When we were finally in his truck heading to Whitefish, he cleared his throat. “Well, you’ve had quite a day, Mary. Twelve hours, three planes. You must be tired.”
I’d rehearsed my response: “I would have taken a wagon train if that was the only way to get here.” I watched his face as he repeated what I’d said with only a slight intake of breath, no further comment.
We talked about flying.
I’d read that Ray wouldn’t fly, drove his truck wherever he went to teach or
give a reading.
He quickly assured me he was not afraid to fly.
“Well, I’m afraid, Ray, but I do it. Anyway, dying in a plane crash might be the best way to go. You’d have time for final thoughts the whole way down. The right kind. Not like when I was sideswiped in my car at rush hour, went into a tailspin, only had time to think, ‘Oh shit!’”
He kept his eyes on the road. I shifted toward him on the seat with my left knee up, alert to his profile. His brows were thatched; his cheekbones might as well have been carved of ice.
“Even if you panicked at the loss of altitude,” I continued, “you’d think the pilot might regain control. And you wouldn’t be alone, not like being murdered in a back alley.”
I could barely swallow, I was so nervous to finally meet him, but I couldn’t seem to stop talking.
“You could hold hands with the person next to you, reassure each other, keep praying the pilot would pull out of the nose-dive. But if it crashed, the end would be so quick you wouldn’t have time to lose hope completely.”
Ray listened, impassive. Finally I asked, “If you’re not afraid, why don’t you fly?”
“It’s a long way down.”
Clearly, this was not a topic he wanted to pursue. And I didn’t know enough about him yet to presume when, or if, I could push. We had a kind of history but were strangers, really. His friend Stephen had come across one of Ray’s poems at my web site and introduced himself by e-mail, informing me that Ray was pleased to know I’d featured him, but didn’t own a computer. “Since he has no hardware, he suggested you call him at his mountain retreat in Montana.”
* * *
I’d had no desire to contact Ray. I did, though, read everything he’d written – poems, short stories, memoirs, a novel. He was a good story-teller, the first and only poet whose collections I read from cover to cover, admiring every single poem. In most interviews, he’d emphasized that he was a purist who wrote everything first in longhand with a #2 pencil, painstakingly typing his revisions on an old-fashioned typewriter.
Then Ray had phoned, pitching a slow curve. At first he showed interest in me, asked what role poetry played in my work as a personal coach, then abruptly said I seemed to be using his poem for personal gain, and should contact his agent for written permission. I reverted to a maddening nervous habit – choking, speaking hoarsely – feeling foolish.
The second time, he called because he didn’t recognize my number on his phone bill. When I picked up the receiver, he barked, “Who is this?”
“I believe you called me.”
“Oh, you’re the lady who quoted me without permission.”
“No. As a matter of fact I took your poem off my web site.”
“I didn’t want you to take it off! I just thought you should get permission.”
“Fine, Ray. When I have time, I’ll get around to it.”
A month later, hoping to allay any future calls, I’d typed a letter to him explaining I’d done as he’d asked, reinstating his poem at my web site, with written permission. Stephen had been working on me, telling me Ray, though somewhat gruff, was a good person and I should not be too hard on him. So I tried to be gracious, but not too gracious – a little smart-alecky, or funny, maybe.
“Dear Ray, I’m writing instead of calling to try to get on a better footing with you, having found myself with my foot in my mouth (maybe your foot in my mouth) in our two brief conversations.”
I closed with what I thought would end our correspondence, “I hope your life continues to be as rich, amusing, and sentimentally deep as it appears to have been so far.”
* * *
I forgot about Ray over the next few weeks and was surprised when he replied (in #2 pencil), “Dear Mary, it seems we are in a story, you and I, connected, as we are, in our own imaginations. My, my.”
I had to sit down.
“But the story is tilted,” Ray’s letter continued, “since you know much more about me than I know about you. What can you tell me about yourself?”
Writing to him was easier than talking on the phone.
Cued by Stephen, I’d re-read Ray’s poems with a different eye. I could love a man who writes as he does.
“I have Mingus on my mind,” I responded to his “My, my” letter. “I heard a piece on the radio in Boston in the sixties that left me flat out in love. Only I thought it was Alice in Wonderland, and couldn’t track it down. Last week, after searching all these years, I found it – Alice’s Wonderland! It’s less than nine minutes long, but worth the wait.”
Again, there was a three-week interval, then another letter from Ray. “Good touch, the Mingus, because of the title of the tune and the nine minutes. I, too, am a Mingus fan – do you know his autobiography? Wonderful description of Ellington firing him.”
His writing was surprisingly formal, almost stilted. I wonder if he’s cautious about letters that might be published without his consent? He enclosed a newspaper clipping about one of his readings, which I found both egotistical and touching.
When we began talking regularly by phone, it took a while to find our way. I couldn’t help responding to his flirtatiousness, and discovered he liked me to be a little cheeky.
“I think writing in pencil works for you,” I said one night, “because you dip it in testosterone.”
“You’re not the first woman to tell me that.”
But I had difficulty reconciling the poetic writer with the exacting man. Remembering my comment about his sentimentally deep life, Ray drummed out a lecture on the difference between sentiment and sentimentality. “Rod McCuen, that’s sentimentality!”
I wondered what he found of interest in me. Is it because I’m crazy about his writing?
* * *
Ray continued to be abrupt, though in a rough, sexy way. Frankness and earthy humor became our theme, sometimes with a literary slant. He asked me one night, “What’s the most screwed-up thing about you?”
“My fondness for shoes. I have forty pairs.”
“Forty pairs!” He was astonished, but didn’t miss a beat. “Are any of them red?”
I followed this exchange by sending him a short remake of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes, starring myself and changing the traditional ending.
“Now what might you take to be the moral of this tale? All we know is that our girl is grown up now and she’s willing to take her chances if there’s a prince of a guy who likes to dance.”
Ray was amused. Later I’d note the irony that we were better for each other on paper. At that time I was beginning to feel an attraction, though not without misgivings.
“There’s a danger for me,” I wrote to him, “in believing a story that may not be true.” That hadn’t stopped me, however, from playing out the story. “I’ve been reading Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. Her Daddy described a woman with an ass ‘like two bulldog pups in a sack.’ Now, don’t expect that from my ass, Ray.”
One night on the phone, searching for a common thread, we discovered we’d both been single for many years after an early marriage, and began to joke about our parallel strings of lovers.
“Am I your one and only writer?” he’d asked.
“Dear One and Only,” I wrote. “I think the approximate count is fifteen, and in review I’m disheartened to note how sadly underrepresented the arts have been in my life. Yes, Ray, almost everyone ‘writes,’ but you are my only writer. Not surprisingly, there was more than one psychiatrist, but good God, there were two lawyers and a judge! Strangest of all, there was a pineapple canning plant manager.”
Ray called that night to report he’d had sex with a woman in every state of the union except Hawaii.
“Well, there you go,” I said. “I’ve taken care of Hawaii.”
That went on for a while, the two of us trying to find out who, really, was on the other end of the line. He asked me to track down a recording by Norah Jones, “Come Away With Me.” When I listened to it I suspected another woman had told him about it. Still, I was touched by the lyrics of Lonestar:
How far you are I just don’t know / the distance I’m willing to go. I pick up a stone that I cast to the sky / hoping for some kind of sign.
I was torn between intrigue and doubt. Ray could be preachy. In response to my questions about his only novel, he’d written “You’re being a psychologist who wants to figure things out. To the writer these can never be interesting questions.” Then he’d relented: “But when you say reading it hurt like hell, I’m rewarded. Part of my purpose is to make the reader feel – or as Conrad says, ‘see.’’’
After four months of
letters and phone calls, I still wasn’t sure how I felt about Ray. I wanted to
either end the flirtation or find out if there could be more to the
relationship.
I need to spend some time with him in person.
This was resolved when he told me about the July 4th celebration in Whitefish. “You would have enjoyed it, Mary. You should have been here.”
“Are you asking me to visit, Ray?”
“If I asked you, would you come?”
* * *Now I was on Ray’s mountain. It was so beautiful, so calm there, I felt almost delirious, hugging him at every opportunity. In our last conversation before my flight, in fact, I’d asked him to embrace me as soon as I deplaned on Friday. “Act as if we know each other.”
“Of course.” The same response he’d given when I said I’d like to sleep next to him, not in the guest bedroom.
“I’m like a mole,” I said. “I have to sniff and feel my way along.”
“Are you blind?”
“No! But if we don’t get it over with right away, I’ll be edgy.”
Friday night was awkward.
* * *
Early on Saturday, I
breathed in the sweet, piney scent from the open window, heard the walls wake
up with creaks and snaps, like a cedar body stretching. A breathing house.
Next to me, Ray’s lean body felt polite; it did not yield. He let me hold him the
way a small boy might who’s been instructed to accept a stranger’s embrace, who
complies because he should.
Later in the day, when it was cooler, we drove to the river to fish. I told him I’d been fly-fishing in Wyoming two years before, but asked him to remind me what to do. He showed me how to hold the rod and reel, when to wind, when to hold, when to let go. He then moved away downstream, leaving me to figure out the rest.
Gradually, I felt my right arm casting into rhythm: hold, release, hold, release. When my line got caught under a rock in the middle of the river I struggled out against the current, feeling stubborn, refusing to ask Ray’s help though I knew he was watching. I fell down twice, had to force my way up.
As we were leaving, Ray bantered with me about what I was doing out there in the river. “Were you swimming?”
“Practicing falling.”
We both laughed.
* * *
After lunch on Sunday he asked, “Do you want to watch while I burn some slash? It’s been pretty dry, but there’s no wind so I don’t think we have to worry about the fire getting out of hand.”
Nodding, I followed him outdoors, avoiding conversation. I was finding Ray to be an odd mixture of sweet and abrasive, compliant and remote. In spite of my years of figuring people out, I couldn’t read him, didn’t know what to say, didn’t feel spontaneous.
Over breakfast that morning he’d made a point about Love in the Ruins, then was aggravated because he couldn’t remember the author. I had felt the name begin to form on my tongue but was equally frustrated.
As we headed up the back hill, Ray told me he’d always been a walker, walked to his mailbox and back – a mile each way – in 30 minutes.
Walker, walker. “Walker! His name is Walker something.”
“Walker Percy. Yes!”
It was rejuvenating to
remember together, to begin gaining balance.
Ray started the fire in a low pit next to a huge tree stump that could protect
the fire if the wind came up. I saw a molasses-like chunk on the edge of the
stump and quickly put it to my mouth. It was bitter and sticky.
“That’s red cedar sap. You thought it was going to be sweet. You’re lucky you got your fingers unstuck.”
We formed a brigade. Ray brought fallen branches from the back slope of the hill, slippery with pine needles. I carried the branches from there in bundles, stacking them near the fire.
After several hours I was noticeably tired, and he said, “That’s enough.” As perspiration began to cool on my bare arms, I shivered. Ray suggested I get his long-sleeved shirt hanging on a nail in the laundry room inside. I found it, walked back out pulling it on: a soft, deep red and green flannel.
“That looks good on you. Keep it if you want.”
He gave me the task of being the fire-watcher, water hose in hand. I sniffed the wind, brushed drifting ash from my face. He talked about an acquaintance in town who was a smoke jumper, told a story of seventeen fire fighters who died because they tried to run from a raging forest fire. His friend saved himself and three others by building a bunker. They nose-dived into it, waves of fire washing over them.
As it grew dark, Ray hissed water on the crisp, hot coals.
We moved to the front porch. He went to the kitchen and came back with two Black Star beers from a local brewery. “It’s double-hopped, full-bodied, the finest.”
I’m not a beer lover. But I wanted to savor what he liked, to get a taste of him. As we sipped, Ray admitted he was lonely on his mountain. I relaxed in my canvas chair, slid out my legs, stretched my bare feet. His flannel shirt covered me to the bottom of my shorts.
“I’d like to see you in nothing but that shirt.”
Afterward, lying on the couch inside, I held my legs straight up, waiting for him to bring a towel. He whistled.
“You have great legs for a senior citizen.” Then he noticed my silence. “Is it OK if I say that?”
I smiled and turned toward him. “Yes.”
* * *
Ray grew all his own vegetables in a large garden surrounded by a steel fence. Watering them was a cherished daily ritual. He liked his occasional encounters with wild animals on the rest of the property and didn’t interfere if they came close. I felt a tender rush when he was affectionately profane toward the deer that ate apples from the tree in front of his house.
By the third day I’d fallen into his routines. Every morning he wrote for three hours. Enjoying the quiet time for myself, I invented yoga postures, meditated, wrote in my journal, took long walks. In the afternoons, we worked side-by-side in his flower garden. “Petunias have to be pinched or they’ll become too leggy,” I told him, “but it hurts me to pinch off life.”
“It’s like separating Siamese twins, Mary. The ultimate sacrifice.’” By this answer I knew he appreciated my feelings, didn’t consider them to be – in his words – frou-frou.
That was the day he told me he’d always wanted to say what Robert Duvall says in Lonesome Dove to his woman in town: “How ‘bout a little poke, darlin’?” I guessed he’d rehearsed this, just as I’d rehearsed what I would say when we met. But I liked the line anyway.
“Oh, darlin’, I’d like
a little poke.” I hugged him, and for the first time his hard body
softened. Perhaps caution held him inflexible until I passed some test whose criteria
were never quite clear. I found, though, even after he seemed more comfortable
with me, after daily pokes, he would never kiss me open-mouthed.
Ray was very particular about how things were done, even washing the outside of
bananas before he peeled them.
When I offered to help him prepare dinner Sunday night he told me to chop the garlic, then put it in the small yellow ceramic bowl on the counter.
As I started to scrape the garlic bits into the bowl, he paused from stirring the sauce. “You don’t scrape from a cutting board with the sharp edge of the knife! You turn the knife and use the blunt edge.”
“Gee, Ray, it would have been a lot easier if you’d just sat me down the first morning and given me a list of all the rules. That way I’d have at least a chance of a passing grade!”
“No, that would take too long. I’ll teach you as we go.”
Though he was joking, this interaction fed my growing confusion. I had sat on the leather couch in the den that morning and wept over one of his poems. But I couldn’t reach deep enough into the man.
We chatted over dinner – a pasta of his own invention with anchovies, salad, Pinot Grigio. “The true test of an interesting woman,” Ray teased, “is if she loves anchovies.” I’d avoided anchovies my whole life but was damned if I was going to fail this little test.
Suddenly he said, “You’re lucky, you know. Here you are in this beautiful setting getting the equivalent of a free workshop with me. There are a lot of women who would pay big bucks for this.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m serious.”
I was furious. “This isn’t free. That last-minute plane ticket cost me almost eight hundred dollars. And I didn’t come here to worship at your feet, Ray. I came to get to know the person behind the writing.”‘
“They’re one and the same, Mary.”
I told him he was arrogant. He said he’d been joking but didn’t like the sour look on my face so kept up the pretense that he was serious. We didn’t speak for hours, until I broke the silence.
“Look, I didn’t know you were joking and I’m sorry I got so angry.”
“It takes a big person to apologize.”
After breakfast the next morning, as we watered the vegetables together, he said, “Doesn’t it seem we’ve known each other forever?” I knew this was as close to an apology as Ray could manage.
* * *
The perfect death. That had been an unexpected theme. Ray admitted he didn’t want to be buried. “I can’t stand the thought of being underground, dead or alive.”
Cremation would be good, we agreed, ashes released on the wind in some memorable place.
“I don’t trust my kids to follow my wishes, though” I told him. “My son would have me buried. I know he would. He’d want a grave to visit. Anyway, it’s how to die I want to know. What do you think is the best way?”
Ray gave me a sober look. “While dreaming, of course. Just going from one dream to the next.”
We talked about the planet burning out, the death of animal species, of trees. I was complacent: “I believe the earth will go on without us. Cockroaches will take over, maybe.”
“The thing I’d hate is that all my work would be lost, nobody left to read it.”
“Then we’ll just have to make a time capsule, and hope the cockroaches learn how to read.” I was keeping it light, but sensed this went deep with Ray – his resolute solitude tempered by the need to be known.
He’d cautioned me not to walk into the woods alone, without him and his pistol. “Cougars wait in trees, could jump on you without warning, snap your neck instantly.”
I’d thought about this for days, liked the idea: When I’m ready, I’ll walk into the deep woods away from the path until a cougar finds me, where there will be no discussion of cremation or burial, where I’ll go back to the earth.
To Ray I said, “I’ve changed my mind about planes. I’ll hold out for the cougar death.”
* * *
One morning while he was locked in his study, I lay on the ground inside the corral, now unused and overgrown with grass, though Ray had talked about buying a horse. For a long time I gazed at the sky, framed by aspen, pine, narrow-leaf cottonwood. At peace, I slowly sat up, admiring the pale, bluish-lavender wildflowers in the field below.
Two small does appeared, walking up the hill behind the corral. One of them looked at me, started to dip her head to feed, stopped, looked again, then pranced off – full of self, head high, tail stiff. I was charmed.
Eventually, I had the urge to urinate, went to the far side of the corral, marked my territory, peeing close to the ground, grazing the wild grass, smelling my own warm, almond scent. The cougar will know I was here.
* * *
On my last morning at Ray’s, I strolled barefoot, saw a dandelion growing tall through a prickly bush. Only the day before it had been a golden globe, but overnight had changed into the familiar white seed head. I endured pricks from the bush it had invaded and snapped it low, tried to capture all its tiny parachutes in my free hand.
Walking toward the back hill beyond the vegetable garden, I looked down so I wouldn’t stumble and spill the seeds before I reached the compost pile. Just past the delphiniums at the border of the flowerbed, I saw a dead field mouse, dark gray guts torn out. Its front paws were touching, prayer-like, its rear paws flung back as if jumping were possible.
Ah! Divining the future from its entrails.
I felt tears rising and turned my head away from the house, in case Ray had paused in his work and was looking out the front window.
Tightening my grip on the
dandelion in my left hand, I picked up the small corpse by its tail with thumb
and index finger of my right hand, carried both past the vegetable garden – the
spinach, mustard greens, sweet peas, lettuce, beans.
Giving the mouse a proper send-off, I flung it high into the cooling air over
the back hill, where it landed in a nest of pine needles. There it lay, curled,
among the scrubby bushes, the browning grass, the fallen branches now turning
punky.
The dandelion seeds flew loose, into the wind.
(Published online in Connotation Press and later in my collection Autobiography Passed through the Sieve of Maya)
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