The Big Picture and the Closeup

The vines and the telephone wires and the guitar strings are all one in a dazzling poetic metaphor, all ligatures that simultaneously vibrate in a siderial harmony and draw the lovers together. And that was exactly what it felt like: that the two of us were being drawn to each other by invisible and harmonious forces.

The bargain I’d made with myself at the beginning of all my running around was that anytime I wanted to I could always turn around and rejoin my life’s earlier course. But when I decided I wanted to, I found anger was blocking that path back. These songs may not have been precisely applicable to our situation, but they were precisely applicable to my mood. I knew how things were supposed to go, and if they weren’t doing that, there had to be an explanation, and I was going nuts trying to find it.

I placed the climactic sex scene in the house of a friend of mine in Baltimore’s Federal Hill. I knew exactly, from well before I wrote it, what the characters would do, and what they would say — and what music I wanted playing when, later on, someone made a movie of it.

And there in the sunroom I stood, one afternoon shortly after my father had died and we had moved into a new house and my life was all jumbled up beyond recall, with the light of the dying day filtering in through the tree outside, tears welling up as I honked through a requiem for my father with the instrument I knew best how to play.

Hmm. I sense a diplomatic silence. One does not simply drop out at the top of a glamorous game and become an anonymous functionary in the halls of justice, marriage or not.