Ricky had told me that his wife worked in some office, typing business documents. He explained, in his breathy east-coast accent, that she was ordinary and dull and he had too young been seduced by her beauty, her astonishing breasts, and his own fierce desire. He assured me I knew him in a way that she never could. Our discussions after Alvord’s class, and in the cafeteria over coffee, and on benches in front of the library, our debates about literature and genius — who knows now if their content held anything more remarkable than youth and idealism cooked up in a predictable collegiate stew?
Still, that night in the library, he stopped his work to stare intensely at me across the table time after time — but didn’t smile. We were conspirators, we shared a plan, an ingenious plot to outfox time, mortality, death. We were both going to be famous writers, and we would, by our words alone, live forever.
At some point that evening, in his frenzy of writing, Ricky’s cramped fingers relaxed, his head dropped sideways onto his arm on the table-top, and he fell asleep in the library. He remained there, vulnerable and naked in my gaze, breathing as I knew he must breathe as he slept beside his wife in that trailer, his mouth slightly open, his blue-veined eyelids closed over his blue eyes, his nostrils flaring slightly with each breath.
I watched him till the library closed, watched his face and memorized every line of his fair cheek, the angle of his chin, watched fascinated as a thin thread of drool spooled from his slightly parted lips to the table-top. I looked around me to be sure no one was near or watching. Then, before he woke, I very slowly moved my hand across the table and anointed the tip of my pencil with his silver spit.
The second time Ricky called me my husband was in the room. It was thirty years later, a day in late August. I, with a slow but certain fortitude, had written and published a number of novels by then. My three daughters were grown. The baby who had been at my breast at the time of his first call was in graduate school, older than I had been when Ricky slept opposite my gaze in the library.
“Janet? This is a voice from your past.”
A warning bell rang in my chest. At that moment my husband and I were deeply absorbed in a discussion about some family troubles. I felt rudely interrupted. I had no interest in the game he wanted to play.
“Which past?” I said. “I have many.”
“It’s Ricky, your old buddy.”
“Well — Ricky! How are you?” I said his name with some enthusiasm because he expected it, but I felt my heart sink because I knew I would have to listen to his troubles and I had no patience just then. The game of “remember what we meant to each other” had lost its appeal. By this time everyone I loved filled up my life completely. I had not even a small chink of space left for a latecomer. “Are you still living in Pennsylvania?”
“No, I’m right here!”
“Right here?” I looked down into my lap as if I might find him there.
“In sunny California. In your very city. And I’m here for good.”
“How did you know where to reach me? My number isn’t even listed!”
“I found one of your books back east and on the cover it said what city you lived in. So when I got here — and I want you to know I picked this city because of you — I went to the library and asked the librarian. I knew a librarian was bound to know where the city’s most famous writer lived. I told her I was your old buddy and she gave me your phone number.”
“I’m not famous, Ricky.”
“Me neither,” he said. “How about that?”
I told him I would call him back in a half hour — and in that time I explained to my husband, more or less, who he was. An old college friend. A used-to-be-writer. A drunk. I don’t know why I dismissed Ricky so harshly. Something in his voice had put me on guard. I could see that this game of playing tag with time made no sense. By now I had settled into my ordained life like concrete setting in a mold, and I no longer trifled with the idea that I might want to change it, especially not by mooning after long-expired romantic visions. With a sense of duty, though, I phoned him back… and braced myself.
“You won’t believe the stuff that’s happened to me,” he said. He laughed — he almost cackled — and I shivered. “Can we get together?”
When I hesitated, he said, “I’ve been through AA, I’m a new person. I’m going to join up here, too, of course. The pity is that before I turned myself around I lost every friend I ever had.”
“How come?”
“How come? Because an alcoholic will steal from his best friend if he has to, he’ll lie with an innocent face like a newborn baby. There’s nothing I haven’t stooped to, Janet. I’ve been to the bottom, that’s where you have to be before you can come back. I’ve rented a little room in town here, and I’m hoping… well, I’m hoping that we can be friends again.”
“Well, why not,” I said. I felt my vision darken as if I were entering a tunnel.
“But mainly — I’m hoping you’ll let me come to your class. I want to get started writing again.”
“How did you know I teach a class?”
“It says on your book, Janet. That you teach writing at some university or other.”
“Well, you certainly are a detective, aren’t you?”
“I’m sly as a fox.”
“I guess you could visit my class when it begins after Labor Day. I’ll tell my students that you studied with me in Alvord’s class. Since most of my old students will be coming back to take the advanced class, they already know about Alvord. In fact, I quote him all the time. We use all his old terms — ‘action proper, enveloping action.’ We talk about his dedication to point of view. Maybe we can even get a copy of your old prize story and discuss it.”
“Great. So when can we get this friendship on the road again?”
“Look — I’m having a Labor Day barbecue for my family and some friends on Sunday — why don’t you come? Do you have a car?”
“I can borrow one.”
“Do you need directions? I’ll have my husband give them to you.” I called Danny to the phone and handed him the receiver. “Tell my friend Ricky the best way to get here.” I wanted Ricky to hear Danny’s voice, to know unequivocally that I was taken, connected, committed… that I wasn’t under any circumstances available.
A stranger rang the doorbell, a man eighty years old, skin jaundiced, skeletal bones shaping his face. The golden hair was gray and thin. Only his voice, with an accent on his tongue like the young Frank Sinatra, convinced me he was the same Ricky. When I shook his hand, I felt his skin to be leathery, dry. When I looked down, I saw that the nails were bitten to the quick.
He came inside. I felt him take in the living room in one practiced glance — the art work, the antiques, the furniture — and then we passed out the screen door to the backyard where the party had begun.
Danny was on the patio, grilling hamburgers and hot dogs over the coals. My three daughters, one already married, and two home from their respective graduate schools, looked beautiful in their summer blouses and white shorts. I saw the backyard as Ricky must have seen it — alive with summer beauty, the plum tree heavy with purple fruit, the jasmine in bloom, the huge cactus plants in Mexican painted bowls growing new little shoots, fierce with baby spines.