American Letters - 1

Season 2 Begins With The Receipts

He is back in America, back at Dartmouth now, sitting at his desk in his office. It is 5:30PM, the time when his London colleagues at QMUL would be leaving to go home and he has at least another half hour to go here. The library clock tower visible outside his window has chimes that ring the hour. He has not missed them.

The office looks ransacked by someone searching for something quickly, and it has been—he is the ransacker, the only ransacker for 7 years now. Despite the 40-some bookshelves on the east and west walls of his office, some of them are empty and yet there are files and books heaped everywhere. A hundred interrupted loops. One of his friends in the department has the habit of sticking his head in if the door is open and from the doorway as he goes by he says, “Looks great,” or “Coming along I see,” and he can never tell if this friend is serious or teasing him.

The students like to look around at the books as they sit down and ask questions. Has he read all of the books? No. A personal or professional library is more of a calculated bet on your future as much as a record of your past.

He is sitting in his father’s old office chair at his father’s old Lincoln desk, which extends across much of the space. A red leather wingback chair is under the single narrow window on the far side, across from the door. He typically directs any visitors to sit in the armchair when they meet with him. The chair, the desk, the desk chair, this furniture is all from his parents offices on Central Wharf in Maine in the 1980s, their fisheries business office. This is the furniture where he and his siblings would sometimes play office, pretending at being adults at work while the adults were at work. And then after his father’s death and the sale of the business, it all sat in storage and then at last in his mother’s basement for three decades after his father’s death. When he took this job, she offered the desk, the chair, the rug, anything he wanted that was down there, and he said yes. He wanted to relieve her of it but also, he felt newly attached to it.

In 2005, during a difficult February, he had moved home and written an early draft of his second novel at this very desk, where he had found it in her basement, wrapped in a moving blanket. He did not unwrap it to work at it, instead putting his laptop out and typing away. He slept in her guest room and the basement became his office. Selling The Queen of the Night as a partial had allowed him to move out again and move on with his life. That novel’s eventual publication then helped him get this job at Dartmouth, and so now the desk is in his office here, and eight years later, it feels as if he drove it all this way.

He never tells anyone in the department about any of this—this is of course what blogs and memoirs are for, sharing secrets with strangers that you’d never tell your friends. He likes to stay late and sit there and read, or to go in on a weekend. His husband knows this about him.

The shelves beside the chair are filled with some of the books of a colleague who retired, an Early Modernist who had the office before he did. His own books on the other shelves are visibly newer. When he arrived that first fall in 2016, the retiring colleague had offered to have a bookstore come and take them but he asked to keep them instead, if it was ok, if they were just being donated. He liked the idea of a library he hadn’t selected keeping him company in the room and besides, sometimes his own taste, and the maintenance of it, exhausted him. Sometimes it was good to just throw a random door open, perhaps especially to the past. But it occurs to him today that the collection, including a fold-out poster of the British monarchs, was like a prelude to this trip to London.

Now his desk is piled with receipts from the London trip. It is tax time as well as expense report time and so he is separating out what is the college’s and what is his. And while normally this process is painful to him, he finds a great deal of pleasure in each receipt. For the first time in his history with receipts, he gets lost in them.

*

“Do you miss London,” people have been asking him. And of course he does.

He misses his friends, the new ones and the old ones. He misses being at the center of Central London, able to go just about anywhere with what felt like great speed, even when it was slow. He misses the twilight of their apartment at night, the all-white apartment lit up with the ambient light off the mall below. He and Dustin gingerly drinking a cocktail before or after making dinner and only sometimes thinking to worry about the red wine, the Negronis, and where they might splash—though they never did.

He misses the proximity of their old friends and new friends, as well as the steady stream of visitors, the people he saw who would come to London before ever coming to Vermont.

He misses the Waitrose and the Sainsbury, Tian Tian, the K Beauty Bar, the many boba tea shops, the little patisserie cafe run by a retired couple that was only open on the weekends. He had wondered aloud at how many of the Sainsbury sultana scone packages he’d eaten but now it is tax time and the answers might very well be in his receipts—he and Dustin saved just about every one.

He misses the many tiny coffees, the flat whites he shouldn’t have indulged in so much, but which seemed to hold him up every day. He misses the Russell Square tube stop with the vast stairwell down that you weren’t supposed to take but that sometimes people did take, including him, exactly once. 175 steps. He misses Fortitude Bakery and the line of people down the block and even around it, sometimes, all of them waiting for these pastries, gigantic and divine.

He misses looking out into the dark park at night across the street from their apartment entrance, and tracing out some of the limbs of the second largest plane tree in London, The Great Plane of Brunswick Square. He misses pretty much all of Lamb’s Conduit, including Ciao Bella, the Italian restaurant with the maitresse who rolled her Rs at such a pitch they felt like a drill through time and space. He misses the Mediterranean gin and tonics at Honey & Co, the e5bakehouse bread he got every week at La Fromagerie. He never got to go back and thank the sweet man who introduced him to Portobello Road gin at Albion Wine Shippers, and he meant to go back at least once for a dinner at Noble Rot.

He misses the sight of the elegant elderly Arab neighbor next door who was mostly quiet but was sometimes could be heard through the wall, for reasons he could guess, and who he mostly saw drifting down the hall in his beautiful clothes at half speed. He misses the Chinese neighbor with the garden who accidentally overheard him complimenting the garden as he gave a friend a tour of the outdoor spaces of the Brunswick. He misses the Chinese mother across the way who he saw go from sitting on a bench with her infant daughter to harnessing her so she could help her stand and walk to the daughter walking on her own with her, imitating her as she did her exercises—he misses them both.

And the building’s falconer, of course, with his falcon, chasing away the pigeons.

He misses the London Library, the search for the perfect hidden desk in the stacks, the writers entering and hanging their jackets up in the front racks across from the lockers. He misses the Italian restaurant around the corner there, where he once ate two days in a row, and on the second day the hostess said, “We’ve never had anyone eat here two days in a row.”

Many mysteries remain, especially of the small kind, the kind most likely unresolved forever. What of the group of men all wearing fake mustaches in a pub, drinking pints together? Who were they? What about the college for psychic mediums he learned about but never visited, just outside London? He had never gotten to Barber Streisand, with perhaps the best queer barbershop name ever. He might have said goodbye to the waitress at the Turkish restaurant on Sandwich Street who sang to all of the crying children at Brunch, children who then usually stopped crying at least as long as the song continued. He will miss all of the people on their benches in St. George’s Gardens, reading books, when they return after the winter in a few months, their open books face up to the sun like the flowers of spring.

He folds up the receipts, packs his bag, walks down to the snowy sidewalks of Hanover and drives home, his very American commute enfolding him all the way.