“Carl Joseph.”
“Yes.”
“Then you were his connection to SeCure.”
She nodded. “I’ve tried to take care of him. He would never take money, you know. Too proud for that. Even though I had money to give. And not much else.”
“How did Carl feel about his father?”
“He hated him-the idea of him, I should say. I could never make Carl understand how kind his father was. That, given the time, the place, the situation, he had done all he could. Once Carl was old enough, I told him about his father, tried to explain what had happened, why. I kept trying. Just like a white man, he’d say.”
“And all those people are dead, Carl himself is dead, because he hated his father, or because he never knew him.”
“It’s not that simple.” She lifted her hands briefly out of her lap, put them back. “What is? Carl was a troubled young man. Alcohol, drugs, dangerous friends. He quit all that finally, but it was all still there inside him, looking for a way out.”
I put my hand over hers.
“I’m sorry, Bonnie.”
She leaned her head against my shoulder a moment, the merest touch, then looked up.
“I’d better be getting along.”
At the door she said: “I’d still like to feel I could call you sometime, or come by, if I needed to. Would that be all right?”
“Absolutely. I look forward to it.”
Standing outside the door I watched her walk, straight and tall, along the path and out of sight around the big house. Another person leaving, falling away. Maybe this one would come back. Maybe, eventually, others would.
I made another drink and hauled it upstairs, picked up novelist Juan Goytisolo’s autobiography Realms of Strife, which I’d begun that morning and was now almost done with.
Memory, Goytisolo writes at the end of his story, cannot arrest the flow of time. It can only re-create set scenes, encapsulate privileged moments, arrange memories and incidents in some arbitrary manner that, word by word, will form a book. The unbridgeable distance between act and language, the demands of the written text itself, inevitably and insidiously degrade faithfulness to reality into mere artistic exercise, sincerity into mere virtuosity, moral rigor into aesthetics. Endowed with later coherence, bolstered with clever continuities of plot and resonance, our reconstructions of the past will always be a kind of betrayal. Put down your pen, Goytisolo says, break off the narrative, limit the damage: for silence alone can keep intact our illusion of truth.
The light snapped on downstairs. Dozens of roaches scurrying for cover, the counter white again. “Lew?” LaVerne’s footsteps on the stairs.
She had brought the Scotch bottle and a bowl of ice upstairs with her.
“Listen.”
I read the concluding passage to her.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What does that mean? Why is it important?”
I read it again as she poured drinks for us both.
“I’m not sure. I only know that it is.”
Then I put the book aside as she came into my arms there on the bed. Body long and warm and supple. Always familiar, comfortable, always new and surprising.
“What have you been doing?”
I nodded toward the book.
“And drinking,” she said.
“Two things I do best.”
“I seem to recall something else you do pretty well. Or used to, anyway.”
I told her about Bonnie coming by, what she had said. LaVerne was the only one I ever told any of that.
“I’ve missed you, Lew,” she said.
“I know.”
“You want your drink?”
“Maybe later.”
As outside, the storm (have I mentioned the storm?) began to quieten.