We'd like to put out another newsletter
before the semester's over.
So if you have any good news with you pass it on to us.
We only print good news.
Don't forget that we'll have punch and cookies after Mr.
Nelson's finished tonight.
And copies of his book, The Tennis Player will be on sale.
--beautiful place in the world.
I mentioned his first book, a collection of short stories
called The Tennis Player.
This story first appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review,
Transatlantic Review, the North American Review,
Sewanee Review, Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review,
among others.
We're happy to have you with us tonight, Kent.
[APPLAUSE]
Thought I'd read one story from the book
and then see how the time goes.
I'm going to read the title story, which
is called The Tennis Player.
A simple motion made from the shoulder.
His left hand, holding the ball, came to the left knee,
and, as the weight of his body shifted forward
over the baseline, Nicky's arm swung upward in an arc.
Suddenly the tennis ball appeared against the blue sky,
like a moon rising.
Through years of practice, countless tosses,
Nicky saw only the ball.
It hung there, poised, and in the precise moment
before it fell again, the crack of his racquet sent it away.
Nicky forced himself halfway to the net,
but he lunged more than ran.
Agee sliced the ball back.
It came high and long, and Nicky paused
a split second trying to decide whether it would go out.
It had been too long since he had last
played to know by instinct.
His pause was his decision, and he let the ball sail.
It struck the court just beyond the baseline, out.
He turned a moment in Agee's direction, smiled at luck,
and then walked back to the fence where
the ball had stopped rolling.
His smile faded.
With a familiar motion, he dribbled the ball
from the court onto his racquet.
He could still do it effortlessly,
and no stranger could tell that he had been away.
He tossed the ball lightly from the racquet face
to his left hand and stepped to the baseline left of center.
When he was younger, 12 and 13, Nicky
had had tantrums on the court when the ball would not
do as he wished.
He cried when somebody cheated him.
He remembered that well.
He always read the lines honestly himself,
and he could not keep other people's falseness
from bothering him.
Sometimes, when he lost on cheating,
he broke his racquet on the ground,
but it was only out of love for the game.
That's how he explained it to his father.
"You can work out a new one in the store," his father said.
"But he cheated," Nicky protested.
"Two hours every day," his father answered.
"You can still play your tournaments on the weekends."
Dressed in a black robe, he moved lights into position
for sittings.
He knew cameras inside out, knew every trick of freezing
a face into a tedious smile.
He knew the smells of the chemicals
as the faces emerged onto cardboard in the trays.
The red lights, enlargers, dryers.
He knew the faces of women and newlyweds
when at last they returned to the store
to collect their own images.
The ball hung, and Nicky served the first ball into the tape.
The second, topspinned, turned oval
in the air, thudded on the court,
and bounced high and away to Agee's backhand.
The return came to his left, and Nicky reached out awkwardly,
out of position for such a hard shot.
The ball skipped by, and he stopped short.
Without expression, he turned and walked back again
to the baseline.
Agee lobbed a second ball over.
Nicky thought of his father's saying that the King of Sweden
played tennis until he was 80 years old.
His own movements came so strangely, dreamlike,
as though he were so old.
He told himself that he could not expect too much.
But the last was an easy ball, one he should never miss.
He remembered Agee differently.
Agee had seemed slower when they had played before,
and he had been more cheerful.
Now his friend seemed farther away, not certain anymore.
The ball always seemed beyond reach.
He started to think of the way Agee had lured him out to play.
Then, he thought, perhaps it had been Caroline.
"We all imagine what you've been through,"
Caroline had said to him.
They had sat on the swing in the warm spring night.
Before they had often sat there.
The terrace overlooked a long, wide swath of lawn
which extended down in the dark trees and the night.
"We try to understand as best we can.
All of us.
But, Nicky, you can't close us out.
You have to try as well.
You have to try to come back to us."
He had closed his eyes and had thought then--
And how did one go about coming back to everything?
Yes, he wanted to come back.
There was nothing he wished more than
to come back into everything just as he had left it.
But, happier.
He had been so tired then.
He opened his eyes again to the night.
"It's just that everyone has not moved at all,
and I've moved a great distance," he said.
His mind went on, and he spoke as though she would
know what he talked about.
"Suppose," he had said, "that I decide to do only one
thing for my whole life.
What happens then?"
"Why, then you become something," she said.
He remembered that he could not quite
see her eyes as she had said this.
"At least yo started something," she went on,
"if you make a decision like that."
"And what if the one thing you decide upon turns out
to be without value?"
Caroline had looked at him.
She stopped the movement of the swing
by putting her foot on the ground.
For a moment he thought she might
be angry at such nonsense, but as she leaned forward
into the light from the windows of the house,
he could see in her eyes that she did not understand.
She had never thought of such things.
Hers was another world-- one of application, restraint,
and respect for property.
She did not answer his question.
Instead she leaned closer to him and put a kiss on his lips.
Then her mother came outdoors.
"Nicky, it's Agee on the phone.
He wants to play tennis with you."
Caroline got up.
"Tell him you will, Nicky."
"I'm too tired."
"You aren't really too tired."
Not really, he thought.
Who knew what "really" meant?
He did.
It was lying in a place which was not home
and wishing you were not as you were
and being so lonely with so many people around you.
"No," he said.
"I don't want to."
"This is what I mean, Nicky," she pleaded.
"You've got to come back to us."
In the end he had agreed to play.
The first time was over.
Nicky zipped the cover over his racket.
"You can see the shape of the old self,"
Agee said, coming over.
"Nearly invisible," Nicky said.
He sensed Agee's hesitance to walk with him.
They headed for the clubhouse.
"Later in the summer we'll play again," Agee said.
Nicky remembered the days when they
had traveled the state like circus sideshow performers,
playing before the crowds.
The crowds were never quiet.
They cheered losing shots, and always expected
the favorite to win.
"No tournaments," Nicky said.
"That's over."
Nicky stopped on the lawn.
Caroline came down from the clubhouse toward them.
She looked bright, her blond hair
against the green of the trees.
She twirled a daisy and nervously in her hands.
Everything at the club looked perfect-- the spacious lawn,
the trees, the big clubhouse-- while the rest of the world
had to make do.
"I watched," she said cheerfully.
"You both played very well."
He had looked for her car before they'd gone out on the court.
She must have come later.
"Hello," he said, taking her hand.
Her blond hair fell to the sides of her face.
She turned to Agee.
"He'll soon be playing as well as ever, won't he?"
She said he would be, he thought,
precisely because that was what she was least certain about.
He felt like an invalid who had to be walked and talked.
They said to him, "Nicky, look at the light."
He looked at the light.
He was sure he had looked at the light.
It was a small point.
The voices came from their skulls, not from their mouths,
as though they were in a cavern.
"Nicky, look at the light."
He was sure he looked at the light,
but they kept repeating it.
Caroline looked at home in the clubhouse.
"I've ordered lunch," she said.
They went in.
Nicky looked around at the glass.
It was an air-conditioned room and it felt cold.
There seemed to be glass everywhere.
On a table he saw a stack of magazines.
That was what had done it before,
and seeing them startled him.
Before, he had stopped reading newspapers
and watching television and looking at magazines.
Mr. Davidson, the club chairman, came over to shake hands.
"Good to see you back, Nicky," he said.
Nicky nodded.
It was as though he were back from the war,
except that if he had come back from the war,
their enthusiasm would not have been guarded.
"Looked pretty good out there, I must say."
"Look at the light."
The light came from a point in the flashlight.
"That's fine, Nicky."
In the beginning he had seen the light,
but then as they said "fine," he had not.
He did not feel himself move.
"Look at the light again.
Over here."
He did not move.
"That's very good, Nicky.
You're getting much better."
Mr. Davidson held onto his hand like an old uncle.
"I wish it felt good out there," Nicky said.
Caroline moved off with Agee.
"Nicky," Mr. Davidson said, "I have a favor."
Caroline and Agee had gone off to leave the two of them alone.
"Maybe it will help you out, too," Mr. Davidson went on.
"Damon, the club pro, can't take his lessons in July.
He has that clinic in Jennings, and we need somebody
to take over the lessons for him for a while."
Caroline was sitting down at the table, looking at him.
He could see that she knew what the conversation was about.
He saw her mouth moving in pantomime, "Say yes."
"Look at the light now, Nicky," they had said.
"Looks different now," Nicky had answered.
It was still that point of light,
but now he could smile when he saw it.
It looked very clear.
"You're going to be home pretty soon."
"I know."
"Have you made any plans?"
"Not really.
I thought I would stay around a while."
"What about tennis?"
"Maybe play a little tennis again
and think about what's ahead."
"It would mean $10 an hour plus the pro shop,"
Mr. Davidson said.
"I haven't played at all," Nicky said.
"You haven't forgotten," Mr. Davidson said, smiling.
"It's like riding a bicycle, but it's rusty."
"Well, it's only lessons.
It won't be hard for you."
He saw Caroline at the table.
Tennis used to be just young days running in the sun.
Now it was not.
"I'm sort of at loose ends," Nicky said.
"It would help me out."
He looked at Caroline.
"Good," Mr. Davidson said.
"Then we're all set."
At 8:00 every morning in July he was
on the court in sneakers, white shorts, and white shirt.
The sun burned him.
In slow motion he demonstrated the strokes
of the game to children and ladies--
forehands with the handshake grip, reaching
toward the net on the follow-through;
backhands with the elbow locked at the moment of impact;
serves like throwing the racquet over the net
without letting go.
He watched the awkward movements of the women,
the uncontrolled hitting of the children.
He listened to them laugh.
From the moment he had agreed to teach,
Nicky began something new with the people around him.
He had given in to telling people
what they wanted to hear.
Of course in the details of the senses
he was scrupulously honest.
He did not charge people too much for their lessons
or say that shots were in which were truly out.
He just did not tell them everything.
He did not tell people what would hurt them.
It was easier to omit.
"I don't mind the work," he said to Caroline.
"Really, Nicky?"
He did not mind the work.
It was the feeling he got from it that he could not stand.
Sometimes Caroline came out to meet him for lunch.
They sat in the snack room where instants of his former life
was hung on the walls--
his arm around Agee after the state finals;
another of the sectionals.
He looked at his own tedious smiles.
"You ought to try another tournament," she said once.
"Just for your confidence."
"Maybe I will," he said.
He knew he could not.
At 2:00 he met a class of young boys.
Caroline loved to watch the children.
She sat beyond the fence on a green bench,
laughing as the boys ran wildly over the courts.
Nicky knew a few would become good if they played.
But he could not wait that long.
Ball after ball he hit to weak backhands,
making sure the ball bounced to the perfect spot.
"Watch the ball," he repeated over and over.
"Racquet back sooner.
It's too late when the ball is already there."
Caroline was the only respite, and yet he
knew it was she he could never come back to.
He spent most evenings with her, sitting and talking idly.
He did not tell her he loved her.
She believed he loved her without words,
and he let her believe.
He decided that at times he did love her,
but since it was only at times, he knew he did not.
Sometimes they made love.
Those are the times that all else faded from his mind, even
the terrible light.
He knew she wanted no other than him,
and he tried to make her see that he had no other than her.
He held her, knowing that for him there was no other chance.
He could feel that the sheets were clean.
They looked tan behind her hair.
Though Caroline was there in the darkness under him,
he did not think of her.
He knew that what he did was the worst thing he could do.
Yet it was all he had, all he could do.
He knew it was not so much her, not
so much being inside her body.
It was simply being inside, lost within someone else,
all thought concentrated outward.
It was the end of having to think.
It was terrible to have it not last forever,
to awake and find the world more pale and less tenable
than ever.
Always the next day he was back on the court with the children.
He tried to vary his method, but it was not
his method which lacked.
Sometimes his mind wandered to the hospital
where he had been tucked away from all of them,
beyond the vision of all else, the all-else unknowing that it
was to blame.
His mother used to say to him, "Nicky, are you well?
You don't look well."
"No, I'm not."
"You don't look at all well."
"What do looks have to do with it?"
He would go down to the photography store
to freeze those smiles.
He knew that it was just that his was the equal of any
of those terrible expressions.
He went on from day to day as if on a tightrope,
the fear of falling increasing as the tightrope became
looser and looser--
the cars, taxes, directions, space flights, schedules,
discussions, airplanes, motels, counters, colors, money, neon,
swimming pools, success, government, medicines,
advertisements driving him on and on over the loose rope.
He stood in one spot on the court,
leaning over his basket of tennis balls, throwing hitting
and talking, "Careful, watch.
Now follow through."
The long summer seemed to be made of the same weather,
always hot air and blue sky.
The sky seemed to open outward and beyond.
Nicky baked to a deep brown; his hair lightened.
Damon did not come back to take over his teaching in August,
but it did not matter then.
When Mr. Davidson asked Nicky whether he would stay on,
Nicky accepted.
"I'll be glad to," he said.
Nicky never began to believe himself
what he knew everyone else inferred from what he said.
He was too removed and watched himself too closely.
He did not make his world over into happiness.
He drifted, not bothering to explain.
Toward the end of August, he began to live through the days.
It seemed to him like a great eternity,
each day adding to the others to make a dark pall, like velvet.
Each day he thought he would fall.
But Caroline said, "You look so much healthier
being out in the sun.
You're much more like your old self, Nicky."
"I am myself," he said.
"Look at the light."
He could see the point of light, but he could not move.
"Do you think you might try a tournament?
Just a small one?"
"I think I might," Nicky said.
We'll wait and see when it comes up."
He often told Caroline that he would be delayed at the club
and that he could not come over to her place until later.
This was true, but not for the reason
he knew she would believe.
She would think that he had a late lesson,
or that the accounting of the shop had to be checked.
But it was not for those reasons, or for any other
than he imagined she would see.
It was only that he wanted to be alone after the club was empty.
The club was a perfect place.
In the evening the courts were no longer
sprayed with tennis balls.
He did not have to watch shouting children
as they raced after the balls.
He did not have to say anything to anyone.
The club grounds were so peaceful in dark green.
The air was filled with the sounds of crickets and breezes.
Dusk came slowly.
One evening in late August, he stayed after lessons.
He lay stretched out on the grass beside the courts.
He stared through the sky, watching the light blue shade
darken toward violet.
The trees above him wavered and turned slowly to darkness.
Stars began.
He loved watching the sky, imagining how deep it was
and how it was filled up with space.
His loose rope hung over that space.
It seemed to him that it would be peaceful, that fall,
going through the space of the sky.
The world moved through several hours.
In this peace a motor sounded somewhere far
down the gravel drive.
The headlights the car struck the leaves over his head,
breaking the trees into shadows as the car
moved down toward the clubhouse.
He sat up.
As the car turned into the parking lot,
the beams moved across his white tennis clothes.
He recognized the car as Caroline's.
The door slammed, and he lay back.
Her footsteps across the grass drowned all the other sounds.
"What are you doing still here?" she asked.
"I thought you had to go home tonight."
"I told you my mother asked me to come."
"But you didn't go?"
"No."
"I just called there and your mother
said they hadn't seen you.
We thought something might have happened."
She sat down on the grass beside him,
folding her dress under her.
"You didn't come to me either."
"I've been here lying on the grass," Nicky said.
He nearly started to tell her how the sky seemed
to go on forever, not in imaginable time, but in a way
he could not even imagine, just deep and deeper.
Instead he said, "I would have come by to see you later."
"When you weren't home I was worried," Caroline said.
I had to see you.
He could not see her eyes.
He thought that whenever it was important to see her eyes,
they were sitting in the dark.
Something new was in her voice.
Nicky turned on his side toward her.
The sun from the day still formed to the skin.
His legs felt numb and heavy.
He didn't want to think about what it might
be that she had to tell him.
He started to reach out and touch her.
"Agee called and said I should talk
to you about the tournament coming up," she said.
"He thinks it might bring you back."
He knew it was not what--
that was not what she had come to say.
"What about my lessons?"
"It's just a tournament in the city.
A small one."
"I mean, my lessons were supposed to bring me back,
too," Nicky said.
"You are back.
But you don't want to go on giving tennis lessons forever.
You're a top player.
Lessons aren't in you, but this is, Nicky, please."
All he could think of was falling
through that endless dark space.
"OK," he said.
That space.
He reached for her and began stroking her bare arm.
He heard her breath start, and he moved closer to her.
He did not want to hear what she had to tell him.
Nicky began hitting with Agee for an hour
and a half every day.
Caroline had signed up for an hour lesson right before lunch
and gave up her time for their practice.
Nicky took a half hour of his own.
Agee was good to him.
Nicky started off riveted to the same spot on the court,
as though it were a lesson.
He could not adjust to Agee's hard shots.
"I can't," Nicky whispered over and over.
He made countless mistakes.
He no longer watched the ball, but instead hit out
of forgotten skill.
He did just what he belabored in lessons to his students.
Agee encouraged him and took it all.
After two weeks of practice, Nicky began to see the signs.
His legs felt more elastic.
His instincts improved; he knew where the ball would come.
He started following his serve to the net
with a series of quick steps.
The serve itself he whittled deeper and deeper
into the service court, a little closer to the corners.
Caroline also came to watch.
"You must see the improvement from day to day,"
she said, when they had come from the court.
"I see an improvement," Agee joined in,
wiping the sweat from his face.
"I don't think the lessons have hurt you.
You were only lazy."
Nicky smiled.
He knew it was coming back.
He felt the old solid stroke of the racquet when he hit.
He was trying shots that had been
dormant for a year and a half-- short topspin
crosscourts, drop-shots, backhand volleys
to the deep corners.
They had begun to fall.
Even his mood during lessons picked up.
He was less bored, and more enthusiastic about the game.
"Weight always forward," he urged.
"Step into the ball.
Never backward."
Only one thing held him back--
Caroline.
Every day she was there, not pressing him in any way,
but there.
She seemed to hang close to him, always at his side,
and yet she did not have the same cheer in her.
She seemed wary of everything he said.
"Tell me the truth, now, Nicky," she said.
"What are you doing tonight?"
"I am telling the truth," he said.
"You're not planning anything?"
"No.
Why are you like that?
Because of the other night?"
He had thought about his omissions.
"No," she said.
"Look, I only wanted to isolate myself," he said.
"I had to be alone because then I'm not lying to anyone."
"You don't have to explain anything," she said.
"I understand."
"You don't understand.
It wasn't only you."
"Now look here at the light, Nicky.
Over here."
The point of light seemed very far away.
The voices came from space.
He tried to move.
"So you're back, Nicky.
What happened out there?
Look at the light."
"And now you think your life has purpose again?"
Caroline looked at him closely.
He could see that her eyes were ready to cry.
"You said yourself that I had to start somewhere
with one thing."
He knew tennis was not it.
Then the tears came.
Nicky could see no reason, but he knew the reasons were not
often seen.
She rushed up to him and put her arms around him and held.
It was the way he often held her,
except that he could never cry.
Before every tournament match in the old days
Nicky had a ritual.
He would sit by himself for half an hour in some quiet place
and concentrate.
He would hold his fists tightly closed for a minute at a time,
pounding them slowly and soundlessly against his knees.
He would tell himself to watch the ball
and to hit hard without being nervous.
He tried to relax.
And he told himself that, if he got behind,
he should change his strategy.
Before each serve he had to bounce the ball
three times for luck.
And if he were winning, he should never
think he had won until the last point was played.
The hour before this tournament, Nicky he
knew he was not in the old days.
As before he went off by himself,
but he did not think about relaxing or about any
of the other things.
He had been with Caroline the night before.
She'd been quiet, sitting there in the swing.
From the step where he sat, he could look down the pathway.
He listened to the crickets.
"Come sit with me," she had said.
He had not moved.
He could sense in her voice that it was finally coming.
"What do you have to tell me?"
he asked.
In a suddenness he had not expected,
the words broke from her-- a child, Nicky, a child--
and for a long time he sat listening to the darkness.
He saw himself growing dimmer and dimmer like the fireflies
far away on the lawn, and he had gotten up and started walking
out toward the dark trees.
Later, sometime during their lovemaking,
he had told her that he loved her.
It was not any kind of omission.
He knew he had had to say it.
He could not stand the dishonesty,
but there was no chance anymore to come back.
"Look at the light now, Nicky."
He did not see a light.
"What was it, Nicky?"
He could not feel himself move.
"The light is over here.
What was it?"
He could not speak.
The space seemed to close around him.
"Was it the lies, Nicky?"
He did not see anything.
He took his racquets out to the court.
In the warm-up he hit the ball as if he were concentrating.
He knew his opponent from years before,
and Nicky was certain to win easily.
He moved mechanically around the court,
reacting without thinking.
Nicky took eight practice serves.
Then he stepped up to the line and bounced the ball
three times.
It was his old lucky way.
Then he leaned back and pointed his racquet toward the net.
A simple motion from the shoulder.
The left hand, holding the ball, came to the left knee
and, as the weight of his body shifted forward
over the baseline, Nicky's arm swung upward in an arc.
Suddenly the tennis ball appeared against the sky,
like a moon rising.
Years of practice and countless tosses had taught him,
but now the ball seemed to disappear before his eyes,
and all he saw was the wide, deep expanse of space.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm going to read a short one.
Called-- it's called "Instants."
I-N-S-T-A-N-T-S.
In winter, the flat plain before the mountains
is a wide cover of blowing snow.
On the plowed road, the snow swirls like dust,
the stark white of the snow drifts passing quickly
out my side window.
Today is cold sun.
A black Volvo passes me going about 80 on the straight road,
three pairs of skis stripe the roof,
undersides blue and orange, Denver license.
The man in the backseat takes a long look at Ellen beside me.
She smiles, not at him, but at me.
I look ahead at the snow which is blown up by the Volvo.
It curls then rests.
I imagine photographing the patterns
as I once had with sand dunes.
My equipment is in the back of the car.
Before I slow down, the gust of wind has swept away the path.
In Hartsel, the middle of the plain, we slow down.
Another 60 miles to skiing.
I drive slowly past the six or seven buildings in the town.
The Volvo is stopped for gas.
Two young men dressed in colorful wool sweaters
stand beside the gas pumps while the woman goes inside.
"Do you think they're going to Vail?"
Ellen asks.
"I don't know," I say.
The unnecessary question breaks the silence
we've been riding in.
"How should I know?"
Ellen looks at me with dark eyes.
I did not mean to be short with her.
It's something else, which I could not tell her.
Outside the town, we turn onto Route 9,
a small road that curves up along the edge of the mountain.
The ranches along the road look bound up
in snow for the winter.
I wonder how the people survive.
The Volvo appears again in the rear view mirror,
its silver chrome bumpers seems to rush at us.
Again it passes, turning up the snow.
The man in the back looks Ellen over once again.
I try to see her expression when she
looks the other way, not following the Volvo as it
races around the curve.
"He likes you," I say.
She smiles, taking it as a compliment.
The smile broadens her face.
She looks fine with her hair pulled back.
Her eyes seem pleased.
"Should I pull up to them?"
I ask.
Her smile continues.
"No."
I press my foot down on the accelerator and the VW picks up
speed, slowly.
I leave my foot down.
"Please," Ellen says.
But I leave it down.
It seems to me as though we are suspended in the moving
car like water at the tips of icicles,
not knowing whether we shall freeze or fall.
I slow for an unbanked right curve, trying to hug the hill.
The VW is too light, and it slides out toward the left.
I let up on the accelerator and pump the brakes.
A burst of sun hits from behind the hill.
The recognition of something on the road
strikes me before it does Ellen.
I press hard on the brakes.
Ellen jerks forward but grabs the dash in time.
I hold hard on the wheel.
Space seems to evaporate between us
and the unmoving shattered cars on the road.
To the left of the wreck is a space to squeeze through.
The black Volvo lies crushed against a Pontiac.
Steam rises from the two engines into the cold air.
The Volvo's horn is stuck, and his tone changes as we inch by.
Steel mashed and slanted skyward,
hood crushed, skis ripped apart, glass shattered.
Someone stirs in the Pontiac, but no one in the Volvo moves.
The driver's head is wedged between the door and the body.
The woman lies over the hood.
Ellen's friend in the back seat sits with head bent forward.
An instant.
I pull my sunglasses up onto my knitted cap.
From the top of the mountain at Vail,
the earth spreads out like a white apron covering a lap.
Pockets of dark towns far below are folded
into the creases of the apron.
Over the valley, the skyline is only and all mountains.
I begin to believe I am not mortal.
The morning's accident is in the past.
I am a bird which can fly the length
and breadth In the anticipation of my flight, I know no bounds.
Convictions, not thoughts, are in my mind.
Born, the certainty that lives are
hollow when two people are no longer of use to one another.
I am thinking of Ellen.
I pull the glasses into place again.
The sky turns yellow-blue.
The straps of the ski poles fit tightly
around the backs of my wrists.
With leg and pole together, I push away from my perch.
Impetus delivered, I glide.
To my right, the mountain drops off precipitously to a basin
below.
I dig the edge of the ski inward and lean outward over the hill.
The snow hisses beneath me.
Whatever I need I have learned long ago
and do not think about.
Weight farther back in the powder, tuck and lift up.
It is not like other things.
I stop.
Down in the folds the valley, Ellen skis easier terrain.
She is foolishly afraid to ski here with me,
and I am foolishly afraid to ski there with her.
Where I stand, the mountain cuts off the wind.
In the quiet I pick out a cloud and watch
it move across the mountains.
Clouds are scarce today.
It reminds me how lazy I am.
I cannot muster my strength to hold onto people.
It would seem that such a lazy person would content himself
and hold onto one.
Without thinking, the weight moves.
It seems that I barely make contact with the smooth snow.
Pole and spring up.
I angle cross-country toward the manicured trail.
I hurry, as though I have seen something to be afraid of.
I am making a run for it.
Full speed, I hit a drop-off.
It looked to me like the one white apron.
In the air my body sinks quickly,
though my mind seems to wait.
I lurch and lose balance.
I feel my poles flip out underneath
and the skis drag through the air.
A tip catches and I snap forward, arms outstretched.
The first puff of snow hits my glasses.
I feel the binding snap open.
It is the second impact, the bounce,
when the pain stings my knee.
I have been drinking solid scotches for almost an hour
and have limped back and forth to the bathroom.
Ellen has gone to the room to rest, and I wait for her.
A stranger notices my cast.
"Today?" he asks, pointing.
He has on a gray sweater, lighter than his hair,
baggy pants, and slippers.
I nod, and he smiles.
"Broken?"
His questions in one word bother me for no reason.
There are pouches under his eyes which make him look weary.
"Torn ligaments."
"It could have been worse," he said.
"I could have been dead," I say.
I think of the accident that morning.
The lightness of my tone frightens me.
He begins to tell a life story, how he got where he got.
Ellen comes in, sleepy-eyed from a nap.
The man spends a long time looking at her.
"Profession?" he asks me.
"Free-lance photographer.
Travel, fashion, on-the-scene things.
Almost whatever I can get.
"I don't like the "press, he says.
He goes on, thinking aloud that the press has
sponsored the war and the riots of the divisions
in the country.
I keep sipping my scotch as he starts to rave.
I can feel Ellen take my arm, as though she knows
what's coming through my head.
I listen.
The room begins to wave like heat over a radiator.
"Come on, let's go," Ellen whispers to me.
I stand up.
And continue to listen and listen
until I'm not hearing words anymore,
but only the hammering in my head.
It is the puffy skin under his eyes that keeps coming to mind.
"Please," Ellen says.
He's calling the press people liars and opportunists
of the worst sort.
"Hey!"
I shout.
He looks at me and stops talking.
For the first time he really sees me.
I can tell by his eyes.
My fist rushes forward from the chest
and connects just to the right of his nose
and a little above the mouth.
I miss the sacks under his eyes.
I reach down and take Ellen's hand away.
"I've been drinking too much," I say.
The voice seems to come disembodied from the air.
I open my eyes and almost expect to see the voice,
but it is only the darkness of the room.
Ellen put your head on my chest and rests her hands there too.
Her warmth seems so genuine that I cannot disbelieve it.
"What are you thinking?" she asks.
"Nothing."
I wonder in the silence whether anyone can think nothing.
Ellen moves.
"Sometimes you shut me out so tightly." she says.
She sits up on the bed in the dark.
Her nakedness, moving away, is our nakedness together.
She doesn't cry.
We had met three months before on one of my assignments
to photograph a new exhibit she had arranged for a fine arts
center.
I see her there, as though in a photograph.
Brilliant dark hair, dark eyes, yellow dress.
Though now the light has gone.
Lying one night on a picnic blanket, at first she said no.
She seemed to be one with too much to lose.
Then it had grown darker, and in the dusk
the world had seemed to dissolve into dust around us,
and timeless, she said yes, because it no longer mattered
what she lost.
She could not help it.
I remember still her short hair then,
and her wide-lipped mouth, and later, with hands
shaking as she bent over the cigarette.
The sheets rustle as she turns to me again.
"There must be some other way for us to go on," she says.
"When it's like this I don't know where I stand."
"I don't know where I stand either."
"With me you know."
I cannot answer.
I'm running away.
As I run, I try to grasp one thing and then another,
to hold onto them for just a moment of time,
to give me support, but I can hold nothing.
It is painful to have everything slip just beyond my reach.
But after a while, pain is no different from the absence
of pain.
Finally I say, "With me you know, too."
We lie together a long time.
We return to the familiar warmth, sleeping.
I hear her breath, and at last inch away from touching her.
In the middle of the night, I wake and turn to her.
She does not resist, but eases over in the bed.
Connection of the most superficial sort,
almost like a glance.
That realization sends me running again,
mindless, with the white snow rushing past me.
My legs running, and in the darkness
the silence broken by Ellen's whines.
Then it happens suddenly.
At last, the running slows.
I breathe again, sad to come back.
Instants.
My first memory of particles was one afternoon
as a child when the sunshafts came into my room
through the windows.
The light illuminated millions of particles
of dust floating in the air.
I could sweep my hand through the shaft of light,
stirring the particles.
But always they returned to floating again,
in and out of the light, according
to the currents of the air.
One moment I could see them, and the next they
had passed the border of light into the shadow
and disappeared.
Instants.
The instant of a shutter.
The sand dunes.
The pattern of snow curls on the road.
The film freezes the moving particles.
Beyond the shutter the particles in life continue to move.
A bird in flight continues to soar.
I have often sat alone in my darkroom
hanging these instants along a wire.
I have divided light into moments.
Particles of separated time.
At what point does a heart begin to flutter in the womb?
I have at times stood before a trayful of negatives
for hours, wondering what I have done to myself.
It is sleep coming on me.
A few minutes have passed since Ellen and I have made love.
I drift in that moment before sleep,
like the particles of dust through the sunshaft
of light in my room, not knowing even whether I am in the sun
or in the shadow.
[APPLAUSE]
This story is called "The Time and Manner."
And this is my quote from James Joyce, A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man.
"Death is certain.
The time and manner are uncertain,
whether from long disease or from some unexpected accident;
the Son of God cometh at an hour when you little expect Him.
Be therefore ready every moment, seeing that you
may die at any moment."
The zebra came out from the shade of the trees
and onto the short grass of the plain.
Sensing no danger, it did not hurry, but rather
moved with deliberate ease, like a sturdy horse crossing
a pasture to the trough.
In any animal there is a majesty of being
within the encompassing dark force of life and beauty,
and the zebra's hard, black-and-white patterned body
stood out on that immense plain the way
the bright plumage of a bird might flash to the eye
from an exposed perch.
For miles around nothing could be
seen except the grass, a few trees, and the sweep of space.
The plain seemed empty then, except for the zebra
and the two men who crouched with their rifles
in a scrap of brush.
Through the hazy glass of a cross-haired scope,
Elliott noticed that the zebra looked different from the way
it did to the naked eye.
It was not just the magnification.
The animal seemed somehow more finite,
enclosed within that circular black border which
blocked out the rest of the plain from his vision.
Elliott squinted as he gauged the shot.
Then, without lowering the gun, he turned to the man
beside him.
They confronted each other and in a silent question,
as though asking for a final time
whether they wanted to go through with it.
Bradley was a man of few words-- he spoke with his eyes.
All the lines of his face seemed to run to the sunken eye
pockets in which his needle-sharp blue eyes were set
off against darkly tanned skin.
On this occasion he said neither yes nor no.
Apparently he believed that the decision
had been taken some time long before in a back room in New
York.
Bradley turned away and looked back out toward the plain.
Elliott peered again through the scope, his excitement mounting.
The heat shimmered up from the dry ground,
and there was no breeze to carry a scent.
More than anything he wanted to wipe away
the sweat that had suddenly risen on his forehead,
but he could not risk the movement.
It seemed like a fine specimen.
Elliott used that word in his mind.
And after coming all the way from there to here
how could he be expected to do other than what
he had come to do?
The zebra's magnified body rippled in the heat.
They had come for the money.
A single report.
Even before he lowered the rifle,
Elliott could see the blood flowing
from the wound in the neck.
Behind the zebra, other animals he had not noticed
began to run, bounding white-assed toward the hills
or back to the east toward the trees.
The zebra would have run, too, but it could not run now.
It seemed riveted there, wanting to run,
but staring in mindless terror as if knowing it
must face the enemy on behalf of the others.
Bradley came up out of the brush.
He hadn't liked the business from the beginning and now
that it had started in earnest, he
seemed to want to get it over with quickly.
Elliott stood up, too, and wiped the sweat from his face.
The shot had been good; there was
nothing to be tracked farther, and he was glad of that.
He didn't know whether Bradley could have taken it.
He put the rifle down beside his pack and came out.
The zebra tottered and lurched forward,
going down on its forelegs and coughing blood.
Elliott watched Bradley start to run across the dusty ground
to the animal.
He didn't know what the hurry was.
From the beginning it had been a a simple business
deal, negotiated in various offices in New York.
Elliott had been sent to bring back skins.
Bradley had come in later, in Nairobi,
because he supposedly knew the country and the way
the wardens worked.
"He's been in a war," Bradley said, when Elliott finally
got to the animal.
The hide was full of nicks and cuts, little gouges
that Elliott had not been able to see through the scope.
Across the side of the face was a bad scar,
a bleached-out patch of flaking skin
about two inches wide, extending from just below the eye
to the bridge of the nose.
Elliott had not seen that either.
It had been on the zebra's dark side, the side of the moon that
was never visible.
That kind of scar on the face of a man
would have ruined the man's life.
"He'll be all right."
Bradley held out the heavy knife.
"You want to work on him?"
Elliott took the knife almost as a reaction.
"Because I shot?" he asked.
"You know how," Bradley answered.
He didn't want to argue.
Elliott bent down and dug the knife
into the hide at the neck, broke through,
and started to slit the belly.
He tried not to go too deep so the blood would not
get on the hide.
"You can pull back as I work," Elliott told him.
"Hold on and pull toward the backbone."
Bradley's hands were shaking as he leaned down
over the carcass.
Elliott smiled.
Bradley wasn't used to death, he thought.
The tracking and the waiting had been worth the moment
that Bradley had to get down over the open carcass
and smell the warm insides.
All those expressionless hours camping on the reserve,
holding back every detail of his own life
while Elliott talked to the fire about what
he'd been doing to raise enough money to get along.
Bradley could have cased a bank, Elliott thought,
but the act itself-- that was another matter.
He wouldn't shoot.
Elliott had to do that.
And now he wouldn't skin.
Elliott cut slowly, drawing out the time.
He knew the shot had made noise and that you can never
tell who might be in the area.
But they had scouted the whole district,
and for cover they had good cameras in the packs,
if they were needed.
Elliott wasn't nervous about time.
"Just hold the thing back," Elliott ordered.
He cut in expert strokes at the membrane just between the skin
and the underlying layer of fat and muscle.
He knew his work.
Until a few years before he had guided for trophies in Canada.
Some bad things had got around, [AUDIO OUT] layer
of fat and muscle.
He knew his work.
Until a few years before he had guided for trophies in Canada.
Some bad things had got around, and those things
had ruined his references.
The business had dissipated almost overnight.
In a messy affair he'd lost his license, and he was through.
But now he had a new calling.
He worked in silence until the job was done.
The zebra's carcass was a mass of fat and blood,
and without the pattern black-and-white hide
the animal seemed nameless.
Elliott stood up and stuffed the hide into a plastic bag
and handed it to Bradley.
The plain had been wiped clean of life now,
and the sky seemed low and even.
Both land and sky were empty all the way to the low rising
hills in the distance.
Elliott wiped his face on a handkerchief.
He had worked hard and there was still more
to do once they got back to the Rover.
They had to scrape the fat and put a solution on it
so that it wouldn't rot or harden up.
Bradley could do that.
They walked back to the brush and got the rifles and packs.
Bradley still had that nervousness about him
and hurried to collect things.
Elliott took a drink of whiskey and washed it down with water
from the canteen.
"It's all him Elliott told him, offering the whiskey.
Bradley refused.
They had left the Rover about two miles back,
farther than Elliott had thought reasonable.
But he had wanted to avoid arguments.
Now they had to walk back.
It was just after 4:00 in the afternoon,
still plenty of light.
It took only a few minutes to get back through the brush
and begin climbing the open part of the gully which
led to the ridge.
Bradley went first.
He had an awkward way of walking on the slope,
as though he were pulling his legs behind him
rather than stepping.
His pace was more rapid now than it
had been when they came down.
Elliott watched him and decided to say nothing.
About halfway up the hill Bradley stopped.
Elliott was ready to rest.
He took another shot of the whiskey.
Bradley was looking back toward the carcass
lying abandoned in the slanting rays of the sun.
It seemed small now from their height and distance
for the huge, empty plain surrounding it.
Then suddenly Bradley raised his arm and pointed.
Elliott followed the upraised arm but saw nothing.
Bradley hadn't moved.
With his head lifted, and his face was as motionless
as Elliott had ever seen it.
"What is it?"
But just as he asked the question, he saw it himself.
In the endless blue waste a black speck floated--
like a piece of dust caught close in a room
or like an insect whirling.
It depended upon the distance.
But this speck was high up, the distance
measured only by its being nearly invisible.
Elliott raised the rifle and focused the scope.
The zebra had not been dead over 40 minutes.
Elliott lowered the rifle again.
The black multiplied.
Three, four of them.
They were distinct shapes now, with wings angled back,
gliding in a direct line.
Elliott turned full circle.
He knew this was what happened at death,
but he had never thought how they came in.
He had thought they always circled for a long time,
waiting perhaps for the rot.
But they were coming straight in across the open plain.
Deaths in families and accidents he read about in the newspapers
never allowed for vultures.
He thought more of antiseptics and had a certain detachment
of death from his own life.
He imagined embalming.
And even in Canada when he was a guide
there had never been the tainted quality about death.
No spoilage.
When he shot he had always been hidden in the trees
or in the crags of rocks, and they brought in the meat.
People
Bradley turned back to the trail and started up.
"Wait a minute."
Elliott took out his canteen, poured water over his hand,
and wiped his face.
"I want to watch."
"Go ahead and watch," Bradley said.
"Don't you?"
"No."
Bradley went on a short distance and then stopped again.
"We have the work to do."
Elliott felt the anger rise.
"You do some of it!" he shouted.
"That will be a change.
Get the hide cleaned up."
He had not wanted to argue.
That was always the first rule when you were in business.
Bradley had been good for what they
had told him to do in New York.
He knew the country and how to avoid the wardens.
But he was too cautious; too silent.
Elliott considered whether he should go back anyway.
Finally he said, "I won't be long."
Bradley went on without a word.
Elliott watched his awkward climbing
to the crest of the hill.
Then he disappeared beyond the brown dusty curve.
Elliott felt a vague sense of disquiet being alone.
Not that there was any particular danger.
He had the rifle.
He could not get lost.
But he had never been upon such a strange, immense expanse
of land before; he did not like the emptiness of it.
He turned his attention quickly back downward toward the plain.
The lands seemed to darken, moving
with the shadows of the birds.
Elliott tried to count but already there were too many.
They soared in now from every direction.
The first of them circled in a close, tight ring
to test for danger, and began to come down.
It was the silence which began to get to him.
He wondered how these scavengers communicated-- was it
by eyesight alone or by the scent of death?
Did one vulture spot the carcass and his honing in on it
alert the rest of them to the discovery?
There was no shade.
The whole plain stretched out before him
in broad bands of browns and yellows.
Even the trees were dust-covered and a hard, dry green.
A couple of vultures dropped to the ground
next to the carcass, their huge wings easing them down quietly.
The first of the birds that touched the ground nearly
made him sick.
After the first, the others came more rapidly.
They no longer made the short circles,
but rather came sweeping in directly in a dive.
The first birds went into the carcass
through the anus, the softest part.
The great hooked beaks tore into the bowels of the zebra
and ripped out the intestines, which curled from the body
like an tight white hose.
Other birds fought for pieces.
There was simply not enough space
at the carcass for so many.
But with the hide taken, it was easier.
Within a few minutes the birds had shredded the flesh.
Small fights were constant, and even small bits of meat
were prizes which had to be won again and again.
Elliott felt all of this run through him,
settle in upon his mind in a slowly building terror.
This body was disintegrating before his eyes,
pulled apart and consumed.
What frightened him was the feeling of being dead and not
knowing what was happening to your flesh.
He imagined what he knew impossible-- being
dead and still sensing the sharp jabs of beaks into his skin.
He lay there unmoving beneath the plague.
Then all at once, when could not stand the sensation any longer,
he pointed the rifle toward the carcass and fired.
The vultures exploded into the air like a mass of black paper.
he saw right away that he had hit one of them,
had wounded it.
It ran in circles, fluttering a huge extended wing.
The rest did not move high or very far.
Several went into the low dead limbs of a nearby snag.
Some simply raised themselves into the air,
like a man's standing up to rest from bending over,
and then settled back down again.
Elliott wondered-- did vultures eat vultures?
He aimed, this time carefully, and fired again.
The sun did not let up, even though the light was easing.
Sweat kept coming.
He was entranced, shocked.
The vultures hissed and struggled over the dead bird,
just as they continued to do over the zebra carcass,
mindless of the threat that he wielded.
He fired another shot into the air above them,
but the vultures did not scatter.
Their giant wings flapping for leverage,
they continued to pull at the body.
He stood up in panic.
Something in him had build up and exploded,
and he dropped the rifle and ran forward screaming.
There was a sudden lull and the vultures
seemed to hesitate for a moment, as if alert
to some possible new danger.
Elliott let his weight carry him down
the slope toward the gully.
He waved his arms wildly and kept screaming.
A few of the vultures flew up, but only when
he came crashing forward from the brush in the gully
did they seem to know he was there.
He lunged forward in the heat across the dusty ground,
panting and screaming in a hoarse voice.
The vultures finally scattered.
They ran and took off in labored flight, heavy from eating.
Some of them could only bound a short distance away.
Elliott reeled forward and fell onto the zebra's
mutilated carcass.
Slowly he came to his senses.
He did not understand what had made him go crazy.
Against the still soft, bloody flesh
he could not believe that he had come all the way back
down that hill and was clutching the torn body the way
a woman might grasp the body of her dead child.
Slowly he turned, half expecting to see Bradley
at the crest of the hill.
He must have heard the shots and started back.
But the ridge was still the same simple curve
of brown bounded by blue.
The heat sifted through his clothes
the way dust came through the closed windows of the Rover
as they drove it over the powder roads.
The vultures eyed him from perches in the trees
and from the ground.
He had left the rifle.
He tried to figure out how to save what was left.
He couldn't take any of the meat back with him,
and he couldn't stay.
He had to get back himself and help Bradley with the skin.
And even if he'd had the rifle, it
was pointless to shoot the vultures because there
were hundreds, thousands.
He looked carefully at what was left of the zebra.
They had started a good job.
The innards were gone and the neck, where the wound had been,
was eaten away to the bone.
The great scar on the now eyeless face
was obliterated by blood.
He thought of burying the carcass,
but beneath the dust was hard-baked ground.
Pouring loose dirt over the blood would do nothing.
He wiped his forehead clear of dirt and sweat.
It was within the order of things that other animals ate.
He understood that in the wild, one animal fed upon another.
But he could not comprehend the chaotic condition of life.
He had never before seen the randomness and viciousness
that one form of life wrought upon another
or upon its own kind.
He tried to imagine how it feels to be
intelligent and defenseless.
The soft, blood-red carcass beneath him distracted him.
He tried to imagine, then, the way he
most did not want to die.
He had considered it before, but never deeply.
Now he thought of various deaths,
but always came back to one--
he did not want to be shot in the head while he was asleep.
He would probably die in bed of old age.
Someone would take him to the morgue in some big city.
At least he would not be put onto the plain for dying,
his body torn apart by vultures.
He tried to imagine what would happen after the morgue,
but nothing came to him.
Would relatives come?
Would there be sadness?
His imagination never got to funerals, cemeteries, or marble
stones.
He got up slowly and backed off.
Blood and dust seemed to cover everything
now-- his clothes, his skin, the ground, the body of the zebra.
The plain had turned toward dusk, a thin brown,
and the sky was a bleached out blue-gray.
He edged back, still watching.
He had to go back and help Bradley scrape down the hide.
Then they would begin to try somewhere else.
Bradley knew where.
They could collect enough hides to sell for a high price
on the black market.
They had outlets, customers.
They had only to do the work.
He made his way back through the brush and up the gully.
When he reached his pack and the rifle he was exhausted.
The sweat had soaked through now,
and although he wiped his face, he still
felt the dampness in his shirt.
Something had snapped in his mind
like a star shooting down from a pure black sky,
some deep connection he had made between his life and his death
and his place on earth.
He had been terrified.
He took another shot of whiskey.
Then, as he looked back, there was something new.
Across the expanse of short brown grass and dust,
a larger form emerged, barely visible
against the fading colors.
It moved slowly, languidly, toward the dark red carcass.
And beyond that larger shape were smaller animals coming in.
The hyenas ran ahead.
Elliott watched their weaving, cautious paths.
The jackals followed resolutely.
This was the way it was.
When the hyenas came to the carcass,
the vultures scattered again.
The hyenas were not interested in them.
With huge neck muscles bulging, they ripped into the meat.
The jackals came on, too, circling the carcass,
nipping and backing away, looking for small openings
to dart in and grab a bit of flesh.
One hyena tore away a huge chunk of meat
and carried it off toward the trees.
Jackals followed.
The sound had changed, too.
Now there was brutal barking and the cracking of bones.
The leopard did not stop to test the territory for danger.
He moved into the trampled circle of ground
around the carcass, snarled at the hyenas,
who were replaced in strength by the cat,
and tested the carcass.
Elliott wanted to look away from all he had seen,
and yet he stayed longer to watch.
He had seen the progression from the beginning to end.
No, he thought, there was no end.
Not yet.
There was the cat still at the body, but no end.
It would go on.
Not only the cat, but the hyenas and jackals,
who constantly circled, looking for their opportunities.
The cat couldn't command the whole of the zebra,
and now and then a hyena would rush forward,
and tear a bit of loose meat, and drag it away.
And even when the feasting was over,
Elliott thought, there would be the broken bones and the bits
of meat still clinging, which the ants
would swarm over and devour.
He imagined these ants by the millions,
descending more terribly than the vultures had
descended, onto the last tufts of hair and meat.
As in the morgue, there would be no maggots here.
Bradley had not come back.
He would be sitting in the Rover now, waiting.
Elliott had nearly the whole two miles to go.
Then suddenly he struck upon something else
and wondered why he had not thought of it before.
He could have the cat's skin.
That was the reason they had come.
A leopard's hide would bring more than a zebra's.
He smiled at the idea of using one animal's carcass as bait
for another, and wondered whether it
would work every time.
Perhaps it was only a matter of waiting
until all the scavengers came.
So he raised his rifle again and looked at the leopard
through the hazy scope.
He centered the crosshairs and focused, the black ring closing
out all the rest of the plain.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all for coming.