“Gerry, what’s wrong?” Karen asked with real concern in her voice. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I mean, you’ve never come home like that; I mean, you don’t just come home in the middle of the day.”
“It’s just like TV,” Gerin said. “Just like Gunsmoke or Bonanza or even The Dakotas. You know, like in the real West, but on TV with commercials and station breaks. Not real. Not important or anything. Just something you watch at the same time every week. But it’s not like the sunset or the fall. It’s not like being hungry. It happens, but it doesn’t matter.”
“What are you talking about, Gerry?” Karen reached out to touch her husband but then pulled her hand back.
He looked at her. Forty-two but with the same body she had when he first met her in college. Her wide smile still hiding under the concern.
“Going to work. Going to church. Getting my hair cut, buying shoes, listening to the radio, talking to Madge and Dan Hurley about their kids.” Gerin reached over, taking her tentative hand in his. “Today I realized that I hadn’t ever left early or anything like that. There was trouble up at the prison, but I didn’t have to worry about it. Today was the first time I thought about things in years. And then when I got home and saw you with that man... You should have seen your butt, Karrie...”
“Gerry!” Karen pulled her hand from him.
“But you should have seen it. It was up in the air quivering and shaking. You were really happy, all excited. You felt just like I do. You got it from that boy, and I did by walking away from work.”
“What happened at work?”
“A prisoner escaped with the help of a guard. They’re both gone.”
“When did it happen?”
“We found out today,” Gerin said wistfully. “But it happened two or three days ago.”
“Gerry, you have to be there. You can’t just leave like that. They’ll fire you.”
Gerin looked at his wife and felt happy that she still cared even though she got her magic from other men. He thought about their phone at home and about how Sonia had the phone number of Ray’s Grotto.
“I don’t want to eat here,” Gerin said. “Let’s go down to Frisco. Let’s have dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf.”
Ten
Nesta Vine lived only four blocks from Horace LaFontaine. She worked at the West Oakland library and came home every night with a stack of books in her arms. Novels, biographies, histories, and learning texts, she read everything, remembered everything, but she told her grandparents, “I don’t understand what it all means.”
“All it means is that you one smart black girl,” her grandfather, Lythe Charm, would say.
Then she’d kiss him on the lips and go upstairs to read while he puttered around with the soup her grandmother had made.
Up in her room she closed the doors and forgot all the things that she knew: her mottled brown skin, her sex, the years going by. Nesta thought that she was ugly and that all her intelligence was only in her eyes. She could see things and remember them, but nobody remembered her.
She was reading The Birds by Aristophanes when blue light struck. She’d raised her eyes for a moment, wondering if there was a textbook on ancient Greek at the main branch of the library. She wondered what kind of lilts and accents the different Greeks had, when the light came into her mind and illuminated all the millions of words that she’d read.
She inhaled deeply and gazed out over the multicolored three-story houses on Mill Street. She saw equations and plotlines, lies and errors. She imagined building a three-masted schooner and then set up a test model around a hydroponic element designed to extend the girth of root vegetables. And as these experiments unfolded in her mind, she monitored them separately, listening all the while to the music of the Oakland streets. Falling deeper and deeper into her reverie, Nesta changed.
The rooms appeared in her imagination, but they were in every respect real. To the left was a mooring dock above which was suspended her silk and teak and stainless-steel yacht. To the right was a laboratory filled with bubbling bottles and tubes of Pyrex. In this room time passed more quickly to hurry along her experiments.
A mirror appeared at the end of the aisle separating her laboratory and yacht. In the mirror was a taller woman the color of ebony. Her eyes were smaller and extremely white; eyes that seemed to flash when she looked from side to side. Her nose had widened, and her lips were as full as the Nile in the rainy season.
“Nesta.”
Her breasts were still small but a little higher. Her feet were much bigger. For running, she thought.
“Nesta.”
The boat and root plants receded into memory, ready to be called again. She walked into the mirror, merging herself with herself.
“Nesta, girl, did you stay up all night again?”
“No, Grandma, uh-uh,” she said. The sun was up outside the window. “I fell asleep in the chair is all.”
The books had fallen from her lap around her feet. She stood up among them and looked at Felicity Charm. She was tall, like Nesta’s image of herself, but sand-colored instead of black.
“How many books you read?” Felicity asked.
“None.”
“None? When’s the last time you didn’t read even one book at night?”
“I don’t know,” she said, a little distracted. “But I don’t think I’m going to read very much anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I have to talk to people now, Grandma. I have to go out and talk to people. I have to make up my own mind about all this stuff. You know?”
“You mean, you gonna start datin’?”
Nesta had a little more than six thousand dollars in the bank from a dozen years of saving. She bought a used camper and a Dodge truck. Then she traveled out across the country, meeting people and talking.
She collected ideas and people’s expertise. She learned more than a thousand recipes for chili and how to drive a big rig. She learned 38,263 names, more than 9,000 body odors, and well over 500 shades of skin and eye colors.
In college towns she listened to lectures by scientists, men of letters, and artists. She always asked questions, never giving an opinion. She never took notes, nor did she forget a word. The only thing she ever wrote were letters to her grandparents. Long letters that were probably the most important documents on Earth. These letters told of what Nesta thought about the nature of light in the eyes of our science and philosophies.
She took a winding route around the Midwest, North, and South. Then she traveled to the East Coast, covering Maine to Florida in her studies.
After that she sold the camper and truck and went to Europe. There she continued her cataloging. She learned German and French and Italian; she spent a month in the major libraries of each nation. Then she moved on.
She was in Hong Kong, wondering whether or not to go into Vietnam, when one night she had a dream. It was a simple vision. She was seated at the table in the dinette of her grandparents’ home. Off to her left the back door was open. Lythe Charm, her grandfather, was in the doorway, in his wheelchair, basking in the afternoon sun. The light was so strong that his back was enveloped in shadow. There was a ruffled newspaper on the table. A partially obscured headline spoke of murder.
She was with a man named Kai in a small room on a footpath that had no name that she was aware of. She loved being there because all she had to do was to lie on her back, and all the sensations, sounds, and odors of the city came to her. And Kai was a wonderful man who liked to talk while making love. He was asleep, his strong and slender back turned to her.