FOR A WHILE THERE, I enjoyed a correspondence with a woman who happened to also be a writer. She was 10 years older than me, but claimed to be a hundred years ahead of me. She had been born in 1969. Me in 1979. She claimed that I was stuck in the 1920s. She claimed to be a woman of the 2020s. We barely got along but it was, but her own admission, quite vivid even though she was an ardent feminist and argued that I would never be able to understand her brilliance on account of my “feeble male brain.” I found her view of men startlingly grotesque.

One of her core critiques of me was that my favorite writers were only “dead white men.” This was not true, though certainly Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Jack Kerouac were all dead and of Northwest European provenance. Yet Haruki Murakami was still living and was not white by any metric. He was Japanese. This was swept under the carpet. He may not have been white, but he was male, which still made him suspect and lacking in feminine virtue.

The sad thing is that I thought she was right. It wasn’t that I hadn’t read Margaret Atwood or Annie Proulx, it was that they hadn’t left much of a trace on my own writing. I recalled the brouhaha in ’16 over Gay Talese’s admission that he had no female writers that inspired his own career. However, the more I thought about it, I realized that this was not correct. I had been inspired by a lot of women writers. They just aren’t the ones you would think about in the pantheon of women writers. No Zadie Smiths, no Virginia Woolfs, no Toni Morrisons, no Sylvia Plaths, no Joan Didions. Not even JK Rowling was on my list. There are some familiar names.

1. Esther Forbes (1891-1967). It’s kind of interesting how little we know about and have heard about the author of Johnny Tremain. Even after looking for information on her, I can’t say I discovered anything particularly stirring. It seems she was a Yankee lady who had a career in publishing and in the writing of historical novels. I read this book many times when I was about 10 years old. It certainly left an impression, or at least inspired the idea that it was possible to write fiction at all.
2. Lynn Reid Banks (1929-2024). Also when I was a kid, my friend’s mom brought me autographed copies of The Indian in the Cupboard and The Return of the Indian. I still have these on my shelf. Again, I think the idea that it was possible to write stories originated with multiple readings of these books.
3. Blue Balliett (born 1955). I read her 1984 book The Ghosts of Nantucket: 23 True Accounts about a million times when I was an adolescent. I can still see traces of her style, her descriptive writing, and different themes in my own stories, articles, and books. I know I have lifted phrases from her books too, but for me it’s the same kind of borrowing that goes on in blues music, for example. It’s unintentional, but even my “dream stories” follow some of the layout that her ghost stories had.
4. Anaïs Nin (1903-1977). Well, here is someone who might past muster among the feminine literati. I haven’t read of all of her books, but I do own Little Birds and Delta of Venus. I think women writers are more capable of what I call “layer cake writing,” which is that they are able to move between different levels of perception or experience, so that something that might seem trivial, a slight detail, speaks volumes about a person’s inner world. Nin taught me to pay more attention to those small details and how they can be so evocative.
5. Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). A British-born Mexican surrealist. This is a writer I also know little about, even though it seems she produced quite a body of work. I came to possess a collection of her short stories some years ago called The Skeleton’s Holiday and I have never been the same since. This completely changed my approach to writing, even my approach to writing straightforward nonfiction work. I began to tap more into my subconscious and to produce automatic writing thanks to that book.

I don’t know what happened to my feminist writer friend. She disappeared one day during the pandemic and I never heard from her again after that. None of my letters were returned and that, as they say, was that. I did come across her once more. It was unexpected. I was dreaming and found myself on the north coast of Australia, of all places. It was near one of those coves that are known to be full of hungry sharks. There were a series of canvas tents pitched in the hills around the cove and, while walking by one, who should step out but Madame Ardent Feminist herself. She was dressed in her finest khaki explorer attire. She seemed to be happy there, wherever it was she had gone to. At least that’s what she told me.

I SAW ESMERALDA in a large museum. There were many floors which opened on a vast, well-lit atrium. Perhaps it was like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, or like Kiasma in Helsinki. It was very crowded there that day and there were lines to get in and out of the exhibits. Esmeralda was there, but she didn’t see me, or didn’t want to see me. She was a small woman, with dark hair pulled back into a braid, and she wore her blue sweater and her blue pants and her white shoes. She was an Estonian girl, light complexioned with light blue eyes, and she chose her words with care. I savored every spare sentence she was ever willing to share. I could never understand why I had attached to her, or come to depend on her in some way. I wasn’t dependent on her doing something or anything. Dependence was more linked to her existence, her presence. There had been times I had thanked the stars that I happened to be born at the same moment she existed in the universe. Two comets passing in the cosmos. Such was my love for Esmeralda, if such a phenomenon could be explained with a simple word.

She didn’t see me. Maybe she didn’t want to see me. If that was the case, I couldn’t blame her.

My therapist was there too at the museum. I noticed her in the line for the women’s toilet, and knew that Esmeralda had also gone inside and was perhaps adjusting her hair in front of the mirror as she waited. Maybe they would meet there in front of the mirrors? Maybe she would at last see this girl of my dreams? I awaited with eagerness her official psychological diagnosis.

Later, I found myself outside at a kind of garden party. It was like something out of Alla vi barn i Bullerbyn. There were tables loaded with Scandinavian goodies, and everyone was wearing old-fashioned clothes. Paula was there with her kids. Her husband Paulo was nowhere to be seen. Where could he be? Paula was wearing a pink dress. She came and lied down next to me. We began to cuddle and soon made love, right there in the grass in the middle of a springtime Swedish party. It seemed to heal something. There were various ways to reconcile disagreements, but this was perhaps the most honest way there was. Oh, the sweetness of a woman’s sex. Like raspberry ice cream, it occurred to me. Just like raspberry ice cream. But she still wasn’t Esmeralda. None of them were. Whatever woman came, she wouldn’t be her.

“None of them are you,” I wanted to tell Esmeralda, if she would ever listen to me or even honor me with a passing glance. “I like them all, it’s true, but none of them will ever be you.”

SHE INVITED ME over, she said she wanted to do something that would embarrass and humiliate her boyfriend. She had dark hair and looked a little bit like Margarita Simonyan though thankfully smelled better. We cuddled in a rather standard contemporary bedroom on beige sheets, the whole place buzzing with air conditioning, but I felt the natural desire to flee. I hid out in a neighboring building where there was a hair salon. Later, I took a boat and arrived at Junibacken in Stockholm, with a whole troupe of travellers. They took photographs.

Here I found a curious pillow, one that if you held onto it would lift you up in the air, as if you were flying. I grabbed hold of the Junibacken pillow and flew up into the air, floating beside the clocktower’s clock. While I was up there, I waved down at the other travellers, and then I saw Igrayne standing in the corner. She asked me to let go of my flying pillow and to come down and dance with her. I gladly danced with Igrayne. Later we made love passionately, but Igrayne stiffened and had unhealed father wounds and stared away into the remote distance.

I held her from behind but it was just no use.

I DO REMEMBER something of it. We were at the music festival, and my wife was sharing a blanket by the castle ruins with a strange woman. As I got closer, I could see it was Dulcinea. Upon watching me approach, her muscles stiffened, and she gave me what is known as the side eye. Several side eyes. My wife got up and left at this point, stretched in the sun, and said, “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”

It took Dulcinea a great amount of self-control to slowly turn her head in my direction and speak to me. She looked older, and her voice was different. She was wearing red nail varnish, which seemed out of place. She had been a free-spirited hippie girl. When did she go all corporate woman on me? Alas, that’s what happens to people. They change over time. She looked tired and worn out though. She did speak. We were able to have some kind of conversation. I apologized once again for having liked her so much. The love letters, the entirety of the predicament. The whole thing had been too much for any normal lady to bear. What young woman at the start of her young life needed the love an older, washed up man?

That was the first day of the folk festival. On the second day, I was in Italy, where I had booked an Airbnb. My daughter came along. I remember when we walked into that hilltop house in the hills around Bari. “From here,” the owner said, “you can get direct access to the highway and drive to any place in Italy.” The apartment was strange. There was a bedroom with a loft, but these looked like they belonged more to a doll house. I was afraid that if I crawled up into that loft the whole Barbie Dream House looking thing would collapse. There was also an Estonian journalist there who wanted to interview me at a nearby café. Her invitations were relentless.

I left my daughter alone in the Dream House and did the interview, but she wanted to make Instagram videos too teasing the interview. All of that time my phone was ringing with some urgency as my daughter asked where I was. She wanted to go back to the folk festival. I wondered how my wife and Dulcinea were getting along. I felt guilty, as if I had only brought limitless dark clouds into their otherwise sunny existences. Back in Italy, the journalist still wouldn’t let me go. Wouldn’t I make her pasta too? We were supposed to drink wine! At last, I got fed up with the whole thing and ran back to the hilltop house. My daughter was already waiting by the car, fuming. “Where were you?!” she stomped. It was misty and raining. “Come on, kid,” I said, jogging over to the driver’s side door. “Let’s just get the hell out of this place.”

IT WAS A ROOFTOP PARTY, and I was explaining my most recent love story. Two women were listening, but one of them wasn’t buying. This girl was unfamiliar to me, but she was an Estonian, she had shoulder-length brown hair, sharp features, and glasses, and the gist of her prognosis was that I was continuing to swim in the warm waters of self-delusion. “You do this over and over again,” she said. “You fall for some girl, but nothing comes of it. She’s too young for you anyway,” the woman said. “Our people are pragmatic! Pragmatic!” Quite self assured, she stood up and looked down on me, with her hands of her haughty hips. I wondered a) why I continued to attract such “truth talkers” and b) why I was attracted to such arrogant women. With some additional psychological hocus pocus, I would soon be assembling her furniture.

Instead I left the party and bought a plane ticket to nowhere. I didn’t even know the name of the city. It was somewhere in the American Midwest, and the confluence of several great and legendary rivers. Perhaps the Mississippi was one of them. Maybe this was that bend where the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio all splashed into each other, north of Memphis, south of Saint Louis. Someplace like that. When the plane came into land, I noticed the airport was unusual. There were trees on both sides of the landing strip, for example. The whole area had a Deep South jungle feel to it, with moss in the trees, and vultures on the tree branches.

This was some kind of private airport serving the three rivers confluence area. We were taken aboard a train, where the conductor pointed out the various renovation facilities for old planes. “No plane ever winds up on the scrap heap,” the conductor said. “Every fuselage is saved and refurbished for future use.” I could see several planes being upgraded by men in white suits who looked like Dahl’s Oompa Loompas. They were lifting, hammering, and drilling.

At last we reached the main part of the airport. Most of the people there were headed toward some of the other cities, but I had to get to my still unnamed third city destination. There were several metro trains heading this way and that. The name of the public transport company was “Ringreis,” which seemed odd, as if some Estonians had settled this part of the Midwest and I had just never heard a word about it. To get to my destination, I needed to take the 5 Train. I stood in line with the other travelers, who were talking about Harris and Trump, and soon enough the 5 Train arrived and I got on. To get to my city though, I needed to take a ferry too. At the port, I boarded the ferry, and could see another city in the distance. It looked quite wealthy and developed with large office buildings topped off with gold glinting domes.

“That’s Waynesboro,” I heard someone say from behind me. “Obama won that city back in ’08.”

So Obama had some soft support out here in the larger river cities of the Midwest. Where was I going? I still had no idea. The river water was choppy, there were big waves, and the river water sprayed my face. “Look over there,” another person said. “That’s Chuck Berry’s birthplace!” So, it was, but it wasn’t mine. To think I had come all the way over here to the middle of nowhere to get away from some Estonian girl on a rooftop. A girl with long hair, glasses, and big opinions about everything that was wrong with me. I should have just kept my mouth shut and nodded along with whatever she said. It would have been easier that way.