Too Close to Home

But Conrad was still a fairly anonymous professor when Ellen was hired to help set up that literary festival.

We’d been living in Albany. Ellen had been working for a company that planned and organized major events. They did concerts, corporate functions, speaking series. When Thackeray started advertising for someone full-time to look after an annual literary event, Ellen applied and, to her own amazement, got the job. I was working for an Albany security firm at the time, going through, to be honest, a bit of depression because I wasn’t getting anywhere with my art.

It was something I was struggling to come to terms with. As a young adult with no parents, I’d managed to scrape up enough money to attend a single year of art college, and I’d tell myself I’d be the one to beat the odds, the one in a hundred who could actually make a living with his talent. I’d had a buddy that year, Teddy, a brilliant sculptor who could find a leopard hiding in a block of wood, and I figured if any graduate would make it, it’d be him. A few years later I ran into him driving a truck weighed down with hot asphalt.

We grabbed a beer, the smell of tar sticking to him, and I got around to asking him about the dreams he’d had in college.

“They got overtaken by fucking life, man,” he said.

I knew the feeling. How else to explain working for a security firm that was sucking a little bit more of life out of me every day? So when Ellen was offered her job in Promise Falls, I had no qualms walking away from mine and looking for something else. Even another job that had no meaning would at least be a change.

On top of all that, Derek was seven and not having the greatest time in elementary school. Didn’t pay attention, the teacher said. Wouldn’t focus on his studies, she said. Wouldn’t settle down, she said.

We chose to do what a lot of parents do. We blamed the teacher. Maybe it even was her fault, who knows. So we figured a move to Promise Falls would be a new start for all of us. Ellen would begin her new, terrific job, I’d find something better, and Derek would start afresh in a new school.

So we bought a place a couple of miles south of Promise Falls, a modest but charming two-story tucked down a lane, just beyond the Langley house. Ellen started her new job. Derek started with a clean slate at a new school, where his teacher, in about a month, asked us in for an interview to discuss the problems Derek was having paying attention, focusing on his studies, and settling down.

I found work at another security firm, spent my evenings and weekends painting, even persuaded a gallery in town to put together a show of my work. Did the whole wine-and-cheese-party thing, invited everyone we could think of, sold one painting, a small one that went for under a hundred bucks, to a friend. Ellen tried to keep my spirits up, insisted I had talent, told me stories she’d heard about great writers who’d taken a long time to be recognized. None of that helped. I fell into a deep funk that lasted several months. Ellen, either discouraged or fed up, or a bit of both, gave up trying to boost my spirits. I think Ellen had been attracted to me in the first place because I was an artist, and as I seemed to be giving up on it, I wondered if there was a part of her that was giving up on me.

I quickly came to hate my new security job. No surprise there. So when I saw an ad in the Standard that the mayor’s office was looking for a driver, I thought, what the hell, why not apply. Ellen ended up working very closely with Conrad to get the first festival organized. He’d offered to be an adviser for the event, given his background in English literature, particularly as practiced by those who were still alive and could accept invitations. This was a heady experience for Ellen, working with someone as charismatic and sophisticated as Conrad, and this was even a couple of years before he ended up on the cover of Newsweek, when it did a story on a new crop of writers who were supposedly pushing the envelope. As it turned out, Conrad mostly wanted to push himself onto Ellen, and maybe, if I had been more attentive at the time, hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own problems, dragged down by not being able to make a career through my own creative outlets, he wouldn’t have been successful.

It didn’t last long. I don’t even know whether you could call it an out-and-out affair. A misstep, perhaps, on Ellen’s part. Getting caught up in the moment. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t think about responding in ways that would only have made the situation worse.