Terry Bisson: Bears Discover Fire

“He has a little beard,” Mother said, “He has a little dog and walks it regularly every day. He’s renting the house while Dr. Crippen and his wife are in Michigan.”

“So he hasn’t exactly moved to Owensboro,” I said, somehow relieved.

“Well, he’s out here every morning,” she said, “walking his dog. Call it whatever you want to.”

I know the house very well. The Crippens are not ostentatiously tacky the way some (indeed, most) doctors are. It was the Crippens who had encouraged me to go ahead and move to New York if that was what I wanted, when everybody else in my class was getting married. It’s not an older home, of the kind I prefer, but if you had to live in a suburban-style house, theirs would do.

All day I imagined E. L. Doctorow watering the plants and looking through Dr. and Dr. (they are both doctors) Crippen’s books. They have the most books of anybody in Owensboro. The next day at lunch I went to Barnes and Noble and looked through Doctorow’s novels in paperback. All together they made a neat little stack the size of a shoebox.

I decided I was glad he had moved to Owensboro.

It’s hard to make friends in New York. I wondered what it was like in Owensboro for famous writers. Did they ever meet? Did they know one another? Did they pay visits, talk shop, drink together? I asked Alan when he called Monday night (right after the rates changed) but he seemed embarrassed by the question.

“Apparently, they have all moved here independently,” he said. “They’re never seen together. I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

When William Styron moved to Owensboro the last day in May, I wasn’t so surprised. At least he was from the South, although two more different regions than the lower Ohio Valley and the Tidewater of Virginia could hardly be imagined. May and even June are nice in Owensboro, but July and August were coming, and when I thought of Styron blinking in the fierce muggy heat, he seemed even more out of place than the urban Jewish writers like Roth, Doctorow, and Bellow. And Updike, a New Englander! I felt sorry for them all. But that was silly. Every place now has air-conditioning.

When I called Janet, she reminded me that Mother’s birthday was coming up. I knew I was expected to fly home.

Janet told me all about how she and Alan were planning to take her out to dinner. This was to make me feel guilty. I wasn’t planning to fall for it like I did last year, at the last minute.

It is very hard to make friends in New York. My roommate and her ex-roommate had shares in a house in the Hamptons (well, almost the Hamptons) and I had been invited out for the weekend. “You can’t go home for your mother’s birthday every year,” I tell myself.

Mother called me a few days later—a pay phone again, this one near a deli on Thirty-ninth Street where she had gotten me once before—to announce that J. D. Salinger had moved to Owensboro.

“Wait a minute,” I said. This was getting out of hand. “How come no women writers ever move to Owensboro?

What about Ann Tyler? Or Alice Walker? Or Bobbie Ann Mason, who is actually from Mayfield (not that far away)?

How come they’re all men, and all these old guys?”

“I suppose you expect me to ask them that!” Mother said. “I only found out the author of Catcher in the Rye moved here because Mr. Roth told Reverend Curtis.”

“Mr. Roth?” So now it was “Mr.” Roth.

“Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus ? He’s renting Reverend Curtis’s son Wallace’s house out on Livermore Road, and you know how Reverend Curtis won’t take checks, and they saw this strange-looking man at the cash machine, and Mr. Roth whispers, ‘That’s J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye?’ Man said he looked like some hillbilly in town from Ohio County.”

“How did Alan get into this?”

“He was standing in line behind them at the cash machine,” Mother said. “He just happened to overhear.”

On Monday night, Alan told me Philip Roth had seemed as surprised as the rest of them to see J. D. Salinger in Owensboro.

“Maybe they had all moved to Owensboro trying to get away from him,” I said, trying to be funny.

“I doubt that,” Alan said. “Anyway, it’s hardly the kind of question you can ask.”

It’s Mother who should marry Alan, not me. They think exactly alike.

As Mother’s birthday approached, I tried to concentrate on my upcoming weekend in the Hamptons. I knew what I had to guard against was the last-minute temptation to fly home.

When I called Janet later in the week from a lawyer’s office—they never watch their phone bills—she said, “Do you know the movie Bright Lights Big City ?”

“Michael J. Fox has moved to Owensboro,” I said, astonished in spite of myself.

“Not him, the other one, the author. I forget his name.”

“McInerney,” I said. “Jay McInerney. Are you sure?” I didn’t want to say it because it sounded so snobbish, but Jay McInerney didn’t exactly seem Owensboro caliber.

“Of course I’m sure. He looks just like Michael J. Fox. I saw him walking down at that little park by the river.

You know, the one where Norman Mailer hangs out.”

“Norman Mailer. I didn’t even know he lived in Owensboro,” I said.

“Why not?” Janet said. “A lot of famous writers make Owensboro their home.”

Make Owensboro Their Home. That was the first time I’d heard it said like that. It seemed to make it official.

Janet’s call made me think, and for the first time since I broke up with him, I called Alan. At least he knew who Jay McInerney was, although he had never read the book. “The other Janet said she saw McInerney and Mailer down there at the park,” I said. “Does that mean the famous writers are starting to meet one another and hang out together?”

“You always want to jump to conclusions,” Alan said. “They might have been in the same park at totally different times of the day. Even when they do meet, they don’t talk. The other day at the K Mart, Joe Billy Survant saw E. L. Doctorow and John Irving both in Housewares, and they sort of nodded, but that was all.”

John Irving? But I let it go. “Housewares,” I said instead. “Sounds like folks are really settling in.”

“We’re taking your mother to dinner at the Executive Inn for her fifty-first birthday Friday night,” Alan said.

“I’ve been invited for a weekend in the Hamptons,” I said. “Well, almost the Hamptons.”

“Oh, I understand,” he said. Alan likes to imagine he understands me. “But if you change your mind I’ll pick you up at the airport in Evansville.”

Evansville, Indiana, is thirty miles from Owensboro. It used to seem like a big city to me, but after eighteen months in New York, it seemed pathetic and insignificant: all trees from the air, and hardly any traffic. The one-story terminal looks like a shopping-center bank branch. You climb down out of the plane on a ladder.

There was Alan in his sensible-with-a-flair Olds Cutlass Supreme. I felt the usual mixture of warmth and dismay on seeing him. I guess you might call it warm dismay.

“Who’s that?” I asked, gesturing toward a bearlike figure at the USAir ticket counter.

Alan whispered, “That’s Thomas M. Disch. Science fiction. But quality stuff.”

“Science fiction?” But the name was familiar, at least sort of. Although Disch isn’t exactly famous, he seemed more the Owensboro type than McInerney. “He’s moving to Owensboro, too?”

“How should I know? He may have just been here in Evansville for the speedboat races. Anyway, he’s leaving. Let’s talk about you.”

We drove back home on the Kentucky side of the river, through Henderson.