Ray and Becky danced with the ease of old friendship. Raymond kept his hips in a respectful rhythm that he never showed with Ann; with Ann it was always deeper and more fraught with sex and abandon and promise. There was a stiffness to him now, Jim saw, a sense of going through motions. When Ray made a turn, his black eyes locked for a moment with Jim’s, and in that instant Weir was reminded again that whatever the final tally would be, Raymond’s loss was the deepest and least fathomable, that Raymond’s memory would be forever tainted by the bitter scent of Ann’s betrayal. Raymond looked away.
And when he did, another truth stood revealed to Jim: that from this point on, Raymond and he would begin to drift apart. Even now he could feel in himself the autonomic recoil when he stood close to Raymond, feel the self-protective urge to go away. It was the weight of Ann, he knew, of the tragedy that had bruised them all; it was something akin to returning, as he once did, to the hospital where Poon had breathed his rattling last, where a frantic voice had told him to get the hell away from there as fast as he could. But that was only part of it. In the future, Raymond would find another woman, and when that happened, Raymond would have to seal off some of this, if there was to be any chance at all of a happiness and a life. Jim saw that he would become to Raymond what Raymond already was becoming to him: a living reminder of pain, an agent of sadness, a fellow traveler on a road once shared but no longer passable.
Jim wondered, How do I keep that from happening?
Becky dragged Raymond off the floor and to the bar. Nesto handed her the phone. Jim watched her nod, freeze, nod again, then give it back to Nesto. She brought Raymond to the table.
“D’Alba’s considering. George said to give them another hour. I can’t stand this. Anybody got a cigarette? Look-it’s speech time. This lady’s great.”
Weir bummed a smoke and lit it for Becky. They sat back in the booth and watched two young men push the old woman in the wheelchair toward the stage. They forgot to lock the chair wheels and nearly lost her over the edge once they had gotten her up. She rolled to the microphone under her own power. The twelve-year-old accordian player lowered the mike for her, cinched it tight, bowed. There was a smattering of applause, which seemed to wither in the voracious stare of this woman, who sat glaring into the crowd. Her downy white hair, backlit by the stage lights, stood out around her head like a halo. She held her hands in her lap, wrapped around a tumbler of scotch delivered by Irena. It got so quiet that Jim could hear the ice clinking in her glass.
“Thank you so much for inviting me here tonight,” she said. “I’ve come to the age where my humble meanderings are praised in public and giggled at in private, but I accept the mantle with whatever grace I can muster. My name is Doris Tharp.”
Weir was surprised at the resonance of her voice, a genderless tenor that seemed launched from a hollow of smoothly polished teak. She sipped from her scotch.
“You deserve better,” she said. “You deserve a Homer to chronicle these days, a seer, a sibyl. But this is not an age of prophets. It is an age of spokesmen... spokespersons. Even our sex awaits the leveling boot heel of conformity — but, I digress. At ninety-one, one’s entire life becomes a digression. My grandfather fought at Shiloh in the Civil War; my father came west in a covered wagon. One of my grandsons flew last week from New York to Paris in three hours on a Concorde; another died two years ago from a virus that didn’t even exist when John Tharp took up arms against the Union.
“I’d like to let you in on a little secret — there is no such thing as history. History is the name given to events in order to mark them for our forgetfulness. Nothing is really past us, in the same way that nothing is really with us — it all changes between blinks of the eye, no two moments the same. Those ignorant of history are not doomed to repeat it — that would be a staggering achievement. They are simply doomed to ignorance of everything else.
“But you asked me to talk about Proposition A, didn’t you?
Doris lifted her scotch glass and sipped. Her eyes — ice blue in the lights — peered into the crowd. Jim had the feeling they were seeing every detail of each face, every thought behind the face. It was quiet enough to hear the bay water lapping against the sand outside.
“We are a nation spoiled by excess, bored with the spoils, fattened on the boredom. We are a people not of ideas but of notions. We are a people hypnotized by the notion that we know what is good for the world, when in fact we don’t know what is good for ourselves. The average American family watches television for seven hours a day. Television executives defend the slop they serve us as ‘what the people want.’ The Medellin Cartel sells us ‘what the people want.’ The President tells us, on television, that we must stop the invasion of drugs because that is ‘what the people want.’ Let me tell you something: People want everything. We are accumulators, hoarders, gluttons, and misers. We Californians produce more trash per person than any other state in the nation, than any other civilization in the history of the planet. But we want more. We want things that don’t even exist yet; yes, we want those, too.”
Doris Tharp sipped her drink again, eyes fixed on the audience. “Why? Because it was here. A bounty inconceivable — an ocean teeming with fish, endless valleys of fertile soil, month upon month of growing season, rivers overflowing with gold. We devoured it at first just to live; now we live just to devour it. And what have we offered in return but one great wrapper licked clean and tossed back — a dead ocean, dead air, and hundreds of thousands more people rushing in to lick the wrapper.
“You people out there, you who want to stop the building and preserve what is left, if that is all your imagination can muster, then go forward with my blessing. But don’t forget your obligation to add something good to what is left. Don’t forget the backs that labored to bring you here; don’t forget that the roofs over your heads were put there by men you trained to do this, men you honored and courted and hired to protect you from the March wind and the August sun. Don’t forget that we are the builders, we are the spoilers, we are the insatiable guests living off the host of great generosity.
“Narcissus drowned in the pool of his self-admiration, and I fear that we may do that, too. We are not morally superior here; we are not the great friends of Earth — look at us, we sit here for the benefit of ourselves tonight, and nothing more — we are only the few who have found enough. It is our duty to share, not to hoard; to offer, not to abscond. Why? Because we have been blessed far more than we have blessed; we have been protected far more than we have protected; and we are all in need not of being saved but of being decent. Thank you.”
There was a hovering, tentative moment of silence before the applause started — scattered at first, then fuller, then rising in pitch and volume until the walls seemed to participate. Becky stood, then everyone else did. Jim watched as the two young men lifted Doris Tharp down from the stage. She handed one of them her glass, then wheeled herself through the parting crowd and out the door.
Nesto was waving frantically from behind the bar. Becky shot up, powered her way through the crowd, took the phone again. For a long while, she didn’t move. Weir’s legs felt numb. Then she placed the receiver back on its cradle, said something to Nesto, and came back to the booth.