Northwest can do it in seven hours

Over the weekend I read "The Essential Lewis and Clark," a book-length compilation of excerpts from that duo's journals. Incredible. If it were fiction it would be unbelievable because the determination of every member of this thirty-odd man expedition was superhuman. If the grizzly bear was still charging with five lead balls in its lungs, they shot a sixth! If there was no food, they hung on till there was! If the wind wasn't strong enough to move the boats up the Missouri, they got out and bloody well pushed! These guys contended with more hardship every day than I'll face for my entire life. And yet it's notable that no one in the expedition died of starvation, exposure, trauma, Indian attacks, or being eaten by wildlife. One guy randomly died of disease practically before St. Louis was past the horizon. That's it. Everyone else lived. They vomited up their stomachs because of unfamiliar roots the Nez Perce gave them, they came within a hairsbreadth of drowning when an unexpected rain poured torrentially into the gully where they took shelter, they spent a winter practically unprotected from the elements on the north Pacific coast -- but they lived. They lived, they all worked together for over two years under the worst possible conditions, they did it largely without sacrificing their integrity -- and they found a water route through North America, not that it ever got much use afterwards. Strongly recommended for anyone who wants to know what a journey across the country used to be like two hundred years ago, or for that matter anyone who likes whopping good adventure yarns.

After reading the story of their journey, it's hard not to regard myself as pretty damn lucky in the resources I have on the journey I'm about to undertake. I won't have to push my boat; there are railroad tracks and an interstate system that connect the coasts. I won't have to eat my horse or dog; there are grocery stores every few miles, and trains have a dining car. And if I think talking to strangers is scary, at least they speak my language and I can be pretty sure they're not going to rob or scalp me. Lewis and Clark set an impossible example for a weak modern human like me to follow, but I can look to them for inspiration anyway and take a few lessons. Come prepared. Treat those you meet kindly. And if a grizzly bear attacks you, run into the nearest river.

One story building

Last week I wrote a pretty good story! It needs editing in places, particularly in the beginning before I was sure how I wanted to structure it, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the result. Distinctive, well-paced, some conflict, and with that wonderful somewhat inconclusive quality that separates much nonfiction from most fiction. If I can keep that up then on this journey I can at least produce something coherent enough to present to an editor as a strong first draft. I've got plans in place to do another practice interview, then interview a friend of Alice's who's a stranger to me, and then at last hit up someone for a story who hasn't already agreed to the chat.

One quandary that came out while I was writing had to do with who the main character of the story was. We're seeing everything through Alice's eyes; it's her memories, her experiences, her dilemmas. She's the main character, especially in the last couple installments. Yet she gets less direct characterization than Joel or his parents do. Alice tells you what kind of guy Joel is, but she mostly doesn't tell you who she is. I certainly can't tell you more about her than she tells me, because I'm writing this story under the pretense that Alice is a stranger. It's sort of a corollary of how in some first-person novels you can go the entire length of the book without discovering the narrator's name. All you know about Alice is the little she tells you plus what you can infer from how she talks and what she does in the story. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Should I at least introduce her as a blonde white woman in her twenties, single, who's lived in Fort Myers most of her life? Should I let that come out, or not, in the course of the story if it turns out to pertain to it? Or do these basic facts of biography always pertain to any story?

Another quandary: is it fair to Joel and his parents that I'm presenting Alice's judgments of them without a counterpoint? I suppose I could try to get in touch with them to get their sides, but I want these stories to be vignettes, not treatises. I don't think there's anything wrong with presenting only Alice's impressions, with the caveat that I've made the conscious decision to believe my subjects when I can. This credulity is necessary because of my format -- doubt on my part without opposing witnesses is gratuitous -- but it may also be desirable. I'm not going to get a lot of openness from my subjects if they feel like I'm looking for holes in their stories like some kind of itinerant trial lawyer. So I'll be gullible, which fortunately comes naturally to me.

The problem, of course, comes when someone is actually lying to me, or exaggerating to the point of lying. They're still telling me a love story, I suppose, but not a true one, and possibly a slanderous one. This is why I'm always going to use pseudonyms for anyone I haven't interviewed; I'm not interested in being an accessory to libel. If I should catch a major inconsistency in someone's tale, I'm not going to think of it as a lie but as a literary coup. I have to ask them to clarify -- since if their story isn't coherent mine certainly won't be -- but what an opportunity to see how people remember (or choose to remember) the events of their lives! If I necessarily let the subjects paint their own self-portraits through their storytelling, then how interesting it will be to see whether they are realists or impressionists, or whether they gloss over faults or exaggerate them...

Now all I need is subjects!

Alice's story, conclusion

"Oh my God, if you guys threw that away, I swear, I will kill you. No, no, no. All relationships aside, say you took it down and hid it somewhere, that's fine, put in in the attic, okay, but throw it away, no! No, no, no!"

"Not that one, not that one!"

"No!"

After Alice and Joel awkwardly fell apart, Alice's reception by Joel's parents was not the same. Before they'd treated her like a daughter-in-law; now they "hated her guts" -- Alice's words. I'm about to prompt Alice for a specific example, but I don't have to. She goes off on a story.

Alice may have mentioned somewhere already that she's the artsy type. I don't think she'll object if I go further than that and say she's an artist. For as long as I've known her, she's surrounded herself with the fruits of her creativity: paintings and sculptures, some very personal, others just pretty. As befits an artist, Alice draws material from her own experiences, and her relationship with Joel was no exception. "I did this beautiful portrait of Joel. This incredible portrait of him. It won awards at art shows. It was one of my favorite works," Alice recalls. It was called The After-Dinner Look. Alice describes this warm moment frozen in time: "It's him stepping in from their patio with the pool behind, stepping in from the sliding glass doors toward the kitchen. And he kind of has this sort of looking up, this 'So you wanna...' expression. Which, I dunno, maybe other people wouldn't see that in the portrait, but I do, because I know what it means." Alice is fond of this painting not only because of its skillful execution or its nostalgic subject, but also because of the secret in Joel's smile. It's her own personal Mona Lisa.

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it does when Alice tells me the lesson she took from this portrait: "Never give artwork like that to the lover." After the breakup, Alice let herself into Joel's parents' house with her spare key to drop off some stuff she'd had of his, his hockey jersey and the like. It must have been a bitter moment already, and it grew more so when Alice saw that The After-Dinner Look was no longer hanging on the wall. "God only knows what happened to it now, which is my biggest heartbreak," she says. She thinks Joel's parents might have disposed of it. Mona Lisa, meet trash compactor.

If Joel's parents did throw the painting away, though, Alice got her revenge in one small way. The After-Dinner Look was not the only memorable scene from their relationship that Alice committed to canvas. She describes a second painting, called Home Too Early -- "because that's what happened," she explains, "when we did the deed for the first time." She describes her painting -- an Impressionist-style piece, all in yellows, because she was trying to paint the light rather than the objects. "And it's us in bed, and it's a sideways shot of the bed, the window of the bedroom in the background. And I'm in the foreground, and you just see sort of my figure, and my hair. And then Joel is sort of behind me, and his head's popped up, and has a really alert expression." Alert, of course, because Joel's parents had just unexpectedly pulled into the garage. It must have been terrifying then, but Alice laughs now as she describes the scene.

Well, Alice kept that one. "And of course, when I met Everett" -- she continues, referring to her next boyfriend -- "I changed that painting and gave him longer hair... because now I was sleeping with Everett!"

And that's Alice's story. The only thing I feel compelled to add, because I'm not sure how well it came across in this first exercise in biography, is that for all the awkwardness, frustration, and eventual animosity, Alice remembers her relationship with Joel very fondly. "A wonderful soul," she says. "He was such a dear, kind, generous... he would give you anything, if he could give you anything at all, if he had to sell a kidney to do it." She's even wondered if the relationship might start up again someday. And thus the wheel turns.

On Monday we'll return to my desultory musings. The following weekend I hope to have another interview, and maybe the weekend after that we'll finally get around to talking to strangers.

Alice's story, part 3

"When he left to go to West Point, I was seventeen, and I knew he'd be gone for about four years, at least, and I was going to college..."

"When did you discuss this with him?"

"Well, shortly after his parents had me over for dinner. After Joel had left they invited me over for dinner, and they sat me down, and I realized how unhealthy their affection for me was, in some ways. Literally, to boil down the conversation in a nutshell, it was like: 'You will marry our son, right?' And I was like: 'I have to go now.'"

It didn't take long, as Alice and I talked, for me to understand how eager Joel was to please his parents. What took longer to understand was how possessive Joel's parents were of Joel. At first Alice described them in rather positive terms (at least apart from her vivid commentary on the odor of Joel's father). "They were very attentive," she said. "It was a lot of fun when I was dating him in high school because they instantly felt like my other parents." It's fair to say that Joel's parents were welcoming, even getting her drunk more than once, but that wasn't the extent of it. "Looking back," Alice reflects, "his parents were asking us to do it." After dinner Joel and Alice would go to Joel's bedroom, close the door, play music, and "act like bunnies." His parents never flinched. Alice says it never even occurred to her that they had any idea what was going on in there.

If this couple felt like Alice's other parents, however, perhaps it was because they already thought of her as a daughter-in-law. "I even remember conversations his mom had with me about grandchildren," she tells me, disbelief still evident in her voice. "I'm seventeen, lady, I am seventeen!" I wondered if Joel's parents had themselves been early bloomers. Alice answers, "They did meet when they were very young; they also got married when they were very young. But their parents didn't make them do it."

No, Joel's parents didn't make Alice marry him, but listening to her you'd think they might have if they could have. The culmination of Alice's story is her two-week visit with Joel and his parents to Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, immediately before Joel entered West Point. She was uncomfortable to begin with in that fantastically wealthy borough, perhaps best known as The Sopranos' shooting site: "I did not fit in there, because I'm an artsy, independent type, I'm not the Prada-carrying, Abercrombie & Fitch-wearing type." She was there to see Joel off, and she put up with the trip for his sake. What she hadn't counted on was Joel's parents' motive for bringing her: "His parents wanted to parade him around their friends and family before he went . . . and I was really the trophy girlfriend. That was my function. Look, this is Joel, he's going to West Point, and this is the woman he's going to have babies with. That was the whole of the trip."

And her pride and shame? In spite of her discomfort, "I had so much fun, and I loved standing beside Joel and going 'My Joel.' He was My Joel. He was very dear to me, my very very best friend, he's going to West Point, and I'm so proud of him -- his parents' goal has been achieved, he's going to have his freedom... and at the same time, I felt so awkward and clumsy, this sort of feeling of -- yeah, but." But what? "I'm not a military wife! God no! This isn't going to go anywhere -- and here I am almost playing along with everyone in this sort of parade . . . and that's not who I am!"

Maybe Joel's parents sensed Alice's tension. They dialed up the pressure so far that Alice reflected even at the time that if her own parents knew the burden being laid on their daughter, they'd object to it. And as awkward as Alice felt about her own uncertainty, "the most overwhelming thing that I was really uncomfortable with was his parents were like, afraid to let me go. It made me just feel like if they didn't see me crying and Joel going through the West Point gate and me waving to him with a handkerchief it wasn't going to come true." Well, they were right. Alice didn't see Joel through the West Point gate, but instead flew home by herself from JFK. It was 2003; paranoia about flying from New York was high, Alice was coping with others' expectations and her own confusing emotions, her heart was breaking over leaving Joel, and the security guard said her photo ID didn't look like her. (Symbolism, a small part of my brain announces.) Alice burst into tears at the airport -- and while she'd had the idea for a while that this relationship would have to end, "it was kind of then, on my return flight, that I was kind of like yeah... I think... it's unwinding now."

And that was it. There was no moment of truth when Alice told Joel that they were through. They just unwound. Alice tells me that since then, Joel has been engaged three times, and each time the engagement has been broken off. He's looking for a goddess, she says, "and eventually the person he's with feels so much pressure from that, and so awkward from that, that they back away and think I can't commit to this, because eventually I'll want to shoot myself." That's speculation, though. She renewed communications with Joel recently; before that, it had been years since they talked.

There's still a little more story here. Chronologically it happened before the trip to Monmouth Beach, but narratively it belongs after you know how it all ended, and the part Joel's parents and Alice's reaction to Joel's disposition played in the ending -- because all of that foreshadows, or maybe hindshadows, what is in some ways the most poignant part of the tale. I hope you'll forgive me my literary devices. Tomorrow we'll find our closure.

Alice's story, part 2

"He was in ROTC. His dream was to go to West Point. Well, I think --" she corrected herself. "The thing with Joel was that it was his father's dream for him to go to West Point."

"He wasn't sure whether he wanted it himself?"

"No, he wanted whatever Daddy said he wanted."

As Alice and I continue talking, it becomes increasingly clear that to understand Joel's relationship with Alice you have to understand Joel's relationship with his parents. Not that it was abnormal, exactly. He wasn't rebellious or anything. In fact, Alice found him almost suspiciously compliant. A giggling Alice describes Joel's father as "a planet;" she means that he was a heavy guy, but she could just as easily have meant that Joel was a satellite in his orbit. Or to use a different metaphor, Joel was a vessel for his dad's ambitions. "His dad could say, get a haircut; and he'd go do it the next day," Alice explains. West Point was Joel's dream because it was his father's dream.

Nor were his parents the only ones whose goals Joel adopted as his own. As the relationship wore on, Alice says, Joel was deferential to a fault to her as well. "Hey Joel, what do you want to drink with dinner?" "I don't know, hon, whatever you want." "Really, I've got milk, water, or orange juice, which one do you want?" "Surprise me, I trust you." Alice snorts. "It drove me mad!" She doesn't look mad, though; she looks a little wistful. She goes on to explain that she took solace in Joel's care and attentiveness. It may have been true that "he didn't have his own personal drive," but sometimes that was what Alice needed.

Later Alice would make a confession. I'd asked her what her faults were after she complained that Joel overlooked them to a degree she found noxious. "I think my biggest fault with him was, subconsciously or not, sometimes very much taking advantage of him," she answered haltingly. "In the sense that, like... with Joel, really, all I would have to say is, 'I really love that necklace' -- once -- and I'd have it within a month. And I'm not a gold digger! Or else I would stay with him. But sure there were times when I'd say 'I really love that,' or 'I want to go there...'"

I'm Alice's friend, so I can't claim to be impartial, but as I listen it's hard to hold her occasional use of Joel this way against her. After all, it sounds like he wanted what she wanted -- and as Alice says, "I'm sixteen, what do you want from me?" -- but it's hard not to hear in this story a teenage boy who's building an identity out of completing others' identities. Perhaps surprisingly, this made for a lot of fights between Joel and Alice, and not just over what to drink. Often these fights centered around his parents. "His mom or dad comes in, and he's just like oh, don't upset them! And I'm like, no, sometimes that's okay! Sometimes you do things because you are an individual with your own thoughts opinions and plans, and they don't exactly correspond to your parents', and that's okay! Not for Joel."

I can't help wondering out loud whether Joel had any motivations of his own. Alice says he cared about succeeding. That answer puts me back on my heels for a minute. Joel, she's saying, was happy to let others set his destination for him; his pleasure was in doing his honest best to get there. We say sometimes that life is about the journey, but is it really okay, I wonder, to follow others' stars on the way? Alice later revealed that Joel got into West Point and is now in Iraq. I'm certain he's a model soldier and a credit to his country. But whose path has led him there?

More tomorrow! After all, we haven't gotten to Alice's pride and shame yet, and to get there we'll need to study Joel's parents a little more.

Alice's story, part 1

"Suggest a topic!"

"Something that made you feel very proud or very ashamed?"

We're comfortably ensconced in Alice's living room. Alice's two dogs kick back belly-up on the floor while a ferret clan clambers around a tall cage behind me. I've known Alice for two or three years, but I've never heard the story she's about to tell.

"He wasn't my first boyfriend," she explains, "but definitely my first real boyfriend. I was very certain I was going to marry him." She's talking about her high school sweetheart, a fellow we'll call Joel who she'd met through a dinner set up by a mutual friend. He was dorky, she says, but had a great body, and Alice and Joel quickly discovered shared interests from musicals to Monty Python. She recalls the early days of that relationship: "He always wore too much Adidas cologne. The couch would smell like him for days. And I remember those first uncomfortable nights where he would sit next to me on the couch and you don't know how to act around each other because you're in high school, you don't have any experience." There's a big smile on Alice's face here. Time has worked alchemy, turning these awkward early moments into fond reminiscences.

For my part I momentarily feel fractionally more awkward, reflecting that I'm still not totally sure how to act when I sit next to a girl I like on the couch, but the moment passes.

Alice mentions offhand that she found Joel more handsome as their relationship grew deeper. I wonder aloud why that was. Alice answers almost immediately: "I think whenever you establish a relationship with someone you begin to understand their quirks. You understand why they toss their hair a certain way. You understand when they wink like this or when they smile like this it means... this. So you begin to notice -- he kind of had this certain way of looking at me, and I knew that what he was saying was, oh my gosh I love you. And so that look became just the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen!"

I listen carefully. It's interesting to hear Alice echo something I've noticed in my own friendships and relationships; I always find women more attractive when I'm friends with them, and my last serious girlfriend said the same thing about me. (I wasn't sure whether to be happy or chagrined.) Alice's explanation makes as much sense as anything I've been able to come up with myself. That, and just having enough positive associations with a person turns their face into a welcome beacon.

For these first minutes of our conversation, Alice only foreshadows what would eventually come between her and Joel. Actually, I wouldn't have predicted it. She's mentioned his parents, but mostly in a positive context: "they instantly felt like my other parents," she said of how they practically adopted her. "They were very attentive." It turns out, though, that attention is not always a good thing. We'll get into that tomorrow.

Lessons from the frontier

I'm writing this post the night after my very first interview! For a first try, I think it was a tremendous success. I interviewed a friend, who I'll call Alice, at her apartment after we had dinner together at Perkins. It was a comfortable way to go into my first interview and both of us felt relaxed as we sat on her sofa, Kino listening from the coffee table, and she began to tell her story.

The content of the story is a topic for later this week. Today I want to talk about the interview as an interview, and in particular what I learned from it. In gross terms, the most surprising feature of our chat was its length: it clocked in at a cool forty-seven minutes! I'd been expecting that interviews would be shorter than that, maybe ten or fifteen minutes. Probably they will be; strangers haven't set the evening aside for me like Alice did, and Alice is talkative by nature. This is important. Pascal said that he wrote a long letter for lack of time to write a short one, and my experience tonight makes me think something similar will be true of interviews. Tonight Alice and I had time to explore several different angles of her love story. I won't always have that luxury. Getting enough interesting detail to make the story unique in ten or fifteen minutes will be harder than doing it in just under an hour.

Which leads into another aspect of interviewing I didn't realize was important until tonight: finding an angle. Boy meets girl is a good story, which is why it's been told so many times, but it's never told the same way twice. Romeo and Juliet is "boy meets girl, only they're from warring clans;" Pride and Prejudice is "boy meets girl, only they're of different social strata;" WALL-E is "boy meets girl, only they're robots;" and so on. These are oversimplifications, but the point is that the story always has a premise beyond the fact of love. Sometimes it's a source of conflict, sometimes of novelty. The same has to be true of my subjects' stories. My job as an interviewer is not just to facilitate storytelling; it's to capture the most unique aspects of the story and how they relate to the common ones. Never at the expense of reality, of course! I'm not going to write caricatures that emphasize an element that was unimportant to the subject's actual experience; I'd sooner not use the interview. But I will find and focus on important elements that distinguish this story from every other love story. Tonight that meant asking questions about the dynamic between Alice's high school boyfriend and his parents. Theirs was an odd relationship that was the source of some tension between Alice and her boyfriend and bore indirectly on other frustrations she had with him. If I could do the interview again I would have focused more on that -- though thanks to the interview's generous length I got an interesting story out of it even without knowing going in that I needed to look for an angle. The hard part will be sussing out that angle under the pressure of time.

Enough for today. More tomorrow!