The Credence of Christopher Craig
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For the past twenty-eight years I have spent much of my time at the airport. People's eyes glaze over when I pull out my computer-printed itinerary with line after line of minuscule type. In the beginning, the less sophisticated viewed my nomadic life as glamorous, but in fact, long before the rash of bombings and suicide attacks, air travel had already lost its appeal. The larger terminals have been transformed into shopping malls, while the smaller fields, reached by gnat-like commuter planes, remind me of Old South bus stations where we switched coaches during the freedom rides of the sixties--tired and hungry college kids huddled under arcaded storefronts, gazing apprehensively at the long wet stretches of blacktop that would carry us into the red dirt and swamps and pine trees of Georgia or Alabama or Mississippi. For today's traveler, resignation has replaced indignation, defeat has supplanted defiance. Complaining, always useless, is now viewed as unpatriotic as well. So I have accepted it all. After I left Cleveland in 1973, I had no choice but to hit the road. That’s how I ended up rich, I keep reminding myself. If air travel in America today is a hellish nightmare, it’s the price I willingly pay. (After all, an objective appraisal of the horrors of life is not to be interpreted as self-pity, which I abhor. I know what we lived through, my friends and I, and I have survived.) It seems I have adapted even at the airport. I show up early for the long security lines. I carry only a regulation size rollaboard and a small briefcase. I wear dress loafers to make it easier for them to check my shoes. I load up on my favorite magazines, munch on Trail Mix, and drink sparkling water out of cold green bottles. I sit in deserted boarding areas isolated from my fellow passengers, but close enough to my departure gate to hear them announce delays and cancellations. I was among the first to discover those foam rubber ear plugs, which not only screen out some of the noise, but also signal to passers-by that I do not wish to engage in conversation. Despite my professional and financial achievements, I am not one to network. Even among boisterous crowds, I manage to keep my distance, creating a comforting sanctuary for myself in the midst of an unrelenting assault on everything we used to think of as human. I sought solace with a portable cassette player for a while (I am a music lover), but I found that the music seized my attention so completely that I couldn’t let my mind wander. I love Mozart and Verdi and Bach so much that once I am in their thrall, my head otherwise closes down. And to tell the truth, it is on airplanes and in airports that I can let myself travel back, mentally, to a distant time of riots and assassinations and an unpopular war, when somehow life seemed better. Mostly, in my anxious moments as the plane accelerates upwards at a precarious angle, I think of Christopher Craig. My day dreams usually begin the same way. Insulated with earplugs, munching on Trail Mix, spreading out my Harper's and Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker magazines in an attempt to extract all the subscription cards and bound-in reply forms, I let my eyes search through the seated passengers and, inevitably, discover a man my own age, his girth swelling, his hair gone, horn rimmed glasses sliding down the front of his nose, moistened by sweat in the stale airport air. I furtively scrutinize each face, hoping to find a clue. What would he look like now, if, indeed, he's still alive? Would he see in my rumpled form the friend he once loved? Would we both be saddened, as if, after almost thirty years, we had suddenly met up with our own true selves, standing in three dimensions before us, criticizing?
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About the Book
How many are the ways of love and how long is love remembered?
Popular American fiction is graced with names that embody a time, a place, a belief or a way of life: names like George Babbitt, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield. In this groundbreaking chronicle of an unusual friendship between two young men who share an obsession with English racing cars, the passionate and unforgettable Christopher Craig leaves his indelible mark. Narrated in the present by David Dellacordia, a businessman and artist whose later years have left him emotionally bereft, the story unfolds during the nation’s 1968-1973 watershed period, with its agonizing war, assassinations, riots, and presidential disgrace. The vigorously heterosexual David and the defiantly gay Christopher Craig are confronted with catastrophes that endanger their lives and shatter their close-knit circle of friends, including David’s two mistresses, Christopher’s lovers, and the gallery of vivid personalities around them – all swept up in a relentless cycle of love and loss, triumph and defeat, murder and mayhem, finally culminating in an authentic crisis of the American Sprit.
By the author of one of America’s first great love stories of the twenty-first century, Jake and Jasmine,
"A brilliant mainstream novel," that is "both entertaining and deep"--"a tour de force." Also available from 1st Books Library or from your local bookstore.
About the Author
C. D. Webb is the author of the novel Jake and Jasmine, previously published through 1stBooks Library. He began his writing career as a poet with work anthologized in New Poems by American Poets #2 edited by Rolfe Humphries and published by Ballantine Books. He studied with James Dickey, Paul Engle, and the Indian novelist Krishna Vaid. His academic background includes undergraduate and graduate concentration in American, British and French literature. He also has a master’s degree in psychology and sociology. As he continued to publish poems in regional journals, he simultaneously launched an administrative career with cultural institutions, leaving his post as development consultant on the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art to found his own company specializing in the visual and performing arts. For several years he was Chairman of the Board of the Circle Repertory Company in New York, which led him to an interest in the theater. The Playoff, his third novel, is planned for publication within the next year, followed by a collection of his plays. C. D. Webb lives in New York City and in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.