Complete Short Fiction, page 60
She glanced at him. “What are you thinking about?”
“Building,” he replied. “The way you build things.”
“You love that, don’t you? Sometimes I think you like the process more than the final result. You never want to be finished.”
“Is a dance performance ever finished?”
She laughed. “No. When it’s finished, it’s sad.”
She lived on the second floor of a triple-decker. Caius loved triple-deckers because they seemed so reasonable. No one found them reasonable anymore, of course, and no one built them.
Caius took Linda’s coat, and they stood in the living room, indecisive. She turned and pulled a record off the shelf. It was by a singer named Jane Siberry. Their common taste for the Canadian songwriter, a surprise to both of them, had been one of the first things that had let them know that they did not have to remain strangers.
“ ‘And I’d probably be famous now if I wasn’t such a good waitress,’ ” Linda sang along to the record. She tried to dance with Caius, but he kept losing the beat of the music. Finally, laughing, she kissed him. The record played to the end. Fortunately, the arm returned automatically.
The seat was hard, and Caius twisted in it until Linda glared at him. He sat up straight and, staring at the three busily playing musicians, tried to find something he could pay attention to. The dark lacquer gleam of the grand piano, the pianist’s precisely painted nails reflected back in it? The duller wooden shine of the cello, its perspiring owner pulling sounds out of it with a saw? Was the violinist wearing a toupee? His hair had slid forward over his eyes, but perhaps that was just the style.
He glanced at Linda. She seemed fascinated, her narrow eyes half closed. She wore more eye makeup than usual, and her hair was pulled back by a black, Carmen-like comb, revealing dangly Indian earrings.
They sat in the Tapestry Room of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Heavy beams supported the large room’s ceiling. High arched windows opened out on the central enclosed courtyard, its lush greenery contrasting with the winter that reigned outside. Tapestries covered the walls. The room was dominated by a huge marble fireplace and a painting of Saint Michael fighting Satan.
“Sorry,” Caius said, once the performance was over. “The seat’s hard.”
“Mine was just as hard,” she pointed out. “You didn’t see me jumping around.” Her eyes flicked past him. “You’re very possessive, you know that?”
Caius tried desperately to remember which of his remarks had occasioned this assault. “What do you mean?”
“Oh,” she gasped in annoyance. “For example, in this museum we went where you wanted to go, saw what you wanted to see.”
“We’ve been in every single gallery,” Caius said, at a loss. “What didn’t we see that you wanted to?”
“Stop it. I don’t want to argue with you. I’m just letting you know something.” She turned away, swirling her red-and-yellow Central American dress like a signal flag. He watched her graceful form slide into the next room, her shoulder blades eloquent of departure. Precariously balanced on his stumping legs, he followed.
“What are you so upset about?” Caius asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Everything.” She looked at him in appeal. “Oh, Caius. When I met you, everything seemed so simple. So choreographed. Like,” she groped into his idiom, “like it had been laid out with a straightedge and plumb line.”
“Why isn’t it simple?” he asked. “What’s different?”
“I don’t know. The steps are all wrong.” She dipped her body in a sinuous tango, dancing with an invisible partner. She looked sadly over her shoulder at him. “I’m getting my coat. Don’t come with me. I need to think.” Feet moving precisely beneath her long dress, she darted out through the stairwell, with its dark, almost invisible Japanese screens, and vanished.
When he finally left the museum, he looked for her red coat, but it was nowhere to be seen. The Back Bay Fens lay across the street, ponds frozen and hidden beneath a thick layer of snow. The snow had been coming down heavily, but now the sky was clear. Cars crept cautiously along the languorous streets, their tires grumbling in undertones.
Caius walked amid the trees, feeling fallen branches snap beneath the snow. The winter sun was setting and the park filled with shades of blue, from the indigo of oak tree shadows to the pale blue of the snow itself, the color of a baby’s blanket. He crossed an arched bridge over hidden water and entered a thick stand of pampas grass, huddled under its new white overcoat.
A glow caught Caius’s eye, the faintest of yellows vividly warm against the cool shadows. Curious, he approached. A bearded figure, like a forest spirit, hunched over a tiny fire in a perforated coffee can. With no surprise, Caius recognized Rum.
Rum looked up and squinted across the fire to see who was disturbing his privacy. He looked older than when Caius had last seen him, his skin splotchy and drooping. He held his hands out to the fire as hobos always did in movies.
Cold and hungry, Rum still managed a condescending smile.
“Sit down, Caius.” He gestured expansively at the snow-covered ground opposite. Caius squatted, hunching in his long overcoat. “You don’t look well, friend. Didn’t she like your flowers?”
Behind Rum, Caius could see his shelter, a lean-to this time, its entry blocked by a heavy sheet of plastic. It had the same reasonable look as the first shelter Caius had seen against the corner of Biomorphics, a look of sensible structure. “Flowers aren’t the problem. Ah—do you need food, Rum? A place to stay?”
Rum barked a laugh. “I’ve never wanted a place to stay. Want a drink?”
“No, I—”
Rum pulled a wine bottle out of the snow and shook it. “Still some left. We better drink it before it freezes. It’ll be no damn good at all then. A Sauvignon Blanc. Not a great one, but hey, it’ll do.” He produced a plastic cup and poured. Caius sipped. Darkness had filled the Fens, and only Rum’s face was now visible in the firelight. A tired face. A beaten face. The face of a man with nowhere to go.
“Bad times are coming,” Rum announced with the relish of an Old Testament prophet. “Cold days. The buildings you’ve built will crumble, sink into the water, vanish like burst pimples.”
“And we’ll join you out here?”
“Ha. Out here will join you. Dogs will run the streets tearing at babies’ arms. No one will sleep anywhere two nights in a row because someone will find and kill them if they do.” His voice rose. “Buildings will freeze and crack. You won’t recognize that world, Caius.” Something caught in his throat and he bent over in a fit of weak coughing. He took a breath and shook. “Summer’s a different story around here, you know. Full of faggots running around grabbing each other. Millions of them. Everybody in the city, as far as I can tell. Don’t know who’s home with their wives. It’s a whole other world, you know. So I don’t stay out here in the summer. Too noisy, and the summer people try to climb in with me. I prefer the winter. I’d like to see winter everywhere.” He shivered and pulled his coat more closely around him. With the sky clearing, the temperature had dropped drastically.
“Look, Rum,” Caius said. “Why don’t you come with me?”
Rum peered at him with sullen suspicion. “Are you one of those funny boys too?” he demanded. “Kind of cold for that kinda thing, isn’t it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You have no right to say that!” Rum shouted. “You’re trespassing on the future and you’re dressed for the past.” He pulled his loose hair back from his face, peering intently at Caius. “So how’s your girlfriend?”
Caius’s knees were starting to ache. His Asian workers could squat that way for hours, but he was beginning to wonder if he would ever walk again. Linda. A man always needed something to hold on to. If he let go . . . well, he could either float, or sink. Rum was sinking. Caius stood up, joints filled with sand. “She’s fine,” he said. “Just fine.”
Rum snorted, and his eyes wandered from Caius’s face. “It’ll all freeze,” he muttered. “You’d better be ready for it. If you’re not, you might get stuck in ice up to your knees.”
Caius shivered. “Rum, there’s a shelter not far from here.”
Rum regarded him bleakly. “There’s no shelter for any of us. Don’t fool yourself.”
“I’ll—”
“If you have them come take me to the shelter tonight, I’ll just get out again. Nomads never like being put on reservations.” He turned away and stared blankly off into space, obviously prepared to ignore Caius for as long as it took for him to go away.
Caius hobbled off into the high grass. The city’s glowing towers rose up above the dark trees. Busy traffic roared on the Fenway. The city went about its business. Caius stood at the park’s edge for a long time, realizing that he felt more like Rum shivering in his lean-to in the Fens than like any of the people in the bustling city before him.
They met for the last time in a diner called Frank’s Eatery, near the building Caius was restoring in Chelsea. It was a gesture of grace on Linda’s part. She didn’t like diners and had always found Caius’s interest in them perverse.
This one was run by Chinese, who yelled at their customers and worked with incredible speed. One had to be a pro to get served at the take-out counter. “What you want?” the counterman shrieked. “You want beef? Beef?” A moment’s hesitation and you were lost, shouldered aside by more experienced patrons.
Someone tried to combine two orders: “I want the chicken, but instead of the slaw I want—”
“We no have!” the counterman shouted in a passion. “We no have! Next!”
Outside the pink-and-green interior it was that wholly unsatisfactory weld between winter and spring called mud season. The earth was so wet and soft that it seemed everything should sink into it.
“Are you still working on that house—what did you call it—stick?” she asked. Now that he knew, her Central American bracelets and earrings seemed like flaring signals. He had only missed them because he had not cared to see.
“Yes,” he replied. “We’ll be on it all summer. It’s a complicated style.”
“But you like that sort of thing,” she said. “Don’t you?”
He took a sip of his coffee. It was terrible. “I suppose I do.”
“Oh,” she uttered. “Don’t be mad at me.” Her tone implied that any anger on his part would be unreasonable and impolite.
Caius had heard that if a man wanted to break up with woman, he should do it in an expensive restaurant where she would be embarrassed to cry. Linda had obviously applied the lesson in reverse. What could he say to her in this diner with its shouting countermen and constructionworker-filled Formica tables that would not seem ridiculous?
“What emotion would you suggest?” he asked, finally.
She shredded her napkin. “Why do you have to make this so hard on me? It won’t change anything. I’m going. It’s what I have to do. I know that you’ve never been committed to this, the way I have. I know your politics are a little different . . .”
“Don’t you feel embarrassed,” he said, “turning a complicated personal failure into a simple infidelity?”
She was calm. “Don’t be so analytical, Caius. These things happen.”
He was desperate to find why it happened. He didn’t understand why her failure to love him enough had led her to Emiliano’s bed. He didn’t understand why, one day, she had incautiously played back her answering machine, so that the romantic Sandinista’s purring voice could tell Caius everything he should have known long ago.
“Oh,” he moaned. “This is so banal.”
She smiled at him and took his hand. Her gesture was a sign of the unselfish affection she had convinced herself had replaced her love for him. Her touch was disconcerting, like false skin. “I’ll write from Managua. I will.”
He pictured her somewhere in Central America, sitting at a table in a flowered jungle, a cracked plaster wall behind her. She wore a wide-brimmed hat. A colored parrot waddled by, its head tilted, peering at the floor tiles for dropped food. She was not writing a letter. Caius could not compel his imagination that far.
He stood up, his food unfinished.
“I have a book of yours,” she said. “That book by Twelve Hughes, remember?”
He remembered. He had bought it for her the first day they had met, the day in front of the Civil War memorial. She had forgotten that it was hers. Looking at her, he could see that she had never read it. “Keep it,” he said. “Or donate it to a hospital.” He turned and walked out. At the last moment, he resisted the automatic urge to pay the check. He left her with it.
A sea breeze cleared the sky. The air was clean in his lungs. He wandered the busy, indifferent streets and felt no urge to go back to the work site. Fred could handle things for the afternoon. So he walked. He walked the high span of the Mystic River Bridge, a lonely pedestrian in a world meant for cars. The highway ran between the tourist sights in Charlestown, separating Bunker Hill from the USS Constitution. He walked underneath it, looking for shelters, for the abandoned figure of a proud and haughty man. He saw no one.
He crossed over into Boston on the low Charlestown Bridge, shadowed by the ugly green span of the highway. He walked, soon footsore and weary. He searched the faces of drunks and panhandlers. He even asked about Rum but, nervous at being approached rather than fled from, they sidled away with muttered, incoherent replies.
With night the cold returned. Caius stopped and looked up at the stars. Perhaps Rum was nowhere to be found. He could well be dead, of “exposure” as the newspapers always had it. Overly exposed to life. He could have left this earth far behind, and be circling one of those distant points.
Caius finally stood in an area of desolation somewhere beyond the boutique streets of the new South End. His home, South Boston, lay some miles to the east, not far, really, but he didn’t feel like walking anymore. He explored the lot where he stood. It was amazing, as Rum had pointed out, what people threw away. Sofas, refrigerators, carpets. And corrugated metal sheets, vinyl fake-wood panels, plywood boards. Everything he needed.
He had wanted Rum to explain, to show him how to live in a world where nothing remained solid. Caius felt like one of those cartoon characters who had run off the edge of a cliff, but could only fall when he looked down and realized that there was nothing under his feet. He was tumbling, air in his hair. Drowning, water in his mouth. It was a world Rum knew how to live in. Had known, at least, until it killed him.
Caius chose a spot against the foundation of an abandoned brick house which rose sturdily above the surrounding garbage. Shrubs hid him from the street. He ran his fingers between the smoothly fitted bricks. Such a wall could stand for centuries. He shook his head. Permanence was not the lesson he was trying to learn.
Caius began to build. He laid the floor down first, a fiberboard panel on the soft, wet dirt. Then, after a moment’s consideration, he hoisted an A-frame of two wall panels and laid a sheet of plastic over them. It wasn’t much, nothing like Rum’s elegant constructions, but it was late, and he was tired. It would be a long time before Caius would be able to compete with the master nomad.
He crawled in and lay on his back, covering himself with a length of carpet. Would this make him free? No. Life would find him in the morning, the ground would be solid beneath him again, and he would have to think of what to build. For now he closed his eyes, and went to sleep.
Seating Arrangement
DAMN IT, KRISHENA Carlyle decided, looking at the sketchbook in her lap, it was true—almost provable mathematically. There was no way to seat everyone at her upcoming wedding reception without violating one or another of her mother’s inviolable rules. Krishena could just hear it: “Krishie, darling, don’t you know that Frederick once slept with Arnold’s wife Steffie? Long before Arnold and Steffie became engaged, of course, but it might come up. A natural topic of conversation at a wedding, don’t you think?” No, Krishena didn’t think, but arguing with her mother was like arguing with the Pythagorean Theorem.
She leaned back in her chair. The aides’ pen was silent, the paper-covered desks all around her like glaciers in the penetrating fluorescent light. Krishena had come into the State House offices to escape her personal life, but it had somehow followed her in, refusing to be distracted by the zoning regulations she was analyzing for her boss, State Senator Merwin. Let’s zone it NO WEDDINGS, Krishena thought, and tugged at her hair. The seating arrangement. It could not be done. Eloping, as Jerry had once half-jokingly suggested, started to make more and more sense. And he wasn’t even home to talk to, off on one of his after-hours water plant inspections. She shrugged and, gritting her teeth, forwarded the seating plan to her mother. She’d be hearing about it soon enough.
Her friend Jaganthir Nasil poked her head through the door. “You’re back,” she said. “Alien update. They took a walk on the beach. A long walk. Twittered to each other the whole time. I caught a glimpse of Merwin just before a commercial for hair spray. He was pouring sand out of his Italian shoes.”
“Don’t be so unfeeling, Jag,” Krishena said. “He loves those shoes.”
“The aliens put silver things on their heads and stared out at the ocean.”
“Italian silver things?”
“Hah! They don’t seem too fashion-conscious, do they? But who knows? Glad you’re here. It’s been quiet.” She gestured around the empty desks, which were normally occupied by a contingent of late-working senatorial aides. “Everybody important is tromping around Nantucket with the space cases.”
Jag had grown up in an Indian family in New Jersey. She had the beautiful elongated features of a temple goddess. She had dyed her long black hair blond, contrasting oddly with her burnt-caramel skin.
“Getting sand in their shoes.”
“Let’s hope.” Jag leaned against the doorjamb. Idly, she wound a thick strand of hair around a finger. “Oh, damn!” The distant beep of a phone, and Jag ran out of the room.
