Now, this will take a little more time.
It's almost as bizarre, so the weirdos among you
can lick your chops.
It's called "More Life."
Several years ago, having just quit a job
in a brokerage house which I'd held since graduating
from business school, I went to Maine
to visit a friend who had a summer house near Thomaston.
My first days there, it rained and everything in the house
smelled damp.
Outside, the landscape was dark and sodden.
I was disappointed, depressed, and on the verge of leaving.
Then one morning, I rose and saw thin broken clouds
moving swiftly overhead.
It was the end of the bad weather.
The sun was out, and the damp was lifting.
By noon, the sky was an endless monotonous blue.
In the late afternoon, my friend and I
decided to go for a walk over the fields that
covered the low hills to the west of his house.
As we walked through a clearing bounded by the sea on one side
and a jagged line of pine trees on the other,
I thought of my father who had been a writer
and who, when I was still a youngster,
had moved the family from New York City to live in Maine.
He was in his late 30s and had written only two novels.
Neither was well received.
He was having trouble getting started on a third
and blamed his failure on the distractions of city life,
so we went to Maine.
There were times, especially when we first moved there,
when my mother and I were enchanted
by the energy of my father.
He paraded before us in his underwear,
reading aloud from Rabelais, instructing us in boldness,
in ardor, and pretense.
He was the authority.
Peering over his reading glasses,
waving an index finger over his head,
he preached domination of uncertainty,
vagueness, despair.
His boxer shorts began under his bulging belly
and ended just above his knees.
His calves were massive but hairless,
and his ankles were as thin as a woman's.
His parading was a kind of dance to the music of words.
My mother and I sat together in a big chair,
uplifted and amazed.
But there were times later on when my father's steps revealed
his impatience, his mounting frustration.
He had abandoned one novel and wanted to begin another.
He blamed the quiet, the dullness of Maine
for his inability to do so.
His boredom made him nervous.
He said he could feel within himself
the exaggeration of moments, the lengthening of hours.
He was perpetually on the threshold of beginning
something, but could not get beyond the initial impulse
to sit and write.
My mother and I would hear him pacing in his room.
He seemed to live in a marginal world between routine
and transport, between laziness and desire.
Day after day, he confronted the newspaper, the coffee,
the attempt to write, the walk, the sea, the dinner,
the wish to return to New York, the fear of doing so.
So he bought cases of Over The Hill wine on sale.
He would drink and rave on about greatness.
More life, more life, he would bellow.
My mother urged him to get a teaching job, but he would not.
He said he hated security and claimed
that immortality, not tenure, was a writer's business.
[LAUGHTER]
But in 10 years of living in Maine,
he did not finish one book.
And eventually, my mother ran off
to live with the local doctor and took me with her.
My friend had walked on ahead while I stared into the summer
twilight.
Walking in a place so close to where we had lived
not only allowed me to feel the poignancy of my father's
failure, but made it somehow inescapable.
It saddened me that he died with no recognition at all.
I'm not sure how long I stood in that field,
but I began to feel a terrible stillness.
The warm air seemed weighted with the perfume of summer.
Then I heard a fly.
It circled me once and then hovered before me at eye level,
staring at me.
Its metallic green body glinted in the last rays of sunlight.
Its buzzing increased and subsided rhythmically.
The sound was threatening, yet there
was something familiar about it, something
that went beyond mere buzzing.
[LAUGHTER]
This is hard to account for, but I was suddenly convinced
that my father had returned.
[LAUGHTER]
He had come back as a fly.
He buzzed and buzzed.
And I was afraid that he'd bite if he landed on me,
yet I could not lift my hand against him.
I fell to my knees.
Then he resumed his noisy circling, broken
by attacks in which he would swerve suddenly at my face,
stop a few inches away, then continue to circle.
Dad, I said--
[LAUGHTER]
--go ahead, land on me.
His buzzing became extremely loud
and suggested frantic disapproval.
I remember wishing there were some way we could talk.
He flew away.
Dad, don't leave, I yelled.
[LAUGHTER]
Come back.
Perhaps I had been wrong, I thought.
Perhaps he had come back not to harm me,
but to beg forgiveness, to abase himself
before me as a simple fly.
Dad, you're innocent.
You did nothing wrong, I called.
Then I heard the buzzing again.
He was back, but he was not alone.
[LAUGHTER]
He had come with a buzzing swarm of friends.
I got up and began to run.
The next thing I knew, I was on my back
and my friend was leaning over me, staring.
I never told my friend what had happened.
I all but put the episode aside, never trusting it
to the ears of anyone.
And it wasn't until about a year later
when I was again bored with a job
that I thought very much about my father,
not about his awful transmogrification the summer
before, but about his life in New York, where he returned
after my mother left him.
In those days, I would go down to New York
and stay with my aunt and her husband.
In the afternoon, I would visit my father,
who lived in a studio apartment with a makeshift kitchen at one
end and his bed at the other.
It was a cramped book-crowded place.
And when I went there, he usually
sat at his desk, which was in the center of the room,
or lay on his back staring at the ceiling.
Once when I visited him, he recalled
with theatrical emphasis the dawn
in Maine, the corps of crows lifting
with the mist, the peeping and chirping of warblers,
goldfinches, and cat birds.
Then he looked at me sadly and said,
Charlie, tell me, why am I here?
Why did I come back.
Another time when I asked him how his work was going,
he said that it wasn't.
He told me that there was a novel he wanted to begin,
but couldn't.
After all, he explained, what sphere was his?
What did he know about any place or occupation?
Nothing.
His specialty was blackness, the features
of boredom, the haze of habit.
He said that his notes were of intangible states,
the feel of sinking into sleep, of drifting into daylight.
He confessed he had been lazy and lacking in purpose.
That he had been an emotional drifter.
That his grandiose determination to create a lasting attachment
with something, anything through his writing was fraudulent.
In the years just before he died,
my father became a ladies' man.
His age, his belly, his close cropped hair
in a time when everyone else's was long
made him an unlikely Lothario, but he was a triumph,
surpassing at times even his own windy expectations.
He wooed with a wistfulness that won sympathy.
He alluded to his life in Maine as if he
were an exile from Arkady.
He spoke of himself as a simple man,
at home under Maine's great sky with its store of mists, fogs,
and clouds, its slanting maritime light.
He described walks he took at dusk
by the sea, its dark body turning and turning
in its lace of seaweed and foam.
But he also made it clear that life on the stone coast
was not always easy.
That his sensitive nature, if not directly imperiled,
was under siege.
He talked of sitting at night in a circle of soft light
reading a book, while outside the wind
hissed through the trees.
And on the roof and against the window panes,
the loud pattering of rain began.
My own life in New York was dominated
by routines that enlivened without necessarily
giving pleasure.
I spent hours each day on the phone, went to parties,
drank, and watched television.
There were several women I took out,
but I was not in love with any of them.
Sometimes they were secretaries who idolized me
for the wrong reasons.
Assuming the authority I affected at the office
was genuine, they would relinquish themselves
to my charge.
Sometimes they were successful colleagues.
I like to think their self-assurance would rub off
on me, but it never did.
They were drawn to my vagueness, my uncertainty, my inability
to come to terms with my life as it was unfolding.
None of these relationships lasted.
My one pleasure was horseback riding.
I did it in the park on weekends and holidays.
And I rode with a zeal that bordered on the fanatic.
I rode from every misfortune I could imagine, from my job,
from the women I knew, from the sterility
of my small apartment.
One autumn Saturday I was riding a sleek chestnut gelding
with large nervous eyes of the sort one
sees in the paintings of Rubens.
A few leaves fluttered from the trees, the sky was bright,
the air was dry, and everywhere there was a remarkable clarity.
My horse moved cleanly, responding with ease
to my commands.
For an instant, it occurred to me
that this was the way the world should be,
and that my unchallenged dominance over my mount
would have pleased my father.
Then suddenly, as if to protest my arrogance,
the horse stopped.
I urged him forward, but he was stubborn.
I began to rock in the saddle.
Powerless and frustrated, I lost my composure.
I called him an idiot and kicked my heels into his sides.
He turned his head slowly to the left.
He seemed to be watching something,
following its motion with eager attention.
I looked up to see what it was.
A woman was walking over one of the bridges that
crossed the bridle path.
She was tall and dark haired and wore a light purple coat.
She walked with an easy stride that
suggested the possibility of physical abandonment.
I immediately dismounted and stood before the horse.
I was sure he was my father.
[LAUGHTER]
It made perfect sense.
The horse was an ideal medium for him.
In some indefinable way, they were alike.
The horse gazed longingly, it seemed to me,
after the disappearing woman, its eyes melting
into tenderness, then despair.
Dad, I said, it's great to see you.
He turned his head away and watched
another woman cross the bridge.
Not far away, an ambulance or police car siren whined.
I felt a chill.
Dad, don't worry.
I won't ride you again.
Everything will be all right.
He looked beyond me at the woman.
Dad, I went on, getting carried away,
I'll do whatever you want.
I'll get you out of the stables and into the country.
I'll buy a house in Connecticut.
You can have the backyard all to yourself.
He neighed and shook out his mane.
I put an arm over his neck in a casual gesture of affection.
Dad, tell me that you'll let me help you, care for you,
make life easy for you.
At that point, my father reared and bolted.
I stood in his dusty wake.
There was no point in my trying to change his mind.
Even as a horse, he was headstrong.
[LAUGHTER]
Days passed in which I did nothing but consider
the peculiarity of my father's behavior.
[LAUGHTER]
I was afraid to go out for fear I
would meet him again, and again be rebuffed.
I brooded.
I drank.
I stared out the window, but the ordeal of loneliness
became tiresome.
I tried to resume my social life and to throw myself
into my work, but failed.
Inwardly upset, disoriented, sometimes distracted, I
found even the most routine tasks difficult.
I lost faith in my ability and gave in
to feelings of ennui and impotence.
It was several months before my life resumed its normal flow.
The incident with the horse slipped from memory,
and I was happier than I had ever been before.
For one thing, I had fallen in love.
Her name was Helen Schulz.
She was a lawyer and lived in my building.
I had been noticing her for months in the elevator.
Her light blue eyes were heavily made up
and looked almost yellow.
Her dark eyebrows, however, preserved for them
an intensity that would otherwise have been lost.
She had high cheekbones and short auburn hair
swept straight back.
Her skin, at least when I saw her in the elevator,
seemed to glow.
But it was her eyes, on these occasions,
that offered with stunning insistence
the promise of sexual fulfillment.
The brevity of our encounters meant that getting to know her
was a long ordeal of suppressed elation, of waiting,
of gaining courage.
The first time we had dinner together, I could barely eat.
My stomach churned with excitement.
She was even more beautiful in the restaurant
than she had been in the elevator.
There was about her a mixture of serenity and severity
that I found alluring, an unsophisticated certainty that
made my being with her both relaxing and compelling.
Before long, we were spending all our free time together.
She brought out the best in me.
Our evenings together were filled with gaiety.
We told each other stories of our past,
sometimes with breezy off-handedness,
sometimes with ceremonious solemnity.
But happy as we were, I felt that by not telling her
about my father's reappearances, I was lying to her.
[LAUGHTER]
I wanted to tell her, and I felt I had to,
but there never seemed to be an appropriate occasion,
and I wasn't sure how she would respond.
Finally, at my apartment one night, the time seemed right.
I sat on the floor.
Helen sat across the coffee table from me on the couch.
That night, there was about her a vitality
that was delicate and precious, and that seemed paradoxically
the issue of weariness.
She glowed as always, even sparkled, but seemed about
to sigh, to succumb to an inner calling that
was remote and private.
Her radiance struck me as flickering and momentary,
and suggested that it was born of a certain sadness
and heaviness of spirit I found hard to associate with her.
And then I realized I was not looking at Helen at all,
but at my father.
[LAUGHTER]
Dad, I said.
[LAUGHTER]
You're back.
[LAUGHTER]
Darling, he said, what is it?
What's wrong?
[LAUGHTER]
I could tell this had been one of his down days.
He had given into his gift for gloom.
It was clear from the frown he wore that he
considered his life a waste.
I got on my knees in front of the coffee table.
Dad, dad, you're too hard on yourself.
He reached for my hands.
What's come over you, he said?
[LAUGHTER]
Dad, it's you.
It's you.
He must have been moved, for there were tears in his eyes
and he seemed unable to speak.
[LAUGHTER]
Dad, relax.
There's nothing to worry about.
[LAUGHTER]
He stood up.
Charlie, dear, I'm frightened, he said.
What of?
I said.
Of you, he answered.
My father, afraid of me?
I was astonished.
My father stood before me and spoke with the voice
of a terrified woman.
It was too much to bear.
I closed my eyes and collapsed onto the couch.
I felt grand.
I felt as if I would burst into flame.
There was a sudden thinness of air, a quiet that
made the distance audible.
For a moment, I felt as though I encompassed the whole world.
When I awoke in my pajamas and under a blanket, I was alone.
Helen came over the next day to see how I felt.
She stood in the heavy stream of morning light,
looking more lovely than ever.
I told her I hoped she was not upset by what had happened.
She said she had been frightened,
but now was over it.
She knelt beside me and explained
that it made her realize how much she loved me.
I took her hands.
Helen, I said, let's go to Maine.
We'll walk by the sea, we'll trawl for mackerel
and visit small islands.
She stared at me.
My sudden energy seemed to amuse her.
In the morning, we'll listen to warblers, goldfinches, and cat
birds.
At night, we'll build a fire.
What's got into you, she said.
Nothing.
Nothing at all, I said.
We went to Maine that summer, and the days
were long and leisurely.
My visions of the future were calm and untroubled.
Helen and I decided to get married.
And my father's visits were rare,
if one could say they were visits at all.
I'd stand in the bathroom shaving
and catch the flicker of something
out of the corner of my eye.
I'd look at myself and feel him near me, his breath barely
beginning to cloud the mirror, but it
would last just a second.
Thank you.
[CLAPPING]