Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

By now, on Monday morning, as I stand in the shadow of an Arch that means nothing to me, the rash has coalesced into a flaming, shingles-like band of pain and itching around the lower right side of my torso. This is an entirely unprecedented category of affliction for me. The itching has abated during the excitement of filming on the bridge, but while we wait for Gregg to sign off on the footage I want to claw myself savagely.

Gregg at last looks up from his little monitor. Though visibly dissatisfied with the second take, he announces that a third take won’t be necessary. Chris, the cameraman, grins like a hunting dog whose instincts have been vindicated. He’s wearing jeans and a corduroy shirt; he looks as if he’d listened to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd in his youth. Gregg, for his part, seems like a person to whom the Smiths and New Order were important. As he and I drive west out of the city, I wait for him to ask me questions about St. Louis or to joke with me about the tedium and artificiality of what we’re doing, but he has messages to return on his cell phone. He has an expensive crew, a marginally cooperative actor, and seven hours of daylight left.

TO FREE UP MONDAY for shooting, I did my socializing on Sunday at the home of my parents’ old next-door neighbors, Glenn and Irene Patton. The Pattons had foreseen better than I the difficulty of visiting too many people sequentially, and they’d called me in New York to offer to host a small reception.

I pulled into my old street, Webster Woods, at three o’clock, approaching the Pattons’ from the direction that didn’t take me past my family’s house. A light rain of no season, neither summer nor fall, was coming down; a gang of crows was cawing in some tree. Although Glenn had recently had both of his knees replaced and Irene had just recovered from a genuine case of shingles, the two Pattons looked happy and healthy when they met me at their door.

Through the windows of their kitchen, where I made ineffectual gestures of helping with refreshments, I could see the back of my old house. Irene spoke warmly of the young couple who lived in it now. She told me what she knew of their lives and of their improvements to the house in the two years since my brothers and I had sold it. Our tiny back yard was now a parking lot for a medium-sized boat and a tremendous SUV. The grass appeared to have been paved over, but I couldn’t tell for sure, because I couldn’t stand to look for more than a second.

“I told them you were coming,” Irene said, “and they said you’re more than welcome to come over and see the house, if you’d like.”

“I don’t want to see it.”

“Oh, I know,” Irene said. “Ellie Smith, when I called to invite her for today, said she hadn’t driven down this street since you boys sold the house. She says it’s just too painful for her.”

The Pattons’ doorbell began to ring. We’d invited four other couples who had known my parents well and whom I hadn’t seen since my mother died. There was something of the miracle now in watching them arrive two by two and settle in the Pattons’ carpeted living room, in seeing all of them so alive and so much themselves. They were close to my parents’ age — in their seventies and eighties — and my memories of some of them were as old as my oldest memories of my parents. If you really get the death of a person you love, as I had finally and reluctantly got the death of my parents, then you know that the first and most fundamental fact of it is that you will never again see the person as a living, smiling, speaking body. This is the mysterious basic substance of the loss. To put my arms around women with whom my mother had played bridge for much of her life, to shake the large hands of men with whom my father had cleared brush or found fault with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, was to feel loss and its contrary simultaneously. Any of these couples could have been my parents, still one hundred percent alive, still making light of their ailments, still accepting from Glenn Patton one of his famously well-poured drinks, still loading up small plates with raw vegetables and assorted dessert bars and baked Brie with a sweet tapenade. And yet they weren’t my parents. There was an altered house next door to prove it. There was a boat and a bloatational SUV in the back yard.

By the time the party had ended and I sat down to watch some Rams football in the Pattons’ family room, a big autumn wind was picking up outside, drying the street and lightening the sky. I thought of the last page of Swann’s Way : the wind that “wrinkled the surface of the Grand Lac in little wavelets, like a real lake.” The great oak trees that helped Marcel “to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses.” And his conclusion: “The reality that I had known no longer existed.”

This was a lesson I’d absorbed long before my mother died. Visiting her at home, I’d been disappointed again and again by the thinness, the unvividness, of rooms that in my memory were steeped in almost magical significance. And now, I thought, I had even less cause to go seeking the past in that house. If my mother wasn’t going to come walking up the driveway in her housecoat with her hands full of the crabgrass she’d pulled or the twigs she’d picked up off the lawn, if she wasn’t going to emerge from the basement with an armload of wet sheets that she’d been waiting to hang on the clothesline once the rain stopped (she’d always liked the smell of sheets that had hung outside), the scene in the Pattons’ windows didn’t interest me. As I sat watching football and listened to the barren wind, I believed that the reason I couldn’t stand to look at my old house was that I was done with it: that I didn’t want to feel the inevitable nothing when I went inside it, I didn’t want to have to blame an innocent house for still existing after its meaning had been emptied out.

BUT THE SHOW MUST GO on! We shoot four takes of me making a left turn into Webster Woods, Gregg stopping us after each so that he can examine it on his monitor. We do multiple takes of me driving very slowly toward my old house. Over the walkie-talkie one of the men suggests that I look around curiously, as if I haven’t been here in a while. We reshoot the same scene with Chris in the passenger seat, capturing my point of view through the windshield and then wedging himself against the door to capture me looking around curiously, as if I haven’t been here in a while.

By one o’clock, we’re parked at the bottom of the little hill on which my old house sits. The new owners have built a retaining wall across the incline up which I used to struggle to push a lawn mower. The wall is pink — the effect is of a Lego fortress — but maybe there’s a long-term plan to let ivy grow and cover it.

After a moment I have to look away. The sky and sun are brilliant, the local trees still green. Three small kids are playing outside the only new house, an ugly stuccoed box, that’s been built on the street since I lived here. Gregg is asking the children’s mother for permission to film them. I don’t know the mother. I used to know everybody in Webster Woods, but now I only know the Pattons.

For half an hour, while the crew films generic American children romping on generic grass, I sit in the sun on a triangular traffic island across the street from the Pattons. I try not to claw myself where I itch. Behind me is a young oak tree that my family planted after my father died. My father had left no instructions for his burial or cremation — had refused all his life to discuss the matter — and so we decided to plant a tree on this island where he’d cut grass and raked leaves for nearly thirty years. We scattered some of his ashes around the tree and installed a small marble marker engraved IN MEMORY OF EARL FRANZEN. I have a feeling that this tree would interest Gregg, and I don’t quite understand my resolve not to tell him about it. Certainly, if I’m protecting my privacy, it’s perverse of me to be annoyed that the crew is lavishing attention on someone else’s children.