Read Online A Thousand Miles from Nowhere by John Gregory Brown - Free Book Online Page B

students, in conversations about the stories and poems and plays they read, he was forthright, casually explicit, when discussing sex. Paul Kehoe had warned him, of course, that he had to watch what he said, that there were parents who didn’t approve, who perceived his candor as a dangerous enticement.
    All art, Henry had wanted to tell Kehoe, is a dangerous enticement, thinking of his father’s passion for music, his mother’s paintings, but he’d said it to Amy instead.
    “And food,” Amy had answered. “Food is the first enticement.” It was food, Amy claimed, that had lured the fish from the sea, that had drawn man from his cave, that had led him to spark fire from the dull inertia of tree and stone.
    It was indeed food that had enticed Henry to ask Amy out on a date. He’d approached her at a local bookstore where she had set up a table of dishes she had prepared, the scent of each dish so wonderful that at first Henry didn’t notice how beautiful Amy was—or how ridiculous she looked in the tall white chef’s toque and matching white canvas apron she was wearing, a silk-screened portrait with her signature beneath it on both, something her publisher had insisted she wear. She was the author of a series of witty cookbooks that led the reader on fanciful, intrepid excursions across various continents in search of exotic meals; she was at the bookstore to sign copies of the latest installment.
    A Pilgrim’s Provisions, the series was officially titled, though Amy told Henry over drinks that night that she preferred her original alliterative proposal, A Forager’s Feasts, which seemed more in keeping, she said, with her modest, decidedly secular aims—and the books’ equally modest sales, she added, which were just enough to send her to her next volume’s exotic destination.
    “Which is where?” Henry had asked her.
    “Japan,” she said. “In two months.”
    And Henry had ended up going with her, even though he hated traveling, hated the dislocation of it, the sense that he had been set adrift. Right after they returned, he suggested they get married. “That way,” he said, as if the issue were one of logic and convenience, “you could, for instance, get a dog and not have to worry about how long you were gone. You’d have someone to watch him for free.”
    “What if I don’t want a dog?” Amy had answered, laughing.
    “Even better,” he’d said. “The truth is I’m not very good with dogs.”
    “So what are you good at?” she’d asked him, and he’d just looked at her, then he’d lowered his head as if he were thinking, and he’d waited until his silence had become comic, had set Amy to laughing again.
    “Nothing,” he said finally. “I’m good at nothing.”
    He understood, of course, the charm of such apparent modesty. But in this case, what he’d said was actually true. He didn’t have a clue, really, about history or philosophy or biology or chemistry or economics. He was at a loss on the subjects of medicine and law and meteorology and comparative religion. He could not play chess or garden or sew and did not understand the stock market or car engines or actuarial tables. He could not locate or name any constellations; he could not tell a finch from a nuthatch, a birch from a cypress. He had never held a gun or a blowtorch or a power saw; he’d never been a bartender, a roofer, a ranch hand, a roughneck, or a smoke jumper.
    “Sex,” she’d said. “You’re good at sex.”
    “No,” Henry said, more seriously, more honestly, than he had intended. “ You’re good at sex. I’m just the student. An eager student, mind you—”
    “Books,” Amy said, triumphant. “You know books. That trumps them all.”
    No, he’d said. There too he didn’t know most of what he was supposed to know. He hadn’t read The Iliad or The Odyssey and certainly nothing obscure like The Tale of Genji or Tristram Shandy or The Faerie Queene or The Decameron.
    “Yeah, well, who has?”