American Letters 6 - Animals At Night

For new subscribers, this is a series of third person letters about my life. This letter sets up the thinking behind it. American Letters 1 is here.

Two Bears, Ottomar Anschütz, 1889, MOMA Open Access

On the path to the house as he comes home from work, a peach pit sits in the dead grass, the surviving evidence of a mystery from the summer before.

Last August he had counted the peaches left at the top of the tree and thought he had one more day to pick them. As the house was full of the peaches he’d already taken down, waiting for him and his husband to process, cook or eat on top of cereal, eat just over the sink to catch the juice, he had told himself there was at least one more day. He’d even left a bowl of peaches in the department mail room for people to take, baked peach bars he left there also, all quickly consumed. A friend was coming for brunch that weekend and the friend’s son wanted to pick peaches if possible. But the next morning, the tree was empty. Picked clean.

He texted his husband first. Did you pick the rest of the peaches this morning. His husband, who mostly had left the peach picking job to him, replied no. Later, examining the tree, his husband counted 43 pits in the grass. They puzzled out possible thieves. The squirrels didn’t seem fast enough and would have dropped more than they ate, or so he supposed. He asked the internet if bears spat out the pits and the internet (Bluesky) said yes they did. In the night, it seems, bears had come and eaten everything left on the upper branches. He would have thought a bear or two eating peaches off the tree in the front yard might wake him but they did not. He wondered if the bears had even used his ladder, which he’d left by the tree, but it seems bears just pull the branches down and yank the peaches off, eating them with quiet abandon.

He sometimes wants to buy a cam to see what happens outdoors when they are asleep but the idea also haunts him a little. He might not want to see it. He likes the mystery, the footprints like a note left behind on the snow in the night that he cannot quite read. A fox or a cat, a turkey or an owl. He would rather be surprised, as he sometimes is, by the animal itself. The possum under the deck, the hedgehog eating the wooden sides of the house, the fox wandering his lawn just outside his office window. The ancient and enormous pale turkey, walking out of the woods like he was the king of all he surveyed, indifferent to their human attention.

As he gets closer to the house he sees the robins have not yet returned to the nest they made in the eaves of the roof over the entrance to the house. The first time they did, they threw the spare key there into the path, right where he found the pit, as if to say the house belonged to them.

He and Dustin agreed to leave the nest alone and found a new place to hide the key.

*

Two weeks later, the peach tree is in bloom.

*

In March he recorded a podcast with a friend, Conner Habib, who he first met in Amherst 20 years ago. At the time, Conner was a bookseller who loved books and sex with men, studying for his MFA in fiction, and when he judged a prize for their program, he chose one of Conner’s stories in a blind submission. Now Conner is a novelist and former porn star. On the podcast they discussed their respective uses of Tarot, and drew cards for reading recommendations. Conner is an excellent Tarotist, he learned, when they read Tarot cards for each other before the recording.

He left the notes he took at the front of his novel’s manuscript draft, and now he reads them each time as he goes back to work. One line is a note he took about either the novel or the Tarot reading, he can’t remember now, and he hears the line in Conner’s voice, but he likes it as something to hear as he starts writing the novel:

Is this person a friend or an enemy met in darkness

*

He recorded another interview that month on a podcast called Chills At Wills, which came out in April on the anniversary of his first essay collection last month. Has it really been seven years? It has. The book was named a Best Book of the Century (So Far) by Kirkus Reviews, an honor, as a friend says, because they are the pickiest. Perhaps. The “best of the century so far” is another sort of reputational precarity. Perhaps he will not live long enough to see himself exit the list, if he ever does. Or maybe he will.

*

Something the Tarot cards did not describe: the way March and then April pass at a run. He wrote a pep talk, as a part of a group effort at Writing Co-Lab. His pep talk is focused on how powerful it makes him feel to write novels, that billionaires have spent all of this money on a machine that means to replace him and his friends and even his enemies, and it still can’t.

He is reading two novels—Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness, out this September, which moves back and forth in time, telling the stories of a group of Black women friends, and the sections set during the first Trump administration are a little uncanny to read during this one but welcome also—it helps him feel the ground underneath his feet. And he is finally reading Middlemarch for the first time, a part of a Bookstagram readalong organized by Bernie Lombardi and Christopher Metts. This is differently uncanny, to read a novel with women characters living under the sort of repression the current administration is anxious to bring back, written by a woman who used a male pen name due to said repression in the mid-19th century, writing marriage dramas while herself living not so secretly as the unmarried lover of a married man unable to get a divorce. The novel is shady as all hell about the characters in it and this, out of everything, makes his weary heart glad.

It’s a little like The Wilderness, honestly.

*

I’m writing a novel, he replies to the friend who says he misses him writing occasional political pieces.

The friend says Of course, of course.