Meeks (9 page)

I still made my rounds, though they often took me the entire day to complete, and I spent long hours sitting near the cafe waiting for the man in the black jacket to return to his old haunt. Families colonized the cafe tables and smiled benefactorially over the park—such pleasure in one's self, such pleasure in a world that lays itself down before one's senses. Men and women ordered cookies and slices of cake, and wheresoever they pointed, their wishes were fulfilled, and they fell into reverent silence as they ate, their minds bitten by the soft, sugary nips of memory—
Things are just as they've always been, let us be thankful—
each sweet bite is like a sacrament, a little portal easily pried open with a fork, a hole through which one can squeeze one's senses and return to the days of hope and innocence and excitement and fear. A pack of boisterous bachelors, their pale jackets bristling with flowers, their cufflinks throwing off sparks of sunlight, tried to take an empty table and were chased off by the cafe owner, wielding his wet-headed mop like a lit torch.

Here are all these people, these men and women, I thought—laughing and playing and gossiping and napping while they are up to their chins in dangerous golden light. Time is running out! They eat cake in the sun, and in the evening they drift away from the heterogeneity of one another's company, sated, and pass back through their own doors into private realms, realms as separate and diverse as distant planets, some cruelly small and over-furnaced, others jollily huge, regally cold, where on the verge of sleep, worries and fantasies bloom on that dusky, curved horizon that is the common seam, though I myself have never passed peacefully or wittingly across it, and I fear I may not always succeed in keeping distinct my rigorous empiricism from certain kinds of dreams.

They pretend at contentment, but I can hear the men and women deep inside their houses, culminating in the dark, the workers pounding down old complaints late into the night. The shoemakers hammering guiltily,
tink, tink, tink,
and gossiping, their dark, wet mouths prickly with black nails, their breath steaming the night air without clouds of antimony. But where is the source of this endless dissatisfaction?
What
is it? What's wrong with the human being who can't find happiness even in a world engineered to supply his every pleasure?

A man banged away at an empty ash bucket with two sticks; girls screamed—in happiness or in fear? I can never tell. All these
people
. The way they judge and congratulate each another (stranger to stranger) with a glance, the way they share, telepathically, their love of new sweaters in autumn, their love of public half-naps under the full summer sun, or the way they grin lamely at the children of others: I've got some! Or else, I want some! And the children are so energetic and delicate, these eager and fragile deputies sadly not yet privy to the larger scheme in which they will do their work.

To think that I've spent my life as a student of their Words, overheard, and that I had come to believe that a conversation between two people was the most complicated project in the known universe.
Hello
may be a blunt instrument, a common tool, but it cracks open worlds. All we've ever known, wanted, or felt floats into view, only to be scrapped by the
How are you?
How do human beings, so full of fear, so miserly of vocabulary, carry on?

"Like two sailors in a barrel,” joked a bachelor from the grass, watching two civil servants pass, one helping the other to walk.

Even after the cafe had closed, I stayed, sat docilely through an evening rain. I was too heavy-hearted to move. My clothes were soaked, and water formed rivulets along the backs of my hands and trailed off each fingertip in a stream. The park path was empty and gray, the details crushed and clumped by the dusk and rainy weather.

The evening bells began to sound, echoing in the valleys between the buildings and thundering through the open spaces of the park. I sensed the old shadow falling across my brain, the slow bubbling-in of the black ink. A light fog seeped through the trees from across the river. The last of the bells fell silent. Mother had always said that all that was hers was mine.

A branch cracked and fell to the grass. Flowers still clung to it. I noted the gradations of yellow, the resiliency of the petals in the rain, the fine silver veins of the dark branch. I struggled, in the failing light, against the tendency of objects (the petals, the wet leaves, the trees in the distance, the gravel of the path) to fuse into large, vague shapes at night, but I knew the air would soon be black with them. I closed my eyes and tilted my face into the evening rain. I granulated and granulated the memory of the yellow flowers on the little branch, and soon I could see everything clearly: the soft green marrow of the snapped limb, the tiny imperfections along the edges of the petals. It wasn't thinking; it was a kind of sleep.

Ben

Life would be so simple if this were life, thought Ben. It would be very sweet if it were enough. Finton was sitting on the buckled hardwood floor in the kitchen, the broad oak planks flecked with paint from the annual repaintings of the kitchen walls, which soaked up the cooking of bachelor meals and the yellowish smoke of bachelors smoking. Finton was settling a young pepper plant in an ash bucket filled with the good, damp soil from the park. A rainstorm had come out of nowhere, cooling the air, tapping peacefully against the windows, filling the house with beautiful blue-gray light.

Finton was telling a long story while he packed earth around the pepper roots, and he was laughing at certain parts of the story, and he looked happy and relaxed, uncharacteristically healthy in the nice light of the storm. Ben was cutting up a tomato from the back garden to have with their toast, and he wished the other bachelors would never come home. They were out there somewhere, striving, hurrying, searching. Why not just live in the world one already inhabits, rather than pining and planning endlessly for the next?
If the world could freeze in a state of warmth, the birds to stop, to turn to father-smelling soap in the waxen green treetops; for the trees to stop pumping life to their extremities, to allow the soft green buds to stop, stay folded, sweet

"Autumn was coming,” said Finton. It was part of his story.

Ben heard the front door bang open, the unmistakable sound of Selfridge dropping his enormous boots in the hall. Finton flinched and stopped telling his story; Ben suddenly couldn't even remember what it had been about. Finton stood, brushing dark soil from his pants.
Would they never have peace?
Tears were welling up deep inside Ben's body, mercifully far from the surface of his face. He closed his eyes.

"See you later,” said Finton.

Ben listened to Finton climb the hollow steps overhead. He picked up the little paring knife and stared at the tomato.

"Ben!"

"Selfridge."

"It's pouring out there!"

"Yes, big storm."

"Fists!” Selfridge barked and fell into a boxing stance.

"Not now, Selfridge."

"Fine."

Selfridge tugged at the sleeves of his pale suit as if concealing something—Was he wearing Ben's honeybee cufflinks again? His gold cufflinks that were a gift from his mother's father? Ben frowned and turned all of his attention back to the slicing of the tomato.

Selfridge stood closer; Ben could smell his tobacco sweat, his gardenia cologne tinged with gunpowder, the rancid wine on his breath. “Ben,” he said, “I'm a little worried, buddy. What have you got going on here? You've missed out on yet another day. More importantly, you've missed out on many, many nice young ladies. Ladies abounded: forgiving ladies, Ben. You would have liked them. One young lady in particular. But what do you care—you've got your little tomato there, you've got your paintings, your pepper plant, your boyfriend, Finton
.
"

"Shut up, Selfridge."

Selfridge sighed. “Ben's life."

Ben pointed at the pepper plant with his knife. “That's not even mine.” Selfridge shook his head in disgust.

"Yes, one young lady in particular who likes Selfridge's hat and touched the brim with her hand. Here,” he said, touching the brim of his hat, “and here,” he said, touching it again. “I say this out of brotherly love, but if you don't get it together, get a proper suit, for God's sake, it's over."

"It's complicated, Selfridge . . ."

"Whatever. Instantly bored. Your old Selfridge won't be around much longer anyway."

The front door opened and slammed shut again. Albert dropped his boots in the hall and joined them in the kitchen.

"It's pouring out there!"

"Big storm,” Selfridge said. “Albert, have you seen my snub-nose revolver?"

"Seriously, look at me—I'm soaking wet."

"Albert,” said Selfridge sternly. “Concentrate on the words I'm speaking. Did you take my favorite?"

"Which one's that?"

"Adeline."

"Adeline?"

"Adeline the Snuggler."

"Ah, the Snuggler . . ."

"Albert, did you take Adeline?"

Albert opened his jacket, turned his pockets out, pouring water out onto the floor. “No, of course not, Selfridge. I'd never."

Selfridge turned to face Ben. “Ben?"

"What would I want with your gun?"

"I shudder to think."

"I paint, remember?"

"Ben. No more games. What have you done with Adeline?"

"I didn't take it."

"Her. We call it her."

"I don't have your gun, Selfridge. I don't know where it—"

"She!"

"Selfridge."

"Ben."

"Planning to get your suit from the tailor at gunpoint? You'd probably shoot the man in the face just to avoid an awkward conversation."

"No, he'd shoot himself, to be more polite,” Albert said, squeezing rainwater from his sleeves.

Ben threw the knife into the sink, a faint, pathetic
clink.
“Shut up. Both of you."

Selfridge leaned closer. “I still say you're a death-by-attrition variation on the doomed-no-matter-what theme. Where's Adeline, Ben?"

Ben reached under his jacket. He slapped the revolver down onto the kitchen table.

"The Snuggler—easy to love, easy to lose. Explain yourself, you rotten thief."

"You took my honeybee cufflinks—fair's fair. You got it back—"

"Her."

"—now give them back."

Selfridge hitched his jacket sleeves, so Ben could see the honeybee cufflinks gleaming; he pointed the gun at Ben's face. “I don't shoot you right now, Ben, only because a particular young lady liked my
hat
and would like to walk in the park again this evening."

"That's enough. Come on, Ben,” said Albert and held out his hand. Ben took it. Albert led him up the stairs and into the safety of his stiflingly hot room.

"Can't you open your window?” asked Ben. Albert dismissed the window with a wave of his hand, “It won't open. It's stuck, I think."

"Mine, too,” said Ben. He saw that Albert had been packing: cramming badly folded clothes into the corners of his suitcase.

"What's going on?"

"I have some news: I've found someone,” said Albert, and looked dazed. “We've reached an Agreement; I'm moving in tomorrow."

"So far ahead of Independence Day?” asked Ben.

"It's not that far,” said Albert.

"Oh, come on,” said Ben, “it's still pretty far."

They both jumped at the
pop-pop-pop
of Selfridge firing Adeline out his bedroom window and into the yard.

"I wish he wouldn't do that,” said Ben.

Albert nodded. “Anyway, she and I'll live together for the rest of the summer, which isn't long, and then on Independence Day, we'll just officialize things."

Ben steadied himself by leaning on the windowsill.

"Selfridge and I are going out tonight to celebrate—you have to join us. Brothers! Bachelors!"

"I don't know. I should probably get some work done, have to see the tailor early tomorrow morning . . ."

Albert's face brightened. “Is your suit ready?"

"Almost."

"Then you've got something to celebrate, too."

Ben and Selfridge waited in the living room for Albert to come down. Ben was studying a pair of patrolling boots propped against the back wall of the cold fireplace and thinking back over summer marches down the long forest lanes, evening copper light, sea air, the sound of waves crashing on the shore far below the ridge.

"Ben!” Selfridge hurled his pen at Ben's head. “Would you please shut up. I'm trying to write something."

"I didn't say anything."

"You're breathing like a bear. I'm trying to write a letter, a rhyming letter, for a woman. Throw me my pen."

"You're writing a poem?"

"No, Ben. We don't say ‘poem.’ Poetry is known worldwide as the sad sound of failure, as I'm sure you're well aware. I'm writing a rhyming letter."

They could hear Albert galloping down the stairs. He appeared in the door.

"Selfridge is writing a poem,” said Ben matter-of-factly.

Albert raised his eyebrows. “
Reeeally?
"

"Ah, forget it,” said Selfridge and tossed the paper to the floor. Ben read it as he walked over it toward the door.
Dear dear
.

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You may have been wondering:
How does a gifted artist with a gentle nature turn to building bombs and dreaming of the wholesale destruction of his homeland?

I'll tell you.

One afternoon, my brother came home and announced his engagement to our neighbor's daughter. Needless to say, Mother was beside herself. She shouted with joy and relief and exultation, burning through all that was fashionably said on such an occasion and then moving on to exclamations whose vintage had not been heard since the earth cracked open and gave birth to the mountain ranges. I had to listen to all of it as I lay on the floor of the front room.

"Where's my little brother?"

"Oh, who knows,” I heard my mother answer, when, in fact, I had lain on the floor in the sun of the front room all day, and she knew perfectly well where I was. I stayed there.