“My dearest darling,” she said. “My sneezy, dirty, grumpy little elf.” I had to grab her wrist. I hadn’t seen Ruth yet this summer. “Did you miss me terribly?” she asked. She looked different, thinner and older, with shorter hair. She called everyone “darling” and “crumpet.” “Nothing will ever come between us again.” She was still joking around but I remembered how, a few years earlier, nothing had: lying under an open window, in a moment of pure stillness, all our nerves on edge. We did everything in that dormitory bunk bed except sing “I Got You Babe,” and slept like babies, and had breakfast in town the next morning. I gave her a hug, banging her on the back like a long-lost brother.
She introduced me to Nancy, mute, agreeable, soft, and sensitive, and Russell, sturdy and angry, hadn’t gotten as much done as he’d hoped, planned to write a hundred pages in August. Somehow, we turned to the subject of Solito. Russell wondered how the cartoonist was able to recall scenes and conversations verbatim from infancy on up. “He used real names,” Russell said. “Does that mean everything actually happened?” We talked about screen memory, emotional honesty, and other stuff.
We were joined by a tall woman wearing lipstick and a guy in gold-rimmed glasses. As Solito’s star had risen, several articles had appeared, exploring the story behind the story, with photos of Angel and other family members pulled from social media, along with evidence of blurry paperwork from his detention in Oaxaca at age six. He’d changed some details about key characters, had altered the chronology of major events, and he had admitted that freely. He’d used real people as a means, boiled them down, strained and stripped out whole through lines and tossed them away, kept other parts, shifted blame, moved ugly things up into the foreground or back, depending on what he needed.
I didn’t want to hear what they thought. I already had my own response. Solito had been given the opportunity to actualize his dreams, and then he’d handed those dreams over to literary critics, professional cranks whose only means of support was to shred the work of others, and beyond that to the wider world of opinion generated by every asshole with a keyboard. I didn’t want them to tear him apart.
“There’s a difficulty in any sort of autobiographical writing,” the guy with glasses said. “It’s a stew of self-analysis, reporting, biography, imagination, and also some heat, a core of wanting, of strong emotions, who knows.”
“That’s why my book is labeled a novel,” Russell said.
“Dearest, it doesn’t matter what you call it,” Ruth said. “Telling stories about other people is immoral. A ten-year-old knows that.”
The poetry reading ended, and bodies flooded through the doors of the main building. By the traumatized looks on their faces, you could tell how it had gone. They dragged themselves into the fresh air, gasping foggily, not looking back, drawn and pale, shoulders fallen, bellies out, stepping toward a table with a melted wheel of Brie, moving gingerly to protect the psychic wound.
“Are you part of the conference?” I asked Nancy. She nodded. “Are you enjoying everything so far?”
She wore a pale orange dress that left her half-naked in back, stitched with little green flowers whose leaves were embroidered with tiny holes through which you could see her bra and tanned pulsing skin. Around one wrist was a plastic bracelet from the Pretty Pretty Princess game. I asked her who made it and she showed me a picture of a girl in a shiny pink leotard with her face pressed against her mother’s larger head. I took out my phone, and we showed each other photos and gave their names and ages.
But then the poet emerged, in a wool suit coat and tie, looking flustered, with a conference handler dutifully stationed at his side, loudly offering him some wine, as members of his audience falsely congratulated him. It became impossible to ignore the metallic vibration of his foul effects, we wanted to get as far away from this scene as possible, and followed Ruth off the porch, along a dirt path, up the hill, to a party in the windmill. Above us in the dark sky, its massive fan blades had been trimmed in white lights. Powerful spotlights lit up its exterior. A small tent had been set up outside with a jazz trio, sponsored by a vodka brand.
Following Ruth, we ducked through the doorway of the oddly shaped building, like something a hobbit might live in, and entered a room lined with a heavy stone foundation. I read the plaque. The guts of the windmill—the mill, et cetera—had been removed. Built in 1811, the structure had been dragged to the campus in 1860 on horse-drawn skids, when the campus had been the estate of a gunpowder merchant. I recognized several trustees coming down the steep staircase, and other funders of the conference leaning back on the banister, stepping slowly, carefully, smiling and red-faced, as though they’d been locked inside a sauna. When our cohort mounted the stairs to go up, I went out to the vodka tent.
I’d worked hard these past days, done foolish things, run around with my blood pumping. It had been a kind of terrific nightmare, a product of a feverish delirium. It had been useful, but there was no point in pretending. I’d become what I would’ve been anyway. I’d tried to disrupt the smooth conveyance of myself into middle age, obedience, whatever, to destroy my own likely future by posing as a bumbling incompetent, forcing myself through outlandish behavior, while cagily implying some authorial control.
Nancy walked slowly around the outside of the windmill. She gazed upward, angling her body in the spotlight so that I could look at her, backlit in her dress, while she studied the building. Then she took a seat and told me how it had been made, using pegs, braces, and trusses. We sat on teak chaises that had been arranged beneath the tent. The town she lived in, near Boston, was full of old mills and tanneries. She worked as a designer at her husband’s architecture firm. Historic preservation was about consistency. There were rigid guidelines. I could feel then that she had nowhere to go. The band played “Tangerine.”
We lay there, in a breeze as soft as butterfly wings, as the wind lifted the hem above her knees and the fabric fluttered over her body. I felt the light from her body enter my brain. She wore leather sandals on tanned feet, her toenails painted pink. Their firm was busy, doing well, had just finished a retail build-out of the train station so that it reeked with economic vitality. The thing to do here was probe more deeply, with a light touch and genuine concern, to file away details and assemble them later, to reflect them back to her in a flattering way. She talked about some old coffered ceiling and her daughter’s ballet schedule and son’s hoop camp. I pretended something interesting was happening out on the bay, and in fact there was, the tide flowing out, the beach wide and flat with bonfires all the way to the cliffs.
“My husband does very well,” she explained. “He’s a wonderful father.” She had a small face framed by thick brown hair. “But he doesn’t talk about his feelings—not to me, anyway. It’s a problem.”
“Oh.”
“He loves to ride his bicycle.” Her eyes went to my face, around my face, for whatever she was looking for, and I felt the pressure building. I had no more space inside me, no more room in my face or in my heart. I already loved as many people as I could.
“You have no right to complain, you have a good life, but he freezes you out, and it’s a sham, and you’re stuck.”
“You know what it is?”
“What?”
“Lack of privacy.”
“Sure.”
“Everything is communal. Nothing is yours.”