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Dad,” and to Saul “I’ll explain it all later,” and Glen says “Maybe one day,” Margo a dark beer, two men scotch on the rocks water in back, Glen, when they talked about what they’d have, said it first and he said “Ah, I’ll have that too though I hardly ever drink, and not before eight or nine when I do, then I have to admit I mostly just sit there in my armchair with something to read on my lap and maybe some chips or cheese on the side and slowly get sloshed, which is awful, I know, but what it has to do with, anyone but this boy can guess,” and Saul said “What does it?” and she said “You shouldn’t let it disturb you so, Dad, especially for your health,” and he said “But when your mind’s running while you’re nipping, or the reverse, what else can it end up doing and you thinking and then drinking more and more till you conk out? but I said it was only occasionally and maybe that occasionally only rarely, but because you brought it up, even that little I’ll try to stop,” what she does an average workday? done the last few years? exactly Glen do? he still doesn’t understand what that particularly is but that’s okay, he gets the gist, schools they went to? where’d they meet, something with every married couple he’s always been interested in: he and Lee, as she must know, met coming out of a legitimate theater in New York: “We both, if you can believe it — well, I’m sure your mother you can still tell just by her voice and face or at least recent past photos of it — wanted to be actors, and she, if you can also believe, picked me up: thought I was cute and maybe for a week I was,” where Glen was raised? his folks and what they do? “You think now that we know each other better you can reveal his last name?” city they live in, will they also let him in on that? heard it’s a good place, safe, slower paced, great for kids, any reason they each married an only child, at least she is to a degree? “Oh, forgot Lee had another kid soon after she dumped me, just as I would have liked to do almost immediately to sort of make up for Julie and we probably would have if we both weren’t so messed up right after and later if she had stayed, otherwise we felt two were plenty enough, one for each hand I liked to say and that’s how we’d cross streets, remember?” and she says “For me it’s too far back and possibly I’ve a block, but I take your word,” and Saul says “You said you wanted to be actors, how come you and Grandma Lee didn’t?” and he says “She to raise kids and me because I had no talent from the start and saw that in the first classes I took and I also think I was only in it to meet pretty girls, which I did with Lee so didn’t see the need for it anymore, and that happened at the standing-room section behind the orchestra at the Music Box and not leaving a theater: she asked me for the time though I never wore a watch,” questions, he has so many questions, do they mind? for instance—“Oh by the way, how did you two meet? and sorry for cutting in on myself like I have,” and she says at college in a chem lab: they shared the same Bunsen burner and sink, their other kids are like? ages and how tall they are? interested in sports more than books? that’s good, as the Greeks said or something like: the balanced life, color hair and eyes? all three inherited Lee’s honey blonde and yellow-green which perplexed the geneticists since Glen’s are supposed to be predominantly dark, “Mom said you thought her eyes the best feature of her looks so I guess we should consider the kids lucky, though they’re boys,” and he says “She had lots of nice features — I can kick myself to hell for making it so easy for her to leave, but nothing I could’ve done — I was crazed, as they say—‘nuts,’” to Saul—“since I knew but couldn’t do anything about it that nothing like finding and knocking off those guys or beating my head blue against a wall would help, and after I left my long-term residence…how much does he know?” and Glen says “Niente
,” and Saul says “Niente what?” and she says “Nothing, it means nothing,” “…it was too late for a second wife if she couldn’t be another mother and I was in such ugly shape that none that young could be gotten around,” their other sons’ names again? how come nobody in their family’s got a nickname? his is Nat which he hates for it sounds like a buggy rat, but at the place he works he can’t escape from, what’re they doing this summer for vacation? “Me, I’m staying home for the two weeks I get and just sleep — I’ll be that bushed…oops, sorry again and then for the last time before for not waiting for your answer but I guess I’m in too much of a rush to let you know everything about me before dinner’s finished and you’re gone,” and she says “Don’t worry, there’ll be other times,” and he says “When, you coming in again?” and Glen says usually they go to a British Columbian beach for three weeks but this summer they’re driving to Alaska for a month and he says “Boy, what I wouldn’t have given to do either of those with my family but closer to home in the East — Maine, upper Canada or just Canada, camping and occasionally stopping off at sort of an inexpensive sea resort to sleep and eat and wash off, flying into the ocean with my two kids or if the water’s too cold, into a pool or just stepping into one and splashing and swimming around, worth almost the other fifty working weeks, why didn’t we ever do that? how come I think of these things always much too late?” and she says “Maybe we did them and you don’t remember, for I think we once went to Chincoteague for a weekend — I remember the name and wild ponies or mules by the ocean and that you got me a plastic figure of one that I slept with I loved so much,” and he says “I don’t remember but I’ll have to work on it till I do,” and what did the figure look like? how big? did she give it a name? did it have a mane? attached straps or any apparatus like that? saddle and rider? but wouldn’t if it was wild, dessert, coffee, Glen pays and gets up and taps Saul’s shoulder to and he says “Well, guess I ought to be going too,” and starts to stand and she presses his hand to the table and says “Stay for more coffee, Dad, or another beer — they have a discount record store to go to the likes of which doesn’t exist in our neck of the woods and I’m sure you’ve plenty more you want to talk over with me,” and they go, “It’s been great, Mr. Frey, and hope to see you again soon,” “Nathan, or Nat if you prefer and which I promise to answer to without asking if you like your coffee black or with sugar and milk or cream,” “What do you mean?” “Nothing, just being silly, and I saw and am such a pro that I’ll probably never forget how you like your coffee unless you switch it around from day to day,” “Nice to meet you, Grandpa,” and he kisses Saul’s head when Saul sticks out his hand to shake, and she stares at him while they share another beer and he says “What’re you staring at, do I look that funny, like a big wizened old fart? — excuse me,” and she says “Not at all, for your excuse or your supposition, this is an event and I’m remembering it and then remembering that I’m remembering it to help me not to forget, and what are you saying? — you look fantastic for your age, lean, one of those going-to-outlive-us-all vigors and physiques, a little less hair than from the photographs of around the last time I saw you, or a few years before — you didn’t take any in there, did you? and I’m not being facetious either — in most ways you don’t seem to have aged a day in twenty years,” and he says “Which ways have I, outside of my hair?” and she says “Your elbows, nobody can do anything to conceal aging elbows,” and he says “But I’m wearing a jacket and long-sleeved shirt,” and she says “I know, so maybe your humor and quick-wittedness have suffered a little too — I’m not serious,” and he says “Listen, don’t kid me, I’m just an old blowhard now, which when you think of it is not too far from being a loud fart, excuse me, must be the beer and just seeing you which is making me talk to my daughter so sillily like this, though actually talking to you alone here — before with them, Saul and Glen, I was just feeling better than I have in years — but with you now I feel less stupid, even half intelligent which I almost never feel, than I have since I went to prison, as much as I tried to keep and even advance my mind in there, but here the words, even, that have eluded me — like ‘eluded’—or I’ve simply forgotten, and just speaking them — the fluidity in the way I speak — and ‘fluidity,’ for christsake — it must be that among other things you’re the first really brainy person I’ve talked to in twenty years, at least one brimming with mental nimbleness and ideas and intelligent intelligible speech, if that’s how long it’s been since I went in, or that speaking to someone like you, even one’s daughter who I’m supposed to, I suppose, posture and lord over, that if this person — me — had something of a mind before, generates or regenerates something like it in him, but you want to know something? — and most of that was confusing, wasn’t it?” and she says “Some, but what ‘do I want to know something?’” and he says “And cut me off if I’m running on too much, and I am but if you think it’s just irritating boring stuff, but you said I should stay if I wanted to say something to you,” and she says “I said stay because there may be things, with the implication being it’s been so many years, you only want to talk over with me,” and he says “Anyway, my darling child, and you’re not getting angry with me, are you?” and she says “No, or only a little, but I’m always a bit of a grouch,” and he says “Anyway,” and takes her hands and rubs them on his cheek and kisses them, “now that I’ve seen you again—” and starts crying on her hands and she pulls them away and wipes them and says “Dad, please don’t, it’s not that it’s embarrassing for a public place, although it is in a way, or that I hate or disapprove of seeing you cry,” and he says “But you don’t know what this means to me — no, that’s too baloney a thing to say, and when I said it I wasn’t talking about just holding and kissing your hands,” and she says “I know, but what is it you want to say, because really I can’t understand you when you’re choking and coughing up tears and phlegm,” and he says “I’ve killed it for ever seeing you again, haven’t I, with all my whining and crying and sentimentalizing?” and she says “We’ll see each other again, you heard Glen,” and he says “But when I asked one or the other of you when, you went into this double- or just avoiding talk,” and she says “We’ll call, we’ll write, this is Convention City now so before you know it we’ll be flying in again or Glen will and he’ll call and if he can make it or same time you can you’ll see him for dinner or lunch and everything you talk about he’ll tell me,” and he says “But you know what I’ve been wanting to say to you now so I don’t have to, right?” and she says “If it’s not that you’re very pleased to be with me here and somewhat despondent that we’re leaving tomorrow,” and he says “Tomorrow?” and she says “The other kids, Dad…but that sort of thing, then I don’t,” and he says “It’s more, but that also, but of course, but okay, here: now that I’ve seen you, and excuse me for blubbering again, even these little tears now, but that’s good, isn’t it? not bad, for these compared to the bigger ones before for Julie and also your mom leaving me, are radically different tears, but where was I?” and she says “‘Now that you’ve seen me again,’” and he says “And one of my wonderful grandkids — let’s skip the ‘wonderful,’ he’s obviously a good kid but it’d be dumb or just what? presuming to think I really know yet what kind deep down inside—