Travels with Gatsby

“Across the courtesy bay,” I typed, rat-a-tatting the floor with my right foot “the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water,” the people two seats behind me murmured at a tone close to the background hum of the bus’s air conditioner and engine, “and the history of the summer really begins,” with each word I felt more tense, “on the evening,” I feel silly doing this, and the angle of the laptop in these small seats is bad for my wrists and for what? “I drove over there,” for nothing, that’s what, this isn’t accomplishing anything, I’m wasting my time here, foolishly “with the Tom Buchanans.” Why am I doing this? “Daisy was my second cousin and I spent two days with them in Chicago.”

“Look,” the man says two seats behind me, “I wanna show you.” The woman laughs. “I wanna show you,” he repeats. The question isn’t a sincere question, it’s rhetorical. I know why I’m doing this. I hope that it will have some good results, that I will improve my writing by osmosis, that passing those words through my eyes into my brain and back out my finger tips will give me some Fizgeraldness, some better writitude than I currently possess. “Whoa look at that college student’s car!” the man says, “that must have cost a bunch.” This is magical thinking, that’s what it is. This is lighting a St. Jude candle. This is kissing a finger and saying “rabbit, rabbit.” This is the breathless voice in the back of my head at times of emergency, “oh god, please,” a habit belying my atheism. The woman gets on her phone, the high pitch tone of voice when talking to a child, “you be good for daddy, can you give the phone to him? … so what’s up? Your blood pressure?” I feel guilty eavesdropping now, decide to go back to Gatsby. “Sorry to hear that …. do you want to talk to him?” She hands the phone to the man next to her, “hey dad… so what’s wrong? … I love you too,” in my mind he becomes a kid, a teenager. He hands the phone back to the woman. “Okay. Talk to you later.” She doesn’t say I love you.

“Her husband, among various physical accomplishments had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven - a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.” The bus slows to a stop, the door opens, the driver stands. “Hi! You going to the airport?” he asks. “His family were enormously wealthy,” a woman replies “yes, I am,” “Let me get your stuff aboard,” he steps down to the curb, “even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach” the driver opens the hatch on the side of the bus with a thunk, he tosses the woman’s suitcase into the opening with a louder thunk, “but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string a polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.”

My stomach lurches. I think of my youngest daughter, who has taken to throwing up in the car on long car trips. “Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year in france, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.” The issue seems to be when she looks at a picture book in the car. My wife tells me it’s something about the inner ear and the feeling of motion, the fluid in the ear tells the brain that the body is in motion, but sitting inside the car looking at a book in one’s lap the eyes convey sitting still. “This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it - I had not sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” Those mixed message of inner ear and eye knot the stomach, so she throws up. It would be easier to not let her look at books at all but the car is boring and she is two so her response to boredom is to shout and cry, making car trips intolerable. To be fair, I don’t handle boredom well either. I’m retyping bits of this novel and the stray sensations and thoughts seized by my wandering attention largely from boredom, if I’m being honest. I imagine for a second throwing up all over the bus, the thought deepens the flicker of nausea into a gut-punch, which leads my bladder to report it has received the cups of tea I drank to fight the effects of the night’s deficit of sleep, about four hours short of sufficient. “We’re going to wait here a couple more minutes,” the driver calls, “and see if this guy shows up.” He has a list of all the pre-registered passengers.

I stick my laptop in its case, with a thought that I should be more trusting of people, no one would steal my laptop, followed by a memory of sitting in a Wisconsin gas station parking lot for two hours waiting for the police to arrive to search all of our bags because the woman in the very front seat came back holding a white Taco Bell bag to find that her laptop was no longer in her backpack. Another passenger climbs aboard, a big man who fills all the space between the two rows of seats, he has to walk sideways down the aisle. He sits in the row in front of me. I stand up, walk to the front and as the bus driver throws a second suitcase in, slams the hatch with a thud and click. “Sir, I’m just going to run to the bathroom.” “You’re what?” “I’m just going to run to the bathroom, it will only take a minute.” “Okay,” he nods. He has thin silver hair and a thick silver mustache, his face looks very pink.

We are parked in a hotel parking lot. I walk to the doors, automatic doors, I feint to the wrong side, the right side. The left side opens, “stupid,” calls a voice in the back of my head, a faint urge to look around and see if anyone is looking at me, why would anyone look at me? I walk into the lobby and see stacks of newspapers, a coffee station. My fingers feel twitchy, alert, signaling they are ready to pick up paper and cardboard. I glance at the desk clerk, would he care if I grabbed a paper and coffee? I blink. I don’t actually want either one, I wouldn’t read the paper and the coffee will just make me have to go to the bathroom again, and make it hard to sleep later in this trip. I walk into the bathroom, you know the drill there, and walk back toward the bus. When I walk out of the lobby doors I smell cigarette smoke. It smells delicious, like coffee, or dark chocolate, I would like to stand here and smoke. I can’t remember when I last smoked. Has it been this calendar year? Has it been within this full year? I smirk, smug at my good life choices, and climb back up the steps into the bus and to my seat, unzip my laptop case. The man in front of me reclines his seat all the way. This won’t work. I put the laptop back in its case, grab my jacket and backpack, move across the aisle and one row back. I notice the man who had been two seats behind me is probably fourteen years old. He has a teenage boy’s whispy upper lip hair. The young woman next to him is actually my age, not exactly young.

The bus lurches back into motion as I type and soon my stomach echoes the lurch. I used to read in the car as a kid. I would sit in the back of the car squinting at a science fiction airport novel and by the time we got to church or to brunch after church or back home, I’d be sure I was going to throw up, and occasionally I did, though I always made it to the bathroom. I should just stop. I try to think of something else. “And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends who I scarcely knew at all.”

My daughters and I shout into the drum part at the bottom of the garage saled mostly broke banjo that’s been residing in our living room lately. We yell “poop!” and “pee!” and “diaper!” and “stinky!” as loud as we can and we laugh at our great wit, and the shouting resonates slightly in the drum and vibrates the strings a little. The line about old friends I scarcely knew resonates in the drum of my mind, vibrating fragments of two songs, “these days the people I love are spread so far apart, all out of reach” and “I’ve got some older pictures of people I see once every couple years… how can we relate when we don’t know a thing about each other anymore?” which leads to a third, “I see your face and wonder where you’ll be five years from now and exactly what it means for you and I” it should be “you and me” I pedantify, and I can’t remember when but somewhere in that third song it also goes “that’s the reason I’m not hanging around.” This rings the words of another song, “note to self: try to be around a little more, hang around a little more, be seen not heard,” rattling guilt and interpersonal anxiety. At least I’m not noticing the nausea anymore wait now I am.

“Their house was even more elaborate than I expected,” more song lyrics rise to mind now, a song I like but this is already becoming annoying, “walk into the boss’s mansion, make his funeral closed casket” and I try to turn down the volume knob on the mental radio, I actually visualize a hand turning a large volume knob like on the big stereo at my biological dad and step-mom’s house when I still spoke to them, the stereo with the speakers he’d had since as long as I could remember, before he and my mom divorced I’d gotten a pet bunny, I remember it climbing behind those speakers once, the bunny’d had the same name as my later step-mom, Dina.

I remember one of those speakers once fell into a wall, I don’t remember the fall, I remember the hole its corner punched into the drywall in the pre-divorce house (a house I remember in flashes, a bird in the vent, a weight dropped on my toe, an oil and water droplet sizzling out of pan and into my cheek, I ran and buried my face in the big white couch, a couch with a brown shit stain on one of the cushions from a time I had run from the toilet to the living room without letting my mom wipe my butt, another time I licked the metal screen door and got stuck, I shut these images down now). Their toddler son once toppled one of the speakers onto himself, it was bigger than he was, he lay under it pinned, barely able to wave his arms. The speakers went into the basement after that, my stepmom put her foot down, “well” my bio-dad had said, at time my sympathies had been with him by reflex but looking back now she was so obviously in the right, “a cheerful red and white Georgian colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and” I’m off songs now, onto childhood images and scenes, remembering push- and riding-mowers, I would crank the headphones up so loud on my Walkman - “remember cassette tapes?” a friend said the other day, and I am back for a moment to songs, the Copyrights record (I still call them records and albums even when I only have them on mp3) that begins with the sound of a tapedeck opening, a cassette chunking into a place, the deck closing, tape hiss, a line about wearing out a tape in 1994 - and between the mower and headphones it is no wonder I say “what?” more often now than I would like, though all those earplugless rock shows didn’t help either (and I remember an old friend whom I scarcely know, we exchanged an email recently, how can we relate when we don’t know a thing about each other anymore?, at least recently if spring counts as recent, our first in about a year I think, maybe longer; she once dated someone who, she would say, “dragged me to another rock show this weekend, they’re not my thing, but he’s into them…. he was excited about all the geodes and quartz they had.” And every time I would do the mental version of a doubletake.)

“The lawn started at the beach,” my mind fans out beaches like cards. A beach in Rhode Island where I swam and picked up shells as a kid visiting an aunt and uncle who shouted all the time but not to make people cry, the way my parents shouted. My grandfather was … co-hogging is how he pronounced it, I don’t know the spelling, collecting clams with a rake-and-basket device, while I swam and walked the shoreline. A beach in Mexico where a fish with a gray and pointed head like an arrowhead poked at me like a chicken pecking me, repeatedly, and I got out of the water. Sex on the beach once, in the water. Another beach in Mexico, the water so blue I would have sworn the picture was photoshopped. This is an inefficient way to read. Are these associations facilitating the writerly osmosis? impeding it? Does it exist at all? “…and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walls and burning gardens - finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. ” I haven’t run much for a long while, I should - ugh, focus! “The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.” Apart… a part… a part of the problem, I realize, is that the file I am typing in and the file I am reading from are visually apart, I keep flicking my eyes from what I am reading and what I am typing.

I shrink the font to unreadablly small and resize the window of what I am reading from so I will only look at what I am reading, not what I am typing. The tiny font lets me know I am actually typing but shows me none of the content. As I type this sentence that is distracting, because of the transition, but it is a transition to a kind of typing I am used to, a much freer typing, I do this kind of thing in freewrites a lot. I am making the mental shift now. Where was I? Ah yeah, Tom Buchanan.

“He had changed since his New Haven Years. Now he was a sturdy, straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance offer his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothiers could hide the enormous power of that body.” My mental associations are turned down lower now, a flick toward doing planks at the park the back to reading and typing. “He seemed to fill those glistening boots until eh strained the top lacing and your could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage, a cruel body.”

And I am at the airport now.

I filed off the bus, through the automatic doors, up the escalator, stopped at a bench because I can’t remember my airline or departure time. I check the paper in my bag, proceed to check-in. My mind continues to rattle off associations, other airports I’ve been to, other times I’ve been to this airport, conversations in or about airports. I am the opposite of attentive to this moment, I am in a cluster, a tesseract of moments. I arrive at the check-in counter and all the computer self check-in kiosks are broken. I get in line and am immediately attentive to my surroundings, the inane chatter about how Susan is driving the RV to the campground while he flies out to meet her and the tickets were very reasonable through Orbitz. I remember to relax my jaw, “you’re destroying your teeth,” the dentist had said. I go through the usual dull routine, a bit slower than usual, standing in line. I get routed through the TSA pre-check line because there are so many of us today. The security guard swabs my palm with some wand, it’s a bit hot to the touch, “what’s this?” I ask, “it detects explosives,” she says. I nod, remind myself not to make a joke, try not to think about how many people’s hands this has touched today, all the germs. I go to my gate and type the last sentence while one security guard lectures another about Kevin someone’s quarterbacking.

“His voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked - and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.”