The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (35 page)

Blossom and Vera stayed with me at the hospital, taking turns holding my hand, until in the late afternoon my baby was finally born.

“I've never seen a newborn with eyes that color,” the doctor said while I held my slate-eyed little boy in my arms.

Blossom and Vera left after a while, both of them tired and hungry. They were coming back later with catfish and biscuits and pie. I sat in the hospital bed holding my sleeping child and marveling at him. I didn't even hear the door to the room open, but Danny appeared like magic beside me.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey,” I said.

“Rafi came by and told me you were having the baby.”

We sat side by side on the edge of the hospital bed. He was looking at the baby and I was looking at him, thinking about how many hundreds of times I had looked at his profile, how well I knew his face, how his eyes looked tired now with the translucent blue shadows I had seen from the very first and the crow's-feet crinkling the corners that were new lately. I loved him just at that moment as much as I had ever loved him.

He looked up and saw me looking at him. He smiled and touched my face.

“The offer still stands,” he whispered, “to marry you and be a daddy to this baby.”

I looked down at the tiny child in my arms—my baby.

“I know you would,” I said. “And I love you. But you know this baby isn't yours. And this life that I'm going to have now isn't the life you ever wanted. I think that, for now, this life is just for this baby and me.”

He smiled at me. “Well,” he said, stroking my baby tenderly, “maybe so.”

We stayed together like that for a long time. But he had a girl waiting for him downtown and he left after a while to meet her. I settled into bed with my baby in my arms and watched him sleep.

When Blossom and Vera came back, bringing my dinner, Rosalita and Bertie came with them. I sat in the bed eating the pie first because the future is always so uncertain, while Rosalita sat in a chair holding the baby and Bertie sat snuggled in Blossom's lap, gazing serenely at the newcomer.

“She doesn't mind you holding another child,” Blossom said to Rosalita.

“Esta es tu hermano,”
Rosalita said to Bertie. “This is your brother.”

Bertie was getting sleepy and her eyelids flickered gently.

“It will be nice for them to have each other,” Blossom said. “I always think it's nice when there's lots of other children in the family.”

Vera laughed. “It's true,” she said. “You don't get in half as much trouble by yourself.”

“Yes,” Rosalita said, smiling. “It's always better to have a comrade.”

The babies were both asleep.

I brought my baby home from the hospital the next day. In the immense quiet of the house with all the trees surrounding it, the baby was a bright spot of warm and noisy life, concentrating in one place, so it seemed to me, the whole warmth of the sun, every gurgle of the river, every whisper of the wind, the very shout of creation.

Rocking my sleepy baby in my arms, I saw every dawn—every indigo, gray, rose-pink, well-remembered dawn—but I saw them through our bedroom window rather than through the opening door of the Cave. Sunrise meant for me the beginning of the day, rather than the end of the night.

It was a long time since I had been down in the Cave. So a few days later, in the early afternoon, I wrapped the baby up and we went downtown. I parked on Thornapple Street and picked my way carefully down the alley and then down the steps to the Ballroom Entrance. There was no one playing pool in the back room and no one at the bar except for Rafi, drying clean ashtrays with a towel and listening to the radio.

“Ah,” he said when he saw me. “At last!”

He held my baby in his arms and crooned to him, swaying back and forth, while I finished drying the ashtrays and then took the covers off the pool tables and brushed them down. My baby had fallen asleep. But eventually two college boys came down the front stairs and wanted beers, so I carefully took the sleeping baby into my arms, kissed Rafi goodbye, and went out the back. Rafi held the door open for me because I had no free hands.

As I walked down the alleyway toward my car, the sleeping baby seemed extra heavy—as sleeping babies do. My arms felt very full and I thought then that I had never before realized how empty my arms used to be.

What would happen, Socrates asks Glaucon, if the former prisoner were to return into the depths of the cave and resume his old seat among his former fellows? His eyes, accustomed now to the bright light of the sun, would take time to adjust to the gloom. For a long while, the prisoner would be blind. And his former friends, observing his blindness upon returning, would conclude that the upper world is a place where one loses one's sight. The cave dwellers would believe that their friend has lost his senses and become a fool.

Socrates points out that the denizens of each place, the one above ground and the one below, would each have similar views of the other world that is not their own. Each would view the other as a place of blindness, a place to be risked only at one's peril. In some ways, both would be right. In choosing to live in one world, the prisoner must forsake the other. There is no way to live in both worlds without being regarded all the time as a fool, without returning continuously to blindness. Few of us have the strength for that. Socrates tells us that we will have to choose.

I didn't know Charlie Blue was in town. He snuck in quietly and lay low out at Vera and Pete's cabin in the woods. I was surprised when I found him at the barbecue joint out on the
highway, sitting at the back corner table with Pamela.

“Charlie Blue,” I said to him while he took my baby into his arms, making kissy-face sounds at him, “when did you get back home?”

“Oh, Josie,” he said. “I'm not really here. I've got a new house out in L.A. that I should be in right now, but I just came back for two days to see about a couple of things. Tell me where this baby came from. I've been gone longer than I thought.”

I ordered a plate of barbecue. “I would have thought by now you'd know all about where babies come from,” I said. “The rock-star life must be more sheltered that I thought.”

He grinned and blushed and looked just the same as he used to.

“What are you doing back in town?” I asked. “Is there no decent barbecue in Hollywood?”

“Girl,” he said, “don't even get me started. The only food I get anymore is green algae shit and I don't know what all—kale and chard and shit like that.” He shuddered.

“You gotta pay your dues, baby,” I said.

“I thought that meant starving and freezing and having my fingers bleed—stuff I could handle. No one told me about the chard.”

“Lord, how you suffer!” I laughed.

“Not that it's really so bad out there, though,” he said, cutting his eyes over at Pamela. “I mean, there are compensations. Palm trees and sunshine all the time are nothing to sneeze at. You know—swimming pools, movie stars.”

Pamela laughed and said to me, “Charlie has snuck back into town to invite me out to Hollywood to sing on his new record.”

“It's going to be a smash, Miss Pamela,” he said. “You're passing up a golden opportunity.”

“Passing it up?” I said. “You've got such a great voice! You
should do it!”

“Oh, I thought about it,” she said. “But you know, it would mean being away from home an awful long time. And just right now, I kind of want to stick around here.”

“Swimming pools . . . ,” Charlie said in his most enticing voice.

“I've already got the pond.”

“. . . mooooovie stars.”

He flashed her his best beguiling smile and she laughed.

“And leave behind my glamorous life here?”

“Pancho could come with you, you know,” he said. “They have out-of-tune pianos in Hollywood, too.”

“Oh, maybe he would come,” she said. “Probably so. But he'd always be missing home. We would both always be missing home.”

Charlie looked out the window, blinking into the dappled sunlight. “It's not like you could never come back,” he said.