man who had constructed a scale model of the solar system in his barn.
Clare sat in the wingback reading, a glass of wine beside her.
“I know it would be far, far too much to hope that, anticipating this second, unexpected morning of mine, you might have coffee waiting.”
“ Fresh coffee, as a matter of fact.” She glanced at the wall clock. Time—thief of life and all good intentions. “Well, an hour ago, anyway.”
It was wonderful.
I drank the first cup almost at a gulp, poured bourbon into the next and nursed it deliciously. We sat listening to traffic sounds from Prytania, a block or so away, and to an update on Somalia relief efforts.
“I ever tell you about my father?” Clare asked.
“Some. I know he died of alcoholism when you were still pretty young. And you told me he was a championship runner in college.”
“Leaves a lot of in-between, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what life mostly is, all the in-between stuff.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” She crossed her leg and leaned toward me, wine washing up the side of her glass in a brief tide. “I don’t remember a lot, myself. Mostly I have these snapshots, these few moments that come back again and again, vividly. So vividly that I recall even the smells, or the way sun felt on my skin.”
A woman walked down the middle of the street pushing a shopping cart piled with trash bags. White ones, brown ones, black ones, gray ones. An orange one with a jack-o’-lantern face.
“I remember once I’m sitting in his lap and he’s telling me about the war. That’s what he always calls it, just the war.’ And he says, every time: a terrible thing, terrible. And I can smell liquor on his breath and the sweat that’s steeped into his clothes from the roofing job he’s been on all day over near Tucson.
“You know about code-talkers, Lew? Well, he was one of them. The Japanese had managed to break just about every code we came up with, I guess, and finally someone had this idea to use Indians. There were about four hundred of them before it was all done, all of them Navajo, and they passed critical information over the radio in their own language, substituting natural words for manmade things. Grenades were potatoes, bombs were eggs, America was nihima: our mother.
“They were all kids. My father had gone directly from the reservation up near Ganado into the Marines. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time. And when he came back, three years later, to Phoenix, he couldn’t find work there. He wandered up into Canada—some sort of pipeline job or something, I’m not sure—and he met Mama there. The sophisticated Frenchwoman. The Québecoise. Who devoted the rest of her life, near as I can tell—though who can say: perhaps misery was locked inescapably into his genes—to making the rest of his life miserable.
“By the time he died he’d become this heavy dark bag my mother and the rest of us had to drag behind us everywhere we went. What I felt when he died, what my mother must have felt, was, first of all, an overwhelming sense of relief.
“I think about that still, from time to time. The feelings don’t change, and it seems somehow important to me that I don’t lose them, but it does keep flooding back. Like givens that are supposed to lead you on to a new hypothesis… . You have any idea at all what I’m talking about?”
“Not much.”
“Neither do I. But I almost had it, just for a moment there.”
“ ‘Keep trying.’ ”
“Tolstoy dying—right?”
“Scratched it with a finger on his sheet, yes.”
“What would you scratch out, Lew?”
“Something from a poem I read a while back, I think: ‘find beauty, try to understand, survive.’ ”
Moments later: “You ready for bed?”
“Hey, I just got up.”
“So? What’s your point?”
Mozart replaced Noah Adams, traffic sounds relented, the old house creaked and wheezed. We got up a couple of hours later and walked over to Popeye’s for chicken, biscuits,
Clare sat in the wingback reading, a glass of wine beside her.
“I know it would be far, far too much to hope that, anticipating this second, unexpected morning of mine, you might have coffee waiting.”
“ Fresh coffee, as a matter of fact.” She glanced at the wall clock. Time—thief of life and all good intentions. “Well, an hour ago, anyway.”
It was wonderful.
I drank the first cup almost at a gulp, poured bourbon into the next and nursed it deliciously. We sat listening to traffic sounds from Prytania, a block or so away, and to an update on Somalia relief efforts.
“I ever tell you about my father?” Clare asked.
“Some. I know he died of alcoholism when you were still pretty young. And you told me he was a championship runner in college.”
“Leaves a lot of in-between, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what life mostly is, all the in-between stuff.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so.” She crossed her leg and leaned toward me, wine washing up the side of her glass in a brief tide. “I don’t remember a lot, myself. Mostly I have these snapshots, these few moments that come back again and again, vividly. So vividly that I recall even the smells, or the way sun felt on my skin.”
A woman walked down the middle of the street pushing a shopping cart piled with trash bags. White ones, brown ones, black ones, gray ones. An orange one with a jack-o’-lantern face.
“I remember once I’m sitting in his lap and he’s telling me about the war. That’s what he always calls it, just the war.’ And he says, every time: a terrible thing, terrible. And I can smell liquor on his breath and the sweat that’s steeped into his clothes from the roofing job he’s been on all day over near Tucson.
“You know about code-talkers, Lew? Well, he was one of them. The Japanese had managed to break just about every code we came up with, I guess, and finally someone had this idea to use Indians. There were about four hundred of them before it was all done, all of them Navajo, and they passed critical information over the radio in their own language, substituting natural words for manmade things. Grenades were potatoes, bombs were eggs, America was nihima: our mother.
“They were all kids. My father had gone directly from the reservation up near Ganado into the Marines. He was seventeen or eighteen at the time. And when he came back, three years later, to Phoenix, he couldn’t find work there. He wandered up into Canada—some sort of pipeline job or something, I’m not sure—and he met Mama there. The sophisticated Frenchwoman. The Québecoise. Who devoted the rest of her life, near as I can tell—though who can say: perhaps misery was locked inescapably into his genes—to making the rest of his life miserable.
“By the time he died he’d become this heavy dark bag my mother and the rest of us had to drag behind us everywhere we went. What I felt when he died, what my mother must have felt, was, first of all, an overwhelming sense of relief.
“I think about that still, from time to time. The feelings don’t change, and it seems somehow important to me that I don’t lose them, but it does keep flooding back. Like givens that are supposed to lead you on to a new hypothesis… . You have any idea at all what I’m talking about?”
“Not much.”
“Neither do I. But I almost had it, just for a moment there.”
“ ‘Keep trying.’ ”
“Tolstoy dying—right?”
“Scratched it with a finger on his sheet, yes.”
“What would you scratch out, Lew?”
“Something from a poem I read a while back, I think: ‘find beauty, try to understand, survive.’ ”
Moments later: “You ready for bed?”
“Hey, I just got up.”
“So? What’s your point?”
Mozart replaced Noah Adams, traffic sounds relented, the old house creaked and wheezed. We got up a couple of hours later and walked over to Popeye’s for chicken, biscuits,
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