Mind on Fire by Arnold Thomas Fanning

Author:Arnold Thomas Fanning
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844884308
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

10. Henry’s Blues

Twice a week I go to therapy now with Martin, going into my past in depth, often leaving the sessions tearful and shaky. But I feel that Martin is truly on my side, and I can say anything to him. To restore myself after these sessions I go to the YMCA on 14th Street and swim all of it out of me, length after length after length.

My driving licence needs to be renewed. I don’t want it to go out of date, so I arrange, with my father’s assistance, to get a new one ordered by post. Several weeks later the new licence is delivered to New York; but I find that in place of my photograph there is a photograph of my father. For no apparent or explicable reason he has replaced the photo that I sent him with one of himself. This unnerves me, seeing his face stare out at me from my driving licence, and I spend several sessions with Martin returning to the subject of the licence and trying to figure it out; but I cannot.

I phone my father, a rare occurrence, and find out that an editor at the Irish Times has been trying to contact me to get permission to publish one of my short stories; my father, obtusely, has told her that I am away and hasn’t passed on my contact details. Again, Martin and I explore my father’s motivation in being so unhelpful and uncommunicative with me. The therapy helps me gain perspective on my relationship with my father, and to distance myself from him.

The story is published finally in the Irish Times and I wonder what my father makes of it; he does not phone to say. Martin does buy the paper, and reads the story. I tell him: ‘I wasn’t sure you’d believe me when I told you I was having a story published.’

‘I never doubted you,’ he replies.

This moves me profoundly: to be believed, to be heard.

Jennifer and I have made plans to get out of the city for July and August, so my sessions with Martin are temporarily suspended and the apartment on Canal Street is sublet. She will go to her parents’ house in the Hamptons and spend her time there painting. I have secured a residency at The Barn, a retreat established by the playwright Edward Albee, near Montauk, a couple of miles from Amagansett, on the tip of Long Island, and then another at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. The plan is for Jennifer to pick me up in Vermont at the end of the conference and for us to spend the remainder of August camping in New England.

In Montauk my routine is to write in the morning, have lunch, then borrow one of the bikes on the compound and cycle the short distance to the beach, where I spend long, idyllic hours walking the shallows around the rocky headland, finding new pools to swim in. In the evenings, I cook

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