Joan would think back to that day in her old study, when she debated the thing her body first held. Had she done away with it from the start, there would have been no second child, this son blasting everything in his path, but neither would she have had Daniel. She tried holding on to that.
She would remember those parents who claimed they would give their lives to secure the life of their child, how she had scoffed, rejecting it outright. But there was a place that lurked beyond thought, beyond the notion of the now and the real, beyond personal and private dreams. She would wonder if that was what motherhood meant, the way a child could affect the way she breathed, her heart pumping hard, not with love, or maybe some love, but not only love, just the need for life to tick on, instant after instant after instant. Moments that strung out into days and weeks, then months and years, reduced from secret writer to some kind of crazy den mother, then a mother viewed as crazy, all those adolescent denials of Eric’s, before she was eventually proven right. All those years of knowing that at any time, an instant could fail, a person could crack that instant in half, into atomic, then subatomic pieces, and she would still need to be here, in her place. She had given life to them both, she could not allow one to die on her watch.
*
But before any of that, there was this:
Daniel sent postcards to Joan, so many that one arrived every single day, telling her what life was like on the road, the nature of highways, of truck-stop diners, the smell of the trees when he was in his tent alone at night, the creaking of branches under the waning moon, the crackle of lightning at dawn, the books he found at the campsites.
I’m reading Faulkner again. Someone left behind that Portable version. I swear it’s the same one you used to read to me. Did you ever read the introduction? Reading about his mythical kingdom is so cool, and it says when he started writing he wasn’t writing for other people, just telling stories to himself, like a lonely child in his imaginary world.
She thought then that Daniel wasn’t totally lost to himself, if he was still contemplating the nature of writing, showing her they were still united, a team.
Eric sent a total of one letter, a list of everything he was learning, that neither she nor Martin understood.
Dear Mom and Dad,
The people are nice, the food is good, the counselors are AMAZING. Yes, Mom, we take showers every day. This is what I’ve learned so far.
Programming - Basic, ML, C, LISP, Fortran, Logo, Pascal, CP/M
Computer theory
Utilities
Peripherals
Machine language
Assembly language
Scripting
Coding
Problem-solving
Software architecture
Graphics
Spreadsheets
Databases
Software operations
Apps
I am working on writing my own program. The counselors all say it’s a great idea.
It was clear Eric was deliriously happy, and at the end of the letter he wrote, “I really don’t need school anymore,” which made them laugh.
Joan marshaled Gus and his men, and Tony and his men, and when the lap pool was finished, a long sweep of darkened concrete filled with saltwater that turned a deep purple in the sun, she planted maiden grass seeds all around it, just beyond the apron of blue flagstone tiles that surrounded it, tiles that led up from the pool in the glen, past the knoll, through the gardens, to the house of nearly all windows, and another set of tiles that marched from their glass master bedroom through the gardens, and down to the pool.
When Martin was free, he and Joan drove into DC, flew for a fast weekend to New York, looking for furniture, a trip so short and directed, she didn’t bother to call Iger. They found what they liked, put the orders in, Joan gasping at the figures.
“We’re fine,” Martin said. “Plus, this is the house we’ll really live in for the rest of our days.”
It was a thought Joan liked very much when Martin said it, instantly imagining herself leaving it for a book tour, leaving it for readings, for panel discussions, for literary conferences, perhaps this time she would agree to participate in those conferences she had refused in the aftermath of her first, then second, collection. She would enjoy being one of the touted writers brought in to talk about her work, lending an ear, perhaps some basic advice, to the young writers so eager to become her, to enter the exalted group to which she had belonged from the start, but would make herself known again with Words. But how lovely it would be, Joan thought, to return to this sensational house when she had her fill of the outside literary world, was content with her place in it, needed the peace, the quiet, the silence to work on the next novel she would write. When she came back home to this home.
The workmen disappeared after the first week of August, their work completed, the house empty except for the furniture she and Martin retrieved from the storage unit, which would be tossed when the new arrived.
On the tenth of August, sitting again at their old kitchen table, the typewriter singing, Joan made the last minor edits to the final few pages of Words of New Beginnings.
The nine hundred–page book was finished. The long-expected first novel she would be proud to publish, that would recall the astonishing nature of her work, cement her reputation—a legacy now, rather than a trajectory, but the book would reconfigure that legacy into a trajectory. She knew it with absolute and immodest certainty.
Joan cracked open a bottle of champagne, meandered through the seven thousand feet of bright space, walked out onto their land, following the blue flagstone tiles as if she were playing a child’s game, through the bougainvillea she and Fancy had planted, the flowers climbing the wooden trellises they had built together, and the lilacs and hyacinth that were hanging on at the end of summer, and the pink and purple of the phlox and poppies and tulips, the wild violets, the lilac bushes, and field of lavender, the scarlet gerbera daisies, past the wooden benches arranged over the years throughout, where sometimes she and Martin sat and had a drink, past the vegetable plots that were dying, because they had mostly eaten out during the construction, so little picked the harvest.
She was swigging from the bottle as she went, the bubbles tickling her tongue, amazed by her accomplishment, amazed that motherhood, in the end, had not stifled her creativity, or her ambition, that she had managed to carve out a writing schedule to which she had mostly adhered these last nine years.
She would let the novel marinate until Eric was back in school, Daniel ensconced at college, then she would read Words through once more. The heavy lifting was done, but one more searching go-through was how she liked to work. Then she would tell Martin about it, call Volkmann, get on with her own life.