The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (21 page)

On the day I moved out of our little house in the woods, I went down to the Cave and sat at the bar, not even drinking the beer Rafi put down in front of me.

“You probably don't want to hear a speech about how it is better to have loved and lost, I'm guessing,” Rafi said.

“Not really.”

He was quiet for a while, letting me brood.

“It can be nice to be alone,” he said.

“But only if you choose it—not if you don't have a choice.”

“You always have a choice,” he said, not looking at me. “You do.”

So I stayed there, sitting at the far end of the bar all evening while he worked. There was no band that night, but it was busy anyway, and Rafi and I didn't talk. We didn't talk after last call or
while he restocked the coolers and I covered up the pool tables. Vera and Pete stopped by to get the bank bag, but they didn't stay, and there was no one else around. Rafi turned off the lights, and it was so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat.

The windows at Tia's were mostly dark when we walked together out to my car, but we could tell by the faint glow coming from the back that the dishwashers weren't quite done yet. It was still early by bar time—not even 3
A.M.
I unlocked the passenger-side door of my car for Rafi, but it was too dark to see him lean over to unlock my door from the inside. I heard the click when he did.

We still didn't talk while we drove to his house. Sometimes it is impossible to say things. When we were standing together under the trees in his driveway, he took my hand and led me silently into the house, through the dark kitchen and the hallway into his bedroom. I pushed the door shut behind us.

Then I kissed Rafi. He backed me against the closed bedroom door and put his arms around me. His lips were warm. We kissed again. In the moonlight from the open window, I could see his bed, rumpled sheets, a pillow on the floor.

“This is a mistake,” he whispered into my ear. “You'll end up breaking my heart.”

“Let's not think about anything right now,” I said. “Let's just go to bed, and we can think about things in the morning.”

We sat on his bed, kissing. I touched his face with the tips of my fingers.

“So I'm your rebound,” he said.

“Maybe. Does it really matter so much?”

I lay down on the sheets, and he lay down next to me.

“Did you really love Danny?” he asked.

“Danny . . . ,” I started to say, but then I couldn't go on because I realized I was sobbing.

Rafi pulled me close in his arms, and I pressed my face against his neck. I didn't want to cry, but I couldn't stop. Rafi held me for a long time.

My head was still on his chest when I woke up in the morning. He was awake, looking tired in the blue morning light.

“Are we still friends?” I asked.

“Always.”

I dropped him at Blossom's, but didn't feel like eating anything, so I went on to the bookstore to open up.

That afternoon, I moved into Pete's three-room shotgun house down by the river, empty since he married Vera and moved all his stuff to her place. It was called a “shotgun” because the rooms and doors were all lined up so that if you shot a gun in the front door, the bullet would go straight through the house to the back door without (theoretically) hitting anything on the way. Fortunately no one ever tried it.

It's important to have friends when you are miserable, and you should count yourself especially lucky if you are fortunate enough to have generous friends with access to a bottomless supply of free alcohol. At times like this, a sufficient amount of tequila, for example, can lead you to a philosophical state of mind where the renunciation of your former one true love seems not only possible but even morally pure and elevated, and you forget that you can't really renounce someone who has already dumped you—or at least not with much actual effect on him. And if this superior mental state of dignified refusal is expressed mostly by slurring “Fuck him—fuck the fucker” repeatedly to anyone who will listen and then throwing up wretchedly onto your own shoes, that does not negate the overall effect,
which is to make you feel so
physically
bad in the morning that you don't have enough energy or brain cells left to spend on contemplating how
emotionally
bad you feel, since you have to spend all your effort on trying not to move or to smell anything. Surprisingly soon, however, you will want a cigarette, and having smoked all of yours in the orgy of sodden desolation the night before, you will have to bum one from your friends. They will give you cigarettes out of their packs, even if they have only two left. This generosity will remind you of what great friends you have, and—especially if you are medicating your tequila hangover with Bloody Marys—this will make you cry.

It's probably best just to get it all out of your system at once.

This was not my best period. The specter of Danny's previous girlfriend Candy returned sometimes to whisper late-night suggestions of spurned-lover craziness and mayhem. I felt now that perhaps I had judged Candy too harshly, back in the days when I was innocently shocked and amazed that anyone would think that making such an ugly spectacle of herself would serve any positive purpose. Now, making an ugly spectacle of myself, to my more experienced and worldly eye, seemed to be a perfectly reasonable plan of action. If I couldn't have Danny back, at least I could irritate the crap out of him. It was better than nothing.

Rafi counseled against this plan. His line of argument, renewed every day across the bar at the Cave, had two themes. The first was that Danny wasn't worth it, and—when that failed under the unassailable counterargument of “But I loooove him”—the second was that I should have another beer first. This second argument was usually successful, although often rather messy, and Vera and Rafi and Pancho had to take turns getting
me home and into bed. There is enormous comfort to be had in friends who see the worst of you and do not turn away. “We've all been there,” Rafi would shrug nonchalantly when I turned up looking woeful and contrite every afternoon. He and I did not kiss again, but I thought about him sometimes, thought about the rumpled sheets on his bed and how warm his lips were against mine.

My friends did other things in their own ways to make me feel better. Vera scolded me—in the best imitation of a mother she could manage—to “toughen up, buttercup.” It wasn't, truth be told, such a bad approximation of a mother, if your mother happened to, say, work in a lumber camp. Or as a stevedore. Anyway it was more helpful than any advice my actual mother had ever bothered to give me. Billy Joe sat next to me at the bar and made drily disparaging comments about Tawni. Charlie Blue made a point of telling me every stupid joke he heard in the kitchen at Tia's or could remember from elementary school. This gave me some comfort.

9

JAKE

JAKE WAS SITTING ON THE COUCH
in the bookstore, reading Walt Whitman. It was late morning, already a scorcher. No one else was around.

“Jake,” I said. He looked up. “Did you ever have a broken heart?”

“Hasn't everyone?”

“Have they? How do they recover? How does anyone ever get over it?”

He thought about it for a minute.

“Well, you just do, don't you? You just keep going on day after day, and eventually you find out you're over it.”

“But suppose you don't? Suppose you never do? Suppose you don't even want to?”

“I'm not sure you have a choice in the matter. You might think you can decide how you will feel about someone or how long you will remember them. But in the end, it's just a matter of fate what stays with you and what goes.”

“What stayed with you?”

“When?”

“When you had a broken heart.”

“What makes you think I've had only one?”

“How many, then? How many women have managed to break your heart?”

“My fair share,” he said, turning back to his book.

“Enough that you've developed a remedy?” I persisted.

“You should know as well as I do that the only remedy for a broken heart is another broken heart,” he said. “All the poets in the world swear by it as a sure-fire cure. Poets must know. Now let me read—somebody may come in and want to buy this book someday.”

“Doubtful,” I said. “Customers are not exactly breaking down the doors lately. Even the textbook orders are drying up.”

He didn't answer and we sat silently. He was reading and I was looking out the window. After a while, I got up and got a book of Sylvia Plath poetry off the shelves and came back to the couch. He looked up and cocked an eyebrow at me.

“Poets must know,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “maybe not that one.”

I laughed.

Jake stayed at the store all day and was still there when I locked up at dinnertime.

“Are you going home?” he asked me.

“I guess,” I sighed. “Might as well—I can't think of anywhere else I ought to go.”

“Come with me. Let's go for a drive.”

“Where to?”

“Nowhere. Nowhere in particular.”

I considered it. “Nowhere sounds like the perfect place,” I said.

We drove out on the highway heading south. We drove until we hit the state line and only then turned around to come back. By the time he dropped me off at home, I was tired and finally able to go to sleep.

Jake and I took to going out for drives in the countryside, speeding down deserted stretches of lonely back roads, going nowhere as fast as we could, Jake driving with a beer in one hand and me leaning back in the passenger seat with my feet up on the dashboard. At dusk, with a storm coming in from the east, our headlights hit the speed-limit signs out on the old highway, making them glow silver against the luminous gray sky. The signs were beautiful, like strange pearls, as we blew past them going ninety miles an hour.

The best thing about Jake was that he was sad when I was sad. Of course, Jake was always kind of sad. One of his endearing qualities, in fact, was that he had absolutely no charm. Given my recent experience with a charming man, this was awfully appealing to me just then.