"I wish you'd let me know when you're going to be away, Danny. I thought we had an agreement. Just pick up the phone. You know?"
"Hey, I meant to, I really did. Been real busy, though."
"Busy."
"Yeah. Got a new job. Good one this time."
Don looked at him, at his friend, then at me.
"Hellish long hours. Most nights I'm so beat it's all I can do to open up a can of chili and fall in bed."
Bobby said something that sounded like Burr goman.
Don said, "At least you have a place to sleep, then."
"What? Oh, sure. Sure I do. No problem. And money in my pocket. You bet. Just like I said it would be."
Bobby said something else to him, even lower, that I didn't catch.
"Look, Dad. I gotta go, okay? I'll call. Promise."
"Yeah. Yeah, sure you will. Take care, son."
We watched them go out and turn the corner back up towards the Quarter.
Don drank from his Abita. I sipped at my tea.
"He's not going to call," I said.
Don put his empty bottle down. "Not a chance in hell."
"You didn't ask where he was staying,"
"He wouldn't have told me."
Don picked up a piece of chicken and put it back down, wiped grease from his fingers.
"It's a lot worse than you know, Lew."
"Things generally are."
"I love him, Lew. I reallylove him. And there's not one damn thing I can do to help him, or stop him. All I can do is stand by and watch it happen."
He looked down at his fried chicken the way a houngan might peer into spilled fresh entrails.
Signs and signals everywhere, if you just knew how to read them.
22
THEY WERE ACTUALLY still there waiting, most of them anyway, when I took the comer fast and walked in, totally unprepared. No notes, no books, just sweaty clothes and a worried smile on my face.
Felt just like my undergrad days at USNO, in fact.
It had suddenly come to me, on the streetcar back uptown, that this was Monday, and that Monday was a class day. I'd already missed all Wednesday's classes and half of today's. I asked the woman beside me, an older black woman sitting with knees far apart, stockings rolled to her ankles, what time it was.
One-forty. I could just about make it.
I just about did.
Two-ten on the classroom clock when I got there. Many hadn't unpacked books and papers. Some sat talking quietly. Kyle Skillman methodically moved potato chips from bag to mouth. Others scribbled in notebooks-homework, letters, shopping lists. Some were reading, a few of them even reading Beckett or Joyce. Sally Mara was reading, too, but not Molloy or Ulysses. She was reading The Old Man.
Somehow I got through the hour. Somehow, talking about Finnegans Wake, At Swim-Two-Birds and early Beckett, and with several tactical detours to nearby Queneau country, I managed to keep them mostly awake and myself, if not exactly on track, then always within view of it, at least.
Sally Mara was waiting for me outside the classroom.
"Have a few minutes?" she asked. When I said I did, she fell in beside me, round face turned up as we walked.
"You'd look great with a beard," she said. We pushed our way through sluggish doors and started down the first half-flight of stairs. "Don't you think?"
"I had one once. Woman I was living with kept trying to grab it to do dishes, thought it was a Brillo pad."
Her smile broadened.
"You didn't tell us you were a writer, Mr. Griffin."
"Lots of things I don't admit to, Mrs. Mara. But somehow these nasty little secrets have a way of getting out."
"But you're good."
We started down the second half-flight.
"Thank you. But that was a long time ago. A different world."
"What are you working on now?"
For a moment I almost said, I'm trying to find my son.
"Nothing," I said instead.
By then we were at the office door. I put in the key and felt the entire lock assembly rotate as I turned it. I pushed at the cylinder with my other hand to hold it in place.
"That's… awful," Mrs. Mara said.
Finally got the door open.
"Sad," Mrs. Mara added.
Each year I feel the gap between myself and these young people widen-cracks taking over a floor as boards wear away. We don't live in the same world, hardly speak the same language. It's possible we never did. Though every year or so a face will tilt up out of some new mass of them, Conversational French or The Contemporary European Novel, yet another redundant student assembly, a group walking together down Magazine or in Lakeside Mall, and for a moment, as a kind of electric arc passes between us, I'll recognize: here is another.
Something of that sense now with Sally Mara.
"Not really," I told her. "There are probably too many books in the world already. And certainly too many second-rate writers."
She stood with one hip raised, leaning against the wall. Still smiling.
"I don't believe you mean that."
I remembered Dr. Lola Park as I said, "I'm sure you don't want to."
Using her other hip, Sally Mara pushed away from the wall. She came closer to me, inches away, face turned up, eyes searching mine.
"Then I won't."
Again, that sudden smile. There'd been times in my life I could have lived on that smile for months.
"I just wanted to thank you, Mr. Griffin. That's all. The course's been fabulous, I mean. Butfinding your books…"
She ducked her head.
"That's all, I just wanted you to know that"
"Thank you."
At the door she turned and said, all in a rush, "I think they're great Mr. Griffin. Really great!"
Then she was gone.
But today my dance card was full.
Another form replaced hers in the doorway. Light from the office's narrow, high window silhouetted his hair, like some exotic plant, on the wall behind.
"I waited outside. Had no desire to interrupt. Or to impose. Hope you don't mind."
He came a tentative step or two into the office.
Much more than that, of course, and he'd fetch up against the far wall.
"Yourememberme? Keith LeRoy?"
"Sure I do."
Last name accented on the firstsyllable. The young man with Woody Woodpecker hair who'd run Tast-T Donut all but single-handedly for minimum wage. Who, when I spoke to him on the phone, with his beeper and E-mail address, had glided so naturally from street talk to standard English.
"This where you work, huh."
I nodded.
"What you do."
Nodded again, thenrealizedit was a question. I was nowhere near as sensitive as Keith LeRoy to inflection, to the subtle clues of class language. Though once I had been. So much gets lost along the way.
"I teach."
"Mmm-hmm," he said, looking around. "This all yours?"
"Pretty much."
"Good. That's good." Nodding. "What you teach."
"Literature. French."
"Parlez-vous and all that."
"Right."
"And literature."
"Novels. Stories. Essays. All the things people make up to try to understand and explain what we're doing here, what life's all about, why we choose the things we do."
"Mmm-hmm. You done this a long time."
"Keith, tell you the truth, it feels to me now like I've done everything a long time."
His topknot bobbed, directly before me and in silhouette on the wall behind, as he nodded.
"Know what you mean."
He looked about. At books and papers stacked on shelves behind my desk, at that nairow, high window, at the computer that worked when fate allowed, trays full of letters and interoffice memos.
"Always thought someday I might do this. Go thisroute. You know? Be a kick."
I don't think I even paused to consider his obvious intelligence, his easy, untutored shuttle among social stations. I simply said, "You decide to, let me know and I'll do whatever I can to help you. Since I'm teaching here, I have some voice in who gets admitted, who gets financial aid, that sort of thing."