I’ve done with this story about a hundred times. I think I know what I want to say in the story and where I want it to go. Maybe they’re the same thing. What I’m having trouble with is how to say it and keeping the story from being boring, stodgily written and overexplanatory. In other words, a story I wouldn’t want to read. It’s been like a wrestling match. The story’s fighting me and I’m fighting it. Sometimes I think it’s got me in its hold and sometimes I think I’ve got it in mine. What I want to finally do is pin it to the mat rather than be pinned. I’ve fought like this with a story before, but never for so long, and I always won. But end of wrestling analogy. I probably used it incorrectly anyway. This is what I’ve got so far: the start. I want to continue writing it after what I write what I’ve already written down.
An Episcopal church is directly across the street from his house. (In some versions it’s “. . . is right across the street . . .” and in others “. . . is across the street . . .” When I’m retyping a page, even after fifty times, I’m always changing a word or two or even a line. But I won’t stop the story anymore like that till I get to the place where I left off.)
An Episcopal church is right across the street from his house. Every afternoon between five and six he takes a walk in his neighborhood and almost always ends up sitting on a bench in front of the church. There are four benches there, all in various places in front of the church and each facing a different direction. He’s sat at least once on all of them and prefers the one that looks out on the street that runs parallel to the church. Not the street his house is on but the one perpendicular to it. He likes that bench best because it gets the most sun in late afternoon and there’s more to see from it. He usually takes a book with him on these walks and reads for about a half hour on the bench if the weather permits it. If it’s not too hot or cold and it isn’t raining or snowing. He always takes his walk, though, no matter what the weather’s like. Well, if it’s raining hard, he doesn’t take a walk. But if it’s snowing or just a light rain, he’ll walk but he doesn’t take a book with him or end up on the bench there. It’d be too wet to sit on. All the benches would. None are protected by trees. If he knows there’s not going to be enough light out to read on the bench by the time he gets there or it’s already dark by the time he starts out, he also doesn’t take a book with him, though he still might sit on the bench for a few minutes. But if he’s tired from the walk or his lower back hurts, which happens a lot by the time he finishes his walk, he’ll sit longer and just think about things—a dream from the previous night and what it might mean, a short story he’s been working on—or let his mind wander. He’s even nodded off a few times on the bench, but only when it was dark out.
So he’s finished his walk and is sitting on what he’s begun to call, in his daily phone conversations with his daughters, his bench. “What’d I do today?”—he always speaks to them in the evening, an hour or so after his walk. “I wrote and went to the Y, of course, and took a walk and sat on my bench and read.” It’s early April, around six-thirty, a bit chilly. Daylight Saving Time started a week ago. The sun’s out but setting. Cherry trees around the church are in full flower—a little early, but what does he know? No cars in the church’s small parking lot the bench also faces, and no people around, which is usually what it’s like out here at this time. He does hear children’s voices from somewhere far off, and a car or pickup truck occasionally passes. But that’s about it for distractions and noises. Oh, a jogger and a woman walking two dogs also went by, but that’s all, or all he saw. So: a peaceful place to sit and think or read. He did bring a book with him—a short biography of Maxim Gorky, one of about two hundred books his wife had on Russian literature in her study and which are still there. But he isn’t interested in reading anymore of it after reading the first thirty pages last night in bed. So why’d he take it on his walk? It was on the dryer by the kitchen door leading to the outside, where he’d left it this morning; he hadn’t decided what book he was going to read next, so he just grabbed it before he left the house. He sets it beside him on the bench. When he gets home he’ll stick it back in the bookcase he got it out of. So, nothing to read, really, he closes his eyes. See what comes, he thinks. Nothing does. Just letters and numbers bouncing around in his head, then a vertical line moving right to left, right to left, and then flashing, like lightning, but he doesn’t know what it is. Maybe lightning. He opens his eyes and looks at the sky, then at the two houses across the street, and finds himself humming something over and over for a couple of minutes. Liszt’s “Liebesträum.” Just the beginning of it. He doesn’t know the whole piece. Why’s he humming it, and now? Well, nothing else to do. No, there’s got to be a better reason than that. It doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Sure, it’s a beautiful piece of music when played on the piano—not with the mouth sounds he was making—or even the cello, meaning he once heard it played on the cello at a concert, but long ago. Before he met his wife. Did she play it on the piano? Doesn’t think so. Or she might have—she knew lots of pieces for piano—but she never played it while he was around. And if she played something—well, he was going to say she practiced it till she could play it without reading the music, and in that time he just about got to know it by heart too. But that doesn’t make the sense he wanted it to—to explain why he would have had to have heard her play it, if she did.
Then he remembers. Esther, a concert pianist who was also her piano teacher at the time, played the entire third “Liebesträume,” the one he was humming, in the living room of their New York apartment before their wedding ceremony began. As a warm-up, or to prepare the guests for the ceremony, perhaps. Then she went into her interpretation of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” which was the signal for his wife to walk slowly out of their bedroom with her bridesmaid and stand in front of the rabbi with him for the ceremony. He burst out crying right after the rabbi pronounced them married, was told by the rabbi and several guests “Kiss the bride, kiss the bride,” and he wiped his cheeks and eyes with his handkerchief, kissed her and thought this is the happiest moment in his life. And it was and continued to be so for around eight months, till the happiest moment in his life took place in the birthing room of a Baltimore hospital when his wife gave birth to their first child.
This is where I always get stuck. I know where I want to go from here but I just can’t seem to get there or even much started. I thought a few times maybe I should chuck the third person and do the whole thing in first and that will help me. And then I always think no, it won’t, so don’t. Stick with third; it feels right, and that’s what you have to rely on. I want him to explain why the moment their first child born became the happiest in his life and the moment they were declared man and wife dropped down a notch to the second happiest. And then to briefly give the third happiest moment, and maybe why it became that. And then the fourth, and so on, right up to the ninth or tenth, all of the last part taking up no more than three or four pages, and that would be it unless something else came to end it between now and then.
What I had in mind was something like this: The birth of their first child became the happiest moment in his life for a number of reasons, and by “moment” he means moments, hours, even the day. He’d wanted a child for about fifteen years. Impregnated three women in that time but none of them wanted to marry him or have the baby. They all thought he’d make a good father but that he’d never earn enough money to keep a family going, and had abortions. More important was that his wife was going through a difficult delivery in the hospital. It had been more than thirty hours since she went into labor and it had become extremely uncomfortable, exhausting and painful for her. Most important of all, her obstetrician—“Dr. Martha” she wanted to be called—said the baby’s breathing was at risk after so long a delivery and the position in the birth canal she was frozen in—her head or maybe it was a shoulder was caught on something there—and she’ll give a natural birth one last try with forceps and if that doesn’t work, she’ll have to do a cesarean. Fortunately, she was an expert with forceps and turned the baby over inside the birth canal and eased her out. So it was the relief after so many hours that the baby had come out alive and healthy and his wife was all right and had been able to avoid surgery and that he finally had a child, that made it the happiest moment in his life, and which it still is after nearly thirty years.
His third happiest
