The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (31 page)

Zeus knew even then that Pandora was destined to engender the misery of humanity through her own action. He also knew that her action was inevitable, arising from her very nature as it was made by the gods. It is in the inherent nature of women, the Greeks say, to be curious, to wonder
what if
?

The gods—the vindictive, scheming, punishing gods—had
not long to wait before Pandora—in the night while Epimetheus slept—opened the box. Out flew all the plagues of humanity—greed and envy and slander, sorrow, mischief of every kind. These plagues buzzed around Pandora's head like wasps and stinging flies and then flew off to spread themselves throughout the world, causing grief wherever they went. But finally, last of all, from the very bottom of the box, out fluttered hope on tiny delicate wings. The sorrows would be with humanity forever now, but we would also have the fragile, sometimes imperceptible, wing beat of hope.

The story of Pandora tells us, if we brush away all the misogyny, that it is only those people—the Greeks call them women—who dare to embrace every part of themselves, who dare the bad with the good, the forbidden as well as the approved, the sins along with the virtues, who give us the saving grace of hope and who open for us the wild and limitless possibilities of wonder. It is only those flawed and tragically reckless rule breakers who ever find the answers to the question, what if? Maybe even from misbegotten people, millions upon millions of flawed Pandoras, there can come some good. Each of us, children as we are of that first woman, sometimes dares to open a forbidden box, and we must ever after brave the perils and demons that our own natures have brought upon us. But we have also, at the same time, released our own saving grace.

I doubt very much that I am the only person who ever thought about Pandora when deciding to have a baby. What if? we ask ourselves with wonder and awe.

It is lovely to have a secret, and at first I didn't tell anyone I was going to have a baby—a little boy, I was sure, with gray eyes.
The little boy was my secret companion, invisible and silent but magical, riding along everywhere with me, part of me.

The snow had melted and left the black tree trunks naked against the gray sky. Even the crows were silent now, and the hawks sat forlornly on high branches with their shoulders hunched against the empty air. But the little boy inside me was a warm vivid flame, a red glow that throbbed with every heartbeat. I carried him around, sheltered from the sharp winter cold, and he laughed with joy and made me laugh with joy also. We were happy to see the faded winter grasses ripple along the ground in the waves of icy wind. We were happy to see the pointed face of a fox peek at us from the edge of the woods and then disappear again into the shadows. I dreamt of the little boy clapping his hands in delight.

The thing about a secret pregnancy, though, is that eventually you're going to have to tell. Even if you don't tell, people are going to know.

I had two problems. Maybe three.

The first problem was how to break the news. The second problem was whom to break the news to. The third problem, which was only maybe a problem, was what to do then.

Maybe the baby was Jake's. Maybe he was Danny's. They bookended the snowstorm, the two of them, merging together in my memory along with the snow and the silence and the warmth of strong arms that held me tight in the violet dusk.

Jake was long gone. I hadn't heard a word from him since he drove off under the gray sky a lifetime ago. Yes, Jake was gone.

But Danny was right across town, pouring drinks at the café, telling jokes and laughing in the warm, coffee-scented air. Danny—who surely loved me as much as he had ever loved anyone.

I went uptown.

Danny was drying glasses behind the bar. The light coming in the big front windows filtered through a scrim of steam so that it diffused in a pearly glow all through the café. It reflected off the chrome cappuccino machine into Danny's eyes and made them seem especially bright.

“Hey, sugar,” he said to me, smiling. “Where ya been?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “Around. You know. Home. Around. Nowhere. You know.”

Danny laughed. “Well,” he said, “I'm glad we got that cleared up.”

I felt sweaty and sick, like I had guzzled a whole bottle of cheap tequila in two minutes flat. I didn't know if it was nerves or the side effects of growing a human inside me.

Danny looked hard at me. “Are you okay?”

“Sugar,” I said, “I gotta tell you something that you're not going to like.”

“Come on out back,” he said, and I went behind the bar and followed him through the kitchen and out the back door into the alleyway. I sat on an empty milk crate and he sat near me, resting on his heels with his back against the brick wall.

He lit a cigarette and looked up at the sky. Then he looked at me, and his eyes smiled. “It can't be that bad,” he said softly.

So I told him—told him I was going to have a baby and that it might be his baby, but that it might be Jake's.

We sat quiet for a while, listening to the sounds in the alleyway—the low swish of cars on Juniper Street, the delicate clink of dishes in the kitchen of the café, Pamela's voice, too indistinct to make out the words, one sharp bark from a hidden dog.

“Scoot over,” Danny said, and I inched a little bit to the edge of the milk crate. He sat down next to me, balancing on the rickety plastic, and put his arm around me. “I'll marry you,” he said, and there was only the very tiniest pause before he said, “if
you want me to.”

I put my head on his shoulder like I used to in the old days when we sat at the corner table in the Cave and I watched him play cards. I tried to imagine us together again—like the old days, only with a little baby now.

But I couldn't see Danny and me together—I couldn't bring the images of it to my mind—because all I could see was my little gray-eyed boy. I could see my little boy's face, watching me, trusting me. He was depending on me.

Farther down the alley, I heard a screen door bang and a woman's voice call out goodbye. Danny was waiting for me to answer—I could feel him waiting, holding his breath. But I knew then that this little boy wasn't Danny's baby or Jake's baby. I knew then that this little boy was my baby.

“Thank you,” I said to Danny. “I appreciate that. But it turns out that what I need most is just for you to be my friend. Be
our
friend.”

His relief was palpable.

The bookstore, with Vaslav long gone, was its usual empty self when Rafi showed up the next morning. I was sitting on the sofa sifting through a big pile of childbirth books that Tom had ordered for Rosalita so long ago. The sunshine was pouring in the rippled window glass, and the dust was dancing in the beams of light. Rafi sat down next to me. I could tell by the look on his face that he knew.

“Oh, God,” he said, picking up a copy of
Green Babies
and looking alarmed. “It's going to be green?”

I laughed.

“Jake?” he asked, looking serious again.

I shrugged. “Maybe. Does it matter?”

“Probably not—not if it doesn't matter to you, I guess.”

“It's not that I don't care,” I said. “It's just that I think we'll be okay without him. We will.”

“We?”

“The two of us.” I smiled. “There's two of us now. And we're in it together, for better or worse.”

He reached over and held my hand. “You don't have to do this if you don't want to,” he said.

“I know. I know that. I want to, though.”

“Are you sure?”

“For the first time ever, actually.”

“I'm glad then,” he said. “Do you need anything? Money or . . . anything?”

“Oh, Rafi,” I said. “Right now, right at this minute, I have everything I need.”

He stayed with me all afternoon.

As the freed prisoner slowly sees more and more in his new world, Socrates says that his gaze shifts upward to the sky. At first, it is still too painful for him to look directly at the sky in daytime, with the burning light of the sun piercing his eyes. But at nighttime, he can study the heavens—the moon and the stars.

That is the word Socrates uses—he will
study
them. In this endeavor, he will not be alone. Humans have looked to the night sky to study the stars and the moon for eons. The sun beats down on us, and we lower our eyes before it. But the moon—how many generations of our ancestors have lingered in the night in order to gaze up at its mysteries, enraptured?

The moon is another world, perched just beyond our
fingertips. We can see its mountain ranges and its quiet deserts. We can imagine that perhaps we could make lives there somehow, deep in its tranquil valleys.

The freed prisoner has learned now that there is a world beyond the confines of the cave. And having made the journey to one new world, he looks up into the night sky and sees yet another, floating serenely above him. Perhaps he imagines there must be a tunnel to it somewhere. After all, he has no particular reason to end his journey now.

It is generally better for me to depend on my vices rather than my virtues. My virtues tend to be largely theoretical—I imagine that I might have them if only I were put into the right situation at the right time under the right attendant circumstances, etc. With my vices, on the other hand, I am on sure ground. They are not theoretical at all.

This dependability is not only comforting but also useful. For example, if I want to quit smoking, I increase my chances of success if I quit in the dead of winter—preferably when the forecast calls for freezing rain. It is far too much trouble to go out into the wind and the cold and the wet just to buy cigarettes—or at least my own laziness makes such a venture less likely. I bank on my vice of laziness to be strong enough to overcome any possibility of action. By the time I've conquered my sloth (or the weather clears up), I've gotten through the worst part of withdrawal. I always tell people who want to quit smoking that they should wait until February. It has worked for me—I have quit smoking lots of times.