Now no explosion came. We tiptoed to our torn books, gathered them up, and threw again.
Later, at the gazebo, we reclined on cast-iron deck chairs and sipped the last of the beers. The chairs were straight and hard as church pews, arranged in a permanent circle, legs bolted into metal plates sunk into the wide gray floorboards. I sat facing Tom, with Jerry to my right and Bill and Abe to my left. An assortment of recently thrown books (the last no-hit salvo at the gazebo steps), and the backpack bearing more books and the beers, rested in the center of the circle, near our feet, within easy reach. The gazebo was an open, airy octagon, built of whitewashed wood and roofed in copper, and decked out in cornice-level gingerbread that threw intricate shadow patterns over the floor and our bodies. Past Tom’s head I could see untended lawn bordered by tall pines draped in crawlers and epiphytes that bloomed lavender and white. A cracked plaster birdbath was entirely overgrown, consumed by creeping vines. And bugs were everywhere, getting in our faces, hovering and landing on sticky metal surfaces of empty, set-aside beer cans.
“I do enjoy the way The Riverside Shakespeare rides the wind on a long toss,” sighed Tom.
“The Riverside Shakespeare does seem to float,” agreed Abe, taking a swig from his beer. What kind of animal would Abe be? Something furbearing and immense and ferocious, obviously, yet with the potential for softness, and a warmhearted, friendly aspect: a walrus, a bear.
Bill said, “For hang time, give me The Poetry of Robert Frost any day.” No telling about this guy. Bill Nixon could be any number of species of diverse phyla. Today he wore a sagging, unhappy face. Slouching in his gazebo chair, clutching his nth beer, he looked fungal.
Jerry swatted at a bee — several were circling in the air above our heads. Tom said, “Hey, Jerry, don’t piss them off, okay?” and got up and placed his beer can on the floor a few feet away. He called out, “Here, bees. Here, bees.” Sure enough, the bees descended, buzzing and congregating on the can’s silver metal lip.
“Good thinking, Tom,” said Jerry. Then: “You want to know what book I liked?”
“What?” asked Tom.
“Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.”
“The Kernberg?”
“Yes.”
We all drank, as if following a toast. Jerry elaborated: “I prefer a clothbound book with thin pages sewn in muslin to a medium-width spine. Anything with a lot of plates is going to be a problem. Art books for instance. You pitch one of those museum catalogues and you feel like your shoulder’s going to come out of the socket.”
“It’s the varnished pages,” Tom said.
I concurred. “They are a bitch.”
Was it a weakness, my facile desire to go along with the guys at the expense of the books? Or was it more complex, a sincere inclination to favor present human company, fellowship and community, over the obscure pleasures of printed narratives? Certainly the air was cool at this time of evening. A wail of birdsong ascended from the gray-green trees. The men’s voices were deep, the world seemed good, there were plenty of unimpaired books left lying on the floor and in the backpack. What did it matter which books? The essence of culture is found in all its artifacts.
With this in mind I surreptitiously took inventory of the assorted tattered volumes tumbled beside my chair. Pleasing to note were a quantity of university press editions, which would’ve been prohibitively expensive, new. One book, Thieleman J. van Braght’s hard-to-find classic of Anabaptist distress, The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptised Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Savior, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660, struck me as an ideal gift for Meredith. It would show my love for her, by demonstrating enthusiasm for her commitment to religion and the spiritual life of children.
Martyrs Mirror is a big book, eleven hundred plus double-columned pages of “eyewitness” and court-record accounts of severe bodily torments, punishments, and executions, encyclopedically detailed and chronologically arranged, many accompanied by engraved plates illustrating dramatic scenes like “Vitalus Buried Alive at Ravenna,” “Phocas Put to Death in a Lime Kiln,” “Two Young Girls Led to Execution,” and the poignant, closely observed “Georg Wanger in the Dungeon”—this last depicting the figure of a Christian (middle-aged, male, forlorn) reclining on a bed of straw. Gloom descends. In the etching’s foreground a pair of largish toads seem to gaze reverentially up at the martyr-to-be, while near his feet, one of which is rudely chained to a wall, a viper coils to strike. Looming contours framing the illustration’s lower quadrant may be mere rubbish, but they may also be skeletons and/or corpses. What a scene. It never occurred to me to include reptiles in my own dungeon. But of course. It made so much sense. What fun I’d have later, down in the basement, roughing out plans for a few 1:32-scale “bathsoap” bog denizens.
“You’re one sick fuck, Pete.” It was Nixon, leaning forward to examine the hefty volume open on my lap. He chuckled, a menacing, beery chuckle. “Heh heh.”
“True scholarship knows neither health nor infirmity, Bill, only esteem for the heritage of man, and fearlessness before the misery in all our hearts.”
That shut him up. Jerry said, “Pete, I take it you refer to the dark side of human nature. Is ‘misery’ the word you want to use?”
“Maybe not, Jer. Maybe just ‘pain.’”
“How about, um, ‘despondency’?” suggested Tom.
“‘Heartache,’” Abe said.
“‘Anguish,’” added Jerry. Which earned a “Hmn” from Bill, who contributed, “‘Rage.’”
We all thought about that for a minute, about rage. Jerry observed, “Good insight, Bill.” Both Tom and Abe nodded their heads in agreement with this, smiling and saying, in near unison and with genuine if slightly sodden enthusiasm, “Yeah, definitely.”
Which seemed to serve as a point of closure. It was that point during polite conversation when talk must either cease or become intimate, self-revelatory, deep … our cue to rise and begin gathering our things. Tom said, “Put the empties in the backpack, guys. I’ll take them home and saw them up for my pit. That is, if no one else wants them.”