The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (30 page)

I was Jake's widow, but no one knew it except me. So while this had the effect of keeping the breakup
Sturm und Drang
to
a minimum, it did open up novel possibilities for other types of action. In secret, I began my “Pilgrimage of Jake.” Freed from the risk of running into Jake himself while I was doing it, I allowed myself to indulge in a lonesome and morbid daily round of visitations to all of his shrines. I could play his favorite songs on the jukebox in Hell in complete safety, no one but me and the vanished Jake even knowing they were his favorites. Jake would have known what I was doing, of course. But Jake wasn't there. I could drive down our old back-road haunts secure that he would never pass me going the other way and pity me. I walked by his house in the weed patch every afternoon, although after surprising the new tenant while he was taking a bath, I did stop looking in the windows.

I didn't moan about him down in the Cave, a respite for which everyone was grateful. I just quietly and determinedly lived in a world made entirely out of his absence, like living in a house where there has been a terrible fire. I mentally set up a cot in what used to be the bedroom and a camp stool in what used to be the living room, but there weren't any walls and everything smelled like smoke.

My friends were relieved because it seemed to them that I was doing fine. Rafi didn't need to push beers on me; Vera didn't need to lecture. Pancho played sonatas of heartbreak at 2
A.M.,
but they were for himself, not me.

Danny, of course, knew better, and we didn't sleep together again. Instead he became very gentle and brotherly with me, stopping by the house sometimes to see if I needed anything—groceries bought or spiders killed or lids taken off new jars—or eating breakfast with me in Blossom's and not saying much, but not asking me to say much either.

“I bought last time,” he said without looking up from the newspaper when the check came.

“Cheapskate,” I said. But I was relieved that he wasn't trying to be too kind to me.

One cold night, we sat together on my sofa and watched the Low Lifes make their first television appearance, playing a song from their new album on the
Late Show.
Charlie Blue joked around with the host and sounded witty and looked like a rock star, which I guess, in fact, he was.

“I gotta run, sugar,” Danny said when the credits were rolling at the end of the show. “I'm late.”

“What can you be late for at midnight?”

“There's a red-headed librarian waiting for me at Tia's. At least, I hope she's still there.”

“Still?”

“Well, I might have told her ten o'clock.”

“Bad man. Aren't you worried someone else might be snatching her up by now?”

“But think of all the fun I'll have trying to snatch her back.”

“Are you ever going to grow up and learn to behave yourself?”

“Do you really want me to?”

“Not in the least.”

Danny went out into the night, and I went to bed because I was feeling sleepy. I was sleepy all the time now. Widows are notoriously somnolent.

Without Jake around, I had no heart to find Orla's visits amusing. My intention was just to ignore her knocking on my door. Given that she usually came while I was still sleeping, this seemed like a workable plan. But Orla was nothing if not determined to give me the benefit of her company, and after three days running of getting no answer first thing in the morning, she shifted her
strategy and ambushed me while I was hanging clothes on the line in the tepid winter afternoon sunlight.

“Hello!” she called out, crashing through the withered remains of my azalea bushes.

“Oh, hello,” I said, startled, dropping my bag of clothespins so they scattered into the frost-crusted mud.

Orla watched me while I picked them all up, waiting patiently to explain to me why she was there.

“How are you?” I asked her.

“I'm good,” she said, and then paused, looking at me expectantly.

“How's Lem?” I said.

“He's good,” she chirped, still waiting for me to come out with it. I had no idea what she wanted, only that the ball was in my court. I cast around in my brain, trying to dredge up the name of one of her many medically challenged acquaintances about whom I could possibly inquire, but none came to mind, and I felt that I should have paid more attention during her previous visits. If Jake had been there, he would have remembered one of them. But Jake wasn't there.

Orla must have read my mind.

“Where's your friend?” she asked, looking all around the bleak little backyard, as if Jake might be hiding under the trampled remains of the azaleas.

“He's not here,” I said as casually as I could, hoping I wouldn't cry.

“Hmm,” Orla said, pursing her lips. “And here I was thinking that you had finally managed to catch someone.”

I thought about Jake saying, “Remember this now,” and about how the water on both sides of the bridge was smooth and still like a mirror.

“You're not getting any younger, you know,” Orla said.

I thought about how the sky had been clear turquoise and about how the sunlight came in the car window and fell in a straight line across his hand on the steering wheel.

“By the time I was your age, I was married and had two babies,” Orla said.

I remembered that the air coming in the open windows had smelled of pine trees, but that if I leaned closer, I could also smell, through the beer and the cigarettes, the faint earthy brown smell that was Jake.

“Why don't you ever marry any of these fellows you go around with?” Orla asked me.

For just that moment, the memory of him was so vivid that I swear I could taste him on my tongue.

“I don't know, Orla,” I said.

The most beautiful of all mortal men was Adonis. Even the goddesses vied for his attention. But it was Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, who lost herself most completely in him. She had been present at his birth and had loved him from the first minutes of his life. As he grew into a man, radiant and brave, she risked the wrath of her husband, Hephaestus, and her lover, Ares, the god of war, to be with him. Alas for Adonis, Aphrodite also incurred the wrath of her rivals, Persephone, the queen of the dead, and Artemis, the huntress.

The legends tell us that Adonis was fond of hunting and Aphrodite would sometimes join him, abandoning her silken robes and her perfumed couch to dress as a huntress herself and follow him through the woods. At other times, she would glide above him, riding across the sky in her chariot pulled by swans. It was on one such day that Adonis met his death.

He was on his own, hunting in a dense tangle of trees and underbrush, when he cornered a wild boar, ferocious and maddened with fear. Adonis drew his bow and sent an arrow directly to the heart of the beast. But Artemis, jealous of the preference that Adonis gave to Aphrodite, caused the arrow to go astray. Instead of killing the boar, it only wounded it, enraging it. In its pain, the boar rushed forward, goring Adonis with its vicious tusks, tearing the flesh that had been so perfect, ripping away his life.

Aphrodite, from her chariot in the sky, heard the death cry of her beloved. She swooped immediately down to his side, taking the bleeding Adonis in her arms. But it was too late. Adonis was dead, and all Aphrodite could do now was weep for him.

The legends tell us that as Aphrodite held Adonis in her arms there in the darkened woods, his blood fell drop by drop on to the forest floor, and where each drop fell, there sprang up a new flower—the blood-red anemone called the “windflower.” They are his memorial.

The ancient Greeks knew that loss is not always the end. Something new can be born from every ending. Flowers can come from blood.

12

PANDORA

WEEKS AFTER THE SNOWSTORM
,
its remains still lingered on the shadowy sides of hills. One night, after the first day during which I made none of my usual Jake pilgrimages, I dreamt that I was in the driver's seat of a beat-up old car. The windows were down and I had a clear-eyed view of a wide horizon all around me. The car was parked at the pinnacle of a steep, rocky mountain. Next to me, riding shotgun, was a little boy. He was wearing sneakers and blue jeans with a ripped knee. He was sitting the way little kids do whenever their legs are too short for a big chair—his feet stuck out straight in front of him, dangling off the edge of the seat. He had storm gray eyes.

The car started to roll backward, down a rutted dirt road on the side of the mountain, picking up speed as it went. I was twisted in the seat, looking out the back window and trying to steer the car as we whipped around switchbacks trailing a cloud of dust, the wind blowing through the open windows. It was very tense and difficult. My heart was beating hard.

I looked at the little boy next to me. “We're totally out of control,” I said to him.

“I know,” he said, and smiled at me. “Isn't it great?”

When I woke up from the dream, I knew I was pregnant. The test I got from the drugstore later that week only confirmed it.

Prometheus, who was the cleverest of the Titans, stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. This angered the gods, and in retribution for this theft, Prometheus was chained by Zeus to a lonesome rocky peak in the Caucasus Mountains, where every day a bloodthirsty eagle swooped down and savagely tore out his liver and ate it. Every night, Prometheus's liver regrew, so he could suffer again tomorrow.

Having taken his revenge on Prometheus, Zeus then turned his attention to the punishment of mankind. Up until that time, there had been no women on the earth. Zeus's revenge was to give men Pandora, the first woman, the loveliest of maidens, endowed by the gods with every gift of grace and beauty. But the clever Zeus also gave his creation one fault, one single pernicious flaw. He gave her curiosity.

Zeus sent the misbegotten Pandora to earth to be the wife of Epimetheus, Prometheus's foolish brother. He sent with her a tightly sealed box, which he warned her never to open. He did not tell her what was in the box.