On the other hand, my coordinator, Jenny, had not had any work for me that day, so I was free. I had been assigned to work at an architectural firm in Cambridge, but then they called and canceled and nothing else had turned up. I lay in bed for a while, took a shower, and wandered out to the back yard (my landlord’s yard, really) with a large heavy dry beach towel. I don’t know now what the date was, but I do know that it was early in the month, when I still felt full of hope (or perhaps it was so late in the month that I felt the undisturbed and imminent hope of the next month in full force), and it was sometime in the late spring. It was one of the first times I had gone out to lie in the sun that year; it was a clean, bud-popping blueout of a temperate-zone Boston weekday. A hundred very small hippopotamus-shaped clouds were on the march overhead, and though I like and respect a rigorously cloud-free morning as much as anyone — when the only possible seconds of shade you can expect out on your towel are those strangely paranormal ex-machinas when a high cruising bird (a gull on its way to inland Dumpsters) or an almost inaudible airplane comes momentarily between your eyelids and the sun, raising your consciousness of the conical geometry of umbral coincidence — given that there were all these evenly spooned-out clouds, regularly dispensing an ideal interval of coolness every five minutes or so, during which the trees regained their green depth and I had the opportunity to appreciate the heretofore-unnoticed sweat on my stomach, and given that I was nothing but a temp and lacked for the time being the one thing that kept my pride intact, which was my fermational gift, I was nonetheless quite happy with what the day had to offer. I invariably feel lucid and pleased with life after a shower anyway (there is an illusion of mental acuity that accompanies a thoroughly moistened and rejuvenated sinus-system and the sensation of wet hair-ends on the base of the neck), but seldom more pleased with life than when I can go directly from the tiley shower out to a clean warm sunlit beach towel on the lawn. I took off my watch and my glasses and set them on the edge of the towel, next to the Fieldcrest label; I took off my T-shirt and laid it gently over the portable phone, lying nestled in the grass, to keep it from overheating. I extended myself stomach-down on the towel (a blue-and-white-striped towel; the blue stripes were detectably warmer than the white ones) and let the weight on my ribcage produce a moan of utter contentment.
No thoughts of unclothed women disturbed my awareness; and it was not so late in the sunny season that lightweight, mothlike hopping creatures were liable to land annoyingly on my legs; I felt only how lucky I was that after a little rooting around, a little trial and error, the groundward side of my face was able to find, within immediate neck-flex range, as it always eventually did find, a conjunction of several sod-humps or dolmens that cradled my cheekbone fairly comfortably through the insulation of the sun-warmed towel. As when I took a seat in the older-style dentist’s chairs and discovered that the weight of my entire head was to be supported by two swiveling occipital cups that determined exactly how far back I would have to slide my ass, so my location on the lawn now became with this satisfactory cheekbone settlement suddenly unarbitrary: I was home, my eyes closed, breathing easily because of the recent shower, still damp here and there not yet with perspiration but with cleanliness, and able to hear, if I concentrated, pressing my headbones deep into Fieldcrest’s plush-blurred pattern, the lonely toils of a beetle or a grub somewhere very near my ear, chewing and pushing on some futile mission in the thatch. Was the weight of my head making life more difficult for the grub? Was there a grub there at all, or was it only the sound of the untenanted thatch itself adjusting to my weight? I couldn’t know, but I was sorry if I was causing trouble for any living thing. I plucked a few blades of grass with my fingers; I heard the muffled sounds of the breakage transmitted through the underreaching rhizomes. I felt calm, thoughtful, at rest — serenely unproductive.
In my idleness I had of course the option of letting my thinking drift in a number of mildly erotic directions at any time, but it seemed important to resist that lure for the moment. It would have been so easy to imagine three women in white bathing suits lying on white deck chairs on a pale-blue cruise ship with their heads poised in different directions, each with one knee up and with her eyes closed, each holding a forgotten bottle of sunscreen that was the color of those older Tercels and Civics whose owners had used their garages for storing other things than their cars and whose paint had consequently oxidized into states of frescoesque, unsaturated beauty, like M&Ms sucked for a minute and spit back out into the palm for study. It would have been so easy to think hard about those leggy thighs flowing into the leg-holes of those white bathing suits; about one of the women straightening one thighy leg and bending the other; about how good the sun made them feel. But I wanted to steer clear of the leg-holes until at least twelve-thirty, preferably one-thirty if possible, because it was so very delightful out in the sun, and there was, after all, an infinitude of complicated and intellectually rewarding ideas in the world that I might use my morning of otium liberate to consider, helped toward states of scholarly attentiveness by the intrinsic good of the blue sky, and if I gave my hindbrain the slightest opportunity to work up a comely sexual shape, my meditative range would inevitably narrow, the sex-thoughts would replicate busily, they would begin to polymerize, forming short, slippery narrative chains which would bind with other formerly innocent images and voluptualize them, contorting themselves like lipoproteins into self-contained masturbatory sub-realities, and from there into fully realized frigments of my invagination, and I would find that I had turned over onto my back to let the sweat on my chest declare itself, and I would bend one knee and perhaps reach tentatively inside my bathing suit to make sure everything was shipshape, and five minutes later I would be inside my apartment, where my eyes weren’t adjusted to the dimmer light, and where it was dissatisfyingly cool and unsunny, and I would send forth four gray stripes of fatherhood and fatherhood by-products onto a tree-patterned paper towel that was guaranteed to be made with more than seventy-five percent post-consumer waste, each stripe shorter and more albuminous than the last. And after that, the rest of the day would itself take on a post-consumer-waste sort of tone, an after-the-grand-fact tone, as when, on Saturdays, the mail was delivered unusually early and I would drive home from an errand in the late afternoon looking forward to it in error, thinking, Well, this was certainly a dud day, but at least there’s still the mail to come, until I slumpingly remembered that the mail had already come — the usual bulk-rate packets saying “To Be Opened by Addressee Only” or “Sexually Oriented Material Inside” or “Over 70 Brand Spanking New Items!! We Command You to Order Today.”