Love & Darts (9781937316075) (7 page)

You smile your liberated loneness into the
blue, alert and ready to wipe that smug smirk off your face if the
waiter walks by. And you should do it now anyway because your
partner will be here soon. He won’t understand if you’re sitting
there all giddy, happy, and free. So. Sit up. Stop gloating about
your well-deserved freedom under the big blue sky. Just be glad,
proportionally glad, that it’s not tropically humid today. That the
air is easy. And that you are no longer alone dealing with your
dead-dad-grief shit. You’re you. A person who can say to himself:
I’m waiting to meet my lover here.

River pebbles are the floor of the courtyard
and square stepping-stones make a path for the waitress to make her
rounds like a geisha bending her head to miss pruned cherry
branches burdened with their blossoms. The tables are old iron and
glass. The menus are beautiful, written in an almost illegible
script. The fountain makes it difficult to eavesdrop. The wine is
white and doesn’t mind at all.

He’ll be late.

So you have time to recover and find
yourself again in the moment.

Take the pill. At least take half of it.

Don’t you realize? You’re the first person
now.

And, yeah, I’m glad to be back in New
Orleans. There is a lady dressed in a bright pink Irish linen dress
and a broad white hat walking two greyhounds. They are like deer
and stop to stare at me through the cast iron fence. She moves on
easily and they follow, leaving the good restaurant smells behind.
The gentleman at the corner table chews his cigar and snaps a
newspaper in reaction to an editorial. A waitress appeases him with
an artichoke and watercress salad. He puts the paper away and
thanks her. “Thanks.” The cigar, not quite out, lies forgotten in
an ashtray. The smell reminds me of my uncle, my father’s older
brother who shook uncontrollably, silent through the funeral.

But I’m not home anymore. I’m here where two
sisters celebrate a thirty-something birthday with too many drinks
in the afternoon. They don’t usually drink in the afternoon, you
can tell. They probably don’t usually drink at all. But it’s a
thirty-something birthday and so the table rattles between the
slipping elbows and the patio stones. They laugh easily and look
alike when they do.

Shadows dance across the white napkin in my
lap. The leaves of the pecan tree are high above my head, so the
shadows are subtle; the grays smudge into each other. Their dance
is a flirtation with the wind and falls into my napkin. Half an
alprazalam half an hour ago helps sooth the shadows. And I
succumb.

“Have you decided?” She is beautiful like a
raven on a glacier in the sun. And I cannot look at her. She is a
dancer just getting through school with this job. We’ve spoken
before. She knows my friend—my partner, my lover: well, I guess he
is my friend—better.

“No. I’ll just wait to order. Except for a
smidge of spaghetti. Can I just have some plain noodles on a fancy
tiny dish with a little pesto? Call it a salad and forgive me.”

“Sure.” She fills up the water again. “Are
you doing okay?”

I smile.

And she gives up. “More wine?”

“Bring the rest of this bottle and chill
another. He’ll be here soon.”

The gentleman in the corner decides on
dessert. It seems he has opted out of the main course in order to
spend his calories on a piece of pie. Good decision.

A couple, tourists, are seated between me
and the fountain. I was watching the fountain so now I am watching
the tourists. They are looking around. Looking up at the pecan
tree. Looking up at the striped awning that sags over the entry to
the courtyard. Looking over at the antique ironwork fountain.
Looking at the tiles on the restaurant walls. Looking at the detail
in the cast iron fence—cattails and rushes as would surround a
stream. Looking at the ironwork of the tables which are frogs
bounding up and down splashes of water. Looking at the flagstones
and pebbles and the beautiful raven waitress who takes them their
water. The lady has cellulite on her thighs and wears comfortable
socks. The man is wearing a French Quarter hat that he likely just
bought today. They are the explorers of our time. Pacific and glad
someone has done it all before. But they are humbled by
decision-making. They share one menu. Sweetly.

There is sun in my wine. But I don’t care. I
drink it anyway.

She brings me my little dish of spaghetti.
It looks like a sundae. There is spaghetti in a fancy tiny bowl
with a tablespoonful of pesto and a cherry tomato on top. She
smiles. And I have to admit it’s hilarious. But thank God she
understands.

Simplicity is a comfort. Familiarity is a
friend. The food is a friend. The smell of the cigar is more than a
friend, is family. The tourists taking it all in is a comfort. It’s
good to be home.

Well. Back from home.

He comes through the side gate. “How was the
flight?”

It’s funny to look at another
individual—about whom you know everything, whom you know better
than yourself—in public sometimes. Some intimate lives don’t
translate easily into communal spaces. All that self-correction
comes back: Don’t stare. It’s not polite. But instead of loving no
person more and cleaving to this one man with a whole heart,
sometimes it’s almost as if you don’t feel anything, don’t care,
don’t even know the man at all. You sit there together without your
tangible connection, like business associates or brothers if you’re
lucky. But intellectually you know something real exists, even if
it’s immaterial.

What, if anything, is love? There must be a
reason he came and sat down with you, here, at your table. So your
years are built on faith as much as anyone’s and without touching
anything, not hands, not arms, not legs, not thighs, not lips, no
part of the material you, he still reaches in and you remind
yourself: This man is yours forever.

“Fine. The flight was fine.”

“Sorry I wasn’t there.”

“How’s work?”

“Please don’t do that.”

The waitress approaches him with a kiss on
each cheek. His suit is navy and the lining opens up to her. She
pours him water and a glass of the wine. They chatter. Then they
remember that today shouldn’t really be a blue sky day in May. I
wish they hadn’t remembered my dead-dad-grief shit. Just keep
chattering.

And I can tell he doesn’t want to deal with
the somber reality any more than I do. He invites her to sit down.
He never was that intimate. Especially not with the big stuff.

Who is?

She is, that arctic goddess, not Norwegian
but Icelandic. She’s got the whole thing down pat. She puts the
pitcher down, puts her hand on my shoulder, squats in all those
shifting shadows, and says to me, “How’s your mom holding up?”

I say something back that makes her stand up
quickly and go away. A cocktail of finesse, tenuous anxiety,
morbidity, and peevishness—she needs to be busy explaining the menu
to the tourists anyway.

My lover’s not pleased with the way I
treated his friend. With his eyes he says my behavior’s inexcusable
even under the circumstances. But what he actually says is, “Do you
want to go away this weekend?”

“I just got home.”

“I know. But do you want to go away this
weekend?”

And so it is that faith is unnecessary
again. There is real love. There is a true connection. And he does
understand, completely. He knows everything that’s worth knowing
about whatever it is that’s me. He cares. He shouldn’t but he does.
And he is strong in the midst of all the impossibilities of it. He
exhales suddenly and puts his hand on my thigh.

The tears affect my view of the tourists so
I blink them away.

“How did he look?,” he asks.

It’s hard to say. “He looked—less.”

“Yeah.”

I bend over and put my forehead against the
cool glass tabletop. The tears come quickly. I pick up a handful of
the river pebbles and fend off the banged-up basement memories. The
rocks slip through my fingers.

“What are you doing with those rocks?” He is
laughing and a little uncomfortable. I wish he weren’t so
uncomfortable. He has a lot of insecurities. He looks from side to
side to see if anyone is bothered. But I know and trust the people
at the other tables. They’re all right. They didn’t care when I did
what I had to do to block out the penetrating joy of a May blue
heaven.

He puts his hand in the middle of my back. I
hate that. I like it on one side or the other but not the middle.
Why do people do exactly what you hate and exactly what you wish
they wouldn’t right when you need them to do the right, best thing?
Strange. A distancing thing, I suppose.

Awareness. Come closer. Get closer. Or you
will drift—safe, calm, away, and done (who cares?)—into some lone
forever. Get closer. Do it now. Reach out. Don’t descend. Say it.
Say to your lover—the man who asked you a thousand times to be
truthful, to include your family in your life, to be proud of him,
of yourself—say, “I’m sorry. I’m just so fucked up.”

He will never really forgive you. But he
says, “It’s okay. He was your dad.”

There’s no other. There is a breeze and I
don’t want anything from anyone under this happy full blue sky. I
don’t want anyone to turn his love my way. So with one jolt of my
thigh I jerk his hand off. I interlace my fingers behind my head
like my dad used to do, lean all the way back in the chair, and
look up. The pecan leaves dance wildly for just a moment in some
small way, some impossible way. They are almost free but exist
attached, like all of us bound to this life for as long as
possible. They shake and tear at their foundation but never break
free. Until it is time. It isn’t time now. And when it is time they
won’t be ready and they will regret this violent shaking in the
wind trying to rid themselves of exactly who they are, in some
pecan-leaf way.

An old woman made her yarn on useless beach house
days.

Rhythm rain. Rhythm heartbeat. Rhythm breath and
blinking. Her foot worked the pedal. Rhythm rain, breath, and
wooden pressing rubber down. Inside on the porch during the rain
her hand held a strand between two old purple-veined fingers,
rolling, twisting, holding the newly-made thread out at a full
arm’s length, and on a spool spun dandelion-dyed woolen-stretched
rhythm and wooden pressing rubber down.

But. That’s later. First the old lady picks
through the wool loosening the fibers, getting rid of any
debris.

The waves and seasons and tides moved on.
Spring tide. Neap tide. The sun and moon came to her porch painted
gray. Under the privacy blinds sea treasure that little hands had
run offering and wondrous for generations covered low bookshelves
that somehow held up under the weight of so many lives lost. Among
them a horseshoe crab, a ten-inch whelk, and an elegant, black,
desiccated pouch of skates’ eggs. Sea glass rescued and reclaimed
sat amidst this happy desolation that ocean-edge collectors find so
soothing. No one walking on a beach—looking, searching,
hoping—thinks much of dead droves of sea creatures or of the
churning, sandy, blasting hell where sharp brokenness is pummeled
to nothing. No. Beachcombers seek only perfection.

Children built her house. Such children had
gone off and come back parents and grandparents. And on the smooth
wooden painted floor this
great-aunt/grandmother/mother/sister/daughter/wife’s pedal hit in
quiet rhythm with wooden pressing rubber down, and rhythm afternoon
slant light, and blackberry-stained ghosts spinning down the beach
from Penny Rock and Briar Croft, with their headless chickens to
scald, and their dead footstep rhythm pressing memories down from
Mile Rock to Port Jeff.

Perfection. Uniformity. What nonsense and
bother for a woman who raised five kids under the moon and sun’s
tense constant dance of evasion. Why worry? Just make enough yarn
for all the sweaters, all the hats, all the knitted winter
days.

During her breaks she handed out sandwich
cookies from special kitchen jars and was part of three hundred
familial years on that land against water. She could laugh, joke,
carry on, and tell stories until no one could breathe. Old ladies
don’t smell like smoke anymore. But with that strand of wool held
out at arm’s length and that pedal working over and over and over
and over she focused on nothing but uniformity. The pedal hit the
hollow wooden porch floor. And the waves hit the pummeled-nothing
sand. And the heat hit the middle-of-nowhere house roof. And the
steel flag clips hit the factory-made pole. And the bottom of the
sailboat hit her gravelly stretch of beach, got pulled up above the
endless tide line through innumerable presorted, shell-marked
graves. And the rubber-edged garage door pressed down softly
against moss and evening as it ended her driveway.