What a Wonderful World This Could Be

Lee Zacharias

Description

What Alex, illegitimate daughter of an alcoholic novelist and an artist, has always wanted is family. At 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, whom she will leave when she comes under the spell of Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. That fall Ted organizes a collective that turns to the growing antiwar movement. Ultimately the radical group Weatherman destroys the “family” Alex and Ted have created, and in 1971 Ted disappears while under FBI investigation. When Ted surfaces eleven years later, Alex must put her life back together in order to discover what true family means.

Sujets

• Historical
• Años 1960
• Weatherman
• 1960s
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781948692519
• Langue: English

Extrait

W HAT A W ONDERFUL W ORLD T HIS C OULD B E
P RAISE FOR W HAT A W ONDERFUL W ORLD T HIS C ould B e
Lee Zacharias brings the 1960’s and 80’s to life with a poet’s precision and a novelist’s sense of drama in this luminous, riveting story. Spare, unflinching, and deeply compassionate, What a Wonderful World This Could Be is both a historical novel about political, artistic, and sexual awakening (and re-awakening), and a powerful mirror for our own time. I was gripped from the first page to the last. Alex’s journey from brilliant, neglected teen to mature artist broke my heart and renewed my faith in humanity in equal measure. This novel is a gift.
—Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones
What a Wonderful World It Would Be, Lee Zacharias’s incantatory novel, is a complex, generous, unflinching portrait of Alex—a romantically conflicted, artistically gifted young woman who comes of age during the tumultuous sixties. Reading it is like hearing Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, but for the first time. There isn’t a smidgeon of nostalgia or sentimentality here. In fact, the world it invites us into couldn’t feel more timely or more true. It’s about loss and love and about how we can’t know one without the other.
—Tommy Hays, author of The Pleasure Was Mine
“At the center of every art is a question of allegiance,” Lee Zacharias writes in What a Wonderful World This Could Be , a riveting novel that foregrounds the personal fallout of the political maelstrom that was the American Radical Left in the 1960s and ’70s. Zacharias’s allegiance is to a narrative that refuses compromise in its revelations of the highs and lows of fighting for a just cause in an unjust world, and the price photographer Alex pays for seeing clearly what others around her will not: in life, as in politics, actions have consequences, many of them irreparable.
—Kat Meads, author of For You, Madam Lenin
One of our finest novelists and a first-rate photographer, Lee Zacharias weds visceral language with lush visual imagery as she modulates main character Alex’s voice to match shifts in time that dramatically render her unforgettable experiences as a 15-year-old who falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer, as the wife of a 60’s New Left activist, and as a photography professor who, in 1981, reconnects with her first love. What a Wonderful World this Could Be is about art, it is about political change, but most of all it is about enduring love.
—Allen Wier, author of Tehano and Late Night, Early Morning
W HAT A W ONDERFUL W ORLD T HIS C OULD B e
Lee Zacharias

L AKE D ALLAS , T EXAS
Copyright © 2021 by Lee Zacharias All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
What a Wonderful World This Could Be is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Requests for permission to reprint any portion of this book should be sent to:
Permissions Madville Publishing P.O. Box 358 Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Author Photograph: Michael Gaspeny Cover Design: Jacqueline Davis Cover Art: a vintage camera by apartment, and a brickwall backdrop by AVN Photolab. Both images are licensed through Shutterstock.
ISBN: 978-1-948692-50-2 paperback; 978-1-948692-51-9 ebook Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941260
for Michael
In some old magazine or newspaper, I recollect a story, told as truth of a man … who absented himself for a long time, from his wife .
—Nathaniel Hawthorne , “Wakefield”
“Wake up, Penelope … Odysseus has returned.”
—Homer , The Odyssey
“My oh my, what a surprise,”
—William Kennedy , Ironweed
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Births
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1
March 2, 1982
But why would she be in the student darkroom? Alex has her own enlarger, and at the university there’s a lab reserved for faculty. Why would she be printing in the big room where the kids drip fixer across the floor no matter how many times she tells them to drain their prints and please use trays, where a radio is always tuned to the top 40, belching and repeating like a drunk reciting a bad joke?
She can’t get the plot of this ridiculous daydream right. She tussles with the implausibility on length forty-one, shallow end to deep, her arms drawing wishbones in the cyan-colored water, hands pausing for a moment like commas at her sides. In the next lane someone is churning up on her. She can feel the water rocking and veers to avoid him, bumping her hand against the side of the YMCA pool. Her goggles are leaking; chlorine sears her eyes. Speedo surges by, chin resting on a red kickboard. He spends hours warming up. When he swims he concentrates. When she swims she diffuses.
Every morning she ticks off thirty-six laps, which she counts in lengths because lengths have destination, but laps are only circles. Speedo—she doesn’t know his name—thinks about his time, she fantasizes, maybe the other swimmers plan the perfect crime, make grocery lists, or do their taxes. Probably every one of them scores the perfect comeback in a word war, those disputes that rankle in the mind an hour after the clerk is nasty or the letter from the irate parent arrives with its pointed little list of cc’s . Civilization hangs by the thread of the mental tongue-lashing.
How else to pass the time?
The black tile cross is moving toward her, and she turns to push off the wall again, but really she’s in the darkroom now, the student darkroom—because that’s where she wants to be. She’s making test strips with her back to Ross, her student, the one with the shy smile and loose walk that suggests some ease in his body the reclusive smile does not predict. He has talent, but so do a lot of students. It’s genius that is rare, talent just common enough to be cruel. She noticed him first for his face, for the deep color that always looks as if it has just sprung to his cheeks, for the beautiful smile so slow to break, the elusive eyes and elegant nose. She would like to photograph him.
At an enlarger across the room he is timing exposures.
They meet at the developer like archetypes at a well, their prints swimming toward each other in the huge communal tray. Individually they agitate and watch the second hand. She bends to see her image bloom. Instead his reflection, tinted amber by the safelight, ripples by and as she looks up to check the clock again, lifting her print with rubber-tipped tongs, re-forms on her retina. They spend the next ten seconds at the stop bath. In the fixer his hand brushes hers, lighting up her body like a shock, or like the little bliss of recognition in a song coming to its chorus. She is the inventor of this fantasy; she has choices, and as she kicks off the wall, plunging deep enough to soar beyond the diving board, she chooses that his hand touch hers again. When she lifts her face to breathe, he smears it with kisses. Their prints will bleach away before they remember to put them in the washer.
Or—
She stands to adjust her goggles and glides into forty-three, the best length of her mile, although she does not understand why it should always be on this one that her rhythm finds the ocean, that the tedium of counting should take her to this luminescence that must be something like the intuited enlightenment of Zen. She has never been a mystic, and yet there is that moment when she feels the arc of her own movement perfectly concentric to the earth’s slow rotation, feels herself pulled by its core of energy. No need to dream away the boredom then—her strokes are as compelling and effortless as dreams. When Speedo spurts by, she scarcely notes his passing, although on other laps his wake can leave her feeling swamped and helpless as a rowboat in a storm.
Once she tried to explain length forty-three to Steve Kendrick, her oldest friend, fumbling with her words because she was afraid that it would sound like so much hocus-pocus he would laugh and recommend she take up chanting. “Oh sure,” he said as if such harmony were as everyday as breakfast. “I used to feel like that sometimes playing basketball.” “Basketball?” Alex scoffed, dubious of any inner peace to be found in a gym smelling of sweat, farts, and moldy sneakers. When did he play basketball? “Basketball,” Kendrick repeated firmly and smiled. “You’re looking good these days, Alex.”
It’s the swimming. Her waistline has appeared.
It was there a year and a half ago, but wasn’t quite so flashy. Then a bad cough turned into pneumonia. For a month she lay in bed, certain she was dying. She tried to feel tragic: her life cut short, to die in the last bloom of youth and never have lumbago, arteriosclerosis, or glaucoma! That might not be enough to make everyone weep, but it was the only life she had, and if she didn’t feel tragic about it, who would? Instead she felt tired. When she went back to the darkroom, she became dizzy breathing the chemicals. Standing at the sink, she had to clutch its rolled edge to keep from collapsing. When she thought about her life, she decided there was too little light, not enough air, too much time spent in the dark trying to record the radiance, not enough motion. She bought a warm-up suit and a pair of Nikes and pulled a ligament on her first half-mile. She took up swimming.
Speedo is doing the butterfly now, wrapping himself in veils of bubbles, sending the water slapping against the trough. She removes her goggles to beg