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Overview
Pete Ferry, our narrator, teaches high school English in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest and moonlights as a travel writer. On his way home after work one evening, he witnesses a car accident that kills a beautiful woman named Lisa Kim. But was it an accident? Could Pete have prevented it? And did it actually happen, or is this just an elaborate tale he concocts to impart the power of story to his teenage students? Why can’t he stop thinking about Lisa Kim? And what might his obsession with her mean to his relationship with his girlfriend, Lydia?
With humor, tenderness, and suspense, Travel Writing takes readers on fascinating journeys, both geographical and psychological, and delves into the notion that the line between fact and fiction is often negotiable.
“A great and edifying read.” —Dave Eggers, international-bestselling author of The Circle
“Travel Writing is an absolute pleasure to read. It is ensnaring, funny, suspenseful, smart and poignant.” —Chicago Tribune
“Ferry builds his quietly tricky tale around an English teacher’s amateur investigation into a traffic fatality . . . Earnest, engrossing and affecting.” —Publishers Weekly
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547545950 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 305 |
| File size: | 847 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TELLING STORIES
Sometimes I try to show my students the power of the story by telling them one. I say, "Last night I was driving home from work and — now, I'm just making this up off the top of my head — I noticed in my rearview mirror that there was a car swerving in and out of my lane. Anyway, I was on that stretch of Sheridan Road just south of Kenilworth that's two lanes each way and no divider and no shoulder and no margin for error, in other words, so I slowed down to let the car pass, or would have slowed down to let it pass me if this had really happened, which it didn't, and as it went by I had a look — a quick look — at the driver and I saw three things. First, that it was a woman and that she was very exotic and quite beautiful. Second, I noticed — or would have noticed if I weren't making this up — that there was something wrong with her; her head was bobbing as if she were drunk or sick or fighting sleep. Now, the third thing I noticed was that her shoulders were bare, and I had the strange sensation that more was bare — that her breasts were exposed or perhaps she was completely nude. Now, remember I'm just making this up. Anyway, I followed her for some time watching her weave and bounce off the curb, wondering what I should do, wishing I had a cell phone, although unsure who I would or should call, when we came to a red light and I found myself drawing up beside her."
By this point, a girl whose hair is green today and who has been passing notes is listening to me, and a dog-faced boy who has surreptitiously been doing his Spanish homework has stopped and a kid whose head was down on his arm — call him Nick — has sat up. When I have eye contact with each member of the class, I stop. I say, "But of course none of this ever really happened, and I've told you that four times, and you know it didn't happen. But look at you. You're interested, you want to know the rest, you want to know if she was naked and what was wrong with her and what I did or didn't do and all the rest, even though I'm making it all up right in front of you, and that is why stories are so powerful."
So, I'm a teacher, a high school teacher. In our society that gives me very little authority. About the highest compliment most people can pay a teacher is to ask why he or she became a teacher. That's supposed to be flattering, as in "You could have really done something important with your life." To boost my stock, I guess, I also do some writing, especially travel pieces for newspapers, magazines, and travel guides.
I teach English at the public high school in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, which in an odd way gives me even less authority than if I taught in a blue-collar neighborhood or a farm town where I would at least have more education than the parents of most of my students. In Lake Forest teachers are sometimes treated like the lawn service. "Honey, see if you have time to call the caterers about Saturday, and let's get someone out here to fix that toilet and someone to teach Charlie the difference between active and passive voice." Mind plumbers. But that's okay. It's a lovely place to teach, and we're paid a living wage. Besides, I like working with people who bring their own lunches and drive little cars. Most teachers are pretty good people.
Before teaching I worked for a publishing house. I sat in a windowless cubicle writing textbooks for which someone else made a lot of money; it isn't glamorous, but you can get rich if you can get every eighth grader in the state of Texas to read or at least buy your thirty-dollar book. And somehow people think that it is glamorous. I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women — and that was important to me then — would say, "Oh, really?" and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, "Well, I teach high school." He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, "I went to high school," and walked away.
Once I repeated that anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a "storyteller." I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than "just" a teacher, and "storyteller" felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.
But it really did happen, of course, the girl in the car, or could have or might as well have happened. It happened just as surely as Ernest Hemingway went down to Pamplona with a bunch of people one of whom was not Lady Brett Ashley, but was Lady Duff Twysden, and she really did sleep with everyone under the sun so that years later when she died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-five in Taxco, Mexico, all of her pallbearers were former lovers, and they really did drop her casket coming down the steps of the cathedral, and those people all drank way too much and slept with each other or tried to and couldn't, so that one morning drinking coffee in the Café Iruña or six months later in Paris, Hemingway said "what if" and "suppose ..." It happened just as surely as Stephen Crane was shipwrecked off the coast of Florida in 1896 and spent four days in a lifeboat and then wrote one of the best American short stories ever about it. But it hadn't happened the night before, and, of course, the woman wasn't naked; I just put that in for purposes of teenage titillation. No, it was some time ago now on a Friday evening in December a week or two before winter break. I had stayed around to clear my desk, so it was after six when I was driving home for the weekend, tired and happy. And she really was swerving crazily and bouncing off curbs. I did get behind her, and as she went by I had just a glimpse of her and saw that she was quite beautiful, although I must tell you that I have a thing about falling in love with women I see through glass. Once I had a fantasy that lasted some months about a drive-in bank teller with a sexy voice. I finally had to see who she was, so I went into the bank. From a distance I spotted her at the drive-in window with her back to me, and I was thrilled, but when she turned around I saw that she was horse faced and middle-aged. I went back to my car disappointed and wondering what I had fallen in love with and if I was still in love with it. So, anyway, I followed Lisa Kim, for that was her name, down Sheridan Road on this dark winter evening, which wasn't very hard because her right rear taillight cover was broken and the light shone white. I followed her, becoming increasingly fascinated and concerned at the same time. How had she gotten so drunk so early? Had she been to an office party? And what could I possibly do about this situation? I looked for a cop, or rather hoped one would see her because by the time I'd have told the story, she'd have been gone, lost in the traffic. Could I signal to her? Should I pull up beside her and have another look? But there was no doubt she was in trouble, and besides, she might swerve into my lane and drive me into oncoming traffic. And why was I so concerned? Would I have been if she had been a woman on a cell phone in an SUV? A black guy with his cap on sideways? An old man? Then there was the stoplight when I did pull up beside her, the one at Sheridan Road and Lake Street, the one just before the - curve that skirts the Baha'i temple. And there she was, head bobbing, car hazy with smoke, music so loud I could hear the words although both our windows were up. It was then that I could have done something. Over beers a few days later, a friend who is an attorney would say, "You'd have been in big trouble legally."
"But what about morally?"
"I don't know about that, but legally you'd have been in big trouble."
Moot point. I didn't do anything. Before I could decide what to do or if to do and just after she had looked at me and we had for one tiny, shadowy instant made eye contact and I had seen on her face a look that may have said "watch this" but may have said "do something," the light changed and she pulled away. Fast. She fishtailed and drove right through the - curve, missed it completely, hit the curb with her front tires hard, which launched her into the air, and hit a cast-iron lamppost about four feet off the ground, breaking the damn thing in half. I got there about the same time as a man in a camel-hair coat and a younger woman who might have been his wife. They had been coming north. We looked through the driver's window. Lisa Kim was lying facedown across the passenger seat and onto the floor. There was some blood, but not too much. I felt the door handle, pulled it carefully, tentatively, pulled the door open (it creaked but came), reached across, and turned off the engine, although my hand was shaking so badly that I could barely do it. Already there were sirens.
The young policeman said I shouldn't worry about it, that I couldn't have prevented it.
"But what if I'd blocked her at the light, taken her keys?"
"Then I'd probably be here arresting you."
"But she was driving drunk. I mean, look what happened."
"Yeah, I know, but there was nothing you could do, really."
"That's a little hard to accept." But I accepted it, at least in part, and began to feel a little better. And we all felt better when someone (the man in the camel-hair coat?) said he thought he saw her move on the gurney, and someone else (the younger woman who might have been his wife?) was sure she groaned.
"She'll be all right."
"Kids are tough. Kids are resilient."
That's the great thing about being American; we're so relentlessly cheerful and optimistic. Our glass is always half full. Daisy's green light is always out there giving us hope. I just don't believe that a group of Europeans would have reached the same conclusion that we did before we got back in our cars and went on about our lives.
I read somewhere that 60 percent of Americans still believe in Heaven and Hell. Of that 60 percent, 97 percent think that they personally will go to Heaven. Only 3 percent of that 60 percent or 1.8 percent of all Americans think they are going to Hell. Wouldn't that distress Cotton Mather? Wouldn't it make Norman Vincent Peale proud? I mean, talk about corn fed, Rocky Balboa, Little-Engine-That-Could positive thinking. Even the most basic understanding of human nature and the law of averages would suggest a miscalculation.
Lisa Kim was dead. Dead on Arrival. DOA.
I once heard Kurt Vonnegut say a writer has to believe that what he's writing right now is the most important thing anyone has ever written. That was hard for me in the beginning because my Presbyterian minister father taught me to be modest, humble, and circumspect. At potluck suppers in the church basement, we always waited to be the very last in line. I never learned how to be important.
Then along came David Lehman. In high school an English teacher told David that he was a poet, and he believed her. The day I met him he stuck his head out of his dorm-room door as I was entering mine for the first time, suitcases in hand (we were both students in a summer program at St. Hilda's College, Oxford) and asked me, "You don't have a copy of the Paris Review with you do you?"
"What?"
"The new Paris Review. I've got a poem in there. Hi. I'm David Lehman. I'm a poet." I did not see a poet. I saw a gawky, pimply eighteen-year-old kid with a New York accent and a Yogi Bear lilt in his voice.
"Pleased to meet you," I said. "Pete Ferry, Undersecretary of the Interior." David didn't seem to hear me. He shook my hand. Oh, we had a good time with David for a couple of weeks. We (three of us had come together from Ohio and had never even been to New York much less London) had chips on our shoulders, probably a bit of residual Midwestern adolescent anti-Semitism, and an absolute phobia about being ugly Americans. And now one of us was David, our worst fear, the ugliest American of all, a New York Jew. So we mocked him, imitated him, asked him stupid questions ("Do poets wear boxers or whitey-tighties?"), and it all missed him. ("I don't think it really matters. I wear briefs. Kenneth Koch wears boxers. This I happen to know because I once came home to my apartment to find him playing the violin in his boxers for a graduate student in comparative literature. She was quite beautiful.") For a couple of weeks we huddled together talking about all the stupid things David did and said, and then he did something stupider. He challenged John Fuller to a poetry reading. We were just mortified.
Fuller was one of our dons. He was young, handsome, witty, wry, bored, very British. He was also a rising star among British poets and the son of Roy Fuller, who was the sitting poet laureate of Oxford University. Fuller accepted, and on a Wednesday evening after sherry and shepherd's pie, we sat back gleefully to watch David's vivisection.
John Fuller began the evening with some nakedly deprecating remarks about his young challenger from across the sea. He was at least annoyed, perhaps insulted. We choked on our laughter, bit our thumbs, but David beamed at us oblivious, certain that we were all on his side or certain of something, at least. Then they began to read. They took turns standing at the podium. We were quieted. David wasn't that bad. David was pretty good. We looked sideways at each other and raised our eyebrows. After half an hour, David said that he would now read some of the New York poets who had influenced him: Koch, Frank O'Hara, David Shapiro.
"No, no," said Fuller with a wave of his hand. "Read your own stuff." They read on. David was damn good. After an hour, Fuller took the podium and looked back at David. "Got a long piece?"
"Well, no ..."
"I have one long piece I want to read. If you have something, too, we'll read these and then go home."
"Well, I have one, but I'm still working on it."
"Try it. I want to hear it."
"Well, okay."
"You first," said John Fuller.
And David read a poem called "Supercargo." He shuffled pages and started quietly, perhaps uncertainly, but his voice rose and rose with the poem, and he stood forward on his toes although he was tall to begin with. He was wonderful. When he finally sat down, we found ourselves clapping.
Fuller took the podium and looked down for a long moment at his loose sheets. "I can't follow that," he said finally, and sat down, too. Oh, we had a party that night. The girls dangled their bare summer legs from our dorm windows over the Cherwell River, and we all laughed and sang and passed bottles of Spanish Graves. We toasted David all night long.
For the rest of the term, I spent as much time as I could with David Lehman. We ate Chinese food because David was homesick, hitchhiked to the seashore reciting poetry between rides and made plans to go to France, where David said "the vegetables all taste like fruits." Before the end of the summer, Fuller, who had a little basement press, had published a broadsheet of David's poetry (I still have a copy of it somewhere), and I knew I wanted to be a writer and was able to say it aloud, at least to myself.
On Saturday evening Lydia Greene and I met some pals at Davis Street Fish Market for dinner. It is the place we gather most frequently because it has good, inexpensive seafood and a wonderful oyster bar where we always start and often finish the evening (sometimes we never get into the dining room) with platters of oysters and clams, plates of calamari, bowls of mussels, peel-and-eat shrimp, red beans and rice, fresh sourdough bread, and lots of good beer and wine.
As always, Officer Lotts was the first one there. He had claimed our favorite table and was sipping a glass of pinot grigio while reading the Times and waiting for the rest of us. He is an unusual cop. A late child of middle-aged parents who took him around the world and gave him everything under the sun including a leafy suburban life, every album ever made, and a gleaming white convertible with tan leather interior when he was sixteen, Steve Lotts started saying at the age of four that he wanted to be a Chicago policeman. "Sure," people said, "good!" But he was still saying it when he went to college to study criminal justice, and still saying it after a year spent as a guard at a nuclear-power plant, two and a half as a paralegal, and four as an internal-affairs investigator when he was finally admitted to the police academy. Even then people were sure he would bail out and head for the suburbs, but today he is an undercover gang-crimes cop who is on the street every day and often night, and is one of the few people I know who truly loves his work. He lives in an apartment full of plants and cats, wears horn-rimmed glasses and a Little Lord Fauntleroy haircut, and attracts wistful, waifish women.
"Ride your bike?" I pulled out a stool.
"Yep." He pointed at it through the window locked to a parking meter.
"Armed?" I asked lifting up his backpack.
"Of course," he said. He rarely goes anywhere without his gun. I had been waiting all week to talk about Lisa Kim, and I almost told Steve the story right then, but I knew I'd only have to repeat it later, so I didn't. It was difficult.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Travel Writing"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Peter Ferry.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Some Time Ago, with Contemporary Interludes,
Telling Stories,
Lydia and Lisa,
Dateline: Cuernavaca Mexico,
The Love Nazi,
Dateline: Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand,
Looking for Peter,
The Long, Cold Spring,
Dateline: Quetico, Ontario, Canada,
Finding Peter,
The Summer of Lisa Kim,
Back to School,
Some Time Later, with a Flashback and a Contemporary Interlude,
Dateline: San Miguel de Allende, Mexico,
The Doctor,
Dateline: Doolin, County Clare, Ireland,
About the Author,
Connect with HMH,
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