Stacks

Richard
Stacks
Starbucks, March 31, 09

Two or three books arrive daily in stiff brown envelopes, none addressed to me. Publishers are appealing to Laurie as if she’s an old friend they’re waiting to hear back from. They seldom do. I stack the books beside her desk in columns that mark the time she’s been gone on her latest trip. There must be eighty by now, neat as bricks.

Suzanne is warm when we meet. As she brushes hair from her face, I notice gray streaks that weren’t there when I left. She slips off her jacket to reveal a flowered dress she bought at a yard-sale for three dollars. “They wanted five.” She laughs. “But I made the lower offer because I wasn’t sure it would fit.” She’s proud it does. She’s shapelier these days, no longer shy to show herself. She asks, “Do you say, ‘I love you’ to each other?” She knows I won’t volunteer details about my life but will answer a direct question. I feel I’ve fallen into deep water, and the pressure makes me heavy. “Yes,” I say, and see her wince. She’s plunged in, too.

Laurie calls to download her day. Suzanne would call, too, when she traveled, although she’d rarely fill me in with as much detail as Laurie does. I don’t always know the people Laurie mentions, but I piece together their stories. Her friends are becoming characters in my life.

I go to bookstores to write, although I no longer buy many books nor read as much as in the past. It’s ironic, since advance galleys and bound copies flood in. I see the book as a dodge against death. Fat chance. Among the people I know, I’ll be the last to produce one.

Suzanne gave me a copy of her latest book when we met, a history of the Tonto National Monument in which she chronicles the majestic and ingenious cliff dwellings built by the Sinaguans, agriculturalists and traders who settled in Arizona and built vertical villages around 1000 A. D.—hundreds of years before the first Europeans arrived. No one knows why the Sinaguans abandoned their homes around 1400. I edited some chapters of the book, and we traveled for her research. Back home, I read the first and last sections, pleased she’s produced it and sad for myself. That I don’t have a book? That I’m no longer part of her process? I looked for a dedication, but there wasn’t one.

Laurie asks me to deposit a check for her in the bank. She asks what mail has arrived but not what books. When she returns, maybe a handful will interest her. She’ll pack off some to the garage, give others to the mail carrier, sell some. Millions of words and thousands of pages headed where?

Suzanne wants me to prepare our taxes—a story about our shared property that omits our separation. We’ll file jointly again. She’s planning to refinance the mortgage that I pay, and she speaks about the steps as if we are a regular couple. “Okay,” I say, “good idea,” because these dogs are the first to charge from my mouth. I feel uncomfortable; we’re not partners apart from paper. The next time we meet, I will give her a check for the expenses.

At the artists’ colony where Laurie will stay for a month, she’ll work on our prompt book. We’ve talked about including one hundred and fifty entries, but I forget if this is from each of us or in total. We read to each other on the phone. Laurie asks me to type up and send her my best pieces, and she edits them, sifting away dust and sand until they are stacked, clean and ready. She fantasizes our success. “We’ll give workshops. We’ll go to Greece and take walks and eat fish.” Is it possible? This fall at ASU, we’ll teach a workshop together on our practice.

Suzanne is writing about other national monuments in the Southwest, and her next project profiles Tuzigoot, a giant pueblo spanning forty-two acres and comprising 110 rooms, including second and third story structures, built by the Sinaguans on a desert hilltop. Suzanne’s focus is the reconstruction, beginning in the 1930’s when a group of young Arizona archeologists discovered the layout of the original site on a hillside of scattered stones. Brick by brick, or rather stone by stone, they gathered enough to build up the walls a few feet and construct several rooms. Enough stones were left to build offices and a small museum. Suzanne says it’s all a fiction, passing as the real thing.

Publishers have taken to sending quantities of slim poetry books to Laurie written by authors I haven’t heard of. I dip in here and there, not knowing what I’m looking for or how to read them. I slip back to my favorites: Wodehouse, Graham Green, Borges—books that change, because I have changed, with each rereading. By the time Laurie returns, I will have stacked a hundred and fifty books in columns that will reach the height of her glass desk. They will take to leaning together for support. Laurie says she has a complicated next few days, and she names friends she will visit before settling at the colony. “I love you,” she says, ringing off. She prompts, “Say it,” and I do.