That's really so sweet.
Thank you, very kind of all that to say.
Of course, all it does is arousing the irony,
so that when you talk about art, I
want to say something that Andy Warhol said when he was asked
what art was, you know about the famous line that said,
"Andy, what is art?"
He said, "isn't that a guy's name?"
So that took care of that problem.
I thought I'd read tonight from a short story of not
interminable length, because I'm very
aware when I go to readings, how I hate the reader.
There is a certain breaking point,
I'm not sure if it's 12 minutes.
There's a certain aesthetic of time that's involved.
And then I know--
I'm with the reader until a certain point,
and then oh, now I'm with no one.
I'm with the reader until a certain-- writer
until a certain point, and then there's
a certain point where I think about other things,
like being not there.
And then it fades into the point where I think,
I hate this person.
I want this person to die.
And I really think that--
for making me be here, and listening to this driveling,
self-aggrandizing stuff.
It's best when they tell you when they arrive-- tell you
how they got here, and why they're there,
and the books they've written, it just never ends.
Anyway, I'll try to be as brief as I can
and still allow time for the story.
This is called, A Ship at Anchor,
and it came out last fall in Granta magazine.
Very nice of them to take this story.
"Mother was old now.
After all the years of being her son,
I could finally judge her age, old.
I wanted to say, "just yesterday, you
were still young, mom.
But today, you're old."
But that's not the thing you say to a mother,
especially when she's come to visit
and is settled by you on a porch in a wicker chair.
The boy was drawing.
The sun was sliding into the pocket of the horizon.
The ship lay tethered to a roving sea.
"The sea is roving under our eyes," my mother said.
"The sea is roving, dad," the boy repeated.
He was fond of replaying certain words
when their sounds suggested a shape or an image to him.
He often made drawings of sounds like the word sound
itself, which looked like an empty cave
with a hanging light bulb.
Or the word pirate, which he once
represented in his more literal realist period
as a rat-shaped pie with an eye patch and a needle thin sword.
"That was just the visual pun," I explained,
"a translation of parts of a word to a picture."
And thus, was much less interesting
than his usual more abstract and evocative images.
He agreed, he said, but it was much harder
to make images representing the heart of the word.
"Those images were painful to make,"
he said, "because they did not come from his eyes,
but from a place deep inside him.
From a place he had no words to describe.
From your soul."
I wanted to say, but explaining that would have taken him
too soon from a world he would one day and on his own
discover.
For now, he was drawing from life, the ship at anchor
in a flat sea.
He put a full red moon above her bow
though there was none there in the sky.
Nothing glowing there at all, not even
a hint of a star as the night fell.
Soon, we would have to put on the porch lights,
and soon we'd have to go down into the house.
"This will be for you, Nana," he said,
holding up the unfinished drawing to his grandmother.
"Why don't I take you along with it,"
she said, "then I can have both of you at the same time,
all the time."
He laughed.
"Nana, my Nana," he said.
"Do you want me to get you some tea?"
I asked my mother.
"I'll be going home soon," she answered.
"Stay with me here a while longer,
and let's devour the time together.
Let's devour the whole night," I said.
Anyway, what's the point of going home
when you're already home.
I liked my mother.
I loved her as much as I had my wife.
The boy looked up from his drawing
and said, "Don't go, Nana."
"I'll think about that," she said.
"Come up here and give me a big hug first."
He rushed to her, throwing his arms around her neck.
"Stay with us, please," he said.
"Well, since you asked me so nicely my dear boy," she said,
"I think maybe I will."
"Stay forever," he said.
"Forever is a long time, don't you think?"
"Not long enough, Nana."
"Forever is an eternity.
I'd gladly spend an eternity with you,
just as we are right now," she said, hugging him to her.
It was soon his bedtime.
He made no fuss, but asked that his grandmother
come up and read to him as she always
did when she stayed with us.
"Of course," she said, of course since little else in the world
made her happy than to read him, to be with him,
to kiss those cheeks so smooth with childhood, and his eyes,
she said, to kiss those eyes so sweet with life.
She took his hand, letting him lead her step
by step up the stairs to his blue room peppered with stars.
When they left, I brought out my binoculars
and took a long look at the ship in the last light.
She was a shabby hulk, black paint scaling off the bow,
rigging flopping in the breeze, lines, laying about,
uncoiled in slack heaps.
Some men appeared now and then, smoking in a shiftless way,
looking over the gun walls toward the shore toward me,
a speck on a porch.
I waved, but no one answered.
The ship had lay there all day and into dusk.
And now at night, lolled about with her running lights
and dull glow, like a string of dirty pearls.
When I first went up to see the boy, the ship was out there.
And even after I kissed him good night and turned off the light,
she was still out there.
He was reading one of his Tintin books when I came up,
looking at me in the last possible moment
before he felt it impolite not to do so.
He had good manners in any case.
You carry your civilization with you,
his Nana had taught him at an age when it could still stick.
He took to the idea instantly, seeing it
as part of a game, which indeed it is.
That was what had made him seem older than his years,
his manners and the kindness beneath them
which gave them value.
"I'm sorry," I said, "I know you want
to go on reading but it's time for sleep."
"Well," he said, as if considering the point,
"Why don't you read to me?"
"It would be the same thing," I said,
"because you'd still be up and awake."
He nodded.
He seldom argued unless he thought I or the world
was being unfair, unjust, being his ultimate word
of disapproval.
A friend who had struck him in the back or a teacher who
had berated him for another's wrongdoing
was unjust as was the world which caused the night to come
before its time."