Fleeing Toxic London, Finding Possibilities in Experimental Writing

An excerpt of The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion

We come because I am sick. I have chronic fatigue. Impossible exhaustion. In London where my husband and I lived, I toured the offices of environmental doctors, in their name a promise to treat something so global it’s everywhere all the time, as if my sickness is everything. And, for me it was, it was the city and the air itself. My first week living in the UK, I broke out in a rash. It was from detergent but could seem to be the move itself.

I went there to live with my husband. He, David, became my husband so we could be in the same country and same city. For most people at our stage in a relationship, that would be dating. But, I was in New York and he a seven-hour flight away, a distance too far and too expensive to transcend. The answer: marriage. Neither of us believed in it. Matrimony is a product of capitalism and Christianity, and that we could promise to have and hold and some other vows that would bind us legally together just to live in the same city seemed wrong. Gay marriage wasn’t legal, and until all could marry, our doing so also seemed wrong. Not to mention the fact that marrying could be seen as an easy immigration dodge for me, a white woman. Nonetheless, I was now a year out of an MFA and three years into this marriage and had visited multiple doctors all to try to cure what we called “my health.” The word itself was a stone, a weight to carry around.

A headache would bloom or my throat would swell, my lips come up in blisters—on the inside, on the tender side. Or I’d come down with a flu, though it was not the flu, not something that anyone could detect or diagnose as a virus, and I’d be in bed for three days. Feeling better, I’d walk too far or ride a bike or wander past someone smoking or smell someone smoking some 200 yards away, or breathe in bus exhaust or something I couldn’t even detect or name, and my lower back would ache and my bones would get sore, my hands sore, then my throat and sinuses sore, and this flu / not-flu would return and I would return to bed. My life whittled down to a fine point, to the fine point of my bedroom and desk, of being stuck at home and sick in Britain, a new country I barely knew.

I had tests, changed my diet, cut this, restricted that, added in expensive vitamins and something called chelation therapy delivered through an IV. There was meditation and I followed regulations, different ones from each doctor—a litany of regimens including giving myself shots in the thigh every other day. None of it worked, or not enough.

***

Doctor’s office. Tuesday afternoon: oatmeal, gray, and beige—colors of no color. This in a dull outer-London suburb already two trains from my own outer suburb. I remember now a bland carpet, but it couldn’t have been carpeting, just drab. These doctors don’t have rugs or carpets. One of the first things I learned is that such soft furnishings could make us sick. I was also part of an “us” now, a group of sick people. The doctor flicks at my file, my life, it felt like.

Move, he said. You cannot stay in London. Manila folders sit in stacks on his desk. More drab, bland shades. Early on he’d commanded: never paint, no new cars, VOCs could . . . His voice had droned on. Stop shopping. No new clothes. He’d said something about their having formaldehyde.

This Tuesday I was sure from the sound of his voice he’d had this conversation countless times.

I was also homesick, but that wasn’t the problem. I was allergic to London, which could be a metaphor but is, in fact, perfume, car exhaust, diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, and the formaldehyde fire retardant used in clothes. London itself is a bowl that collects pollution, and these pollutants settle in the city.

How long before we can come back? My voice arced up. Everything in David’s and my lives has been aimed at cities. We’d both moved to our own cities as soon as we were eighteen.

If I follow protocols, this doctor says, six months, a year, two. Well, three.

So, exile.

~~

That winter: David and I stand on Regent Street. An argument. We have to leave your city, I said. The “you” was underlined with accusation. The city belonged to him whenever things went wrong. He reached for my shoulder. There was the soft burr of his voice, lamplight phosphorescing in the damp December night. Humid air held more pollution, we’d learned. A sinus headache bored into my brain, the colors red and blaring. On the street, with the impossible exhaustion of mine, he hailed a cab.

Inside, I angled away from him, and there is so much in this moment that reveals David, this man gentle, kind and generous, who is willing to leave his city for the unknown, for my health. I stared at the window, spoke to the glass. My breath fogged it. I laid down an ultimatum. This time next year we must be gone. He didn't argue. I wanted him to fight back. My voice rose. We must go. He touched my knee. The driver eyed me in the rearview mirror, and we could not afford this cab to our house in the outer suburb, and yet. This man married me only so we could date, and we were both held hostage to my being sick.

~~

I was also homesick, but that wasn’t the problem. I was allergic to London, which could be a metaphor but is, in fact, perfume, car exhaust, diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, and the formaldehyde fire retardant used in clothes. London itself is a bowl that collects pollution, and these pollutants settle in the city.

~~

We consider going anywhere we have ever been that is not a city, because to leave all cities, where do you go? Particularly when your existence has been aimed at the urban, at places of burnishing and polishing, where you feel part of the forward march of the future, of art and design, music, clubs, parties and writing, scenes of noise and vibration, where people have to shout as they ask what you are working on, where “work” isn’t a job but identity. In those moments I tightened my insides, shellacked my outsides, and felt aglow with possibility.

~~

The doctor suggested Greece. We’ve been to Crete; we consider it. One town has a flight once a week, four hours direct to London. I think the other days of the week are given to military jets. This town has cell service but little internet. Neither of us would be able to work.

Or a desert, the doctor said. Arizona.

On spreadsheets I calculate the cost of living. If we go to the US, how will we afford health insurance? I never do get an answer. I call insurance providers whose names promise crosses and shields, anthems and fidelity. Friends in New York give advice, and still we vastly underestimate the amount. I now too have a pre-existing condition of “my health.”

~~

The final place we consider: the Catskills. Neither of us has been to the Catskills, but I say it is like Vermont. I spent my childhood vacations there, on the side of a mountain at a defunct ski area. By then my sisters had left home, and my parents were exhausted by me. They would send me outside to pick wildflowers. I’d walk down the dirt road past one switchback and another and scamper down a ravine to a stream called Roaring Brook. None of this do I explain to David, not the way loneliness felt nor how it was held in the flowers I dried. But he says okay.

~~

We move to a fairytale house on the corner of Walnut and Orchard streets where neither walnuts nor orchards grow. The neighbors soon will plant an apple tree whose bounty will be free to all. These neighbors are a gay couple whom we come to call the godfathers, because they get together the year we are born, and one of them, we discover, is a distant cousin. His family hails too from the shtetels of Vilnius.

The final place we consider: the Catskills. Neither of us has been to the Catskills, but I say it is like Vermont. I spent my childhood vacations there, on the side of a mountain at a defunct ski area. By then my sisters had left home, and my parents were exhausted by me. They would send me outside to pick wildflowers. I’d walk down the dirt road past one switchback and another and scamper down a ravine to a stream called Roaring Brook.

This house is in a row of stately Victorians. The fronts are wrapped with porches. Gables grab for the sky. Ours is called a Queen Anne Victorian, as if being named for two queens makes the place doubly regal. It even has a turret. Inside is ornate woodwork—any possible surface that can be tooled, carved, inlaid, or ornamented is—the moldings, the floors, the railings, the newel posts and staircases, the hall closet and linen cupboards, even. Above every door, the lintels are shaped in three peaks like a crown, and intricate carved wooden beads suggesting an abacus hang over the French doors between the two living rooms. Things here also come in twos: two staircases and these living rooms. One of them David dubs the parlor. Too fancy for daily use, we never furnish it beyond a couple chairs.

Order the book…

This queenly home gives us space beyond our imaginations. There is a room for every and any activity: work, writing, meditating (if we do it) or yoga (if we practice it) as well as guests. The turret, though, is a folly. Form does not follow function. Outside, it promises turret-ness, climbing to a pointed spire and topped with a ball. Inside it is a just bulging curve where the turret should be, as if the room is distended, angling out with ambitions to escape.

~~

October: I do the closing by myself. David is back in London. The air is crisp, and the night will freeze, and I stand before this home with all of its doubles and rooms, so many I can’t figure out where to settle or land. How do I write the emotions of being alone for something so big?

Flowers, he sends flowers. They are beautiful and not nearly enough: tea pinks and pale greens spilling from an elegant vintage vase the florist picked out. The florist too is a transplant, so are our realtor and lawyer and the couple from whom we buy the house. Like the godfathers, all of them are gay, and we are heartened to move to a rural town where stickers with rainbow flags appear in windows, as if a decal can dispel our worries about what life might be like here.

~~

I think now about beginnings, all of the places this story starts, doctors’ offices and bland carpet, marriage—but my opening is here at a desk surrounded by note cards and index cards with headlines taped to a wall alongside quotes from writers I love. There’s Elizabeth Hardwick’s nascent beginning, her false start for her autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights. She was a critic and essayist, writing of other writers and their lives. Her circle of friendships seems synonymous with the city and its intellectual mores at midcentury. The group is tight and cliquish, and I picture her regal, arch: scotch, high heels, cigarettes. . . . In the novel, time is dimensional and all at once. She draws from pieces of her criticism in it too, including entire passages from her essays. It’s all first-person, present-tense—and past, the times swelling together, as if this is her view of how to write a novel at middle age.

I begin to cross time. Only in moving to Margaretville I am first a writer stuck on time and causality: characters, order and plot, things linking up in an orderly direction. And, I support myself by copywriting and some occasional journalism.

Right now, in the bit I’m hanging on the wall, her project is not a novel yet, but still just an essay in the New York Review in the early seventies. She writes of Goethe—the possibilities of beginning, like a threshold as a place to pause. Then she talks about another writer, an unnamed novelist, who “cannot accept a linear motivation as a proper way to write.” Instead, it is replaced by “chaos.”

~~

In the village every day at noon an air raid siren goes off, testing the alarm for the volunteer fire department. The siren calls out first responders, loud enough to reach hills and hollows, but it sounds like a perpetual alert for the Cold War, a call to duck and cover as if that war never ended.

~~

In her opening to Sleepless Nights, Hardwick talks of a building lot. First she says, “muddy tides” of chaos create “a strewn random beach” whose shores border “a house lot always suitable for building.” In time, in a high valley we too will find a plot of land, though we cannot afford construction. Instead, we spend summer nights sleeping in a canvas tent that feels permeable to the outside, to the wind and rocks and stone walls and calls of coyotes and owls, the stars and comets, the Milky Way a superhighway across the night sky.

Permeability, that is another beginning, maybe the beginning of all of this. Synesthesia, neurasthenia, the world pressing in on me, time pressing in: lichen and rocks and stars so many billions of light years away crossing the borders of time. I begin to cross time. Only in moving to Margaretville I am first a writer stuck on time and causality: characters, order and plot, things linking up in an orderly direction. And, I support myself by copywriting and some occasional journalism.

Hardwick writes that this writer of hers, the novelist who embraces chaos, doesn’t agree with Chekov’s law, the one about the gun. If it appears in act one, the rule says, it must go off by the end. Eventually, here guns will be shot.

I begin to write a crime novel, set on this land. Being sick, I have been driven inside; that is how I originally start to write. Now outside in this world, with the eerie icy winters, the swathes of immense, empty space seem threatening. The land is suggestive—or I am suggestive to its dangers.

Crime novels, however, demand plot. I fail at it. When I try, my writing is airless and impossible with the then and then and then of orderly time. A friend, a poet, tells me to cut the interstitials. She means all the small elements connecting characters’ movements and development. I try to delete the segues and markers of time’s passage, the paragraphs that begin, “next week,” “this year,” “last season,” or the sentences that settle a character in space, in a room, on a street, setting the scene around them, but I can’t. I try and I try again. Instead I see everything connecting. The writing comes not with the then and then and then of narrative time driven by the hierarchy of information that plot demands, but with the and and and and and of parataxis. Everything is equal all together and all at once.