of being nowhere that engulfs you each time you step into the cabin, the unreality of being propelled through space at five hundred miles an hour, so far off the ground that you begin to lose a sense of your own reality, as if the fact of your own existence were slowly being drained out of you, but such is the price you pay for leaving home, and as long as you continue to travel, the nowhere that lies between the here of home and the there of somewhere else will continue to be one of the places where you live.
* * *
You would like to know who you are. With little or nothing to guide you, you take it for granted that you are the product of vast, prehistoric migrations, of conquests, rapes, and abductions, that the long and circuitous intersections of your ancestral horde have extended over many territories and kingdoms, for you are not the only person who has traveled, after all, tribes of human beings have been moving around the earth for tens of thousands of years, and who knows who begat whom begat whom begat whom begat whom begat whom to end up with your two parents begetting you in 1947? You can go back only as far as your grandparents, with some scant information about your great-grandparents on your mother’s side, which means that the generations that came before them are no more than blank space, a void of conjecture and blind guesswork. All four of the grandparents were Eastern European Jews, the two on your father’s side born in the late 1870s in the city of Stanislav in the backwater province of Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, subsequently part of Poland after World War I, later part of the Soviet Union after World War II, and now part of Ukraine following the end of the Cold War, whereas the two on your mother’s side were born in 1894 and 1895, your grandmother in Minsk and your grandfather in Toronto—a year after his family emigrated from Warsaw. Both of your grandmothers were redheads, and on both sides of your family there is a tumultuous mix of physical features in the many offspring who followed them, ranging from the dark-haired to the blond, from the brown-skinned to the pale and freckled, from curls and waves to no curls and no waves, from stout peasant bodies with thick legs and stubby fingers to the lithe and elongated contours of still other bodies. The Eastern European genetic pool, but who knows where those nameless ghosts had been wandering before they came to the cities of Russia, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for how else to account for the fact that your sister was born with a Mongolian blue spot on her back, something that occurs only in Asian babies, and how else to account for the fact that you, with your brownish skin and wavy hair and gray-green eyes, have eluded ethnic identification for your entire life and have been variously told by strangers that you must be and most certainly are an Italian, a Greek, a Spaniard, a Lebanese, an Egyptian, and even a Pakistani? Because you know nothing about where you come from, you long ago decided to presume that you are a composite of all the races of the Eastern Hemisphere, part African, part Arab, part Chinese, part Indian, part Caucasian, the melting pot of numerous warring civilizations in a single body. As much as anything else, it is a moral position, a way of eliminating the question of race, which is a bogus question in your opinion, a question that can only bring dishonor to the person who asks it, and therefore you have consciously decided to be everyone, to embrace everyone inside you in order to be most fully and freely yourself, since who you are is a mystery and you have no hope that it will ever be solved.
