Читать книгу The Big Impossible - Edward J. Delaney - Страница 9

Street View

The original word, I might point out, was Googol. I remember that distinctly from my favorite childhood book. The Answer Book. By Mary Elting, and if not that, surely its sequel, Answers and More Answers. I Googled the book a while back to see which; sadly, both books seem lost to prehistory, defined here as prior to 1990. But the lack of the internet in my youth covers my tracks, even as it now works to haunt me.

The Answer Book was like a paper version of Google, if Google were limited to three hundred questions you didn’t get to choose but were assured that “children asked most.” How is glass made? What happened to the dinosaurs? What makes a rocket go?

When you finished that book there was a sense of completeness, but also the sense of all that was out there beyond one’s view. What would the 301st question have been? In my rural childhood, when I closed that book, all that was left was the long expanses of sorghum that stretched out to the hot sky’s edges.

“Googol” was the largest named numeral. A numeral one, followed by one hundred zeroes. Numbers like that seemed stupendous back then, but now barely make a dent. I feel a life in which, as I age, I have multiples of personas. The flow of information is overwhelming, and I found that the night I began to Google my possibly sad journey here. But circa 1970, The Answer Book was all I had, a meager meal in the end, staving off a ravenous appetite. The irony I find now is that for my own students, for whom facts and information lie boundlessly before them, they seem not to want to open the covers.

I grew up in Arkansas. The other night, I sat in my study in Cambridge and typed in the address of that first house, a faded bungalow shouldered onto Highway 65; on the screen of my laptop, rising like a fever dream from Google Street View, there it was. That shoebox of my misery. I could see them all, instantly: my mother, dropped ankles and rubbery skin, fretting on that low porch; my grandmother, wheezing in her housecoat; my father, shirtless, the billow of stink off his breath.

I worry that Street View might defeat my memory; I click the digital chevrons at the bottom of the screen, and the picture slides, and I am again gliding by that squat house, collapsing of its own humid cladding. I’m gliding as I did on that secondhand bike, spray-painted red, the underinflated tires thumping on the hot ribbon of Route 65—what my father called “The Road to Damascus,” although the flow of northbound traffic indicated it was mostly “from.” I don’t remember sweating, but I must have, all the time, in that heat. I was ten.

Sometimes, then, I don’t know how I got here. I rarely speak of who I once was, here in the rarified life. I am married to a woman who sits me down for a “serious talk” and says such things as, “I feel I need to be living a more textured existence.” She cannot imagine the serious talks at that kitchen table in the house on Route 65, as poverty and alcoholism and despair closed in on my people. Then she looks at me looking at her, and accuses me of not understanding.

I wear all the right clothes now. The Oxford shirts and buttery loafers, the pressed chinos. After dinner I drink The Famous Grouse, on the rocks, from a crystal tumbler. I live in just the right place: I sit in my house on a leafy street, brick-sidewalked street (walking distance from the Yard), a street on which birds seemed to have been shipped in to sing their morning tunes.

So different than the machine-thrumming summer buzz of Arkansan grasshoppers. I had a drawl then; I speak now in the canned-soup vernacular of all the places I’ve been—not enough spice to make it interesting, not so little as to not be adequate to most.

My father would be ashamed of me.

But he died too early. Dropped dead in the rows in ’72. On Google Street View, I find the next sad place, the apartment house in Little Rock where my mother and grandmother and I then lived on food stamps and church doles. Out there on Geyer Street, I discover, that house still stands, but barely: What was likely built to shelter a single family had then become diced into tiny compartments for unfortunates such as ourselves. Now, in my computer’s image, that house stands beaten and boarded, the low chain-link fence collapsed and the scraggly trees in front as untrimmed as a drunk’s beard.

But there, in the city, our fourth-hand television could get a signal, and the transformation began in small increments. In that small airless living room, I began to mimic those television voices, whispering those accentless sentences as holy mantras. I wanted to talk just like the Brady Bunch did. I wanted to talk like the Partridge Family. My mother would sit in her chair looking at me, saying nothing at all.

School was where I spoke that language loudly. My classmates would ask me where I was from. My teachers saw my hunger, and fed me; when, on my computer, I look at that boarded window to the right of the front door, I see beyond it my younger self, sprawled on the floor with pages, my limited facts and allotment of equations.

Could I have been my happiest then? Now, looking at my iPad in my dawn kitchen, with its Italian marble tiles and its massive culinary island, I look again at that boarded window on my MacBook and wonder. It was just myself, my mother and my grandmother. We endured those hot summers with only the rattling fan. My sweat coursed onto the books in that midday heat. My mother did find a way to get me the books, and I realize I never thanked her. At sunset, she went walking, alone, to get her air. She did so every night, night after night, coming home long after dark. One night she walked home early, with a man.

“This is Herbert,” she said.

“No,” is what I said.

Herb was a widower who had a house up on East Sixth Street. He was older, with two grown daughters; I think his only sin was loneliness, although I punished him for far worse, with my silence and derision. He spoke in that slow ramble, and when I had to speak to him, I responded in kind with my clipped new voices, my Transatlantic lilt. He was kind, although I’d have never admitted it then; it’s harder for me to look at that house (which I never once referred to as “my house,” always “Herb’s house”) on Street View, although even now it looks very well kept. The two cars parked on the lawn seem functional, the yard itself is green and trimmed and only burnt toward the curb. I suspect that some Herb progeny yet occupy that little place, which stands painted and clean among less-reputable neighbors. It could have been a haven. But I was already plotting my escape.

I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I didn’t know exactly who I wanted to be, but I sure knew who I didn’t want to be. I explained as much in my college applications. It is the true remaining flaw on my permanent record of life (easily Googled now, to be sure, with various wiki entries, faculty profiles, and speaker bios) that I spring not from the Ivy League but from a less portentous place. But I recall the campus with happy memories. The day I got the letter and the pledge of scholarship at Bethany College, I knew this was the essential pivot of the plan. I can MapQuest the exact distance, door-to-door from Herb’s to Bethany: 519 miles. A substantial journey, by any measure.

At Bethany, they were stout Lutherans (How many Saturdays I spent cheering on our football team, “The Terrible Swedes”? I recall exactly our cheers from the grandstands: “Kor Igonem! Kor Igonem! Tjo! Tjo! Tjo!”).

Regrettably, Google Street View has not much come to Lindsborg, Kansas. I refresh periodically in hopes of a more ground-level view, hope that camera-crowned Google car has finally breached its borders. But the blue line vaults straight up Kansas 4, through town, headed toward other places. Travelers had little to stop for. It is exactly in its plainness that I remember it.

Among those Nordic blond farm girls and soft-spoken boys, I continued to excel, overheated and driven. My letter of application had begun my shaping of my own story; happily, application essays are kept in locked places where my mother could never experience that betrayal. But I knew the way to a Lutheran’s heart was to prostrate myself for salvation at their hands, and they were duly enthusiastic. Herb was recast as the heavy, my mother was substituted with someone sinful and irredeemable, and I was the boy in the wilderness. And they bought it! They even gave me clothes, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed. Within days of arriving on campus, I began to again reshape the narrative all over again.

The unexpected advantage of attending a college called Bethany was that not only were there multiples (the teams of Bethany in West Virginia were also “The Swedes,” although the Bethany in California fielded the “Bruins,” more fearsome than even a Terrible Swede). But beyond that, the school’s name, absent locus or eponymy, had the generic decentralized property of the accents I so astutely cultivated. A lot of people seem to think it’s a good school located in Pennsylvania, or an up-and-comer in the Twin Cities. I disabuse no one of such notions. I arrived at history as my course of study, maybe owing to the endless facts of other times that one could drink in.

I never actually met a Terrible Swede in college, only very good-hearted ones. And the best of all was my professor of history, who was a gentleman farmer and amateur poet in the Edgar Lee Masters mode. He saw what I had, and he wrote the recommendations, and when I got the graduate fellowship, he bought me a celebratory coffee in that mostly dry town. I never bothered telling my mother where I was headed. At commencement, the president alluded to my salvation from hard times, to the confusion of my classmates, who’d been led to believe (notice me using the passive voice) that I was money from St. Louis.

I cannot view that old school from my stealthy Street View vantage, nor can I really see the faces of any of those peers, whom I scrubbed from my memory like the sheen of Kansas dirt that would blow in during spring planting. But the next place I seek on my computer represented a truer sense of arrival, thanks to that professor: When he’d coughingly mentioned he was himself a graduate of Dartmouth, it was frankly the first I’d heard of it. (I’d been led to believe the Ivy League consisted only of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.)

Dartmouth, up there in the woods, is exceptionally well documented on Street View, even to the point of each crosshatched foot path on the College Green having its own blue line to drop onto. I can parachute my little Street View man, that similarly generic-and-golden avatar, onto exact spots. I can stand and again see places that still smolder in sky-clear memories.

I tend to linger especially on that curve of Cemetery Lane where, in a scene lighted only by a New Hampshire moon and its reflection off the deep February snow, I stood as Barbara walked off, disgusted at my intractability. I can drag and rotate the Street View image as if turning my head, canning those trees (still!) for her receding figure.

“I don’t know who you are,” she had said.

“I am who I am,” I said. “Graduate student at Dartmouth. Eastern European history. Thesis proposal on the effects of Serbian exceptionalism.”

She sighed. “So you are what you study,” she said.

“In a way.”

“Then I don’t know who you were,” she said, and to this I offered nothing. Not my accent, clothing, nor mannerisms betrayed a place of origin, or a story.

My own undergraduate students use Facebook addictively (even during my lectures!), pouring their minutiae out into the ether; I look at my own story and wonder if such transparency (more, really, than transparency, in its willful launch of facts into a universe presumed to care) could allow these children any chance for thrilling reinvention. My Barbara walked off into the shadows, and for the first time in my life I truly agonized, wondering if her love was worth disclosure. We never spoke again.

I realized, leaving Dartmouth with my first graduate degree, that I had acquired two firm addictions.

First, I knew I had become a collector of degrees. I chose not to pursue my doctorate at Dartmouth in order to add a different school to the list. I moved to New York, to Columbia, to begin my work in Early Modern Europe.

The second of my addictions was to change myself as I changed my location. As I left my graduate housing up in the woods, one of my female classmates said, “You need a haircut.”

“No, I don’t,” I said, and firmly. The person I would be in New York wore his hair much differently.

Street View seems to have delivered a higher-resolution image of that apartment building on Morningside Avenue, and I tilt up into overcast sky to see the window of that walk-up on the fifth floor, with the fire escape outside, where as a man of long hair and fading history I smoked weed and romanced girls from Marymount. Histories indeed are like sediments; I accumulated personas in a way that, should I be asked something of what I had been, I had ready anecdotes and winning yarns. I look at that building on my computer screen and I smell the burn of the joint, and feel the throb of The Bird , and remember moist kisses but not the names of the girls being kissed.

Was I dishonest in all this? I would say not. I was who I was at any moment; my growing scholarly success suggested I was now who I should have been. In kind, I had escaped being the person I should never have been. I avoided judiciously any study of the South, with its Gothic tragedies, and I also abandoned in time the backwaters like Serbia, focusing instead on the great empires. Provincials are provincials, no matter where you go looking.

I was living on stipends and fellowships, a kind of welfare for the brainy, but New York fashioned my fashion. I roomed with a student named Will Featherly, of Short Hills, New Jersey; he became my primary observation subject. He was who he was. Never a doubt or veer. Money, smarts, and blond looks. Good at tennis. We shared a nodding and polite proximity; I was never invited by him to do anything or go anywhere. Yet I noted every nuance of his clothing. As I could squirrel money away, I accumulated like items, then never wore them. They were for the next stop. I could stare for hours at the custom-made shorts, with their mother-of-pearl buttons and hand-stitched plackets.

The doctorate came in quickly, and the offers of postgraduate fellowships were many, spread on the table as the array of people I could next be. I favored juxtaposition that year.

At UCLA, my faux-British accent returned to full flower, as did my bow-tie habit. It gave me a fish-out-of-water superiority that played surprisingly well in that sunny clime, both among my flip-flop-shod students but also my open-neck-shirteded faculty colleagues. I was presumed, with my Ivy degrees, to be a prince-in-waiting for higher stations.

Then I met Estelle.

The low hills west of campus, as it meanders toward Bel Air, come up on my screen vivid and bittersweet. Cars still triple-nose into the parking spaces under the canopies of apartment buildings on Midvale Avenue. Like pups pushing for the teat. The buildings are utilitarian, just grids of rectangular slider windows. I had my own “unit” of plain Sheetrock walls, a kitchenette, and a foam mattress on the floor, but I walked out that door each day as if to the manor born.

Estelle wore her South like a pair of chew-stained dungarees. She was a graduate assistant who came from Arkadelphia, “But I was born in Umpire!” she said in her bright twang, playing it up. Why she gravitated toward me I don’t know, but I was to her like a familiar smell. I watched her from a distance in the fifth-floor lounge, trying to read her. But then I saw her likewise reading me, as through a two-way mirror that isn’t fully silvered. Why me? She stared at me as if trying to place a face.

She was much younger, and by then no one I could have possibly known in my Arkansan youth, but she kept circling.

“Something about y’all that’s hard to pinpoint,” she finally said.

We began an affair of the most perverted kind: She took me to places like those I’d spent my life trying to escape, under the rubric of broadening my horizons. Cheap country bars with long-necked beers and thick-necked women, and Kuntry Kitchens tucked on side streets of far suburbs, with their steam pans of grits and hush puppies.

“How marvelous!” I cried from behind my bow tie, wielded like armor, as I sampled the fare of the hoi polloi. “Just this once, at least . . .”

She would stare me down. But I was partaking. We ended up in her frilly bed, making love under the ceiling fan, and, as I withdrew, I had something like a fever dream. I saw below me the chilling alternative: This same girl, rougher and cigarette-smelling, on a soaked mattress in some cheap town; I saw us—she and the Me I might have been—sweatily heaving in an airless room. Grunting razorbacks come to root.

“What?” she said, alarmed at my expression.

“Nothing,” I replied, knowing it was over.

“You’re not who you seem,” she finally said.

“Either are you,” I said, a dagger to her: She was in fact a UCLA graduate student, not some hick with country sass. I know we felt more naked in that knowledge than we were in that moment.

The problem is, I have no way of remembering her address, where via Street View I could skulk outside her window, with these complicated memories. She had driven me there in her pickup truck; after I left her place in rising dawn I simply walked away from the sunset. I want to say she was somewhere like Sunset and La Brea. I have walked my little golden Street View man up and down those sun-drenched streets (it occurs to me he must have been purposely modeled after Oscar ), but we’re searching for something we’ll never find. All those places look the same, with only degrees of variation in a surprisingly depressing facade.

I went for a breakup beer with her a few nights later, in a country bar off Melrose. I patiently talked her through it and she laughed.

“Not unexpected,” she said. “Because you know that I know.”

“What do you know?” I said. I thought, What am I afraid of? I’ve committed no crime. Each degree on my wall was fairly earned, each publication the result of my own thinking and research. Why was she making me feel fraudulent?

But you get into it, maybe too deeply. She had rattled me.

“You know that, too,” she said.

It was upon my return to school, this time to pull an accelerated doctorate in linguistics at Cornell (I was collecting Ivies on the premise that I’d otherwise risk backsliding, but here I had full teaching schedules and was treated as the peer I was). I was fully adult, nearly middle-aged, and I knew this would lock me into high stations. When I met Margaret, I knew she was the woman for me. The brittle patrician aloofness, the cultivated disinterest. She was a woman who exuded no secrets of her own, and no airs. But she came from the right kind of family in Utica, and craved larger venues. We married at her family church in a snowstorm, and I waited for the letter to come from Cambridge, which it did.