Oct. 2, 2023
Bloomsbury, London
He has wondered about how to explain the last month in London, wondered for the better part of a week. It occurs to him finally to start here:
He had been leaving a dinner after the ceremony for a literary prize. He and his questioner had been seated at opposite ends of their table with their respective favorite people for the entire dinner. It had felt cozier than these things usually did as a result. None of the “introduce everyone at the table” business. It was late after all and the group was hungry and everyone wanted to be in conversation instead with their own cohort. The conversation at his end of the table had run to discussions of past experiences judging literary prizes, and all sorts of unrepeatable stories were told. Now the dinner was over and this sprightly white-haired man with bright blue eyes had walked toward him, smiling as they filed out of the small Italian restaurant near the London Library, and as they lined up for the door, he sprang his question.
“Explain yourself in two words,” the man asked him.
“American novelist,” he replied, and they both laughed, each of them a little startled by how quickly he gave his answer.
“What’s your name,” the man asked next.
“Alexander Chee,” he said. They shook hands.
Alexander doesn’t remember the man’s name now, weeks later and he’s sure the man probably doesn’t remember his name either. Or maybe he does—and maybe he is the subject of a story about the gall of this American novelist to answer that way, to be told and even repeated for years after the fact, doomed to become an old joke he’ll never hear. It was hard to know. This was one way people became novelists, turning a moment over again and again. Either way the exercise—explain yourself in two words, like trying on a tiny hat for laughs—has stayed with him. Or really, the tiny hat was still with him the next day, and weeks later, and it is still there somehow and maybe it has just been on his head the entire time, his entire life. The tiny hat of it all, really. Just hiding out on the back side of his head, a flag-colored birthmark. Inescapable. And when he thinks about it, “American novelist” has been a theme running through his entire time here so far, like the underground rivers nearby. It didn’t describe him but maybe it did explain him. Maybe his answer had come so quick because it was true.
*
The week of departure had felt like it took forever to arrive and then in the last week before he left, preparing for the subletter, he did things he had put off for years, like organizing his office closet, a much-avoided private museum of his past intentions. The closet was so large he could have fit a second office inside, a barely concealed metaphor in that moment. He peeled off the much-abused desk calendar blotter for the month of January 2020, but folded it up for the notes scribbled furiously across it, just in case he needed them someday, and put it inside the closet with all the other artifacts of this kind. He packed his clothes with what felt like a kind of optimism, including shirts he didn’t usually wear and a few that hadn’t fit in years. He had been losing weight in order to stop the upward march of his blood pressure and the progress he’d been making toward diabetes. 31 lbs gone as of his 56th birthday that week.
“We’re bringing more bags than we brought to Leipzig,” his husband Dustin observed as he brought his luggage downstairs. That was the last time they’d spent more than a month in another country—2013. He typically packed light but there in Vermont the last seven years he had developed a style he called Vermont dad going to the gym, which included wearing shorts no matter how cold it was, and it didn’t take much to dress that way. But he found he wanted different clothes in London. His brother had gravely told him a few months before after a visit to a shaman that he had a message for him from their father’s spirit: “He says that you’d feel better if you dressed better.” He’d laughed out loud on the phone but not because he thought his brother was joking, or his father for that matter. His father had been a stylish man and a funny one—the message sounded true. His father had loved tailored bespoke suits, especially his handmade shoes from London. He wondered if he would splurge this way. A kind of offering to his father if not to himself.
He packed shorts for the end of summer, long pants for the fall and winter, sweaters, his Paris Review sweatshirt, a hoodie, tee-shirts enough for a baseball team, buttondowns also, along with with two blazers, a belt, and the brown silk Macintosh raincoat his grandfather had given him back when he had visited him in the 1980s in Seoul.
As they finished packing the car and pulled out of the driveway the next morning, he thought about how seven years ago they had moved to Vermont after he took his job at Dartmouth, looking for a place that would not fail them the way New York City had during Sandy—a place that might be prepared for climate change. They had eventually found this house in a town so small no one would go there unless they knew it was there. The road was named for a direction on the compass with an initial, not even a punctuation mark, as if no one could be bothered to spell it out. They moved in at the end of November in 2019, just in time, it turned out, to spend most of their time there over the next few years. In the first months of the pandemic, he regularly drove past the new house, so new to him he would miss the turn. But the house has kept them safe so far, it felt almost reckless to leave. Even as it has also felt sometimes reckless to stay.
*
They arrived at Logan airport three hours early for the flight. They ate an overpriced meal at Legal Seafoods and marveled at how the airport felt deserted until just before the flight, when it filled in.
The flight took off on time, a kind of modern miracle, and eventually degenerated into another one of those weird group sleepovers with strangers that any flight is. He’d been sold a seat designed to immiserate him into upgrading if he could afford it but it seemed even more miserable than usual. The reading light for his seat was inexplicably controlled by a button on the seat along the window—he was on the aisle—and so he read by the light of a John Wick movie he found he could not pay attention to, hesitant to ask his seatmate about his need for light.
Questions moved through his mind, furtive and dimly seen like the people walking the aisles in the dark. Was this the flight where he learned to sleep slumped against the back of the seat in front of him, for example? No was the answer six hours later, and it might never be. Instead he was mostly awake when the plane landed at Heathrow on time and after they exited, he waited with his husband for their luggage for an hour and a half. He even performed a clumsy dance in front a soda machine in an attempt to amuse Dustin, who did smile but was also a little embarrassed for them both. And then guessing it was time to check the desk, he walked over and found their bags at carousel 10 instead of carousel 1, as it seemed half the luggage had come out at carousel 1 and half at 10 with no announcement. Their bags leaned against each other as if consoling themselves at some imagined abandonment. He put them on a cart and then they were on their way.
The apartment they are subletting is in the Brunswick Centre, a Brutalist apartment complex in Bloomsbury, built on the site of a ruin left behind by the Blitz as perhaps many if not all of the Brutalist buildings in London are—knowing this now, each one feels to him a little as if the feelings of a destroyed building had inspired another building. The building reminds him of the ships in Battlestar Galactica, and was in fact used recently in the filming of Andor, a tv show he and his husband had enjoyed the year previous. They had envied the show’s bureaucrat villain his apartment, in fact, and so it was almost like a dream had come true.
The second oldest plane tree in London resides in a park across the street. It is a very London thing to have them ranked this way, and he admires this.
The photos in the sublet listing had not quite captured how compact the apartment was in terms of storage, though the solarium living room had occupied their imagination. For the four months of his time leading his department’s foreign studies program term they would live here in two bedrooms, a living-room kitchen, a bathroom, a hallway, a patio filled by Chinese wisteria and verbena. Everything is white except the wood table and chairs and floors slowly bleaching every day in the sun. The apartment is a glamorous minimalist exercise, with the metal shelving he remembers from loft apartments in New York in the 1980s. You have to put things back right away or the clutter leaves a kind of unbearable visual noise. The books are smart and interesting, a relief. It is a little like visiting the cool minimalist architect aunt he’s never had.
As they unpacked, he thought of each item he’d brought and how funny it was that he thought that he would need this or that shirt or pair of sneakers. None of the shoes he’d brought were thick enough for the cobblestones, for example, and now he wears a pair of brightly colored Hokas, with soles almost like platform heels that he calls Elf Shoes for the Apocalypse. He can already imagine returning this December with all new clothes, the Vermont dad gear left behind in the helpful bins for donating clothes on the sidewalk outside by the recycling station.
As he stayed up with his jet lag in that first week, the previous year already felt as if it had been sheared off somehow. His little habits of life as strange to him as the shirts and the other things he had brought.
What would he keep, he wondered, and wonders still.
This is the first installment of this letters in the third person exercise. For more details, you can check out this previous post. Thanks for reading and for my subscribers, thanks for subscribing.
Really enjoyed this--and in particular the third person memoir perspective, as you've called it. I've been toying with something similarly in a novel draft I'm working through and was just this morning wondering if it even really works. Reading your version, and being engaged throughout was helpful to see that it can. Though I still wonder how to make do with the loss of the immediacy and voice of the first person, and whether my novel will feel "slower" as a result of the 3rd person or not. And whether "slower" in this particular book, is useful or not. Interesting questions to sort through. Anyhow, I appreciate your work here, and will be reading not just for enjoyment but also to get a sense of how you're working through it all. Thanks!
Loved this slice of 3rd person diary. So fluid and it reads like an adventure. I found this phrase stunning: "private museum of his past intentions".