The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (22 page)

“Whatever happened to that old church lady you used to live next to?” Rafi asked me one afternoon while we were sitting together whiling away the hours.

“I don't have any idea,” I said. “I never see her anymore.”

But speak of the devil, they say, and the devil appears. I don't know how Orla got my new address and found me at my little shotgun haven down by the river. And I certainly don't know why she felt she should come visit me, but it wasn't too
long after I moved in than there was a knock on the door, and there stood Orla on my tiny front porch, wearing a rigid smile on her snapping-turtle face and carrying a bag of canned goods.

“Hello!” she called out, coming straight in the door when I opened it. “I was cleaning out my cupboards and found these—you might want to be careful of the ones that are a little swollen. Anyway I was sure you would need some things.” She glanced around my tiny living room with a beady, critical eye. “Now that you're alone again,” she said cheerily.

She handed me the bag with the air of a strict nursery governess who knew what was best for me but was cagey enough not to say it to my face. She would get her way in the end, she was certain.

Orla looked around the room for somewhere to sit and finally chose the very front edge of a straight-backed wooden chair.

“Have a seat,” I said.

“So I see you never got married,” she said.

“No,” I said, blushing. “No.”

“Well, I guess that's not surprising,” she said. “You know what they say about getting the milk for free!”

“Would you like some tea?” I said, desperate to get out of the room.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Just a Coke.”

“I'll see if I have any,” I said, and went into the kitchen.

Orla, however, followed me, taking in the disheveled state in one comprehensive survey. “Hmm,” she said, pursing her lips.

I scrabbled around in the refrigerator, hoping that a Coke might possibly appear but knowing it wouldn't. “I don't have any Cokes,” I said, somehow shamefaced. “I have orange juice?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don't want that!”

She looked expectantly at me, and I dove back into the refrigerator as if I could somehow conjure up an acceptable beverage out of the jars of canned tomatoes and cold Clyde's Chicken languishing there. No luck.

“A glass of water?” I asked.

“No,” Orla said with an air of resignation but no surprise. “I'll just have to do without.”

She headed back into the living room and sat on the edge of a different chair, dusting it off a little with her hand first. She stared at me for a few minutes, as if expecting me to tell her why I had called her there.

“Well, I have lots of news,” she said, and launched into a long tale of Lem's annual colonoscopy.

I gasped in faux sympathy and said “How awful!” at random places in the story. This went on for quite a while. “Oh, dear,” I said, shaking my head and wishing I was having a conversation I cared about.

“Well, I've got to go,” Orla finally said. “I can't stay any longer—I'm so busy, you know. But I knew that I had better bring you some things you would need. Next time, I'll have to bring you some Cokes!” She laughed a dry little laugh of disparagement.

I thanked her for the canned goods until she finally seemed satisfied enough with my appreciation and headed down the front steps.

“I knew you wouldn't get married,” she called out gaily across the yard, waving her hand goodbye and smiling.

Eventually the freed prisoner glimpses daylight—his first sight of the light from the sun—glimmering at the end of the tunnel. Initially it seems to be just a pinpoint of light, and he might be
unsure if it is real, so faint, so far away. He might think it a star, if he had any knowledge of stars. On his lonely journey without the comrades of his former life, he has no one to help him puzzle it out, no one to help him build myths and ideologies out of this light. The freed prisoner must make sense of the world from only his own observations.

So he advances, guiding his steps by a star whose meaning he must construct on his own.

If there is a difference between the myths we believe in along with all of our comrades and the myths that are only our own, known to ourselves alone, it is that our shared myths are spoken out loud. They gather authority and solidity from the confirmation of others. They have substance—the substance of our comrades' beliefs. They are real.

We do not often speak out loud of our own private myths. They are merely daydreams. But we are still guided by their star.

“You're spending a lot of time with Jake lately,” Vera said to me one afternoon.

“I guess so.”

“I thought you didn't like him too much.”

“He's okay—no big deal.”

“Does Danny know?”

“Why should I care anymore about what Danny knows? He's got about all he can handle with his new girlfriend.”

Vera went on, “Be that as it may, Danny and Jake have been friends for a long time.”

“All Jake and I do is go for drives in the country,” I said. I didn't tell her how Jake had held my hand while we picked our way gingerly through the ruined rooms of the abandoned
cotton mill off the highway in Magnolia, or how we had kissed each other in the katydid-laced silence of the empty spinning room with the summer bees zooming in and out through the broken windows.

“Is it really over with you and Danny?” Vera asked.

“Apparently so.”

Vera sighed. “It just seemed to me that you made a good couple,” she said. “It seemed that you each gave the other one something you needed.”

“Well, Danny's getting what he needs elsewhere now.”

“And are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Getting what you need elsewhere now?”

“I don't need anything except another beer.”

Vera pulled one up from the cooler. “If you say so,” she said.

Finally one night, home after a long drive to nowhere, Jake and I found ourselves undressing one another in the dark of my bedroom.

“I thought we didn't like each other,” I said, only half joking. “Why are we doing this?”

“You're doing this because you're a sucker for lost causes,” Jake said. “You can't help yourself.”

He pulled me close. I kissed him on the ear, then the side of the neck, then his shoulder.

“What about you?” I whispered. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I've wanted to kiss you ever since the very first time I saw your mouth.”

Billy Joe, as both a carpenter and a guitar player who played the blues late at night in dim, smoky bars, naturally had his pick of women. Once, he took the stage with a bandage wrapped around his left hand where he'd gotten himself with a nail gun earlier in the day, and a girl in the front of the audience actually fainted from lust. She said it was the heat, but we all knew what she meant. And Billy Joe was not the sort of cold-blooded person who would let a pretty girl faint from lust and not come to her aid. And also, possibly, the aid of her pretty friends as well.

But a man has plenty of time to think when he's hammering together wall braces day after day. And when that same man spends his evenings playing the blues—songs about broken hearts and broken lives and love and loneliness and longing—his thoughts naturally take a turn toward deeper questions. And despite being constantly besieged by lusting girls, Billy Joe was a thoughtful man. So when a woman came along who was different, Billy Joe fell in love with her.

We started seeing less of Billy Joe. He and Lily (that was her name) stayed at home a lot of nights, watching TV together or just hanging around talking or sitting on her porch swing together while Billy Joe picked out tunes on his guitar. When he played the Cave, girls still came around, but now he seemed not to see them. And when they obtruded themselves into his notice, a little imploring, a little frustrated, he didn't ever focus his full attention on them anymore. It was as if he were always thinking of something else. He dismissed them not like a man reluctantly renouncing his former—now, alas, forbidden—pleasures, but like a connoisseur in a crowded museum, craning his neck to see around the hordes of loudmouthed tourists so as to keep his eyes on the masterpiece.

Gradually Billy Joe stopped sleeping at the little white house with the stones in the frying pan in the kitchen that he
had shared so long with Rafi. He started going straight to Lily's house after work, although at first he just kept his toothbrush there. But then his books and his clothes and then his guitars migrated over. When Rafi cooked breakfast in the early afternoon, Billy Joe wasn't there anymore to share it. Although sometimes he stopped by the Cave after closing time and gave Rafi a ride home, he only dropped Rafi off and then went on to Lily's house to sleep.

Despite this, Rafi liked Lily. We all did. She was warm and smart and had bright laughing eyes. The day after Billy Joe asked Lily to marry him, he and Rafi took the pan of river stones out into the woods behind their house. They stayed out there a long time, and Rafi told me later that they had thrown all the stones, one by one, as deep as they could into the trees.