Travels in Vermeer Read Free

Missouri, the day after high school graduation, drifted for a few months, worked odd jobs in the Rockies, and then enlisted. It’s difficult enough to simply be eighteen, but when you’re eighteen and knotted up within yourself in the foul, hot hold of a steam-driven ship for months on end, those smoke-filled mercies—brothels and hovels stocked with neighborhood-sweetheart, twenty-buck whores—shine bright in the mind, like the final proof of God.
    I remember riding the liberty launch into the Bay of Naples. 1975. The crew of my ship, the amphibious attack ship USS El Paso, had just rescued a thousand American civilians from the siege of Beirut. First, we spent a month anchored off shore in mined waters, waiting for negotiations that ultimately broke down. Suddenly one night we got the call, and went in thundering fast and hard with landing craft. A small band of Marines picked up the Americans in front of the embassy, and led them in single file down to the boats. From there, we delivered them—crowded on every deck, like anxious immigrants, each with a single suitcase—to Cyprus. It was our moment, our single, incandescent moment. Gerald Ford telephoned—patched in live, on the intercom—to thank us.
    Then we approached fleet landing, under a flame-clear sky, bouncing through a little harbor chop. We could see the queue of girls on the pier, dolled up in heels and fishnet in broad daylight, late sun shadowing the immolated backdrop of Castel Nuovo. To the victors go the spoils.
    Now, on the bridge, in this other liberty port, I hear a titter from behind as two women pass arm-in-arm. Normal, urban ladies, with scarves and topcoats. “Oh no, you would not ,” one says. “Would so .” They are Brits, about my age. They’re starting to gray but are still spritely, you might say, enjoying themselves immensely. Girls’ night out.
    For me, what the red lights of De Wallen signify is theme-park or “cultural tourist” lust and, charming as it is, there’s little heat in it, for me. I’m far more tempted by the clink of glasses, laughter from every corner brewpub. I’m imagining a frothy swallow of Heineken, so I keep moving, moving, shivering, my mouth watering, and I don’t stop.
    Hours later, out of the wrong direction, I arrive on the waterfront, where I’d marked an X for the Renaissance Hotel on my map. It’s a modern high-rise, earthen and mahogany tones inside. My room is on the fourth floor. I swing open the French windows to a canal view of gray sky, lead-gray water. Only eight o’clock, but I’m truly done—and lonelier than I’ve felt in years.
    What am I doing here? I slump in the chair for half an hour without moving. In the bathroom, I line up pill bottles and inhalers on the sink—my Advair, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, Aleve—then sleep in my clothes until sunrise.
    2. Daydreaming
    There’s a story I sometimes tell my college students about how I was placed in “slow” classes in grade school, a designation that lasted through high school. The reason, I think, was because I was extraordinarily shy and inward, and always traveling in my mind. I can conjure up my experience in a single scene. I remember an open window beside me, with a view across the emerald football field, its white chalked lines and wooden bleachers, and beyond that, nothing but rolling hills. I’d stare and stare, in a trance-like state, as the teacher’s voice washed unintelligibly over me—as soothing as ocean waves, I might say now, though I never saw the ocean in my childhood. If I retained nothing from Basic Math or Wood Shop, at least I became a world-class dreamer.
    The only event that had much impact on the reveries of my youth was the rather violent break-up of my family when I was thirteen. There were five children: three boys, then two girls. I was the second. For many months (it seemed forever), leading up to