The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (34 page)
“Oh, he doesn't come around too much anymore. Word is that he and Stinky spend most of their time in the lounge at the Ramada Inn out by the airport.”
“That sounds festive.”
Vera rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“Do you suppose he'll ever come back?” she said.
“Stinky? Not if we're lucky.”
“I mean Jake.”
“Oh, I don't know. I imagine we'll see him again someday, maybe. Probably years from now,” I said.
“You'll have a lot of explaining to do.”
“I'll worry about that when the time comes. After all, who knows what things will be like by then?”
“I guess you're right,” Vera said. “Life sure does have a way of changing.”
“Anyway,” I said, “he left us. He couldn't have thought everything here would stop and that we'd all stay the same as we were the day he drove away.”
“But that is exactly what everyone always thinks, isn't it?”
“Maybe. They shouldn't, though. They should know better.”
“Well,” Vera said, “the things people should know better aboutâthey make a long, long list.”
In
Symposium,
Diotima asks Socrates, “What is the purpose of love?” and when he doesn't know, she answers that the purpose of love is to “give birth in beauty.” This is cryptic even to Socrates, so Diotima explains.
Reproduction, she says, is as close as we humans can get to immortality. Because things to which we give birthâwhether they are babies or poems or philosophical ideasâlive on after us, partaking in a kind of immortality, it is in reproduction that we come closest to being like the gods. Through our offspring, and the offspring of our offspring, it is possible in a way for us to live forever. It is possible for us to be divine.
We are all pregnant, Diotima saysâall of us, whether it is with babies or with ideas. And when the time is right, we all need to give birth to the things that are growing inside us. In order to be immortal, in order to be like the gods, we must release our children into the world.
But the purpose of love, Diotima says, is not just to give birth, but to give birth in beauty. We will give birth to our children only when we are surrounded by the good in spirit. We will bring our beloved children into the world only when the time is right, so they will be greeted by kindness and grace.
Pancho's generosity meant that we could order books again at the bookstoreânot just textbooks for classes, but books to fill up the vacant places on the shelves, too. Rosalita and I worked
together in the afternoon, flipping through the catalogs that publishers sent us, some still with Tom's name on the address labels.
“There are so many,” I said to Rosalita. “How do we know which ones to get?”
“No lo sé,”
she said, turning the pages and looking quizzical.
“How did Tom decide?”
“He just knew,” Rosalita said. “He had been to college, you know. Maybe he learned there.”
We looked at each other across the pile of catalogs between us. I could tell we were both thinking the same thing.
“We should go to college,” Rosalita said finally.
“You and me?”
“We could go together.”
“How?”
“We will ask Rafi,” Rosalita said. “He went to college. He will know what to do.”
Rafi went with us the next day to the Extension School office at Waterville State and helped us look through the list of courses offered for the fall semester. Classes were scheduled to start right after Labor Day, and my baby was due right before then.
“How will I manage?” I asked them.
“We will help each other,” Rosalita said.
“Everyone will help,” Rafi said.
So Rosalita and I signed up for a class called “Great Books” that met once a week in the evening after the bookstore's closing time. Rafi helped us fill out the enrollment forms. The class cost four hundred dollars. I took the money that Uncle Joe had given me when I left home and handed it over. I had been saving it all this time. Rosalita looked solemn while she was filling out the forms, but when we got back to the bookstore afterward,
she kept breaking into bright laughter at the thought of being a college student. Every time she laughed, Bertie would laugh, too.
“Tom is so happy,” Rosalita said.
In the dog days of summer, even the bookstore stopped being cool. The dust sifting gently down onto the floorboards had a faint baked smell to it, as if we were making bread. Tom's coat was still hanging on the back of the door, but the smell of him had long since faded away, replaced by the slight stinging scent of pine resin in the heat.
The managers at Tia's ran the air conditioner out front where the tables were, but the kitchen was a sweltering steam bath. Two of the dishwashers even temporarily gave up smoking because, in a straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back kind of way, getting that close to lit matches was more than they could stand.
An argument broke out at the café uptown over the direction of the ceiling fans. Some of the staff argued that setting them to blow upward would pull the warm air to the ceiling and cool off the room. Others thought that was hogwashâand said so in terms considerably more direct than they were accustomed to using in cooler weatherâand argued instead that they would rather have just the breeze. Everybody was looking a little peevish and sweaty around the eyeballs when Danny went down to the SaveMart and came back with a large supply of bags of discount frozen peas that the staff started wearing wrapped in dishcloths draped around the backs of their necks. This helped considerably.
Blossom managed to stay cool and sweet smelling all day, and when we asked her the secret, she told us that it was to
think cool thoughts and to talk slower. I followed her advice as best I could but found that it worked most effectively if I practiced thinking cool thoughts while lying in a hammock under the shade trees in the backyard with a package of peas under me.
That's what I was doing the last time I ever spoke to Orla. I was just thinking about closing my eyes for an afternoon nap when her snapping-turtle face thrust itself around the corner of the house. She was moving much more quickly than Blossom would have recommended and started talking even before she was all the way into the yard. She had three worn-out, itchy-looking sweaters hanging over her arm, and I knew she had been cleaning out her closets and that I was once again the intended recipient of her charity, whether I liked it or not.
“I suppose you've been wondering why I haven't been by to see you in so long,” she said. While I tried to gather up my heat-addled and scattered thoughts, she forged ahead into a preamble about rectal fissures. I swung the hammock back and tipped myself out of it and stood.
Orla gasped.
For one moment, there was a shocked silence with only the buzzing throb of the katydids to emphasize the sudden stillness. Orla gaped at me with her mouth open, and the sweaters fell to the ground. I put my hands protectively over my belly, and we stared across the distance at each other. I watched her face as she started to pinch it up, reminding me suddenly, vividly of Stinky.
“Are you pregnant?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, feeling the butterflies fluttering under my hands.
“Are you married?”
“No,” I said. The butterflies were stronger now, like sparrows stretching their wings toward the sun. The gray-eyed little boy
inside me was laughing in delight.
I tried not to think about Stinky much. But now, as Orla began to lecture me on my sins and mistakes, I couldn't get him out of my head. This would have no doubt surprised Orla, since Stinky was a vile drunk and Orla was a staunch and formidable pillar of her church. But there it was. Anyway, Orla was not pausing long enough for me to get a word in edgewise, so I couldn't have told her about this amazing mental conjunction even if I had wanted to.
“Let's kneel together,” Orla was saying. “Kneel and beg God for forgiveness for your sins. Beg Him to stay His mighty vengeance against your iniquity, that it might not be visited on this child. Kneel and beg!”
Her words drifted slowly through the haze of heat, and it took me a minute to get the gist of what she was saying.
“But,” I said, “isn't it . . . isn't it better to die standing than to live on your knees?”
Orla was momentarily perplexed by this, as if it seemed somehow familiar to her but she couldn't place it. She shifted tactics. “You don't even seem to care that this child you're bringing into the world will be a bastard. That's what everyone will say behind its back. A bastard.”
I would like to report that I responded to this with an eloquent rebuttal, a moving defense of everything I held dear, an unassailable argument in favor of my life and my choices.
But that is not what happened.
“Orla,” I said. “Fuck you.”
She abandoned the sweaters lying on the ground, and later that afternoon I threw them in the trash.
AT MIDNIGHT ON A CLEAR
and moonless Saturday night, I went into labor. I was sound asleep, and in my dreams, a gray-eyed little boy was laughing. And then I was awake and I could feel, sure and certain, that this baby was ready to be born. I called Vera down at the Cave, and she left Rafi to take care of things there and went to wake up Blossom, and then the two of them came to get me. I sat out on the porch steps with my little suitcase next to me and waited for them in the cool night air. The stars were very bright.
While I waited in the dark, I imagined the scene at the Cave. The band was probably playing its first set, and the bar would be crowded with people who didn't know me at all, and Rafi would be working fast serving them beers. Pete and Pancho were most likely shooting pool together in the back room. I imagined them watching Vera leave and touching their beers together, and then Pancho would have a good run and sink the eight ball and Pete would go up front to pass the hat for the band. Danny was at the
café almost certainly flirting with a woman he had never met before and not knowing yet that this was a different night from other ones. Two of the waitresses would be standing out in the alleyway together sharing a cigarette and trying to hurry about it because they had to get back inside. I imagined Rosalita asleep in Tom's old iron bed with Bertie next to her, cradled gently in her arms.
