Good Trouble

The Trusted Traveler

For almost a decade, Chris and I have received an annual visit from one of my former students, Jack Bail. This year is different. When, as usual, he e-mails to invite himself over, I reply that “our traditional dinner” can “alas” no longer take place: six months ago, Christine and I moved to Nova Scotia.

Jack Bail writes back:

Nova Scotia? Canada’s Ocean Playground? I’m there, Doc. Just say when and where.

“Oh no,” Chris says. “I’m so sorry, love.”

It’s I who should say sorry to Chris. Not only will she have to cook for Jack Bail but she will also have to handle Jack Bail, because, even though I’m supposedly the one who’s Jack Bail’s friend, it’s Chris who retains the details of Jack Bail’s life story and the details of what transpired in the course of our meals with him, and who is able to follow what Jack Bail is saying or feeling. For some reason, almost anything that has to do with Jack Bail is beyond my grasp. I can’t even remember having taught anybody named Jack Bail.

“And I guess Chris will be coming,” Chris says, confusingly. “His wife,” Chris says.

Of course—Jack Bail’s wife, like my Chris, is a Chris by way of Christine. Which is irritating.

I say, “You never know. Maybe he won’t be able to make it.”

Chris laughs, as well she might. Jack Bail always turns up. Without fail he marks the end of the tax season by eating at our table. It is always a strangely fictional few hours. Only after Jack Bail has left does our life again feel factual.

Chris’s long-standing opinion on the Jack Bail situation is that I should effectively communicate to him that I don’t wish to see him. It’s not her suggestion that I socially fire him in writing—as she acknowledges, “That’s pretty much psychologically impossible”—but that I make use of the well-understood convention of e-mail silence.

I’ve tried it. E-mail silence only prompts Jack Bail to switch to pushy text messages. For example:

Hi about this dinner thing. Just let me know details as soon as you have them, no rush.

This obdurate memorandum and others like it—

Dinner this month? Next month? All good:)

—weigh on me so heavily that in the end it’s just easier to spend an evening with the guy. The truth isn’t so much that Jack Bail is a terrible or unbearable fellow but that Jack Bail falls squarely into the category of people whom Chris and I really don’t want to see anymore as we hit our mid-sixties and apprehend the finitude and irreversibility of human time as an all-too-vivid personal actuality and not as a literary theme to be discussed in high school classes devoted to The Count of Monte Cristo or The Old Man and the Sea. A central purpose of moving to this Canadian coastal hilltop has been to shed our skins as New Yorkers and finally rid ourselves of the purely dutiful associations that, it seemed to me especially, overcrowded our day-to-day existences, which, even discounting work, apparently amounted to one interaction after another with individuals who demanded that we transfer our time to them, often for no better reason than that our paths had once crossed or, would you believe it, that their very demand for our time constituted such a crossing of paths.

(Illustration: A, who claims to be a friend of a friend, informs me by e-mail that he’s thinking of applying for a job at the school where Chris and I teach. Could he pick my brains over coffee? Further illustration: B writes to Chris to say that her child once attended the school. Could Chris help B get an overseas research fellowship? Exercising what is, I believe, a universally accepted right to reasonable personal autonomy, we choose not to answer these approaches; whereupon, we find out, both A and B tell people that we’re rude, selfish, full of ourselves, etc. In A’s and B’s minds, their making unilateral contact with us means that we, the contactees, are somehow in their debt. The difference between Chris and me is that she doesn’t let this stuff get to her, whereas I stupidly waste a lot of time and emotion being bothered by the ridiculous injustice and hostility of it all.)

I won’t even begin to describe how many hours and years we devoted to the parental body—the Hydra, as Chris named it. You cannot defeat the Hydra. You can only flee it. None of this is to say that we’re refugees; but it can’t be denied that we’ve retired, and that to retire means to draw back, as if from battle.

The good news is Jack and Chris Bail will not be sleeping over. My Chris took it upon herself to warn Jack Bail and his Chris that there was no room at our inn, so to speak, to which Jack Bail responded:

No worries.

We’ll take him at his word. The other good news is that Ed and Fran Joyce, new Nova Scotia acquaintances, will join us for the dinner in order to absorb the Bails, although of course the Joyces aren’t aware that this is part of their function. We don’t know the Joyces at all well, but they strike us as good sports. Also, they hosted a kind of welcome event for us, and so we owe them dinner, arguably: one day soon after we arrived, a hamper filled with good things was left at our front door, together with an invitation to join members of “the community” for drinks and nibbles. We freely accepted the invitation—we hadn’t come here to be recluses, after all—and enjoyed the occasion, although we were, and still are, a little wary of and astonished by and ironical about the prospect of joining a retiree crowd. Our plan is to have a year of contemplative idleness, after which we’ll have a better idea of what to next get up to. We’re far from elderly, after all. Time is not yet a victorious enemy.

Shortly before everyone is due to turn up, Chris and I take to the deck and get a head start on the wine, which is white and cold. “I wonder what Jack will have to say about this place,” Chris says. “Yes,” I say. “That’s something to look forward to.” She has reminded me of Jack Bail’s chronic amazement at our old apartment in Hudson Heights. Every time he came over, from Brooklyn, he would say something like, Hudson Heights? Who knew this neighborhood even existed? Who lives up here? Oboe players? It’s like I’m in Bucharest or something. Should I buy here?

This kind of thing is all fine, needless to say, and absolutely within my tolerance levels in relation to schoolchildren, although of course Jack Bail, who must be in his late thirties, and if memory serves is balding, is no longer a schoolboy. But his personal qualities are beside the point. The point is that Jack Bail is uncalled-for.

It’s a mild, semi-sunny, slightly windy June evening. “Just look at that,” I declare for about the millionth time since we moved into our cottage, which offers a panorama of a pond, green seaside hills, a semicircular bay, and a sandbar—or spit, perhaps. To the south, there’s a wooded headland that may or may not be a tombolo. It’s my intention to investigate this vista systematically, since it feels strange to look out every day and basically not understand what I’m looking at. Right now, for example, I’m observing an extraordinary horizontal triplex: in the offing, a distinctly ultramarine strip of ocean water is topped by a dull-blue band of unclassifiable vapor, itself topped by a purely white stratum of cloud. Then comes sky-blue air and, almost on top of our own hill, an enormous hovering gray cloud. This outlandish hydroatmospheric pileup, which is surely not unknown to science, leaves me at a terminological and informational loss that’s only intensified when I look at the bay itself, where the migrant and moody skylight, together with the action of the wind and current, I suppose, and maybe differences in the water’s depth and salinity, constantly pattern and texture and streak the aquatic surface. It’s unpredictable and beautiful. Sometimes the bay, usually blue or gray, is thoroughly brown, other times it has Caribbean swirls of aquamarine or is colorlessly pale, and invariably there are areas where the water is ruffled, and there are smooth or smoother areas of water, and areas that are relatively dark and light, and dull and brilliant, and so forth, ever more complexly. There must be some field of learning that can help me to better appreciate these phenomena.

“The Salty Rose,” Chris says. “For the Lunenburg whaling years.”

“Not bad at all,” I say.

This is one of our favorite running jokes: Chris suggests titles for the memoirs that I am not writing about the lives that we have not led. In this subjunctive world we are adventurers, spies, honorary consuls, nomads, millionaires. The Hammocks of Chilmark describes our summers on the Vineyard. Our Corfu stint is the subject of a trilogy: The Owl in the Jasmine; A Pamplemousse for the Captain; and Who Shall Water the Bougainvillea?

We have never set foot on Corfu or Martha’s Vineyard. Other than a four-year spell in Athens, Ohio, our thirty-one-year-old marriage and thirty-two-year teaching careers, and almost all of our vacations, have unfolded in and around the schools and streets of New York, New York. Jack Bail claims to have been in my class at Athens High, which is confounding. I have a pretty good recall of those Athens kids.

“Goddamn it.”

Chris: “Leg-bug?”

I pick it off my ankle and, because these lentil-sized spider-like little fuckers are tough, I crush and recrush it between the bottom of my glass and my armrest. I call them leg-bugs because these last couple of weeks every time I’ve set foot outdoors I’ve caught them crawling up my legs—to what end, I don’t know; they’re up to no good, you can bet—and because I can’t entomologically identify them. They’re certainly maddening. Often my shin prickles when there’s nothing there.

“Here they are,” Chris says.

Our guests have arrived simultaneously, in two cars. Fran and Ed get out of their red pickup and Jack Bail gets out of his rented Hyundai. There’s no sign of his Chris.

Dispensing with the steps, Jack Bail strides directly onto the deck. He’s extraordinarily tall, maybe six foot six. Has he grown?

“Adirondack chairs,” Jack Bail says. “Of course.”

As the young visitor who has gone to great lengths, Jack Bail is the object of solicitousness. There’s no way around this: once Jack Bail has traveled all the way from New York, he must be received with proportionate hospitality. “Jack first,” Fran says, when I try to pour her a glass of wine. “He deserves it, after his voyage.”

“The flight was great,” Jack Bail says. “Newark airport—less so.” Ed says, “You might want to think about the Trusted Traveler program. Might speed things along.” “I am a Trusted Traveler,” Jack Bail says. “It did me no good. Not at Newark.” “What happens if you’re a Trusted Traveler?” Chris says. Ed says, “You don’t have to take your shoes off.” We all laugh. Jack Bail exclaims, “They made me take my shoes off!” We all laugh again. Ed asks Jack Bail, “Which program you with? NEXUS?” “Global Entry,” Jack Bail says. Looking at Fran, Ed says, “That’s what I’m all about. Global entry.” That gets the biggest, or the politest, laugh of all.

Soon we’re eating grilled haddock, asparagus, and field greens. “Delicious,” Jack Bail is the first to say. “Thank you, Jack,” Chris says, with what seems like real gratitude. Jack Bail inspects the ocean, parts of which are ruddy and other parts dark blue. “That’s some view, Doc,” Jack Bail says. “Well, it’s not Hudson Heights,” I say. “I thought you lived in Manhattan?” Fran says. “Hudson Heights is in Manhattan,” I say. Ed says, “‘Doc,’ eh? You’re a dark horse.” “That’s what they called me,” I declare heartily. I didn’t invent the custom of recognizing a teacher’s academic title. Ed continues, “How about you, Jack? You a doc, too?” Jack laughs. “No way, man. I’m just a CPA.” “‘Just’?” Fran says, as if outraged. “You must be very proud of this young man,” she tells me, and this is a tiny bit infuriating, because I don’t like to receive instruction on how I ought to feel. How proud I am or am not of Jack Bail is for me to decide. “Certainly,” I say, Mr. Very Hearty all over again. Fran says, “How was he in the classroom? A rascal, I’ll bet.” I make a sort of ho-ho-ho, and Jack Bail says to Fran, “Hey, don’t blow my cover!” He adds, “Doc was a great teacher.” I say, “Well, we’ve come a long way from Ohio,” and Ed says, “We’ve all come a long way, eh?” and he tells Jack Bail that he’s from B.C. but that Fran is a Maritimer and Maritimer women always return home eventually and you’d have to be crazy to stand in the way of a Maritimer woman.

Fran says very attentively, “Your wife can’t be with us, Jack?”

“No, Chris is not able to come,” Jack Bail says.

“Maybe next time,” Fran says. Chris somehow catches my eye without looking at me and somehow rolls her eyes without rolling them. Or so I imagine.

“Unfortunately we’re currently separated,” Jack Bail says.

This gives everyone pause. “I’m sorry to hear that,” Ed says. Jack Bail says, “Yep, it’s not an ideal situation.”

Now Chris gets up and says, “We have assorted berries, and we have—chocolate cake. Jack’s favorite.”

“Do you have children, Jack?” Fran asks, which is surely a question whose answer she can figure out by herself. “We don’t,” Jack Bail says. “A couple of years back, we tried. You know, the IVF thing. Didn’t work out.” I’m refreshing the tableware at this point. Jack Bail says, “As a matter of fact, I just got this letter from the clinic demanding nine hundred dollars for my sperm.”

This silences even the Joyces.

Jack Bail continues, “So three years ago, as part of the whole process, we froze sperm. Yeah, so anyway, we go through the whole thing, an ordeal I guess you could call it, and this and that happens, and we forget all about the frozen sperm. Now here’s this invoice for nine hundred bucks because they’ve stored it all this time—or so they say. I call them up. I speak to a lady. The lady says they’ve sent letters every year informing me that they’re holding my sample. Letters? I don’t remember any letters. But first things first, right? Destroy it, I tell her. Get rid of it right away. She tells me that they can’t do that. First they need a notarized semen disposition statement.”

“OK, here we go,” Chris says. “Jack’s cake. And berries for anyone who might be interested.”

“Now, I know their game,” Jack Bail says. “I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to mail them the notarized statement and they’re going to say they never got it. And they’re going to make me go to a notary all over again and they’re going to make me mail them another statement and they’re going to drag this thing out. And every extra day they store it, they’re going to charge more, pro rata. See? They’re literally holding my sperm hostage.”

“Corporations,” Ed says. “Fran, doesn’t that—”

“Exactly,” Jack Bail says. “It’s not that the employees are evildoers. It’s the corporate systems. When it comes to receiving mail they don’t want to get, mail that reduces their profits, their systems are chaotic. When it comes to billing you, their systems are never chaotic. And I mean: retaining my genetic material without my consent? It’s insanely wrong. So—do you ever do this?—I tell her I’m an attorney and that I’ve got a bunch of hungry young associates who’ll be all over this shakedown like a pack of wolves.”

Ed says, “That would blow up in your face in Canada. We’re—”

“In the U.S. it’s different. In the U.S., you don’t register on their systems unless you threaten a lawsuit. That’s how they operate. Human reasonableness is just seen as an opening to make more money. So I said to Chris, Do you recall us ever getting a letter about a frozen sperm sample? She’s like, I don’t know, all those letters look the same. I’m like, Wait a minute, this is important, I want you to think hard. She’s like, I can’t do this, I’ve got to keep my eye on the ball. I’m like, What ball? This is the ball. I mean, think about it. My genes are in the hands of strangers. Never mind the nine hundred bucks. We’re talking about my seed. For all I know, I could have children out there in the world right now. Offspring. It’s far from impossible, right? Mistakes happen all the time. And foul play. People think that foul play doesn’t really exist. They’re wrong. Foul play is a very real thing, especially when there’s money to be made. Believe me, I know.”

Nobody has made a start on the cake or the assorted berries. I say to Jack Bail, “You’re right to be concerned. You have to take care of this.”

“That’s what I did, Doc. Cut a long story short, I caved on the nine hundred bucks and I went to the clinic personally with the documentation. I made sure to get a receipt.”

“That was smart,” Chris says.

Jack Bail says, “I had no option: I got a letter from a debt collection agency. I had to cave. What was I going to do, risk my credit over nine hundred bucks? No, I had to cave. And I don’t even know if they’ve actually disposed of the semen. I’ve got to assume they have. But I’ll never know for sure, will I?”

Jack Bail spends the night on our sofa. In the morning, when Chris and I go down, there is a thank-you note.

Then a year passes and with it a tax season, and we are walking on the beach, and I stop and I say to Chris, “You know what? We haven’t heard from Jack Bail.”

Our beach is a sand and shingle beach. The sand is a common blend of quartz and feldspar. The sand emerges from the ocean, so to speak, and continues inland until quite suddenly shingle replaces it. The shingle, or gravel, consists at first of pebbles, next of a mixture of pebbles and cobbles, and finally almost only of cobbles. This progressive distribution of the beach stones, apparently methodical, is in fact natural: a storm’s waves will force rocks small and large landward, but retreating waves have less power and will move only smaller rocks seaward. The result is a graduated stranding of the rocks, which amass in a succession of steep slopes and berms. Our beach walk begins by scrambling down one berm and then a second, and I always take care to hold Chris’s hand as we go down. Countless large spiders somehow make a life among the cobbles, and my job is to help Chris to put them out of her mind. Out of my mind, too. There are no leg-bugs out here. Leg-bugs are deer ticks. Every evening from May through November, Chris and I must examine each other for ticks. Sometimes we find one.

From the sand beach, the brown drumlin cliffs are exposed to our contemplation. The drumlins have been here since the Wisconsin glaciation. Their crosscut formation is the result of erosion by the ocean and the wind and the rain, a battering that is ongoing, I can testify after two winters here. As the hills retreat, they leave behind rock fragments that will, in due course, form part of the beach. This sort of fact is difficult for me to really understand; it must be said that much of my newly acquired geological knowledge is basically vocabularistic. I can’t recognize feldspar, for example, or a granitic boulder. The Wisconsin glaciation isn’t something I’m really on top of.

Chris and I scan the water, instinctively, I suppose. Sometimes we’ll see a seal’s head. It disappears for a while, then surfaces once more. They have large, cheerful, dog-like heads, these seals. It would feel good to see our warm-blooded kin out there today: this is one of those strolls when the up-close ocean daunts me more than a little, and as we skirt dainty rushes of water, I sense myself situated at the edge of an infinite and relentless eraser. I’m not sure that there’s much to be done about this: awe, dread, wonder, and feelings of asymmetry come with the terrain. There must be something appealing about it, or we’d be elsewhere. Where, though? It’s places that are going places. This part of Nova Scotia, the paleogeographers tell us, was once attached to Morocco.

“I hope he’s OK,” I say to Chris.

“I imagine he is,” she says. She says, “You could always call him.”

Yes, I could call him. But where would it end? I have taught, I once calculated, almost two thousand children.

No seal today. We keep walking. Chris says, “The Last Fez.”

I say, “About the Constantinople mission? We were sworn to silence about that.”

Chris says, “Remember that night we crossed the Bosporus? With that surly boatman?”

“Ali the boatman?” I say. “How could I forget?”

The World of Cheese

It had never occurred to Breda Morrissey that things might go seriously wrong between herself and her son, Patrick. But back in the fall he had declared her “persona non grata”—his actual expression—and pronounced that she was no longer permitted to have contact with her grandson, Joshua, on the grounds that she would be “an evil influence.” It was a crazy, almost unbelievable turn of events, and all about such a strange matter—a scrap of skin.

Patrick disputed this. “This is not about skin, Mom,” he said during the first session of the mother-son therapy they jointly underwent in New York. “Can’t you see? That’s not what this is about.”

Breda turned to the therapist, Dr. Goldstein—Dan, her son called him—for help. But Dr. Goldstein, whose dramatic beard and small pointy nose gave him, Breda thought, the look of a TV judge, was regarding her so severely that Breda was silenced.

Breda’s reliving of this moment, as she sat in a window seat on the flight back to California, was interrupted by a nudge—a barge, almost—from her neighbor. This person was an obese woman of Breda’s own age, mid-fifties, who from moment one had been tangling and fidgeting with carry-on luggage and safety instruction documents and in-flight entertainment gadgets. “Sorry,” the woman breathed, continuing her struggle with the wires of her earphones. At the woman’s other elbow, in the aisle seat, sat a littler person in a red sweater, a man. When drinks were served, the fat woman, as Breda thought of her, wordlessly helped herself to the little man’s mini-pretzels packet. Breda understood with revulsion that they were a couple.

She looked out the window. An immense cloud floor covered the bottom of the void. Brilliant stacks of white vapor rose here and there, and pink haze lay beneath the blue upper atmosphere. It was a glorious, otherworldly spectacle of the kind that Breda, when she was a girl, would have found suggestive of winged horses and unknown realms; but what it came down to, when you grew up and looked through it all, Breda thought, was rain, rain falling on the fields and the forests and the houses and the people.

Breda kept gazing out. Something about the bumpy spread of cloud reminded her of cottage cheese, which in turn reminded her: Patrick had developed an interest in, as he put it, the world of cheese. During her stay, her son had each evening approached the dinner table with a cheeseboard, making bugling and fanfare noises. “Try this one, Mom,” he said, pointing to one of the half-eaten, slightly stinking varieties, and Breda, who wondered whether these foodstuffs were legal, took a mouthful. “Nice,” she said, refraining from any other comment—for example, that Patrick was obviously gaining weight as a result of his new hobby—for fear of provoking another outburst on his part. (And of course his wife, Judith, would no doubt be touchy, too. Everybody was touchy these days.) One night, Patrick announced that he and Judith and baby Joshua were taking a cheesing trip to Ireland. The plan was to go to the Kinsale International Gourmet Festival and then to drive from farmhouse to farmhouse, tasting semisoft rind-washed cheeses. “I’m not interested in hard cheeses,” her son said importantly. If they found the time, he said, they’d drive up to County Limerick and maybe look up whoever was left of the ancestral Morrissey family.