“I don’t often stop to think about it,” the waitress said, springing into action again and giving Ben his lunch. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”
“You probably see it all in a second, don’t you?” Fran said. “You can probably look in their eyes and see what kind of a tip they’re going to leave.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” the waitress said.
“What their relationship is to one another,” Fran said.
“Yes,” the waitress said, looking directly into Fran’s eyes. “I’m usually right about that.”
6
Disturbing, Chap thought. Disturbing to get such a self-pitying letter from Marshall, saying that summer would be the ideal time to die. That predictable periphrasis: “Passing on to the Heavenly Kingdom.”
Disturbing that the Brunettis’ house seemed to intensify Fran’s feeling of isolation. Though she had finally perched on one of the wooden kitchen stools to draw a still life of fruit in a wicker basket, her heart hadn’t been in it. Things had to speak to Fran — declare their necessity, so she would not feel she was just some zookeeper, capturing them — or drawing became just a chore. Of the several drawings she had done during their stay, the first seemed to him the most complex and … well, disturbing. The loose weave of the basket was picked up, or rather made to seem similar to, the grillwork of the Galaxy fan they had brought with them. Once the eye detected the strange similarity between the fan front’s splayed metallic regularity and the basket’s handwoven symmetry, though, you began to notice what the grillwork hid (amber blades) and what the basket contained (shiny, overripe fruit). That was what artists did. Like poets, they ferreted out strange connections. Though he was not really sure what conclusion could be drawn from what he observed in Fran’s drawing. That two dissimilar things were similar? If that was all there was to it, why wouldn’t she jumble together any number of similar shapes?
He looked, again, at Anthony Brunetti’s drawing he had seen his first night in the house. Naturally Lou would like the fact that his son could think three-dimensionally. That the boy was not put off by the material world, but saw in it shapes that could be exposed, transparent cubes wittily tipped and rectangles into which he could stare.
He remembered seeing 2001 stoned, and how utterly convincing and involving it had seemed. He wondered if there was a video store nearby, and whether he might be able to rent that movie to watch again, although he realized at the same time that in doing so, he would just be opening the floodgates for disappointment.
That word again.
He finished his letter to Marshall a bit more abruptly than he intended. He was afraid that if he went on, and allowed larger issues to intrude, he would never be able to keep Marshall focused on the facts. When a person was in distress, it was not the time for anyone else to question the order of the cosmos. He had written a firm, fond letter to Marshall, enclosing a check and telling him to have the house insulated before winter, or he would be forced to go there and hire somebody to do the job himself.
Of course he realized that Marshall had not wanted the mention of winter’s cold to suggest only the temperature of the house. He knew perfectly well what Marshall meant, but except for insisting on his own affection for Marshall, he could not imagine what incentive to go on he might offer.
He was sitting on a kitchen stool. He had pushed it across the floor so it was six feet away from the area where Fran had been drawing. She had her spot, he had his. In her spot, a few tiny gnats spiraled up from the ripe bananas. In his, there was a stain made by the bottom of the coffee mug. He gave it a moment’s thought: it was interesting that while the Brunettis liked variety among the things they collected, the kitchen plates and cups were all uniform: mugs in different colors, but exactly the same shape. Simple white plates in graduated sizes.
He was not sure which of Pia’s breasts had been removed. But of course that did not matter at all. The fact of having one breast missing was horrible, but undoubtedly something a man could never really understand, just as a woman couldn’t really know what it felt like to be kicked in the balls.
The sun was shining on the garden. Butterflies fluttered. For a split second, he allowed a Daliesque scene to shimmer outside the kitchen window, where a naked-torsoed Pia stood behind the garden, like the Virgin presiding over paradise. Just as quickly the image was gone, and he thought, for the second time that day, about LSD. About seeing 2001 stoned, about the chances he had taken, the time he had wasted during that period of his life when he often viewed the world through a drug haze.
He ground fresh coffee. As the water boiled, he thought that skills — things you could do in the world — were likely to help you, but that objects — because they could never be complex enough, and rarely beautiful enough — would almost always disappoint you. Fran was not a skier, so it was difficult to explain to her how the same ski slope could be so involving, day after day. The slope itself was fascinating: varying, even as you rode the lift to descend again. But the further fascination was in your own skill, because you could never tell when chance would intervene, when you would have to compensate for something that was happening. Only an egocentric fool would try to predict his response vis-à-vis chance and as a variable in danger. You just snapped to, even when it already seemed too late, and you found yourself operating automatically.
He turned off the water, deciding that caffeine was the last thing he needed. He even took a deep breath and left the kitchen, suspecting, as Fran did, that the room made him a little crazy. Bad vibes, he would have said in the sixties. Or no vibes at all, which was just as bad.
He, too, discovered the Fiestaware in Lou’s study. The window above Lou’s drafting table had been left open, and the wind that had begun to blow as the sky clouded over sucked the door closed. When Chap opened the door, he looked for a doorstop and found, instead, the shelf of blue dishes. Marshall’s wife had had some of those plates, though he hadn’t seen them in years. By now, they were probably all broken.
Lou’s room did have good vibrations. The posters from European museums were in good taste; the architectural drawings drew you in. He sat on Lou’s high chair and looked out the window. He could imagine being an architect. Which also made him think about Fran, and the decision she was trying to come to about what job to move on to next. When you were an adult, you could not easily try on other professions: no dressing up in a white hat as a nurse; no clomping around in firemen’s boots. It was no longer a matter of how you dressed that transported you, but the possibilities, say, awakened by music, though explaining its direct application would have made you sound like a fool.
He pushed the POWER button on Lou’s stereo, then the PLAY button for the tape inside. Whatever it was was unfamiliar. He listened for quite a while, though, liking it — liking being in the room sitting on Lou’s drafting chair, his feet dangling because they could not touch the floor — preoccupied by the motion of a wasp examining the outside window frame. It had such a delicate, frightening body, and it was so intent upon what it was doing. Though there was every chance that the wasp was only programmed. That what it was doing had nothing to do with selectivity and everything to do with survival. The wasp flew up, then landed and crawled to the top corner of the outside window frame. It was just a little too far away for him to see it clearly without his glasses. In a minute or two, during which he lowered the window a bit because the breeze was coming much stronger and there was going to be a storm, the music changed. As he was transported, the music changed once again. The tape must have been a compilation of things Lou liked. He pushed EJECT and took out the tape. He had been wrong: it was a tape by a group called Metropolis. They were so good they could play in a variety of musical styles and be utterly convincing. Fran’s favorite book by Calvino was on the floor. A book by Richard Rorty was on Lou’s drafting table, the charge receipt tucked inside. Another wasp joined the wasp crawling outside the window. The first drops of rain began to fall. He got up, closed the window all the way, and went back to the kitchen, where he stood looking out the screen door. The driveway was deeply rutted. The holes had been filled with muddy water when he and Fran arrived, from so much rain. Mosquitoes hovered outside the screen, wanting to get in. He realized his folly: he was anthropomorphizing again. They were instinctually drawn to the surface of the screen. Who knew what made them hover?