Brief and Continuous Encounters with Brief Encounters: Beth Kephart on Lenney and Kitchen's Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction

You were distracted. You had your eye on other things, and so it all went on without you, the entire conversation, the rhythm, the song. They were arranging themselves, not you.

You hold the throb of it in your hands, years after the fact: Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction. Dinah Lenney threw the party with Judith Kitchen. Together they drew up the guest list, issued the invitations, opened the door, orchestrated the bends and swerves. Dinah wishes, she says, that they had called the affair “Meaningful Encounter (singular) or Continuous Encounter (ditto).” You get her point. You would have told her so. Brought peonies from your garden. Whispered in her ear.

You conjure the place, you present-tense it: a cool blue room made blue by the sky beyond, by the hour. You privilege the wines and cheese, the creased crisps of the yellow party napkins, the sofas for the loungers, the stools for the sitters, the piano, absolutely. A parade of objects on a window sill, and, in the valley beyond, the rising puff of a circus train, and, within the blue of the room, the people you once knew, or might have known, or wish now that you had known to want to know.

Why did you put your eye on other things? Why did it all go on without you?

In the corner of the room, in the softness of the breeze, you see him with your imagination, though it has been eras since you previously actually saw him (then was Prague, then was castles): Nicholas Montemarano. He is pushing at the mop of his hair as he speaks of the German Shepherd who went to final, fitful sleep, the dog’s empty collar in his wife’s hand in the afterward of sadness. When he tips forward, sweeps his hand again through his hair, you see who he is talking to—Abigail Thomas—her bright eyes on his angular face as once they turned to your own face—how many years ago, now? You can see how Thomas pauses and endears, recalls her own three dogs, the hounds with which she dreams, the way they fly into her yard when she opens the door to the kitchen. Dogs as antidote, you hear her saying, not to you, but to him. Dogs as life. And Montemarano nods, and Thomas nods, and now Scott Nadelson slides by, holding the cat he calls Lady Luck in his arms. Nadelson waits until it is his time, then uses quiet words to describe Luck’s violence, the mouse she has beheaded.

Montemarano turns. Thomas turns. They listen.

All around the room made blue the stories beat and pulse, timpani. Leslie Jamison is in a silver mine in the highest city in the world, and Barbara Hurd is dissecting a chrysalis (too soon), and Emily Rapp stands in the birthplace home of Diego Rivera (you have stood there too, you would like to tell her), and Martha Cooley is describing, with the devastating poetry of precision, what she hears through tinnitus ears—not just “a low-pitched thrumming,” but also “a keen needling, sometimes the slightly lower-toned sound of a violin string being bowed.” She cannot escape herself, Cooley is saying, and Jamison stops, and Hurd, and Rapp, and the patterns changes, and the tempo shifts, now rises, so that of a sudden Joan Wickersham is talking about mothers (you walked your campus with her once; she wouldn’t remember) and Patricia Hampl is talking merchandise (you had dinner with her once; she wouldn’t remember) and Michael Martone is talking about cicadas (you shared antipasto with him once; he wouldn’t remember) and Brenda Miller is talking psychic devastation (you have taught her more than once, she would not know that) while Paul Auster sits upon the throne of the piano bench, time traveling. He is young and he is old, and in both conditions, he is saying, there is snow—a phenomenon to which Julian Barnes responds: “We go down in dreams, and we go down in memory,” and now Dinah Lenney puts a finger to her lips as if to hold back her thought, or to self-correct it, track change it, then posits, in this brief encounter, this meaningful encounter, her own concern: “How” she asks, “to insure the future, real or imagined? How to make it true?”

Fortissimo. 

(It is her piano, after all. And her piano bench.)

The writers in the blue room talking race. The writers talking sports. The writers talking family and loss, color and attire, what it is to be home, what it is to be gone, what it is to be seen by the long-lashed eye of an elephant, and now it’s Dinty W. Moore you hear, the crowd around him growing, as once it grew, when you met him years ago—you were teaching memoir, he was teaching memoir, wherever he went, the crowd was growing—and he is saying:

There have been few moments in my life where the thought simply stopped. Nothing spun, nothing sifted, no words fought to read the foreground screen of my mind. Not a whisper. Just momentary blankness. This moment was one of them.

Moore tells his story until there is no more story, only the memory of story, and it is quiet, so very quiet, so that here comes Paul Lisicky, glorified and glorifying, the pate of his head catching the light as once you watched it catch the light beneath the lamp of a friend’s Philadelphia kitchen. Lisicky’s story, Lisicky begins saying, is about the end of his own parents’ marriage, and how fifty-one years of arguments gave way to dementia and forgiveness.

How? The gathered want to know.

How?

And so he tells them.

You might have been there, in that blue room, you are imagining, you are thinking. You might have given yourself at least half a chance to be invited to the party, had you not decided all those years ago that to teach memoir was to forfeit the right to write memoir, that you could not be both counselor and counseled, adjudicator and judge, encourager and encouraged, a person taking space inside the literary journals while you searched for space for others. You might have abandoned the fallacy sooner. You might have been less righteous.

Or: You might tell a better truth, because you weren’t distracted. You were self-quarantined, stripped by yourself of your own instruments. You were living in Devon, Pennsylvania, the town where Jennifer Finney Boylan grew up, it says right there in the book you are reading, conjuring. You were and are still living mere houses away from where Boylan grew up, this place about which she writes, briefly and collectibly, right there in Brief Encounters. You are still thinking, as you are reading, Why didn’t I write a Devon story?

But it is Boylan standing there among the others speaking:

When I was a child, I liked the Devon midway a lot more than the actual show. There were funnel cakes, a concoction called a lemon stick, which was a hollow peppermint stick stuck like a straw into a lemon, and the Ferris wheel. Many years later, I took my young son, Zach, on that Ferris wheel. As it rose, we could see the whole town—the run-down Victorian train station, the Mercedes-Benz dealers, even the house I had fled in anger, and to which I had finally returned. And above it all, a sky of Devon blue.

The sky is blue, the room is blue, the blue is growing darker. The bottles empty. The cheese crusts. There is the puff of smoke of a circus train out in the valley, and now listen close, listen for always: It is Judith Kitchen talking. Her cancer advanced, her days running short, her own story inside Brief Encounters set into motion by a photograph of a girl with a chicken on her head.

Beginning:

Oh my God, who is she? I want her for my own. I want her affinity with all those chickens, her lopsided leaning, her house all atilt.

Ending:

I want this moment, but not what it stands for. Want one minute of overlapping shadow, one slapdash second of light. Quick, while she has a perch on pleasure. Quick, before her tiny breasts grow bigger, before she lifts up her hand to lift down that feathery weight.

Just sky again and light. Just Dinah Lenney at the piano now, all the others leaving. Just Lenney, now, remembering the words Marvin Bell whispered in her ear, for he is the one who brought her peonies: “The barest rhythm or tune can imprison or free us, and the words of songs, like dreams, are incontestable. Music always wins.”

—

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of nearly three dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a widely published essayist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays and We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class. More at bethkephartbooks.com