Writing BLUE HIGHWAYS: The Story of How a Book Happened

V. The Pretzel versus the Book

47 V. The Pretzel versus the Book Soon after my return, a woman I’d met not long before the journey began moved into an apartment two doors away. She was an attractive high school teacher of Spanish, a woman who liked to read and laugh. After a few weeks, she invited me to write in her place whenever I wanted. Her refrigerator had food in it, and she was good at putting together its contents, and on weekends after a day of drafting, we’d celebrate an issue of new pages with a matching round of bloody Marys. Those moments helped me through another week in the courthouse , a place I was coming to see as a court of probation for a guy on a suspended sentence for certain failures, a man granted provisional freedom to try to redeem his past life. Enforcing the notion was the county jail in easy view beyond the office window behind my desk. To shift so quickly from three months of almost uninterrupted involvement in life on the road to one approaching asceticism was, for a while, a tolerable change 48 Writing Blue Highways providing a quietude where matters could uncover themselves more sharply. Five days a week I served as court scribe, and the other two days I was a simple scribbler. My partner (whom, for her privacy, I’ll call Lucy and leave her here as an enigmatic if not shadowy character) did what she could to help unsnaggle my life. I never read to her from the manuscript, but I did talk about weariness, doubts, setbacks, and writerly progress appropriate to glacial ice. Unaware that someone other than myself also needed reasons to believe, I shared not light but darkness. With an established, unvarying pattern, the days slid along unremarkably with a single exception, a night when something happened and led to one of those moments in a new friendship that reveal how poorly a person can know another’s inclinations. Lucy had been married to a man of the cloth, a reserved and steady chap whose life she described one day as “a pane of glass.” I didn’t follow her: A pane of glass? “Not pane,” she said, “plane! He’s always on an even plane. Never too low, never too high, but a little fragile. A plane of glass.” And now, I thought, she’s with a man whose life is a pain in the ass. One evening, wearied by a day of matters jurisprudential , I stopped for a beer after work and happened on a fellow I hadn’t seen in some time. We tilted glasses for a spell that took me past my usual hour to arrive home. Lucy was waiting inside the door, ready with the standard questions touching whereabouts, and I had to admit to actinglikeasingleman(whicheffectivelyIwas).Ipledged a phone call were there a next time, and she calmed. As The Pretzel versus the Book 49 I was pulling off my shoes, she said, “I have something more to say,” and pointed to my one irreplaceable possession : the notebook of my negatives and contact prints of the portraits I’d made on the blue-highways trip, the faces of people I’d soon be writing about whose visual presence was crucial to the story. Publication might well turn on their images. Beyond that, just looking at them as I wrote helped me recapture the temperature, the climate of our encounters, and encouraged a sense of obligation not to let people down. After all, they had stopped what they were doing to give time to a stranger and had become a resonant force capable of challenging the absence in so many yet unwritten pages. Often, before beginning to write, I’d leaf through the notebook just to see those who were, for a while, as important as family and, in helping shape my future, just then more significant. Tapping the notebook, Lucy said, “When you didn’t call to tell me where you were, I thought about turning on the oven and putting in your negatives.” By the end of that first summer, the decree of dissolution of my marriage came through, and Lucy lost her lease on the neighboring apartment and moved a couple of blocks away where I eventually joined her in a thirdfloor two-room place with an entire south wall of glass looking over a greenly woody and...