Here & There (16 page)

Elle reached down and wrapped her fingers around his wrist. She pulled his hand past the final equation, across the threshold, and into the crossroads.

His fingers sank into the landscape of her.

VI

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

~Gustave Flaubert

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

~Oscar Wilde

Pierce and Woodbury took great care in placing the Reidier family in Providence. The Department, through Brown University, appropriated a stunning home in the historic College Hill neighborhood. It was a mammoth property, originally the Royal C. Taft–George Smith House (c.1888). As the real estate listing describes it, the house was a

Stately Queen Anne Colonial Revival beautifully situated at 454 Angell Street. Designed by Stone, Carpenter, and Willson.

Gorgeous architectural details throughout, including a Palladian window over the fan-light entrance, broken-scroll dormers in a picturesque design, a widow’s walk, and a polygonal turret which is reflected on all three floors. Spacious rooms flow graciously from one into the other, high
ceilings, exceptional moldings, beautiful hardwood floors, and five fireplaces.

Gracious entry foyer features a dramatic staircase and opens to a double parlor and a formal dining room. Cozy screened porch overlooks the private and expansive yard. Large kitchen with a butler’s pantry and a mudroom. The second and third floors offer eight bedrooms, three of which have fireplaces, four full bathrooms, plus a lavette. The expansive, partially finished lower level offers a flexibility of space and a colonial charm with several original exposed stone foundation walls.

Magnificent grounds include lush perennial gardens and a lovely mature Copper Beech tree. Convenient two-car garage is attached to the house by a covered and enclosed walkway. A true Providence gem!

It was not only a magnificent place to make a home but also a mere half-mile walk to 182 Hope Street, the Brown Physics Department.

The house was only the beginning. Eve was awarded a Visiting Assistant Professorship in the Department of Comparative Literature, located in Marston Hall, a stone’s throw away from the Physics building and in the shadow of the Science Library.
*
Allegedly, due to limited resources and the general bureaucratic disarray of the Comp Lit Department, there was no space available in Marston Hall. Instead, Eve had to be placed a block away, at 97 Waterman Street, in the Arnold Lab. Her office was across the hall from Bertram Malle’s.

*
It’s more than a bit unnerving to encounter my mom’s walking tour through the landmarks of my alma mater. She used to take me for lunch on Thayer Street for Parents’ Weekend, dinner down on Wickenden for the odd pop-in, and
here
there she was again, traipsing around like an admissions officer, while I sit in an empty carriage house in Hell’s Kitchen.

How many jaunts did she take up there? How much time did she spend? How often did she stop in New York on her way back, see me for an afternoon, and cover with some story about a lecture at Columbia? How often didn’t she stop? I think that last question bothers me the most.

Hilary on College Hill.

As the myth goes, the Sci-Li is descending into the ground at the rate of, I don’t know, two-tenths of an inch a year. Supposedly it’s all because the engineers when designing the library’s foundation forgot to account for the weight of the books. It’s kind of charming, in a Venetian sort of way. At least it is when glimpsing it through last night’s alcoholic haze.

Her trips had got me thinking. Thinking felt too heavy, though, so I needed to be lightened up a little with a titration of alcohol. I slipped out to Siberia, dove into a fifth of Russian vodka, and surfed on the bartender’s iPad. Somewhere toward the bottom of that bottle, I found the magic mixture. The perfect few words, ordered just so, dropped into Google’s search bar like a little tab of acid,
et voilà
!

I found it.

Weeks of searching and all I needed was a few shots of Stolichnaya and Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

“Entangled in the Bourg.” Eve Tassat’s long-lost short story.

Well, not her short story per se. But an archived bulletin board thread from some literary forum. Several members were going back and forth about the motif of memory. More specifically of forgetting. They went on about the fidelity of memory, the fidelity of language, how the piece itself was Tassat’s act of remembering. Then there was a whole string on absinthe, its side effect of memory loss, how the wormwood is supposed to rot holes in your brain. And then a long debate about the nature of an oubliette: was it meant to imprison or erase? A poster who went by the screen name “Hoggle” put the kibosh on the argument, finally insisting that “An oubliette is a place you put people to forget about ‘em!”

I rushed back to my oubliette. I had to get this down and not forget myself.

I mean it was a broken html link to the text itself, but still there was the reference. AND, and there were dates. The posts were all from the summer of 2000. One year after my mother claimed it was published.

So Hilary was right. It did exist, and it was published. And I don’t know why, maybe it was that clean, clear Russian vodka, or just following in Mom’s steps, but I was so titillated. Until . . .

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

A pounding on my front door.

I froze. A chill undulating up my spine; icy tendrils branching like capillaries. And I just sat and waited. It had to be a mistake. A drunk
neighbor’s wrong turn. Nobody comes here but me. Nobody even knows about it but me.

So I waited in the basement of that carriage house, hidden in the middle of the block, sunken into a cement courtyard. My own personal oubliette. And I listened, trying to outwait the interloper. Listened for a hint. My heart thudding in my ears.

WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!

With no furniture to get in the way, the thuds echoed around the empty carriage house. This time, though, I could hear the wrought iron walkway creak as the knocker shifted weight from one foot to the other. And then the railing creaked. Whoever it was, was leaning against it.

My fucking desk lamp was on. Of course it was, I had been reading. The yellow glow spilled out onto the concrete. And someone was leaning over the railing looking at it. Someone had followed me.

“MAKE OUT PATROL! Anybody making out? Anybody wanna make out?” he shouted down.

It was Toby. A wave of tiny needles rolled across the back of my neck and shimmered down through the rest of my body, and I was overcome with an urge to piss myself.

“You scared the hell out of me,” I screamed up at the front door.

“Yeah? I guess we’re even then,” he yelled back.

Apparently, I had been a little remiss in retrieving my voice mails, and Toby had become a little curious about my Invisible Man impersonation. His fears were far from allayed by the décor of the house.

“You’re not sleeping here, man, are ya?” he asked, staring at the mattress on the third floor.

“It’s just for naps. I still stay at my place. Most nights.”

He raised an eyebrow and then headed downstairs. Having dug myself in, I didn’t quite have the perspective on how disconcerting a depth I had sunk to. To me I was just unpacking the briefcase, to Toby . . . well, all he could say really was,
Man
, and ask me if I had found anything. I told him about French Guiana and the Brown trips. He nodded, thumbed through some stuff, fiddled with the bead necklace hanging on the wall, and then suggested a little distance might help me get some perspective.

“Know any place where we could get some absinthe?”

A wry smile accompanied another eyebrow raise, and we were off. We snuck down to the West Village to stop in at Employees Only, slipped eastward to PDT, and finally spiraled around the shuttered, reeking fish markets of Chinatown until we swirled into this place called Apotheke.

I’m not sure if it was the green mist permeating my blood–brain barrier or the peculiar sense of interior design by some eccentric proprietor, but from what I can recall, all the bartenders wore lab coats and
mixed drinks in huge laboratory beakers. And every now and then, some random Austrian guy called The Mixologist stood on top of the bar and made flaming absinthe shots while the sound system blared the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra.”

Somewhere along the way, I ended up with an arm around the waist of this done-up brunette, and Toby found himself sharing a stool with a tipsy redheaded actress who wore Ugg boots, a scarf, and eye shadow with glitter (aka the herpes of makeup). I’m not sure how the whole thing got rolling, but after a little bit, I realized it was becoming increasingly awkward that I had no idea what the brunette’s name was. Completely forgotten.

Toby was riffing on absinthe metaphors: if absinthe were sneakers, it would be a pair of laceless Chuck Taylors designed by John Varvatos for Converse; if it were facial hair, it would be the soul patch; if absinthe were a finish on kitchen and bath fixtures, it would be brushed nickel. Nonsensical erudition that he most likely plagiarized from a
New York Times
piece.

I was getting antsy, though, thinking he had completely missed my signal until he leaned in to my brunette, and shouted above the din that he apologized, he was awful with names, and what was hers again.

And in that moment, the fog cleared, and I remembered.

“Her name’s Heavenly,” I told Toby.

“Hilary,” she corrected me.

That plucked at a strand of my brain stem. “Really? I thought you said Heavenly. So fucking loud in here,” I yelled above the crowd of people singing along with the flaming Austrian about
calling names
and
burnin’ flames
.

“S’ok. I kinda like being called Heavenly,” she smiled.

Of course you do
, I thought, as I pushed down a surge of what I preferred to diagnose as Oedipal paranoia rather than excitement—about her having the same name as Mumsie.

“What’s your name again?” she said to Toby.

“Burroughs.” Toby drained the rest of his absinthe.

“That’s a funny name,” giggled the actress, as she rubbed the tip of her nose against his shoulder. A little glitter held on to his cotton-blend collar.

I stepped in with the save. “Tell him about it. He’s been getting shit for it for years.” I grinned.

If there’s one thing I learned at Anomaly, it’s never refute an accusation. It seems defensive. Once you’re on defense you’re done. No, the trick with an accusation is to say yes. Wrap your arms tight around it and run with it. The accuser’s already partial to her story, and she’ll gladly go along for the ride.

So we riffed on what’s in a name, I danced along with a vague sense of déjà vu, and somehow Toby ended up pushing me to tell the story about the name a buddy of mine got when we were smoke jumping in Oregon. I hemmed and hawed, playing up the reticence. On cue the girls insisted, we ordered another round, toasted the holy trinity of wormwood, anise, and fennel, and I collected my thoughts in order to tell the story about a job I had never had in a place I had never been.

I started out with how this friend of mine, Tyler, and I were white, affluent kids who grew up in that megalopolis otherwise known as the Eastern seaboard, privileged, entitled, and experts of ennui.

And then we went to college and discovered how much we couldn’t stand our ‘old’ unenlightened selves or where we came from. We needed something different. Something authentic. Something as far away from the East Coast and all its facades of bullshit as possible.

“Either of you ever been to Redmond?” I asked.

The girls shook their heads no. Redmond it was then.

“Well, there’s this town, Redmond. Forest Service has a base there where they train smoke jumpers. They got a handful of them all over, California, Washington, Montana, Idaho, but the one in Redmond was the first, the best, and the most intense. And somehow Tyler and I talked our way into the program. I think it had more to do with dwindling applicants and the forecasted drought than our silver tongues. Doesn’t really matter, and the fact is, we made it in, and somehow survived the four weeks of training—”

“Wait, what’s a smoke jumper?” Hilary asked.

“It’s a firefighter that parachutes into hard-to-reach areas, the wild-lands, to combat forest fires.”

“They drop you in? Like, off a plane? Into a fire?”

“Well, not into the fire. Near the fire,” I corrected her.

“With a fire truck?”

You’re so pretty.
“Nah, they just drop in tools, like shovels, chainsaws, Pulaskis, portable pumps, food, small oxygen tanks, a mask, and water so we can be self-sufficient for a couple days.”

Toby raised his eyebrow and his glass just ever so much. A subtle toast. It was the Pulaskis. I knew that would get him. Don’t know where I knew that one from, maybe some Norman Maclean short story. Just reached deep into my bag of goodies and out it came. A combination of an axe and a mattock.