She seems less interested in the cat’s anus: he keeps a distance and has returned to his primary mission, asserting the rights of private property against neighborhood coon cats.
I just laid a Quaker Oats container on the fire, which had burned down to a dim red glow. The cylinder flamed, blindingly, and the Quaker in the black hat, smiling, was engulfed. What is left now looks like some war-blackened martello tower on a distant coast. I looked over to the window to see if there was any light yet outside, but the curtains were drawn: Claire sometimes closes them at night because they are, she’s right, a kind of insulation. But I think I’ll pull one of them open now so that I can see the hints of light outside as I work.
“It’s completely dark,” I whispered when I pulled back the curtains. The glass, though, had a good smell of summer-afternoon dust in it.
19
Good morning, it’s 5:44 a.m., and I’m up late again, but I’ve got four big old logs on the fire, each with a layer of burn-scabs from yesterday evening that break off when I rearrange them. The coffee is extra strong this morning; I poured in some from the less good bag so that we wouldn’t run out of our reserves in the good bag. Phoebe is disappointed in herself because she didn’t say interesting things when a restaurateur came to dinner last night. She appeared, dressed with great care in a T-shirt with tiny sleeves, her bangs perfect in a fourteen-year-old way, in the living room, and listened while the restaurateur told Claire about his drive through Nova Scotia, and I carved off bits of nutty cheese log and scraped them onto crackers. Finally, the restaurateur asked Phoebe how her school was. Phoebe described her science project, in which she baked three small cakes, each made with a different brand of baking soda, to see which one would rise more. “Hm,” said the restaurateur. Phoebe went quiet again. Afterward she said, “I wanted to ask him how you get to be a chef and instead I just sat there.”
“You told him about your baking-soda project.”
“I’m a boring person,” she said.
I told her that she wasn’t a boring person, and she insisted that she was, and I countered that she wasn’t, and then we got onto the subject of the unnecessary repaving of Calkins Road, which took us to the subject of war crimes, and that we discussed till ten-fifteen, which is why I got up late.
I’m glad there are fifty-two weeks in the year — it seems like the right number, and there is the interesting congruity with a deck of cards. But there really should be more than twelve months. January is one of my favorites, and we’re getting towards the end of it. My children are practically grown, and my beard — I’m not at all content with my beard. Fortunately February is a pretty good month, too, so I’ll still be okay. They’re all pretty good months, actually, it’s just that there aren’t enough of them. On New Year’s morning this year Claire got us to drive to the ocean to watch the sun rise. That outing was what made me suddenly understand that I needed to start reading Robert Service again and getting up early — that New Year’s outing combined with the time a few months ago when I took the night sleeper car from Washington to Boston and woke up in my bunk and pulled the curtain to look out the window and saw that we were in the station in New York City, and I realized that I was passing through a very important center of commerce without seeing a single street and that something similar was happening in my life.
On New Year’s morning we packed two thermoses, one of hot chocolate and one of coffee, and we drove for half an hour, the four of us, to the little parking lot at the beach. There was a bitter wind that made our pants flap, but several people were there with their dogs, looking out at the places on the horizon where they expected the sun to rise. Some seemed to know where it would come up and some didn’t; one old couple, bundled and hooded in matching orange puffy coats, stood still, halfway down to the water, mitten in mitten. I figured that they would know where the sun would appear and, yes, they did. It underwent some waistline contortions, as rising suns so often do, narrowing first and then oozing out as if from a puncture in the seam of the horizon, and then the sky around the puncture point became inconceivably blue.
That was this year. Last year for New Year’s I decided that I would shave off my beard because there was too much white in it. I bought an electric trimmer, and I began plowing off chunks of coarse fur. Henry watched with interest, but Phoebe became unexpectedly upset. She said that my personality had to have a beard. I must stop immediately, she said. I said I was tired of looking in the mirror at a prematurely white-bearded person — that I had no respect or affection for badger-people in their forties. If, after I finished buzzing it off, I didn’t like the results, then I would just regrow it. When I was halfway through, Henry said, “Dad, I think it looks interesting but you need to work some on the other side.” Claire said to Phoebe, “He’s just seeing how it looks.” But I could see that when she, Claire, saw me in the mirror she was a little startled.
You see, Claire had never seen me beardless. I’ve had one since I was eighteen, and in years past I’ve been more than a little proud of its curly density and its russet highlights. By the way, you can trim a beard, I’ve found, using a double-bladed disposable razor: you “shave” over the beard’s shape as if it were your jaw and chin. I originally grew the beard because I thought I had a thin weak face, which I did, but over the years, without my knowledge or consent, it had changed into a plump weak face. The mouth was the main problem: I had always thought that I had a generous ho-ho-ho sort of mouth, the mouth of a backslapping mountain man, quick with a knock-knock joke or a kindly word, but it turned out, when put in the context of my upper lip, that my mouth was pursed and almost parsonly. That evening Claire kept getting caught by surprise by my face. “I can hear your voice in the room,” she said, “but when I look up, you’re not there,” she said. I buried my head in her bathrobe so that she wouldn’t see me; I was reminded of a time in seventh grade when someone kicked me during a soccer game and I spent the day with a puffed lip and thick twists of toilet paper projecting from both nostrils. Every time the teacher looked in my direction he laughed, and then he apologized for laughing, saying that he just couldn’t help it.
It was a good experiment, Claire said, worth trying, but she liked my beard and wanted it back. I began regrowing it immediately.
20
Good morning, it’s 4:39 a.m. and I just watched a cocktail napkin burn. After its period of flaming was past, there was a long time during which tiny yellow taxicabs did hairpin turns around the mountain passes, tunneling deeper and deeper into the ashen blackness. I’ve torn off some pages of a course catalog for a local community college and I’ve rolled them up and pushed them into the hot places. Because I started late yesterday, I was in a rush to be sitting here in front of the fire by five a.m. sharp, and that is probably why I stepped on Henry’s airplane in the dining room. Out of a paper-towel tube, an electric motor, a battery holder, a light switch, and a great deal of masking tape, Henry made an airplane. He was sure that it would fly, even though Claire and I both gently, in different ways, observed that though it was beautiful it was heavy. Henry cut out larger and larger propellers from the lid of a shoebox, and he tried to tape on a second battery pack, and he and I went outside just before dinner and climbed the snowplow mound. He turned on the propeller and flung his machine out into the twilight. It landed heavily, but it seemed to be not too badly damaged. We came back inside. Phoebe and Claire were watching an episode of Gomer Pyle. I showed Henry how to make a paper airplane. I’d showed him once a few years ago, but he’d forgotten, and I’d almost forgotten myself. The moves came back to me, though, as I talked my way through them, and as the triangles narrowed into swept-back wings Henry began to make a purring, half-laughing sound of enlightenment that I thought he had stopped making forever.