It was cold out there. I was shivering in my corduroy jacket. There were a lot of good-looking guys coming and going, though. The bus finally came and we rode into the city to the bus station. I was thinking that I like the way Boston looks. I like New England and the men it breeds. It’s too bad about the 10 ½ months of winter.
The TV news was on in the bus station. That’s when I heard the news about the London bombings. Riding back out through the city, thinking about the news, I watched the morning commuters come out of the train station, looking solemn and gray-faced.
I slept a little on the ride to Portland, but not enough.
In the mirror in the ladies room at the Portland bus station, I looked pale and tired and my roots were showing and my forehead lines, bane of my vanity, looked liked they’d dug in deeper overnight. I knew RW would look at me and see the time that had passed.
The first thing I noticed when he picked me up was that his hair had turned gray. But otherwise he looked the same. He still lives in the same apartment, with its view of the harbor and the cool sea air coming through the window.
I only had four hours in Portland. He took me home and made me coffee and we smoked some weed. He’s a hardcore daily toker. For awhile I matched him hit for hit, even thought the second inhalation made me cough and cough. With that and the bombings on television and the sleep deprivation, I was bleary and felt incoherent.
We walked to a diner by the docks for a sandwich, then all over downtown Portland. It was a cool, overcast day. Portland’s a likeable little town. The downtown looks neat and well-scrubbed—my perception may be skewed by living in beautiful but filthy New Orleans—with more in the way of movies and restaurants and so forth than you would expect in a town of 60,000. Still, in Maine and especially with RW (The Big Train from Sanford Maine), you feel that blue-collar roughneck undercurrent running against the tide of well-heeled vacation playground Maine. I like it, that tension.
RW seems well. He’s struggling, but with the right things. He’s a great writer and with him there’s no question of what to write about, just whether he’s up to facing it on any given day. He’s got a band, too. The Rumbling Proletariat. He played me a demo of their hit single, “Wet Hot Librarian.” It was good. RW’s singing voice is nothing like his speaking voice. Their performances sound like a real stage show, with RW in a white pimp suit and James-Brown style cape, being carried offstage on a stretcher. I wish I could see it.
But he said he’s mad that I said I’m not a fiction writer—more on that later.
As we were walking through downtown, my mom called me on my cellphone. It was probably rude to answer, but it was my mother calling after all. She wanted to make sure that I’d made it and she also said that my great-aunt B had died and she and my dad were going to the funeral the next day. I said I was sorry to hear it. But my aunt was old and I didn’t know her well, so I wasn’t upset. I was more upset after I hung up and realized I’d casually referred to Cindy as “that fucking storm” in a conversation with my mother.
We stopped in a bar and had a beer and talked about the people we knew in Memphis and about writing and his ex-wife who he still loves—which I find quite touching, though it may be a symptom of misguided romanticism.
On the way out, my sister called and again I answered. She was stuck in traffic on the road to Providence, Rhode Island. The first thing she told me was that my aunt hadn’t just died, that she was strangled in her house, apparently by two young men who she opened the door for—someone she probably knew, in other words, because who is going to put that kind of energy into strangling an old lady with no money?
It’s all very odd, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I didn’t really know her, so I don’t have it in me to grieve, exactly, although of course I feel sad for her and just generally unsettled that such a thing has happened to my family back in small town, Pennsylvania—when things like that happen all the time in New Orleans.
My sister was also upset because she’d had a fight with my mother over her (my sister’s) allegedly sinful lifestyle and consequent ticket to hell. My parents don’t see that there’s any middle way for a single woman between being a 30-something virgin and being the whore of Babylon. They don’t usually say the things to me that they say to my sister, though. I think they’re a little intimidated, which is fine by me.
But I didn’t want to get into a histrionic conversation with her while I was visiting RW. I realized she hadn’t heard about London yet and I told her to turn on the news and I’d call her later.
The bus to Bar Harbor was almost full and the seats were narrow but I still managed to sleep a little. RW burned me a couple of CDs—reggae covers of Bob Dylan and of R&B songs. I listened to the latter and to the new Ryan Adams record.
Traffic was bad and the bus got in late. NF was waiting for me at the station, looking exactly the same except with shorter hair. I told her about not sleeping and my long day and she said she’d treat me to dinner and a cocktail and she did—pomegranate cosmopolitans and shrimp wrapped in proscuitto and crabcakes. Then she took me to the top of Cadillac Mountain and we watched the raspberry sherbet sunset and then we went home and I went to bed in her front-porch-turned-summertime-spare-bedroom and slept and slept and slept.
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