This is a three water reading I see.
I have to use this thing.
I've never used a portable microphone.
Does it come out easily?
I'm-- wow, it works.
It makes you feel like Madonna up here.
It's really fabulous, but I'm not
going to use it while I'm reading.
I wanted to answer questions afterwards
because, in fact as the Boy's Extemporaneous
Speaking champion of the Commonwealth of Kentucky,
a distinction very important to people there,
I like to do that sort of thing but that will
have to wait until tomorrow.
But it is good in a way because it enables me
to sandwich what is some fairly heavy reading with--
I'll add something-- it's a little lighter in the middle.
But before doing that, I wanted to say, thanks to University
of Arizona for bringing me here and specifically, to Alison
Deming who ran the program beforehand
and who extended the invitation to me to speak.
To Jim, of course, as you've heard,
I had the good sense to bail out of that scene
before it became a scene.
That's when you know you're really
on top of things is when you stop going
before it hits the newspaper.
But it was a great scene, and we have ambitions of recreating it
in Tucson so watch out.
Also, thanks to the department.
I see Larry here--
Larry Evers, and it's been great.
It's a real pleasure and the faculty,
and Dennis Evans also has been a great host
in welcoming me to town.
I'll read about, probably 40 minutes or so, I would say,
and then I will not answer questions,
unless you catch me out front.
What I am going to do--
I was in a kind of dark frame of mind
earlier this week when I put this reading together
for a couple of reasons.
One of which was the stabbing on Fourth Avenue,
which was upsetting to say the least to me
and which is the purpose behind the specific cause,
behind the rally, which Jim referred to,
which is happening on Sunday.
And I want to give David Robinson credit, the faculty
member who's also new, who has really been pushing
forced behind that rally.
That and then there was a wonderful essay in my workshop
this week by Eliot Sloan, my student who
wrote about those dark days of the 1980s
from a very different perspective-- someone who
was a teenager at the time, but they put me in that place.
And I decided I wanted to go back and visit those places
again, kind of in memoriam in a way,
so I thought I'd start by reading some fiction.
And I'll read a couple of passages.
Maybe it's the frame of mind that I am in these days.
There was the time in my life I would never
have thought that I would have ended up
in this particular journey.
And certainly, a question to ask is how did I get here?
I ask myself that all the time, but I
seem to be, these days, engaged with issues of faith a lot.
And the pieces that I put together,
not all, but most of them, I would
define as prayers in some way or another.
And it's interesting to think about why,
but that was my motivation behind choosing them.
So you can make your own judgments about that.
This is a passage from my novel Scissors, Paper, Rock,
my second novel.
I think it stands alone.
It's probably helpful to know there's
a matriarch and a patriarch.
The matriarch's name is Rose Ella.
The patriarch's name is Tom Hardin.
The son's name is Raphael or Raphe for short.
It's at the end of a long day, a family picnic,
and during the course of which this picnic is celebrating
Tom Hardin's recovery from cancer surgery,
but at the end of it, the son Raphael
chooses the day to tell his mother that he's HIV positive.
And this is at the very end of that long chapter that
has included everything from dancing monks
to family disputes, and Rose Ella
is alone at the end of the day.
I'll talk a little bit more later about how I come
by my connection with monks, but for the moment
[CLEARS THROAT]--
0 Scissors, Paper, Rock.
"Rose Ella lay awake alone.
Tom Hardin, who slept fitfully these days,
had taken to spending his nights in one of the children's
empty bedrooms, so as not to disturb her with his tossing
and turning.
Rose Ella lay and stared at the sheet light--
at the sheet lightning flicker and dance across the ceiling.
Why me?
Why us?
People thought they were so smart these days,
going to the moon and making all this money,
but that's what it came down to.
That's what it always came down to, and always would
come down to--
questions with no answers.
Now, she was alone.
Now, she-- now, she could cry, and she bit her lip
to keep from crying.
What did she done wrong?
A big country family deep enough in the hills
to avoid city, influences but with enough flat land
to live decent--
the family that prays together stays together,
the priest had said.
Well, they'd prayed together, at first anyway, a rosary a night
on their knees, then every other night, then every third night,
or once a week.
Had they abandoned God?
More like the other way around, she said this aloud,
then muttered a quick act of contrition.
All those children in something like a decade,
and that wasn't counting the miscarriages.
These no one remembered except herself,
who remembered each of them as clearly
as if each of those babies had been born squalling and whole.
There had been too many children off in a million directions--
cheerleading practice, football, homecoming parades,
graduations, births, births, births, and always the cows
to milk.
Rose Ella had done her part and stuck with the church.
She'd raised her kids to be good Catholics.
Was it her fault they'd left the church?
What did she done wrong?
That was no question worth lying awake over.
If she was old enough to know anything,
she was old enough to know that, and still she'd
spent a life hiding from questions
that came upon her, watching Tom Hardin's balding,
jaundiced scalp, his thick silver hair lost
to chemotherapy, staying busy for a lifetime around Raphael
because she was afraid of what he had to say,
of letting herself know what she already knew.
She and her husband, she and her daughter, she and her sons--
of all them, this was true.
They had been less than honest with each other
because they had not wanted to speak of these matters,
because none had wanted to hear what the others were
unwilling to say.
But wasn't this true of everyone?
What were words worth when confronted
with the mute intuition of things unseen,
the infinitude of grief, the high pinnacles of joy,
the profundity of love, the omnipotence of desire?
How could grief, joy, love, or desire
be spoken of when they weren't comprehended
by the words themselves?
Words-- as necessary and shapeless as water.
A summer afternoon, Rafe had talked about the hot light
from the patio that would make it the new house sometime
around 1960.
Rafe would have been six or seven,
and she had been so upset as to flat out cry
right in the kitchen where one of the kids
was sure to come upon her."
In the scene where he tells her he's HIV positive,
he recalls the only time he saw her cry, and he asks why.
And she says she doesn't remember it.
"1960-- she and Tom Hardin had been married 17, no, 18 years.
They hadn't fought in a long while,
not since around the time of Raphe's birth.
Now, when things got tense, Tom Hardin hid out in the woodshop.
She had the sewing, and cooking, and cleaning,
and one hour a week for the Sacred Heart sodality,
when she napped while pretending to pray.
When would she have had time to cry?
Merciful memory, nothing, then something--
one of the monks, Brother Edward, Brother Asaph,
Brother Benedict, Brother Romuel,
he had long since flown North back where he'd come from,
had brought flowers.
The monastery had a greenhouse in those days,
where they'd grown flowers for the altar, none of that
frivolousness now under the new regime.
The green house had been dismantled years ago.
The monks had brought her cuttings
from the flowers they'd thrown away.
These she'd rooted, and planted, and tended still.
This monk had brought succulents for Rose Ella's cactus garden
and a single stalk of a cymbidium orchid from which
there hung eight or 10 blooms.
And those delicate throaty blossoms
she remembered Camp Jr., the only son of a rich farming
family who rode her around in his father's car,
and took her to movies, and yes, bought her flowers.
At the movie, she'd realized how many of the stars
were just country girls who'd taken themselves
to California with a little gumption and talent,
and she had plenty of both.
Oh, she had plans.
The rich boyfriend-- well, rich to her--
took her out, and they parked on the courthouse square
and looked at maps.
They would drive his new car-- to be bought with money he was
sure to inherit--
across route 66 to Pasadena, to Hollywood, where
he would go to law school--
they must have law schools in California--
and she would try her luck in the movies.
Then high school ended, and Camp Jr. Went
to the state university.
She wrote him letters and waited until the day
when she met Tom Hardin on the courthouse square,
and she had waited long enough.
Tom Hardin was flirtatious.
He had no money at all, but he had a truck.
Even if it was an old one, it got them
where they needed to go.
By the time Camp Jr. returned-- in fact, his father had died.
In fact, he had inherited the farm and a good deal more.
In fact, he was on his way to Vanderbilt Law--
Rose Ella was married.
She had her children, and named them for movie stars,
and put all that foolishness behind her
until the day when that monk--
Brother Tobias?
Brother Brendan?
Brought orchids, and Rafe found her crying.
Typical, she told herself sternly,
that in a life with plenty of good reasons to cry,
Raphe should have come upon her crying over nothing.
California, the place where their children went.
She imagined herself there now, standing in the middle
of the Golden Gate Bridge.
This was easy to do and on her only visit to San Francisco,
Rafe had walked her halfway across,
and she returned here often when she had trouble falling asleep.
She felt the bridge tremble and sway beneath her feet.
It's nothing but a plain old swinging bridge,
was what she said to Raphe on that first visit,
just like the bridge Tom Hardin built
across the creek behind the old house, only bigger.
And Tom Hardin had the good sense
to put a high chain-link fence on his bridge,
she might have added.
But this was California, and there
was, between her and giddy air, only a middle bannister not
much higher than her waist.
To look over and look down was to be sucked in.
You might fall off such a bridge just by looking down too long.
She thought this thin standing next to Rafe,
and now she yields to temptation.
She leans over and looks straight
down until the scalloping waves mesmerize her and she falls.
At first, she tumbles head over heels, but then she spread--
her spreads her arms like the Olympic diver she's seen
on television--
thrusting her ample breasts before her,
pointing her toes to the retreating sky.
A flock of mud swallows attacks her
with sharp beaks and beating wings.
But she falls through them, and they bank and wheel
back to their nests, built on the underpinnings
of the bridge.
She falls past screaming gulls, toward the billowing sails
of the boats on the bay, past the crenelated turrets, and gun
emplacements, and astonished tourists
faces crowding the Civil War Fort into the sea, splashless
as a pelican.
The cold waters of the Golden Gate close over her.
She runs her tongue over her lips and tastes salt.
The tide is withdrawing.
She floats sideways, west toward the sun,
toward the foreign places of her imagination
until pressure from the water above overcomes her buoyancy,
and she sinks.
Rafe, who knows such things, has told her that the channel here
is very deep, 300, 400 feet.
A shark swims by-- the great white shark
that breeds in the bay.
It bears its teeth.
She faces it down smiling.
She has not failed her scattered children, her dying husband,
her youngest son.
Above the waves the sun spreads itself
across the Pacific, tons of--
tongues of livid scarlet yield to Rose,
then muted yellow, then the deepening violets of dusk.
On the rocks of the fair lawns, elephant
seals slide into the water.
Tens of thousands of birds, mirrors, puffins, petrols,
cormorants, sink to darkness, finding nests and niches,
tucking bills into their breasts,
ruffling feathers about their young.
Sinking below the waters, Rose Ella remembers--
Brother Alfred, bringer of the orchids, and she sleeps."