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Not these Bears. They're strange bears.
Rare Spectacled Bears?
Well, I don't know about that.
But they're multiplying?
I don't know about that, either. But they're very friendly with each other, you know.
Oh yes, I know.
And that was a little something to know, anyway. And enough to get the motorcycle running under me. I listened to my idle coming smoother; it still had rough edges, of course. But I braced my feet on each side of the old beast, and it sat steady; it waited for me, now. Then I identified all its parts in my head; there's a certain confidence in having names for things. I called my right hand Throttle, and turned it up. I called my left hand Clutch, and pulled it in. Even my right foot responded to the gear lever, and found first - and it's not a particularly impressive right foot.
The point is, everything worked. Oh, sure, for a while I would have to be careful, and keep a sharp eye on the mechanics of things. But for that moment, at least, everything was functioning. My eyes too; I saw no more bears, but I could see the grass they'd bent down for a path across the field. Tomorrow the grass would be sprung back in place, and only the watchful dog might remember them with me. And he would forget before I would, for sure.
As for those casualties back at the Hietzinger Zoo - even for old O. Schrutt's mind, left behind, name by name and roar by roar - I will admit to being responsible. For sure, I will turn myself over to Ernst Watzek-Trummer. Historian without equal, and the keeper of details. He should make a fine confessor, for sure.
So I felt the clutch in my left hand; I controlled the throttle and front brake with my right. I put myself in gear and was properly balanced when I came out of the gravel at the roadside. I was steady, shifting up, when I rode into the full-force wind. But I didn't panic; I leaned to the curves; I held the crown of the road and drove faster and faster. I truly outdrove the wind. For sure - for the moment, at least - there was no gale hurrying me out of this world.
For sure, Siggy, I'll have to let your grave mound grow a little grass.
For sure, Gallen, I'll look you up some Wednesday.
For sure, I expect to hear great things of the Rare Spectacled Bears.
READ ON FOR AN EXTRACT OF
IN ONE PERSON
THE BREATHTAKING NEW NOVEL FROM BESTSELLING AUTHOR JOHN IRVING
A compelling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love - tormented, funny, and affecting - and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences.
Chapter 1
AN UNSUCCESSFUL CASTING CALL
I'm going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost--not necessarily in that order.
I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word--both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part--people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who've treated me--alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to "severe speech impairments"--an overstatement. I'm now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I've ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)
I don't even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries--the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. ("Liberry," or "liberries," I say--the way children do.)
It's all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont--a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street--until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play.
The town's amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remember, I saw all the plays in our town's little theater. My mom was the prompter--if you forgot your lines, she told you what to say. (It being an amateur theater, there were a lot of forgotten lines.) For years, I thought the prompter was one of the actors--someone mysteriously offstage, and not in costume, but a necessary contributor to the dialogue.
My stepfather was a new actor in the First Sister Players when my mother met him. He had come to town to teach at Favorite River Academy--th
e almost-prestigious private school, which was then all boys. For much of my young life (most certainly, by the time I was ten or eleven), I must have known that eventually, when I was "old enough," I would go to the academy. There was a more modern and better-lit library at the prep school, but the public library in the town of First Sister was my first library, and the librarian there was my first librarian. (Incidentally, I've never had any trouble saying the librarian word.)
Needless to say, Miss Frost was a more memorable experience than the library. Inexcusably, it was long after meeting her that I learned her first name. Everyone called her Miss Frost, and she seemed to me to be my mom's age--or a little younger--when I belatedly got my first library card and met her. My aunt, a most imperious person, had told me that Miss Frost "used to be very good-looking," but it was impossible for me to imagine that Miss Frost could ever have been better-looking than she was when I met her--notwithstanding that, even as a kid, all I did was imagine things. My aunt claimed that the available men in the town used to fall all over themselves when they met Miss Frost. When one of them got up the nerve to introduce himself--to actually tell Miss Frost his name--the then-beautiful librarian would look at him coldly and icily say, "My name is Miss Frost. Never been married, never want to be."
With that attitude, Miss Frost was still unmarried when I met her; inconceivably, to me, the available men in the town of First Sister had long stopped introducing themselves to her.
*
THE CRUCIAL DICKENS NOVEL--THE one that made me want to be a writer, or so I'm always saying--was Great Expectations. I'm sure I was fifteen, both when I first read it and when I first reread it. I know this was before I began to attend the academy, because I got the book from the First Sister town library--twice. I won't forget the day I showed up at the library to take that book out a second time; I'd never wanted to reread an entire novel before.
