GRANITE STATE VIII - Visuals

I favored time-warp roads in these trips I was making into the past – two times in August over from Vermont, where I had gone using the old Taconic rather than the thruway or the interstates – financed for the summer with money from Penthouse – one of many lives I was leaving – and then in September a trysting trip – and now this trip to see Lauryn.

On the trysting trip each time I called in to my answering machine in Chelsea I got the voice of my Aunt Alice – who, as someone once defined it for me when he saw an old smiling photo of her - your aunt, the black sheep of her generation, who has sex on behalf of all the family members who have none –

At the end of the tryst – the end of the affair, which seemed in motion so long as we were in motion – traveling in foliage time through the mountains of Vermont – so soft and comforting, so many shades of green – some of it in perfect square patches of planted high altitude clover – and in motion traveling through the mountains of New Hampshire – big and wild and jagged and scarred – these mountains we were in in New Hampshire while practically at the doorstep of this aunt who could not know I was back in town after so many years, and was trying to reach me in New York.

When the tryst, the affair, was over – for it did not transfer from being on the road in New England to being planted in life in New York – when it was suddenly over I returned the call to my aunt – and this was when this aunt, the only relative with a light touch in my childhood, this pretty laughing woman whom I had called my favorite aunt –

This was when on the phone she said something awful had happened to her - and then told me about the awful thing that had happened to her daughter Lauryn – and this was when she said she really could not blame the guy –

As I listened I was cold.

I was remembering.

I was getting what I had recently heard a person searching hard for clear memories call the “the visuals” – the visuals I had hoped for when I began the search to find out what had happened.