Marcelo in the Real World (25 page)

I do not have the slightest idea of how I could possibly hurt Jasmine. Maybe he knows about Wendell’s request. But how could he? Then I remember the memo and the risk she took by giving it to me. Whether he knows about these things or not, his question is relevant. “No,” I say. “I will not hurt her.”

“Good. That’s what I wanted to know.” Then Jonah looks at me deeply. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“Are you attracted to Jasmine?”

“Attracted.” I am at a loss as to what to say. I like being with Jasmine. I like the comfort and the ease and the not worrying about how I sound or look when I am with her. I like hearing what she says and how she responds to my questions. I like what I see through her, what she leads me to discover, and what her presence opens up for me. I like talking music with her and I like being here with her. I am
pulled
toward her in a way that resembles the
pull of the IM. Is this the kind of attraction Jonah is asking about? “I do not understand what you mean when you use that word. Can you be more specific?”

Jonah hesitates. “Do you have sexual desire for her?” He looks away. I interpret this gesture as embarrassment, as if the question he is asking is not something he should be concerned about. I do not know, in fact, if it was proper for him to ask me that or if it is proper for me to try to answer it, but I decide to do so anyway, as best I can, not knowing exactly what I will say.

“As far as I have been able to determine, sexual desire is a kind of energy or attention directed at someone’s body or even at parts of a body. It consists of imagining doing sexual acts with the body of a person or with a part of a person’s body. But I do not imagine doing anything with Jasmine other than what I am doing at the time. That seems to be sufficient. I like spending time with her. I like it when we talk about music or when I ask about the meanings of words. She makes me laugh and makes me think about things I never thought about.”

“Boy, you really break things down, don’t you?”

“Some say it is an illness.”

“We should all be so ill.”

“The part of her body that I like the most is her eyes. When I look into them, I feel like staying there as much as possible. Is that force sexual, as far as you know?”

Jonah shrugs his shoulders. The shrug, as far as I can tell, means that he has no way of knowing the answer to my question. It is a question that only Marcelo can answer.

I am confused all of a sudden. Confused that Jonah could think that Jasmine and Marcelo could be more than friends. It
has never occurred to me and I cannot believe that Jasmine could be interested in me that way. Perhaps the comfort I feel around Jasmine is also sexual in a way I don’t understand. Maybe attraction for another person is like the IM, where body and mind cannot be separated.

Jonah looks in the direction of the open window and I hear the sound of the piano. The notes come slowly, one after another, each carrying a slightly different tone of sadness. We listen in silence, then Jonah speaks. “When Jasmine’s mother was dying, they put up a bed there in the living room, and that’s the song she wanted Jasmine to play to her at the end.”

“Gymnopédies,”
I say.

“Pardon?”

“The music is called
Gymnopédies,
by a composer named Satie.”

“Really? That’s one touching piece of music. I wouldn’t mind hearing that when I’m dying.”

“The stars seem so close to the earth here.”

“You like it here?” Jonah asks.

“Very much.”

“There’s not many places left where you can still make an honest living off the land. Amos can do it ‘cause the farm is bought and paid for. He was nearly fifty when he got married. Jasmine’s mother was a waitress downtown where Amos and Father used to go on Friday nights to have a few. She and Amos had this bantering going back and forth for years. Everyone knew they liked each other. One day Amos said something flirty to Lila, and she just turned around and told him that if he wasn’t intending to ever get serious then she’d appreciate it if he left and never came back. They got married the following week. She was nearing forty. The
doctor told her it would kill her to have kids but she went ahead and had two. After she died, Jasmine became a little mother for the whole family real quick.”

The piano stops playing, and a few seconds later we see Jasmine come out the back door. She looks around before she spots us sitting in the back of the pickup truck.

“What are you guys doing? I don’t like this. What have you two been talking about?”

“We were having a heart-to-heart,” I tell her.

Jasmine glares at Jonah.

“It’s okay, it’s okay, don’t look at me like that,” says Jonah, jumping off the flap of the truck. Then he whispers to her loud enough for me to hear, “I think you finally met your match.” He moves away before Jasmine can punch him in the shoulder. Jonah announces, “I’m gonna get me one last beer and I’ll make sure those guys aren’t getting too comfortable. One more beer and we’re out of here, I promise.”

Jonah enters the house and closes the kitchen door behind him.

Jasmine says, “You like it here. I can tell.”

“Yes. Here you can still make an honest living.”

“You got that from Jonah.”

“Here a person would not have to pretend or lie.”

“Not as much, maybe. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen anyway.”

“You are saving your money to take care of Amos in a few years and to build your house-
slash
-studio.”

“Jonah talks way too much. In a few years I’ll have saved enough to pay for Amos’s medical bills and my health insurance, and
maybe I’ll have enough to finish the studio and a little extra to fix this place up. We need to get six more cows and a new steel tank to hold the milk until the truck comes to get it. They already told Amos they were going to stop buying his milk unless he got one. Then we have to cement the bottom of the cows’ stalls. New regulations. Actually old regulations, but somehow Amos has gotten away with it. Knowing him, he’s probably bribing someone. You got the milk and cheese from twenty cows, the honey, Kickaz’s stud services, maple syrup we harvest from the trees on the hill, firewood—and I can give piano lessons and get a parttime job as a music teacher in a school. That should give us enough to get by.”

“And your music?”

“It’s part of the plan. It’s at the center of it all. Everything else supports it.”

“When you went to Boston you always planned on coming back.”

“Of course. My plan was, is, to make as much money as possible and then come back. Besides, after James died, Amos was impossible to be around at times. At the beginning of dementia and Alzheimer’s, there’s a lot of hostility, paranoia. I needed to give us some space. He’s better now. If he takes his pills.”

She looks up at the sky and studies a dot of light crossing the darkness. I follow the light as well. “Maybe I don’t know any better, but I always knew this was where I belonged. It’s not that life will be easier here. It’s just that here’s where I belong, that’s all.” She waits for me to speak. I am thinking about the places where I felt I belonged and how, maybe, these places are no longer there for me.

Cody’s voice brings me back. “Jasmine, you better get in here! They’re getting into it!”

We go back to the house. Amos is sitting on the sofa, blowing rapid puffs of smoke out his pipe. He is addressing Samuel Shackleton, sunk beside him on the sofa. Some of his words are slurred.

“Maybe old Eleanor wasn’t hot like she used to be, but she was lukewarm enough for fucking. It’s that bull of yours who’s got no more yeast in his dough. Pecker’s flabby as yours.”

“Dad!” Jasmine cries.

Cody finishes putting the violin in the case and goes over to the rocking chair and sits down. He seems ready to enjoy himself. Jonah brings in two chairs from the kitchen, one for me and one for him. Jasmine is already seated on the piano stool.

When everyone has finished taking their seats, Samuel responds. “Shit! Old Bruno still hardens up like a telephone pole with every other cow that’s put in front of him. Just ‘cause the oven’s warm don’t mean it’s hot enough to cook the rolls. That cow of yours is just plain too old and ugly. Besides, she’s Bruno’s momma.”

“Look here,” Amos says, “an animal is not made so as to be able to turn down the opportunity to get it on, unless his equipment is not working. An animal ain’t like a person. If the female animal can conceive, the male animal will jump the female, willy-nilly. Now take you, for example. You gonna go home tonight warmed up by that cheap Scotch of yours, and you gonna look at Jane asleep there with her curlers, maybe snoring a little, and you’re gonna say, ‘Naaah, I don’t think so,’ and you’ll turn around and go into the bathroom and dig out one of those old magazines
you got hidden in the towel drawer, and you’ll try to handle things as best you can. But an animal is not put off by age or ugliness. If she still can, he will.”

“Oh-
kaay,
time to go home.” Jasmine claps and stands up but no one stands up with her. She sits down again. “Samuel, you’re our guest, so in accordance with long-established custom, you get the last word. Say your last word and then you all have to scat.”

Samuel Shackleton downs the last drop of Scotch in his glass slowly. Then he speaks. “All’s I can say is that there comes a time in every bull’s life when he decides to stop being a motherfucker. Wished the same principle applied to menfolk as well.” He sits on the sofa staring at Amos. Then when he can’t hold it anymore, his laughter bursts out, together with everyone else’s.

Amos sticks his pipe further down his mouth. I can tell that he is not happy with the long-established custom of letting the guest have the last word.

The Shackletons file by, each shaking my hand. When it is Jonah’s turn, he says to me, “Good heart-to-heart tonight.”

A
t five forty-five the following morning, Jasmine comes out of the house. I am in the front yard, surrounded by the plastic animals, lifting weights. I stop long enough to see her rub her eyes. Either she is rubbing off remaining sleep or she cannot believe that someone would be up so early doing what I’m doing. I stop and put the ten-pound dumbbells on the ground.

“What are you doing?” she asks, yawning. “How long have you been out here? What time is it? And where did you get those?” She is looking at the dumbbells. They are round and coated with blue plastic.

“Which of the four previous questions would Jasmine like me to answer?”

“Don’t tell me that you brought those dumbbells in your backpack.”

“Yes.” I don’t understand what is so strange about this.

“No wonder I nearly broke my back when I was getting your backpack down from the Jeep.” Namu walks over and sits in front of Jasmine, waiting for her to notice him. “Your owner is one
crazy boy, Namu. I gotta get some coffee.” She turns around and goes back in the house.

After breakfast we load up Kickaz. Jasmine wants to take supplies to Amos’s shack so that, come winter, Amos doesn’t have to do it. She puts a blanket on Kickaz’s back and then places an aluminum frame on top of the blanket. On various parts of the frame she places Amos’s supplies, as well as the tent and sleeping bags and other stuff we’ll need for our trip.

Amos seems unusually lucid this morning. He does not confuse me with James. He recognizes me as Jasmine’s friend, although a couple of times he calls me “Marshmallow.” Jasmine says that the reason he is so subdued is that the “meds” have kicked in.

By seven we are on our way. We ascend the knoll where Jasmine is going to build her house-
slash
-studio, go down the other side, and then go up over the forested mountain that Jasmine calls a hill. Here there is a trail that we follow, and from the trail I see paths to clusters of trees. “Maple trees,” Jasmine tells me. “There’s about fifty of them on this hill that we tap for syrup. The syrup you had this morning for your pancakes comes from one of those trees.” Namu stops and cocks his ears. Jasmine stops as well. And I stop after her.

“Listen. Can you hear them?” Jasmine asks.

I hear popping sounds.

“People out hunting. It’s illegal to hunt in August but they still do it.”

“What do they hunt?” I ask.

“White-tailed deer.”

“With guns.”

“Yup.”

“Has Jasmine ever hunted?”

“Yup.”

“And killed a deer with a gun?”

“Yes.”

It is a way of seeing Jasmine that I did not have before. I wonder how many new ways of seeing Jasmine there will be during this trip.

“Sometimes the meat from venison lasts us all winter.” I understand that this is her way of explaining why she hunts.

We walk for more than an hour. She is leading Kickaz and I am holding on to the aluminum frame. “Look.”

There, hidden in the middle of the hill, are a dozen or so thin and tall white trees. The green leaves on the top rustle with a breeze that is not felt on the ground but must exist up there. “Birches. Aren’t they pretty? They’re my favorite. I don’t know why. Those white trunks in the middle of a brown-and-green forest. And in the fall, their leaves make a tinkling sound.”

“This is where Jasmine…where
you
get
your
ideas for
your
music.”

“There are so many sounds. The wind makes different sounds depending on the different trees it travels through. There are sounds that the earth makes. And wait until you get to the water. Then there are animals too. And they all come together sometimes.”

I hear the popping sound again. “And guns,” I say.

“Yeah, and guns. I guess I should include the sound of those as well.”

The memory of Wendell poking my chest comes to mind all of a sudden. Here’s another unexpected experience—this pleasure I feel when I imagine how I am going to tell Wendell that I will not ask Jasmine to go on a boat ride. What do I call that?

“That’s a red-tailed hawk.” We have reached the top of the mountain. Above us, a hawk circles and rises, dips and tilts without a single movement of his wings. “He’s looking for a rabbit. There’s tons of them in the valley below.”