In fact, two desks belonged to him. One was an antique rolltop formerly his father’s. Prior to becoming old he’d wondered what to do with it. Never practical, he employed its pigeonholes for the adapters and plugs of lost electric-powered devices, which might yet reveal themselves (for in those days it was patent that he would live forever); not to mention the fat old analog microphone, the flash cards he had once made in order to dither with the Inuktitut language, broken pencil leads, pens which might or might not be out of ink, boxes of color slides whose subjects he had forgotten (but worth saving in case some of them might be naked pictures), spectacles which no longer befitted his eyes, keys to forgotten chests, padlocks, apartments and houses, and an empty pill bottle which remained eligible for one refill fourteen years ago. Luke gave him those pills when he developed a certain intimate complaint.
It makes me happy to think of you having this desk, his father had said. The son already owned the other desk. He liked his father’s desk and vaguely hoped to someday work at it in a worthy manner. His father had been as uncluttered as Luke. Seeing what became of his desk, his father said nothing.
When he sat down to cross his arms on its bed of darkgrained red-stained maple, he knew that his father must have rested his elbows here in some analogous configuration, wide-eyed in his spectacles, sipping tea, steadily and probably contentedly preparing business drafts. His father had always been a light sleeper, and in early middle age sometimes worked through the night. Once the boy himself had insomnia, and came barefoot and quiet into the study at dawn, peeping at his father, whom he loved very much but of whom he was somewhat afraid. His father did not send him away. They sat together, his father working prodigiously over these papers which the child could not understand: the boy in the leather armchair, his bare feet cold, his father at this desk. It was one of the few objects he could imagine which appeared both precious and dependable. Even now he could barely grasp both of its curving wings when he outstretched his arms. Of course his father had been a bigger man in every way; once his mother had them stand back to back to be measured, and his father was a quarter-inch taller. — I want you to have this, his father said when his parents moved away. But while his father lived, the desk was not so much used as imposed upon. This box of rope, scissors and string, what would happen to it now? He opened the drawer which contained a wooden gouge, perhaps his father’s, a box of Luke’s travel slides, the hair ornament pertaining to a bygone girlfriend (the scent of her cheap pomade, somewhat simplified by the decades, nonetheless resisted them), a square of the red cloth in which his signal pistol used to be wrapped, and the red pinwheel which his daughter had awarded him when she was in elementary school (nowadays her children preoccupied her so happily that he preferred not to inform her of his condition); and then he closed that drawer again, gnawing on a pain pill. The next drawer down was so full of unlabeled color negatives that it barely closed. He pulled it out an inch, just to remind himself that someday — as if there were still a someday! — he would sort all those images, and even utilize them. Shutting that one as best he could, he drew out the drawer containing an obsolete “Guide for Expeditions to the Canadian Arctic Islands,” a galvanized nail, a bottle of expired sulfa powder for frostbite, a photograph of a very young and handsome Luke (he ought to mail it to the widow, who continued unremarried), a pamphlet which discussed the breathing holes of ringed seals and the overwintering strategies of bearded seals, and a moon map, copyrighted thirty-five years ago. Half-smiling, he browsed for a moment over the craters of that bluish-grey disk. When he was a schoolboy, the teachers used to promise atomic-powered lunar travel “in our lifetime.” He had always wished to visit the moon.
But it was not in his father’s desk but in his own that he had to search. The stout square legs of this ugly if likewise capacious item, whose smooth top was wood-patterned laminate, doubled as filing cabinets. The left side being unlockable, he used that for his contracts and other such items which he never would miss if someone stole them. His father would have guarded them better. The righthand cabinet was for old love letters; those he had locked up years ago. Where was the key? Over the years he had dropped all keys extraneous, unknown or momentarily unnecessary into a ceramic dish on his father’s desk. As it was, he still carried too many around — the price of owning properties, leasing mailboxes and hiding secrets.
And so in advance of dawn he was on his knees before the desk, wearily trying this key and that in the spiderwebbed lock on the inner side of the righthand leg. He seemed to remember a brass, short-necked entity with a trapezoidal head. But no object of any comparable description served. Could the lock require oiling? He would spray it as soon as he felt less ill — any day, no doubt. First he’d better open it. An impatient craving overtook him for this forgotten miniature country, whose people and landscapes he once knew so well. In his healthier years, boredom had impelled neglect; and so he had commenced the effort half expecting to be stupefied by futility and disgust the instant he gained admittance; but with every failure his longing waxed. — That’s life, thought the dying man. — In his haste he made the mistake of trying only the most likely keys in each ring. Then he started all over again, more systematically. One brass key whose head happened to be ovoid penetrated to the hilt, but declined to turn. A loose silver key leaped from his fingers and disappeared into the dusty darkness. He reached for it, but his stomach checked him at once. Rising, he swallowed two codeine pills. It was sunrise. He lay down, his eyes slowly half-closing.
When he found the key three days later, he had given up looking for it. Most certainly he had tried every key in the ceramic dish. This one, the ugly-headed object, lay beside the dish as if it had always been there. He turned the lock and opened the drawer. So many women! Luke had met several of them. — Bella struck me as brilliant from the beginning, he said. But she never did her homework. I wonder if she’s lost her mind? — Then for a moment the two friends would remember Bella together, and because Bella had been so long ago there was no pain, only the moderate pleasure which scientific colleagues might share when they identified another previously uncatalogued virus. — Beatrice was my favorite, Luke would say. I felt like she and I had a lot in common. What a goddamned nightmare she was. Have you heard from her? — And he would feel happy that Luke was remembering him by remembering his girlfriends.
He scooped up letters and let them fall. Now he was getting tired. At the very bottom (for she had been his first) lay the sack of letters from Victoria, in the fat envelope and the thin one.
He smiled; his heart beat fast. It was she whom he now most longed to know.
Had he first met her in later life he might have found her ordinary, although she probably wasn’t, this slightly plump blue-eyed blonde who had once been most provisionally his; and if he could have come across her now as she was then, he would simply have turned away from seventeen-year-old jailbait. But since he had known her then as he was then, he was free to claim her.