MAGICIAN
“I’m telling Beth about Adam and wonder at her slight smile. She was thinking, she says, ‘the power of love!’ Strange to say, I’ve apparently domesticated that balking, braying, little crosspatch of a mule. I guess he does love me. But something he did the other day...
SHE-BEAR
In the years after our sojourn in Spain, Ella flew up from L.A. to visit me de vez en cuando—oops—from time to time (I still sometimes remember the Spanish word or expression before the English), and together we’d drive north to Healdsburg to see Dale. Dale lived in a...
VISE
In one of my early sessions with Beth, I said I felt like I was trapped in a vice:“Beth is asking me, ‘What did you construct the two sides of the vise of?’ Turbulent impressions…I’m remembering stroking my own hair and cheek, as I would a disconsolate child’s, to...
BREAK-IN
“One morning last week I accidentally locked myself out of the house before my therapy session with Beth, and, in no mood for hassles, I smashed in the back door with my shoulder, tearing the latch out of the doorframe and ripping off the six-foot strip of molding...
STONE
From time to time I flew down to L.A. to visit Ella too, who was working for a translation agency.
“A gardener is trimming a lozenge-shaped hedge in the grassy courtyard between the wings of Ella’s apartment building. His rake scrapes the sidewalk as he clears away…
CHAPMAN TOWN
I find a journal entry about an impulsive trip to visit high-school friend Meryl in Chico—how the Bomb broke down after dark, just outside of a tiny town called Winters, and I wound up spending the night in the trailer of the clerk who worked the night shift at the neighboring 7-11.