Alex Waters Text — Lyall Bush

Alex Waters

Alex Waters knows the stories, has thought about them, studied them in libraries. He knows they are about the beginning, the lures in dreams, the scent of ferns and trees by the river, childhood. He is near and far, even to himself, opaque except when he comes into focus. Alex Waters, a brown warm voice, brown hands, his fingers rounded, as over a ball he is about to throw. These are his hands on the wheel of the brown Rabbit, on whose dash he has glued Polaroids. One is of a line of people at the post office, each standing in fluorescent twilight holding a package. Another is of him from before his first growth spurt. He is pushing the lawnmower, wearing a winter coat. “All part of the story,” he once told me.

He was older than everybody. He was a hippie Shaker. He wore a Carhardtt coat. His elegant blue eyes saw comedy everywhere. He had a lean look and dough hands and a beard and no chin. He was bald and smart and had a humorous man’s sense of the purposelessness of everything except dripping icicles and baseball. February was his time. He loved the smellless succulence of sun and snow, the snow on the ground in late winter: its intimations of sleeping grass, winter tailpipes, morning branches, the smoke of evergreens.

Alex Waters, bearded and hidden, had two wives. Everyone knew him. He wore no deodorant, peed in the snow of the university quad, spoke in a dark wood tone, loved baseball and hockey, read stories at night with the wind in the windows, with old news and music humming out of a Bakelite radio. It was quiet then and he could feel the minds of the writers. And he loved women. He secretly loved women. He secretly loved one woman, a former girl. He eschewed television and drugs and spent years in the heightened color of Chicago winters, of Middlebury winters, watching the frost on the windows, fixing his car, the dark Rabbit, shaking her, trying to shake her. Then he came up, through the underground, tunneled through it, something having tunneled through him, earth, stone, soot, grease, the husk of beans and seeds. He duplicated her.

Alex Waters, tall and untrim in his body, his hands holding three books while we talked, told me that when he worked construction he would often fall asleep at night with his books. Hours later he would wake up with his hand on the page of a dictionary but no memory of what word he was looking up. In the library one day he said that for a long time he could not understand why anyone would read Hawthorne. What was he missing? Then he had a dream one night about being pulled from his car and beaten over his body and left on the edge of the woods. Lying on wet ground what he feared was being seen. Afterwards he went back to Hawthorne and saw what was true in him, the sense of a world sickening: the creep of weather, damp weeds on lawns, nature corrupting will. He worried that the dream meant he would later be crippled, brought down by something neurological.

Growing up in rural Illinois Alex Waters would sit indoors watching icicles form on the roofline of the house. His mother watched them through his eyes. They would sit together watching, taking in the tick of the drips in the sun. On a snow bank once in winter he jumped and grabbed one. He put it in his mouth, was surprised by the flavor, candied somehow by the sun. It stuck to his mitten, and trying to unstick it he dropped it in the snow where he let it stay. He bent over and put some snow in his mouth, tasting the difference.

His mother had read that the scientists had tried to determine the math of icicles, how the shape formed, drips releasing heat as they froze. Watching them, the polar sun refracting through them, they seemed less cold than the snow.

We met in school, in the morning, in late August, so long ago that my face has changed since then. We walked over cut grass, dew, the bending alders holding something mental and dark against the buildings. We went down a hallway to a room with open, slanting windows, grey tiles, school desks. Everyone moved with clean hair, fear and winsome hips, our smiles inner and rueful -- facial hangovers left over from years spent on leafy porches reading in silence. We ironed our jeans. The air held pieces of things: nerves, weather, mind. We were washed and devotional and carried a silent, horny desire to be unclothed against knowledge. Somewhere in the distance a graduate student was fucking a poet.

It was a medium-sized classroom, with chair-desks, a green board, and a recently polished floor. Late summer coming in through the windows felt juiced. We sat, crossed our legs, projecting intellection and harmlessness, wanting to be led to a world past desire. The women had downy faces and the look of the irregularly screwed, their hair long and pretty, mostly held over from childhood. The men had chaste skin, lightly parted lips, some general heaviness about the hips. Everyone laughed at the smallest provocation. A few were former high-school sprinters whose freckled faces and slacker tummies portended later corpulence. This was me, too.

Even the professors were young, even the older ones with the slower, heavier eyelids and thinning hair had young lips and young cants to their heads. They talked to us, one after the other, about language, the need for discipline, filing systems, still time needed for study. I imagined corridors that would lead to other hallways and turn into passageways or stairwells or something underground and dark and lightless, squeezed. Finally there would be a door, and inside would be older professors at lecterns reading recently discovered Ur-texts. Further in I could see secret shelves, small libraries with fans in the summer, soft fingers tapping pages. Before we got to all that we would have mid-semester revelations, stairwell epiphanies. Someone would pull a well-thumbed text on metonymy from her book-bag. Someone, at some point, would say the thing we would talk about for weeks.

It was late August and the entering class, 30 of us, listened to a man with a boyish haircut and carved lips talk about research, one hand on a startlingly large, tight bowl of a stomach as on an earned thing. A Spenserian with a medieval smile and arresting knees blushed telling us our study was our treasure. An older man dressed in a suit told us in an odd, cut-up voice that we probably did not know how to read at all yet. They would bring us into the rooms, we thought. They would tell us that “radical” meant “go to the root,” that “cast,” with 76 separate meanings, came from an Old Norse word, “kasta,” which mean the form a thing takes after it is thrown. That’s what we seemed to want, a hand on us. Fate, story, thrownness.

The first (the first before the first) was Susanne. Anne, for short – she had a secret inner name, dark hair, dark eyes and a pointy nose that moved when she laughed, making her more beautiful in his eyes. She had a protective father named Dick who practiced law for a series of east coast biotech firms. He had nearly died, twice, of heart attacks – one of them diagnosed only later. He had changed his name from Alvin Richards because he needed a more dependable sobriquet. Al Richards would work if he were delivering milk or writing newspaper editorials. But Dick was the name he wanted to give to bartenders at the Olympic Four Seasons, to hookers in Waco and to everyone in the buffet line at the large, charitable fundraisers where he wore a black coat over his tennis shoulders.

She studied art at Middlebury, a year behind Alex. After graduation she stuck around, finding piecemeal work first in the summer helping professors and then doing research, house sitting, cat sitting. At night she got access to the big art rooms where she would work with oils on canvasses. She painted careful imitations of Renaissance masters, details only – the wings of the angel in Fra Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation, the furred leg of the faun in The Death of Procris, various medieval nimbuses. Alex Waters met her one day touring prospects through the college. He knew next to nothing about art after the Romantics but he began to study it then the way he would later study baseball, as a second language. He watched her mix colors and study the result. She seemed to be solving problems with her brushes, ones he didn’t know existed. That fall she joined him in the recruiting office. She was 23, he was 24. They talked all day, went out for dinner. She was from Connecticut but he had to keep reminding himself of that. Based on her eyes and the movement of her head when she looked away, her clothing, she often seemed to be from somewhere else.

One day she skipped work and the next day she came in and said she thought she had met a man, her match, a banker. She had gone to the next town to install a piece of art in his summer house. In the spring the banker asked her to marry him; she talked it over with Alex, her friend, before saying yes. At the end of the spring term she quit work at the recruiting office and moved to New York. Alex Waters left his job in the summer and moved back to live with his parents in Illinois. Glazed, he listened to ball games in the back yard, bought a glove and the Baseball Encyclopedia, and all summer listened to the sounds of the announcers’ voices rolling over the batters’ stances, the outfield catches, waves of description while the sun warmed his body. He threw the ball into the pocket of the glove, stopping to read the Encyclopedia. He imagined a new life as a baseball play-by-play announcer. He ate toast and marmalade over the cutting board gloomily and waited for the letter that would come every other week from her describing her hapless days looking for a wedding dress plain enough for her taste, for a caterer who knew how to make carrot cake. She explained how she and Alan, who she would call “my banker,” would laugh about it at the end of the day listening to Sinatra. That was the year 24-year-old women were taking up Sinatra, Alex would later write in a short story, trying to get it out of his system. He would reply to her immediately, then wait, with the Baseball Encyclopedia by his side like a dictionary of mythology.

Anne married Alan, and by 30 she had three preternaturally intelligent daughters. Alex took a job repairing and selling bicycles. When he got the e-mail about her third daughter he applied to graduate school, wanting to study Wallace Stevens. Anne loved this. She told him she was painting again.

There were internal struggles. There were weird, hopeful internecine conflicts. We wanted our words on paper to go into it, to find things. The other side of trees and fire in lines and novels. The pleasure of dying, the velvet opera in the violation of nature. I talked in a half-fervent way about this to anyone who would listen, but we were all praying for something, for the thing that would take us far enough into the material that some Moebius of the mind would turn and there would be a Paleolithic map showing the place everything came to. I wanted to submit to the words and I wanted to know how they had traveled through time.

Alex Waters, bearded and worldly and enthusiastic and a non-drinker, older than me, knew this already. He had traveled. He talked without the closed hesitation, the reaching fingers, the dodging glances of the rest of us. He was tall and happy, and his dark green eyes said something about time, its rounded forms. He rarely bathed.

They met on the bleacher seats. Alex Waters loved baseball, its circulations. He was on the mailing list for the Triple a teams where he lived, the feeder teams, the farm clubs. He loved the singing in the air. If you listened you could hear the air catch at the binding of the ball, or so he thought. He loved explicitly the White Sox, their tragedy. He loved the more or less scholarly history of the game, the asterisks and scandals. He took them as myth and tarot, and he would think and dream about them as much as he did the stories of the American Renaissance. The spell was what connected them.

Maybe it was because baseball came to him later but in the spring, with a bowl of blue sky and fresh air it felt like a final, a rising love. He knew about lumber and gear shifters, about first editions, pouring cement, and rosary windows. But he came back to the game as to a codex. Growing up were basketball and hockey, winter games. He had played hockey and revered the Blackhawks of the 1970s. He took Tony Esposito’s butterfly style in the net, the beauty of his kick saves, the electricity he pulled from the air in the playoffs as something to aspire to. Now at forty-two, with a pot belly, his lungs burned after one trip up and down the ice. But baseball had him now because it operated like memory. The beautiful blue chill of February coincided with the year turning back.

After school Alex Waters got a job teaching Modernism to young people at a college in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Neither joke – the town name, the current elderliness of “Modernism” – was lost on him. I had, meanwhile, moved to the west coast and started working for a series of start-ups. I met Melanie, we started raising a family, and I lost touch with him. I had made a break: I’d decided to work in advertising and I came to a place where people thought about clothes and trends in restaurants. I read Frobenius and War and Peace in the evenings, but I had given up the chase that Alex hadn’t – tracking things, mixing a new philosophy of language with something older. He was still in it.

He sent letters to me. He sounded like I used to sound back then under the walnuts and alders, a little sharply smart, a little exhaustingly playful. But behind that was also a repertoire of easeful free association, as if his work included holding things together. He wrote about the snow in Beaver Falls, the steering wheels from the 1970s cars he had collected and was turning into an experimental solar system in his basement. It was dark there, with the half-daylight windows, and in the center he had set a sunflower that he lifted out to the sun three days a week. “I feed it plant food and water,” he wrote, “and once a month a new page from Philosophical Investigations. It is growing slowly but deeply.”

Alex Waters lived in Beaver Falls, fixed his car, bought furniture, traveled distances to see ball games, night games, matinees, all of which had to make him believe in chance and the melodrama of fate that could give a person the sense that the pattern could be different. The story was about chance and magic. He watched the games and thought about this pitch versus that one. The pitcher knew the high and inside fastball was the one the batter would swing at. The batter, expecting that ball, coiled and bent. The pitch came knee-high and inside, uncontrolled, but the batter swung and connected. So where lay the law? Was the ball leaving the infield following or not following it? It was dice, the movement of cataracts, a strong wind through trees.

One chilly afternoon in late February, on the bleacher seats in Geneva, Pennsylvania, a stub of pencil in his hand, Alex looked up and saw Susanne. Dark hair, pointy nose, dark eyes. She was coming toward him. She sat beside him. Afterwards she said he had the look of a sorcerer in a French cave. He would say that all his baseball thoughts, the question of a network of ordained moments, came to him. Was he supposed to say hello? He did. Was she supposed to reply? She did. She said that baseball was about will and circles. He thought and then said he thought it was will and time. Did he know Emerson’s essay on history? He marked his scorecard. “‘The Sphinx must solve her own riddle’,” he said.

She wasn’t Anne, yet she was. He had the feeling that he had brought her back. “I don’t usually get to talk about burned creatures of myth at ball games,” she said.

“And yet it’s so organic,” he said, studying her hands. And then: “I’m Alex.”

“Sandra,” she said, shaking his.

They watched for a minute.

“The first baseman,” she said. “He can really tee off at the plate, but every ball he catches is iffy.”

Alex was about to say something else from Emerson, then just said, “A woman who knows about baseball.”

“There is a crack in everything God has made,” she said. They laughed.

He was 42 then. She was 33. Soon they were lying together in bed.

I am making this up. Some of what happened must have happened the way I have written it. But did Alex look at her hands, her nose? Did he pretend to be casual? Did she really comment on his shaman appearance? She was not a painter but a writer, her work painterly. Had she known an Alex before? I have given them dialogue, a sense of place. I have suggested certain things that must be true.

Alex Waters and Gretchen were married for six years when Alex met Sandra. Gretchen lived in Philadelphia, teaching composition to freshmen and Edith Wharton to sophomores. She had the same helium in her voice as she did when she summarized plots in graduate school, but she had put on weight and the bubbling narratives now seemed more like strange performances. At 35 her skin was still fine, but there was something about her carriage that upset Alex when they saw each other every other weekend: she seemed, more and more, to be another earnest, hard-working teacher, the kind he could find himself standing behind, any given day, in the main English Department office at Beaver Falls, waiting to use the photocopier.

Gretchen got pregnant the same year Sandra did. Soon Alex was in two hospitals in two months, cooing and choosing names: Andrew for one, Daniel the other. Was it because he liked the sound of “and” so much? He had missed something with Anne, the sense of what there would be now, the feeling two people have hearing the ring of the bell of fate. So Alex Waters fabricated a story for himself that rhymed in the way that Andrew rhymed with Daniel. Was that it? After studying Modernism he was back, back at fables about searching – Le Morte D’Arthur, The Faerie Queene whose landscapes are clear and symbolic and, in most ways, more frightening for their inclusion of pattern.

Growing up in Etan, Illinois, winter lasted into spring and the basement of the church smelled like it – branches and melting snow and turkey dinner. He was among the group of kids who went to Sunday school on Sunday mornings, sitting in rows of wooden chairs, small and large. The girls had white socks and black bangs and the boys had O’s for mouths and blew their noses between songs about cherishing the old rugged cross. They were led by a man with carpenter’s hair and bowed legs. Singing, they seemed to be pleading with invisible adults.

Bald and bluff as an adult, bearded and hidden, with bright, darting eyes, Alex Waters remembered the vertigo spot the church held at the end of Main Street in Etan. When he was twelve and 5’10” and nervous he sat at the piano in the basement of the church, and when he started to play the first plaintive hymn his hands froze up like mittens covered in snow, and a feeling ran through him like fresh gasoline or coyotes, their tongues out and their eyes like failing comedians.

Before that, when he was younger, his father tucked him in sometimes, asking if he had said his prayers. If he hadn’t he would get out again and kneel at the foot of the bed while his father hovered behind him. The moon came in through the curtains. If it was his mother she would read to him from the Children’s Illustrated Bible, the story of Methuselah who lived to be 969 years old, or the story of the parting of the Red Sea, stories of the magical world. Then with his head on the cold pillow he would go to sleep picturing the long desert-y stretches of life, 969 years, God still up in the blue-black night making things come around, the sea forming a path. He would frighten himself into hallucinations about starlight and eternity and death and his own short life. And then he would sleep for ten hours and get up and got to school with his red lunchbox.

When Sandra tells Alex she is pregnant he is listening to “Are You Experienced?” on vinyl. He turns down the music to hear her properly. She seems to be saying what he thinks she is saying. And for some amount of time in there, maybe an hour, he thinks he will marry her. He hasn’t told her about his wife. He doesn’t plan to. He is happy. For the space of an hour, standing in his living room, the Hendrix back up, he carries this double thought in his head and it seems both a good idea and not impossible. He takes her to dinner to celebrate. “If it’s a boy I would like to call him Andrew,” he says, sipping wine. Not very many weeks later he is at a dinner celebrating with Gretchen. His heart feels squeezed, as if he is wriggling through a very narrow cave. “If it is a boy,” he says, “I would like to name him Daniel.”

Gretchen agrees easily. It wasn’t like him to be forward thinking but she loved him for that, for being capable of pleasing inconsistencies. She had just read Bleak House, and she told Alex about Lady Dedlock, the two wards in the case, the theme of identity, identity duplicated, the gradual uncovering of Lady Dedlock’s secret life. Alex knew the novel well (he knew many novels well) but he let her tell him. Midway through he stopped listening and thought about his long-ago conversations with Susanne about oil paints, the texture of wings. And he thought about Sandra and his one-time desire to play alongside Tony Esposito and the smell of Susanne’s collar bone, the polished skin behind her ear, which he had smelled only twice when they hugged good-bye. And he thought about the last place he knew Susanne lived, its unaccountable sterility. And he thought about the two babies that would soon be born together. A few weeks later he and Sandra married. Sandra knew a man with a degree from the Internet and they got married by the river.

Mostly things run in our heads as images, over and over. Repeating film strips, train sounds, the sound of water boiling, the feeling of hunger, greed, desire. Behind those are the primal causes: mother, father, family, pain, the sewers of things, feelings of being royal, infinite, thirsty, dead.

It’s June now, the month of weddings and bad news, and Alex is making patties for the grill and laying them on with his fingers. He and Sandra are taking turns deejaying, playing vinyl from his collection. Alex is counting five minutes for each side of the hamburger and meanwhile going to the house to uncover the boiling potatoes and running a paring knife into them to test for doneness. It is 7:30; the light is warm and yellow. Hearing car brakes he thinks it is probably someone visiting the neighbors. His heart beats a little hotly.

After weeks of being reasonable Gretchen is in her dark red Honda, driving west. It is her sabbatical year and she wanted to rent out the house in Philly and live together in Beaver Falls. Over the phone he had paused. Was this really a good time for this? Of course Andrew was important, but he would still come every other week like clockwork. Meanwhile his book project was eating him alive. It was the important thing in his life. He hoped she could understand it. Driving, Gretchen keeps turning the radio on and off. Her mind is off focus and a little startled by what she is doing. Andrew is in the baby seat in the back.

Five hours later she pulls into the yard, under the ash trees they had spent time thinking about where to plant many years ago. Her heart is pounding. She is breaking something unspoken between them. She pulls on the emergency brake, her fingers nervous, and gets out and pops the trunk and yanks out her suitcase. She is still out of shape from giving birth. She is tired all then time. And then he was there, at the door, saying hello as if he isn’t surprised, the June twilight finding all the grey in his beard, a scent of cooking in his little house. He holds a child’s shirt in his hands that she hadn’t seen before. She knows when she asks that she will not understand the answer. She looks past him as he talks, at the acre of bush behind the house, the sun coming through, reddish, against the near-silhouettes of the trees.

It is an extension of the fiction enterprise, this story inside the story of his life. It is like the person whose trip to Paris includes a few unplanned days in the south of France, four hours away by car. They come up because the friendly couple at the hotel invited him to join them in Nice, but then once he is there they turn out to be monsters, loud, narcissistic, greedy, disturbing. They frighten him. He imagines them bending down like giraffes to tear off leafy parts of his head. After two nights he leaves, vowing to return one day in a different way. Someday, returning, he can have been to Nice, and then he will be able to talk about his experiences from his first trip too. In his head it makes sense. And then in any account of his travels he will elide the two nights he spent with the overbearing couple, a story that a different person might leave in as evidence of their fatal openness to life, the curious souvenir of a trip under the heading “What Different People You meet.” But for him, for his life, it can’t be that. Alex wanted to stay in there, in his way, with the frightening couple, to see what came of it, and he wanted to say afterwards, with an elasticity of imagination, that all the time he was only in Paris, just with large gaps in the timeline that no one could ever explain.