Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [151]
Six months later, Liz had dropped out and moved to California and I was living in a motel in the shadow of the Flat Irons working for Christof. There was the feeling I’d displaced her, had shown up and derailed her dream of getting educated in the Western mountains. In that time we drank too much, didn’t talk enough, took refuge too often in our warm bodies till they cooled, her sweet roommate forgotten.
My room at the motel had a desk, a bed, a shower and toilet. No TV or radio. No shelves or pictures on the wall. I bought a coffeemaker that brewed one cup at a time, and each morning I’d drip some and stare out my window at the back of the pancake house, its blue dumpster set against a graying plank fence. On the other side was the street, the traffic slow and easy, beyond that a shopping plaza, then a rise of ground where split-level homes were set into the aspens and columbine, then the steep climb of the Flat Irons, these massive slabs of stone under a cold blue sky.
I’d pull the musty curtain closed and sit and sharpen my pencil and stare at what I’d written the day before. So much of this seemed to be staring, waiting really, waiting for something true, no matter how small, to reveal itself. I’d write the wrong words, the false or slightly false, and nothing substantial would come. I’d cross it out, this act of cutting a gesture of good faith that somehow summoned the glimpse of something real: the front tire of a red tricycle, a woman hanging up the receiver in a phone booth, a car pulling too fast out of a driveway—then there were only a few seconds to find the words to catch those images before they faded and I’d be left staring again. But if I caught one, then that thing led to the next to the next and some days it was hard to stop though I knew I had to; there should be something left in the well for the following day.
Ever since I was a boy running from other boys, I’d been making myself into a man who did not flee, a man who planted his feet and waited for that moment when throwing a punch was the only thing to do, waited for that invisible membrane around me to fall away and I’d gather once again the nerve and will to shatter another’s. But I had discovered a new membrane now. The one between what we think and what we see, between what we believe and what is.
ONE LATE morning, sitting alone at the desk in my motel room, I pushed aside what I’d been writing. All my staring and waiting had brought scenes that led to other scenes, but I’d felt little to nothing about the people in them and I didn’t know why until I read The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. It was clear Pancake not only knew the West Virginia hollows he was evoking so well on the page, he became the men and women and kids living in them. Maybe he even loved them. And he showed this by writing in a simple, naked style that drew the reader’s eye not to him but to them. It’s what I had not been doing. Somewhere along the way I had started trying to sound like a real writer, something I did not see myself as, a contradiction between my actions and my desire that seemed to put me in the worst stance possible for writing honestly: I was staring at myself as much as I was staring at the page; I had one eye on the mirror to see how I was doing.
Years later I would read this definition of sincerity in Nadine Gordimer’s novel A Son’s Story: “Sincerity is never having an idea of oneself.” I was still the boy who could not bear being perceived a certain way, a boy who’d learned to fight and get hurt or worse just so he would not be seen as weak. But what did being seen have to do with writing well? It was time to start seeing. I sat at that desk feeling small and self-absorbed and with little ability to do this one thing I felt pulled to do. But this negative self-scrutiny was just another form of insincerity; I had to disappear altogether.
It took a few days or a week