When I got back home, I had occasion to reread Tough Guys Don't Dance and screen the movie version for an article I was writing. It was a pleasant jolt to read about and then view the places we'd just been together.

In 1995, I had the fine experience of having dinner at Norman and Norris’s house on Commercial Street, with Robin and Norris, Maggie and my artist/writer/poet daughter Leslie, who had recently graduated from Connecticut College. After dinner, while our wives and daughters chatted, Norman and I sat up late in his bar overlooking the ocean drinking single malt scotch.

When we ran out of time and energy but not talk, and had exhausted the patience of the women, he suggested we meet for breakfast at Michael Shay’s restaurant, which has since become one of my favorite Provincetown haunts. I remember that the Mark Fuhrman controversy had just reached its peak in the news that morning, and I suggested that Norman eventually write something on the O. J. Simpson case. Although he felt the subject was virtually mined out, he did finally write the screenplay for a mini-series years later.

In the years since, I have had a recurrent and gathering gratitude that we are unable to see our futures. The last five years of the decade and the century brought great tragedy and travail, as well as new achievement and triumph for me.

When my beloved daughter Leslie died suddenly in 1996, I had no reason or intention to trouble Norman with my personal life, so I didn’t write him of this. But my good friend Mike Lennon interceded: when I wrote Michael of Leslie’s death, he immediately informed Norman. A day later, an envelope covered with stamps arrived Special Delivery. In it, Norman sent a beautiful, poetic, heartfelt letter of condolence and commiseration. That letter will remain always in a secret compartment of my heart.

Where can I start to write about Leslie? How can it be other than a series of cliches, like those of any other bereaved father? All I can say is that I miss her terribly, profoundly, irrevocably.

The funeral director, a character out of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, didn't believe the bereaved parents and sister could arrange and speak at the funeral, so he had a minister waiting in the wings. I had my friend Bob Miles standing by to finish my eulogy in case I became unable to continue. But we did it. We made a pact that we would not only try not to break down during our own speeches, but during one another's, so that we wouldn't set off a chain reaction of uncontrollable, wracking tears. Throughout the assembled, there were audible sobs, even among the tough Motor Vehicle guys Robin worked with. But we did it. Here's what I said:

When Leslie was born, after a predawn drive to the hospital on black ice in a vicious February, she ameliorated everything by the radiance of her smile. That face, that Leslie smile, would melt this snow outside and the ice that encases my heart, our hearts, today. Her literary and artistic accomplishments merely echoed the intensity and beauty of her intuitive center, as her lovely face was but an image of her beautiful soul. I won't see her like again.

My Leslie was a mass of engaging, often frustrating, contradictions. Painfully shy in childhood, she was also furiously independent, as when at age two she refused for hours to wear a winter coat in the coldest weather, never admitting to discomfort. She wanted approval; but when she went to receive her Winthrop fellowship (conferring early selection to Phi Beta Kappa), she wore a black leather jacket to the reception. Her response to the dirty looks she got from officials was, "Fuck them. I got the grades!"

That was Leslie. That is Leslie, because she's here in me, and will be until I die. But the world will never be the same again. I don't know why she had to leave us. But as Millay, one of her favorite poets, wrote, "I only know that summer sang in me/ A little while, that in me sings no more."

At the cemetery, we lay Leslie in the frozen ground. Our friend Ross Baiera read one of her favorite Edna St. Vincent Millay poems, ending with "But you were more than young and sweet and fair/ and the long year remembers you," and then led us in the psalm of David. Everyone waited for a cue as to what they should do next.

"Goodbye, Leslie," I said. What more was there to say? Everything. Nothing. And we left. I'm still trying to say goodbye. I know I never will.

* * * * *

And now? Now? I still have days when I wander through the empty house, blinded by tears, calling her name aloud. I haven't lost my sanity, just my heart. Nonetheless, I try to remake my new life, a life without Leslie. What life is that? Well, there's one out there, I suppose. Or in here.

I see now that I'm not just badly bruised like Rocky Balboa after his first fight with Apollo Creed. Something's broken inside me that will never heal. Just as Crohn's Disease is not the 24 hour flu or a mere irritable bowel, my condition is chronic, permanent. There may be remissions, but no physician exists who can cure me.

The summer of 1996 found us in no mood to return to Provincetown. Instead, Robin and Buffy and I took a trip to Newport, where we began to understand the statistical dictum that the vast majority of marriages in which a child dies end in divorce. When, in 1997, Robin showed little or no interest in accompanying me to visit the Mailers, I went alone.

By the summer of 1998, with our marriage sadly eroded after more than thirty years, Robin and I separated. On this visit, which had begun to be an annual event, I was accompanied by my long-time friend Beth, with whom friendship had ripened into something more.

During the fall semester of 1998, teaching my Course titled Norman Mailer: Fifty Years of Achievement, I was so impressed by the intense engagement of my students with Norman’s work, and the high quality of their midterm exams, that I called him to ask if we could make a group pilgrimage to visit him. Instead, he made me an even better offer: he came to my class, secretly, to avoid crowds. These students were volunteers, not draftees, and it was they and they alone who deserved to benefit from and enjoy his visit. Beth and I picked Norman up at the train station in Hartford, slipped him in and out of my office and my classroom like Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel, and had a fine, stimulating discussion with my students, which Norman repeatedly said he enjoyed as well. Beth and I took him to dinner, dropped him off at Wesleyan where we hooked up with much of his family, including Norris, his sister Barbara, and most of his "kids," and declined their invitation to attend the play in which Norris and Norman’s youngest son, John Buffalo, was featured. Instead, we kept our promise to meet my students at Tony’s Central Pizza, across the street from the CCSU campus, where we found them amidst a forest of beer bottles and pizza crusts, still avidly debriefing each other.

The pilgrimage idea did not, however, die. In October 1999, I took a group of graduate students from my Mailer/Kesey seminar to Provincetown to meet Mailer and have a three hour seminar in his living room. They were so grateful, excited, dazzled to the point of awe, and so intelligent in their questions, that I realized the experience was analogous to how I would have felt if one of my professors had taken my class to Key West to visit Hemingway at his home. I was very proud of them, and very grateful to Norman. The year 2000 brought another fine visit. By now, Beth and I had decided that autumn visits were preferable to summer. That fall, despite Norris’s cancer (and the consequent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation) and Norman’s painful arthritis, they were not merely stoical and self-deprecating about their own travails, but, as always, warm hosts. Over cold vodka and sushi, followed by hearty Russian borscht, we had the pleasure of discussing Norris’s fine first novel, Windchill Summer, (of which I write in Chapter 10) and of having two Mailers sign their books for us.

That's only one example of why it's so exciting to work on an author who's still alive and active. It's a dynamic adventure of constant revelation. Most of us who choose to teach literature have embarked on a voyage of self-discovery, seeking to explain ourselves. I've found myself; but I'm still in the process of finding Mailer.