Homeland Elegies(31)
“Not anymore. But when I was growing up? For sure.”
We turned again and drove past columned multistory homes from the early part of the last century. They were falling apart. “A made guy. That was a thing to want to be. With stacks of cash like stones in their pockets. I mean, I knew my share of them, ’cause my dad helped run the literary society over on Prospect.”
“Literary society?”
“Dante Literary Society. It was a social club. I mean, it’s still over there, but it’s pretty dead now, like everything else around here. They started it in the Depression to help teach folks from the old country how to speak English, though by the time I was a kid it was mostly about teaching kids like us Italian. That and ballroom dancing, if you can believe it. Made guys hung out there pretty regularly. There was a room in back where they, you know—played cards.” His eyes—meeting mine in the rearview mirror—narrowed with a knowing smile. “Don’t get me wrong; I thought about it. I had a moment when I thought that might be the life for me—nice suits, pretty girls. But it didn’t take me long to figure out I wasn’t cut out for that.”
As we entered the downtown, further neglected splendors from the nineteenth century dotted the blocks, old Greek or Romanesque revival mansions, intermittent reminders of an era of great wealth long passed, crowded by the thoughtless array of the town’s newer construction, the ad hoc styles and worn facades adorned with signs advertising empty space for rent. Mark pointed out the sturdy, unostentatious granite blocks and arches of the university; the dappled, rough-cut stone of the county courthouse; the creamy limestone of a building he called “the Electric.” For a moment, here, in the center of town, against a garish late-afternoon sky that could have been colored by Hockney—heaps of silver-pink cloudy fluff against a cornflower blue—Scranton suddenly felt every bit the painted backdrop for the modern sitcom The Office, which was my only previous association with it.
“Here you go,” Mark said as he pulled to a stop under the hotel awning. The fare was just under seven dollars. I fumbled through the bills in my wallet and handed him a ten. He put it in his mouth as he pulled a thick wad of singles from his shirt’s breast pocket to make change.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Keep it.”
He looked startled, his jaw slack with what I took for a disproportionate surprise. He thinks I have money, I thought as he thanked me with a deferential, distant nod.
Mary’s Lattice, or Nightwork
Up in my room, I spent two hours on my daily writing practice of making detailed notes about the day, then I went out to Thai for dinner. The restaurant was the only occupied storefront on the block, and its luxuriant stone-and-bamboo interior belied the squalor outside. Through the window, I saw a cop standing over a homeless man across the street, trying to wake him. It turned out the man was actually dead. As I walked home after dinner, two EMT workers were loading the shrouded body into an ambulance emblazoned with the image of a crucifix on a mountain.
Back at the hotel, I made more notes as I watched the Patriots demolish the Redskins, then I went to bed. For many years—and still back then, but no longer—I used to sleep most nights with a notepad within easy reach on the bedside table and a tiny pencil tied to my index finger. It was a technique I’d learned from Mary Moroni, an aid to recalling my dreams, the presence of the pencil against my finger a sensate reminder—in those dimmest moments of faint arousal after a dream—not to fall back asleep but to reach for the bedside pad and make note of whatever I could recall. Mary had learned the trick from a follower of Lacan’s Parisian seminars, a woman she’d studied with in the early ’80s during a semester abroad at the Sorbonne. It was apparently a trick Lacan himself had used. Noting her dreams—Mary told me as we brought to a close an afternoon of prosodic analysis of Leaves of Grass—had helped her begin making sense of the unconscious, though using that term, she said, she believed was problematic: “I know it must sound silly to hear me say that sitting under the collected works of Freud.” She glanced back at the block of beige volumes lined up in a lower corner of the mammoth bookshelf towering behind her. “Anyway, that’s what Jenny”—Jenny was her girlfriend—“always says to me: ‘If you hate Freud, why do you spend so much time reading him?’”
“Why do you?” I asked.
“I don’t hate him, for starters. Do I think he was wrong about a lot of things? Yes. Women, especially, though not only. And what he was wrong about he was really wrong about. Was he power-hungry? Yes. Was he a misogynist, a drug addict? Yes, and probably. But none of that changes the fact that he was a genius.”
“Should I read him, too?”
“Absolutely.” She turned in her chair and pulled out one of the beige volumes. “They’ll probably be worth more when I die if I keep the dust jacket in good shape,” she said as she slipped it off. “Like I said, it’s not that everything he says is right. But he was the first one through the door. And despite his failings, he still went deeper than most ever will.” She handed me the naked book across her desk: VOLUME IV (1900) THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.
“I used to dream a lot as a kid,” I said. “Intense stuff. But then it stopped. I haven’t had a dream in years.”
“You’re still dreaming. You’re just not remembering them.”