“Embrace Your Madness”

Tristan may have been capable of a lot of things. If so, he was a man capable of a lot of things who told himself for 33 years that he was capable of only one.

“It’s all I can do,” he said once, on French TV, smiling slightly, “in the world.”

And if Tristan wasn’t good at that one thing …


EVERYTHING IS ARBITRARY, everything is explosively unfair. Everything is not going to be okay. The rent check bounces. The book doesn’t sell. The egg implants in defiance of the Pill. Banana peel, bonk, crash, the audience roars, you marine-crawl to a new mark and do the whole routine over again. It takes courage to embrace this vision of life — Tristan’s vision — as what he called, in one of his books, a perpetual slapstick cliffhanger.

And yet even the slapstick hero has to sit back and pay the bills and scoop the dog shit from the walkway.

It takes courage to be boring, too.

So he was out one night. Friday night. That coming Sunday was Mother’s Day, 2005. He was drinking, according to the story his friends heard later. He and Kara had been fighting. He drank into the night and into the early morning. When he came back to the house, a little rowhome on Charlotte Street, he was carrying a shotgun. He walked into the bedroom. Woke up Kara, so she could see. Put the shotgun into his mouth. Nine-one-one. Sirens, police. An obituary in the Times: “Tristan Egolf, a young novelist whose lavish prose was dismissed by some critics as callow … ”

And that was it. Exit novelist.


FOR MONTHS AFTERWARD, Paula refused visitors. She retreated to her easels, immersing herself in color and shape. The few times she ventured out of the house, people would inevitably walk up and start telling her how much Tristan had meant to them.

Eventually, there was a memorial service. His friends came, told stories. Jason Clouser, a.k.a. Dogboy, told the one about how Tristan used to piss in empty 40-ounce bottles back in Philly. It was that kind of service. Afterward, in a sunny field on the campus of Lancaster’s Franklin & Marshall College, Paula planted a tree in Tristan’s memory. A plaque beneath the tree says, “This story never ends … Tristan Egolf, 1971-2005. ”

… Which it didn’t, of course, because the only person to get closure from Tristan’s death was Tristan himself. He’d made sure of that. There were exposed power lines everywhere. Orla, half-orphaned. Kara traumatized. Gretchen cut in half. There were global reverberations. Over in France, Tristan’s daughter, Sashka, was six years old now, and talkative. Her physical resemblance to Tristan was eerie: same treelike nose, same canopy of a brow. She’d begun to beg her mother to take her to America. She had gotten it into her head that Tristan was waiting for her in one of those big American buildings with the millions of shiny windows. Sandra didn’t have anything of Tristan to give her daughter, so she went to court to claim the right to the next best thing. His name. Egolf. Sandra’s paternity suit generated a legal notice. And this notice then traveled overseas, to Lancaster … where a startled Paula, who had honored Tristan’s wish that she never contact Sandra or the baby, opened the envelope and saw a sea of French that she couldn’t read, and that she could only interpret, once she’d gotten over her confusion and shock, as a money grab by Tristan’s ex … the whole thing, just generally, making Paula grateful for the lessons she has recently been learning from her Buddhist guru — lessons about impermanence, and flux, and how to let go of need.

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