Nocturne Read Free Page A

whimsical story of the friendshipbetween Wilbur the pig and Charlotte the spider moved me as nothing else had moved me before. When that spider died, I was inconsolable. Mum, nonplussed by my sobbing, tried to calm me by pointing out that because Charlotte had babies there were still lots of spiders at the end of the story. But of course these other spiders didn’t matter because I didn’t know them. I didn’t care about them.
    Since we lived in the suburbs, few people walked along our street, suspicious or otherwise. Everyone drove everywhere. You soon quit being my surveillance assistant, saying that it was boring. I realized then that it might be better to make up the adventures rather than wait for them to happen to me. And my devastating response to
Charlotte’s Web
made me think that if I controlled a story, I would never have to feel that sad again.
    I was wrong, but this was how I became a writer.
    You said, near the end of being you, that music is always good—meaning, to listen to it, to play it, is always an enriching experience. I can’t say the same about writing, and my lifetime of doing it has always held ambivalence and struggle. But it makes sense, if I think back to our beginnings. You responded to the music. You got up from the couch and walked over to the piano and simply entered what had moved you. Ilooked to writing to provide what life wasn’t providing, to be, in a way, a substitute for living. And this has remained. For to write well, to write fully, to really get inside a novel, I have to leave the world I actually live in. I can’t have distractions from the story, which means living alone, and creating an environment of calm and routine—wearing the same clothes day after day, eating the same food—so that nothing from the real world interferes with the creation of the fictional one.
    Over the years this has worn me down and created a kind of loneliness that is hard to live with, and surprisingly hard to leave.
    About ten years ago, when I was writing almost all the time, I remember you saying to me,
You used to do other things besides work
, and I thought that was strange coming from you, who was just as driven to create. But you were right. And now, perhaps, the desire to not write is really just a desire to not leave the real world, a world that has been made possible again, perversely, by your death.
    But the thing about writing is that I’ve done it for so long, I can no longer differentiate where it ends and I begin. My being is enmeshed with what I do. And this is why, in spite of my desire to give up writing, I am writing to you one last time. Writing is what I have, and it’s how I make sense of experience.
    I even wrote a line at your hospital bedside, as you lay dying, because two ideas occurred to me in that moment and I wanted to remember them. The first was just the very simple fact that, in the end, you can step out of a room or you can’t. That is what separates the living from the dying, that one small, enormous action. The second is the poignant truth of the flesh we live inside, that in the end the body leaks or it holds.
    Someone is letting off firecrackers tonight. The dog is apprehensive, but she’s not scared yet, because she’s still so young. We grow into our fears, animals and humans alike. We grow into our fears and our neuroses. So, for now, she sits beside me on the little deck behind my house, panting and nervous, but staying with me.
    You had an ulcer at the age of seven. Now the experts say that ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, but the ulcer always seemed connected to your practising the piano or worrying about your practising. It just felt like further evidence, to me, of your seriousness as a child. And when I look back now, tonight, it seems that neither of us was ever really lighthearted or carefree. We may as well have been adults, not children. We were driven and responsible and pathologically independent.
    When we had our last