Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

I haven’t listened to an adult tell stories to an audience of children since I was a child myself, but I’m not surprised to find that I’m calmed and reassured by it, the voice an ember glowing and changing in the midst of a muted stillness that might itself ignite at any moment. The boundaries inherent in performance are there, but there’s also an ambiguity, an offhand sense of collaboration. That regular glimpse of the inventive tension latent in those quiet, crowded spaces, when the voice begins speaking, and especially when it pauses and the room falls into its willed hush once again, is one part of what holds me in my seat in the children’s library (rather, “Youth Services Department”) twice a week. The other part remains a mystery to me.

DYLAN FECKER TOLDme on the phone, “A kids’ library? What it sounds like to me is that you miss going out. He misses going out.” I’m a writer, and Dylan is my agent. To him, a panicked social life is the sole bellwether of mental health. In confusion he finds relief. Only his phone knows what he’s scheduled to do next. Without it, he might starve, freeze, wander mistakenly onto public transportation.

“I go out all the time,” I said. “The whole place is mostly out. Here, outside is the default. Indoors is shelter.”

“When I say ‘going out,’ you know what I mean. And you miss it. Why can’t you just say that? Why can’t he just say what he means for once? Quicker and less confusingly? These are the big questions people want answers to. People are always waiting for him to say what he means, and then he says it, and Monte and I have to clarify.” Monte is my editor.

“What do you tell them?”

“That it’s all about getting to the center of the human heart. But you can thank me later. Are you writing? He’s not writing.”

“I would be.”

“He’s being smart. Don’t be smart. I’ve tried calling you when you’re really working: you can’t wait to get rid of me. Lately you’re lingering. Lately you want to talk.”

“Oh, is that what you’re getting?”

“Don’t be smart, I said. You’re not writing. I admit I made a big mistake letting you move out there all by yourself. I said, he’s a big boy. Was I wrong.”

“You weren’t wrong. I took my temperature this morning. Totally normal. Sent myself off to school, kicking and screaming.”

“Ha ha ha. Listen. You went out there, you said you wanted quiet. I say OK, he needs to turn it down for a while. I understand. I saw how the last couple of years were going for you, for you and Rae. And that terrible business with Susannah. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t rush you. But Monte is eager to see pages. They’re tracking you. Where is he with it, is the general tenor of things.”

Dylan had allowed his sense of romance to persuade him that there was something valuable, even narratively inevitable, in my leaving New York to come to northern Michigan and finish a book. It seemed right to him, right and just, that a gifted person should flee from the distractions and temptations of a big city, flee from the difficulties of a complicated personal life, to make art in self-imposed exile, working from the provinces. If some artists court outrage, others court solitude: it was a chunk of wisdom as simple as a popcorn date at the multiplex. He expected searingly brilliant, expiatory pages to flow one way, direct from my computer to his office on Mercer Street. That was the agreement, as far as he was concerned. That, he claimed, was what had kept him from going to the airport and wrestling me off the plane personally. It wouldn’t have helped at all to explain to him that I didn’t feel purposeful, I felt dangerously adrift; that escape wasn’t a strategic writerly ploy but simply and only escape. For Dylan there was no such thing as flight. He stayed, he survived, he thrived. He’d had some successes; I was one of them; I was letting him down. This much was clear. The fierce pages weren’t erupting from my printer, weren’t springing to life on his 24-inch active matrix display as unencrypted digital attachments. Exile and cunning he would accept, silence was another story.

“Just get out of the house once in a while. Better yet, come back to Brooklyn and then get in a cab or whatever it is you people have there and come to Manhattan to talk to me in person. I just don’t get what you’re doing.”

“It’s all about getting to the center of the human heart.”

“Please. They don’t have what you need to be human out there.”

“They have enough,” I said. “It feels close.”

“How close?”

I RENTa bungalow here in Cherry City that’s much too big for me alone, though it’s a modest house. If my children lived here with me, we’d fill it, but they don’t and I doubt they’ll ever visit. But I hadn’t been thinking about my children, about accommodating my children, when I was looking for a place. It had been a long time since I’d lived in a house, and I had an idea that I’d enjoy the garden, which I watched die in the waning days of summer, after I’d pulled the last of the landlord’s ripe tomatoes from the staked vines in the backyard; that I’d like sitting on the front porch in the evenings, which I did until the weather began to cool. Moving in was like adapting to any other change in one’s material condition. Things I liked, things I didn’t. I didn’t like the feeling of being exposed, and locked the doors and pulled the curtains in the evening. I didn’t like the sounds the house made at night, settling into whatever new shape another day’s use had beaten it into. I did, though, like having a driveway to park in, a kitchen door to tote groceries through. I did like having a washer-dryer. These ordinary things were a quiet rebuke to the proud lunacy of the assumed inconvenience that marked life in Brooklyn. The sound of tumbling laundry, zippers pinging against the steel drum of the dryer, coming to me as I sat not in a molded plastic chair in a drafty laundromat, vigilantly guarding my socks and shorts, but in my own living room, could fool me into believing that this was the solution; that it addressed all my problems in their entirety.

I ARRIVED HEREafter I walked out of my wife’s apartment, the home of my wife and children, with no more than I could easily carry. It was the second time I’d done it. This time it was a mutual decision: You leave now, Rae said, and I did. What about it, about any of it, could possibly have come as a surprise to either of us? While remaining supremely mindful of the consequences, we’d failed spectacularly. There weren’t any protests or reconsiderations.

Prior to that, during our period of reconciliation, after the disaster of Susannah, Rae and I had been traveling once a week to the Upper West Side to see a counselor, a Dr. Heinz. Because it was the sensible thing, the requisite approach, the one reference to our catastrophe that actually could acceptably be made in public. Unfortunately, Dr. Heinz’s reassuringly Viennese-sounding name was only a front for a tall, athletic-looking fiftyish guy in Birkenstocks, chinos, and open-necked Oxford shirts who spoke in the gently twanging tones of the upper midwest.

Heinz’s office, which never failed to distract me, was as bland and unassuming as the man himself. He had a large sofa patients were to sit on, and although there was also a green armchair and matching ottoman (which together were much too big for the room), he always faced us in a swivel chair, sitting hunched forward to listen, his elbows resting on his thighs. His posture made me feel as if we’d interrupted him. If Dr. Heinz had rotated his chair 180 degrees, he would have been facing a small desk with a computer on it. A small bookcase held a selection of professional journals. His framed diplomas and certificates hung unobtrusively, in a vertical line, along one margin of the wall in which the windows were set. On the other walls were somewhat gloomy abstract watercolors — paintings that, with their vestiges of figuration, their seeming resistance to the depiction of gesture in their dark brushwork, struck me, for some reason, as “European-looking.” The parquet floor wore a large, rectangular melon-colored chunk of deep-pile carpet. It was the Segal lock on the door, though, that preoccupied me the most. Was it supposed to keep the contents of the room secure? Or him?