email a few times since I’d been served with the petition.
“She’s asking for the house in Cambridge and wants you to pay Candace’s graduate school tuition, should your daughter decide to go that route,” she wrote in one of her dispatches. “Considering your wife’s income is five times larger than yours—and that yours is completely predicated on what you write—we could argue that she is in a far better financial position to . . .”
Let her have the house—and I will find a way of paying Candace’s tuition. I don’t want costly legal disputes or further rancor. I just want a clean break.
I pushed the petition away. I still wasn’t prepared to engage with it. Instead, I stood up and negotiated the narrow staircase up to the second floor of my house. Once there I opened the door to my office: a long, narrow room with bookshelves covering most available space and my desk facing a wall. Dragging my ankle behind me, I reached for the bottle of single malt Scotch located on the filing cabinet to the left of my desk. I poured a shot into a glass and sat down in my desk chair. As I waited for the computer to illuminate, I sipped the whiskey, its peaty warmth numbing the back of my throat. Memory is such a jumble of emotions. An unexpected package arrives—and the past comes cascading in. But though this rush of remembrances and associations may, at first, seem random, one of the great undisputable truths about memory is the fact that there is no such thing as a random recollection. They are all somehow interconnected—for everything is narrative. And the one narrative we all grapple with is the life we call our own.
Which is why—as the whiskey drips down my gullet and my computer screen bathes the otherwise darkened room in an electronic glow—I’m back again at the drugstore lunch counter on East Twenty-first Street, my book propped up against my egg cream. It’s the first moment when, perhaps, I understood the necessity of solitude. How many times since then have I found myself alone somewhere—in a place familiar or strange—with reading material propped up against a bottle of something, or an open notebook in front of me, awaiting that day’s quota of words. In these instances—no matter how distant or difficult the locale—I’ve never felt isolated or alone. Then, as now, I often quietly think: whatever about the collateral damage that my parents’ unhappiness may have visited upon me, I am enormously grateful to them for sending me off on that November Saturday forty-two years ago, and allowing me to discover that sitting somewhere on your own—outside of the maelstrom of things—has an absolute clean ease to it.
But life, of course, never really leaves you in peace. You can shut yourself away in a cottage on a back road in Maine and a process server will still find his way to your door. Or a package will arrive from across the ocean—and try as you might, you find yourself transported back twenty-five years to a café in a corner of Berlin called Kreuzberg. You have a spiral-bound book in front of you—and the vintage red Parker fountain pen that your father gave you as a goingaway gift is in your right hand, blitzing its way across the page. Then you hear a voice. A woman’s voice:
“So viele Wörter.”
So many words .
You look up. And there she is. Petra Dussmann. From that moment on, things change. But that’s only because you yourself answered back.
“Ja, so viele Wörter. Aber vielleicht sind die ganzen Wörter Abfall.”
Yes, so many words. But perhaps all the words are crap .
If you hadn’t attempted that bit of self-deprecation, might she have moved on? And had she moved on . . . ?
How do we explain the trajectory of things? I haven’t a clue. All I know is . . .
It’s 6:15 on an evening in late January. And I have words to write. Having just driven six hours in the snow—and having just been sprung from a hospital—I could make sundry excuses to dodge work for the night.
Will Murray Lester Dent Kenneth Robeson