None of this Ever Really Happened Read Free Page B

resign her partnership, sell her condo,
see the world, run a marathon, learn Spanish, get an MBA,
and move to South America. "Within five years I intend to be
the finance minister of a small country somewhere in Latin
America!"
    "Ándale!" someone said.
    "I'm going to finally do something fucking important
with my life!"
    "Arriba!" we cried. By this time the waitstaff was eyeing
us wearily. Later that night I lay awake in bed thinking about
doing something important with my life. I was aware even
then that something in me had changed. I was not sure what
it was or how big it was or how long it would last, but something
was different. I had seen another person die. I thought
about soldiers who can never quite come all the way back
from combat, can never really shop again for tube socks at
Wal-Mart or go all out for a foul pop-up or fall asleep on the
couch with a book turned over on their chests. Can never
even read a book or eat soup or make love without the knowledge
of what they've done or seen.
    For me right then, it was the knowledge of what I hadn't
done. Oh, I knew that my friends were well-meaning, that
they were kind and wise and generous to reassure me and I
was sure they were right that any action I would have taken
could have failed or backfired or even exacerbated the situation,
but they were also missing the point. I saw someone
alive, and then I saw her dead, and in between I could have
acted at least theoretically, at least hypothetically, to change
the dynamic between those two things. Perhaps that's what
had changed. Perhaps I'd never realized before that I could
have such power. Perhaps I'd never even thought about it.
    The first real writing I ever did was a bunch of short stories I
wrote as a senior thesis at Ohio University for Walter Tevis,
and I had been carrying around something that Tevis had
said to me ever since, something that despite the fact that I'd
spent much of my life writing made me hesitate to call myself
a writer.
    I would love to say that Walter Tevis was my mentor, but
it would be more accurate to say that I wanted him to be my
mentor, and he tried to be, sort of. I don't think that I was
very mentorable because I was only playing at being a writer,
trying it on as you might a suit of clothes, and I think he
knew that, but he was kind and indulgent and treated me as
a mentee even if we both knew we were faking it.
    Tevis was a goofy, gangly, buck-toothed man who knew
Paul Newman and drank wine, sometimes too much. I'm not
telling tales out of school here; he was candid about his drinking
and used to joke that the only day of the year he didn't
drink was New Year's Eve, "amateur night," and every New
Year's Day he gave a brunch so he could enjoy his bleary-eyed
friends and welcome the new year with a Bloody Mary.
About Paul Newman: He had supposedly and very briefly—if
at all—attended Ohio University, and we as undergrads were
much more impressed that Tevis knew him than that the reason
he knew him was because he had written two novels called The Hustler and The Color of Money that had been made into
movies starring Newman. This all made Tevis something of
a local celebrity, and I considered myself lucky to get into his
creative-writing class as a junior and luckier still when he
agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to sponsor my independent-writing
project the year I came back from Oxford.
    I spent the winter quarter sitting up all night in my tiny
room smoking cigarettes, drinking Nescafé and typing five
rambling, mediocre stories about growing up. Once a week
Tevis and I met late in the evening. The hour was partly because
we were both night owls and partly, I came to realize,
so Tevis would have a reason to open a bottle of Spanish sauterne
that was sometimes not his first. We met in his living
room at first, but his wife, who had correctly assessed the
situation and clearly saw me as a bad influence and facilitator,
would walk through glowering at us, so we moved our
sessions to the