Boy, Snow, Bird(10)
“Well, go on, my child . . .”
“Thank you, Father. I think I got too close to the details of my era of supposed expertise. You lose certainty that anyone or anything is really instrumental; you know, maybe time just does all the deeds from great to despicable, and uses us, and we pitifully try to save face by pretending we were at the controls. From where I was sitting the whole thing looked and felt like a flea circus. Not entertaining, not illuminating, just endlessly pathetic. Why is this flea being made to carry that grain of rice across a stick of spaghetti? Sure, it’s the strongest flea there, the strongman of the crew, but it’s struggling . . . the rice is obviously too heavy. The whole thing’s kind of degrading to watch . . . I decided to quit, with no clear idea of what I wanted my new job to be. That wasn’t as important as planning how to break it to my family that I was about to throw away a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice, theirs and mine. Snow was well on her way to being born, and my wife liked things the way they were; I think her favorite thing about our . . . collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.”
He rested an elbow on the top railing and stood at a slant that made me think of the crooked man who walked a crooked mile. How does the rest of that nursery rhyme go? Something to do with this crooked man journeying farther and farther along and coming across crooked things that he takes for his own because nobody else wants them, and then he finds a crooked wife and the two of them have a crooked whale of a time ever after . . . ?
It began to look as if he was just going to stand like that without saying another word for the rest of the boat trip, so I said: “I didn’t know you had to change friends when you change jobs.”
I think he smiled. “You don’t, I guess. I don’t know . . . I sometimes go to dinner with those same people now and I feel like a poser. I get what they’re saying but I’m not as invested in their bickering. I’d rather talk metals. Anyway, back when I was still a professor, I think my wife got wise to me before I even said anything about quitting. She sat me down to tell me, quite urgently and emphatically, how proud she was of all my achievements . . .”
“I think I get the picture. But you said there were two reasons.”
“Right. Good memory. The second reason is that I met a jeweler on the train from Boston to Flax Hill one evening, and we got talking. Making baubles wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before I got talking to that man. Why feed vanity? He said: “Oh, come on now. What do you think you are, a Puritan?” He said any Puritan worth his salt knows that vanity isn’t fussy; it’ll eat almost anything. He said it’s a matter of fact that there’s no way to avoid feeding vanity, no matter what line of work you’re in. He seemed to be doing okay, much better than I was. He was happy with his work. He mentioned that he’d recently left his wife, not for another woman, just for peace of mind, but he continued to look forward to the future and saw no reason why it shouldn’t bring him good things. I picked up his briefcase by mistake as we were getting ready for our stop. We swapped back almost immediately, of course, but—his briefcase was so light. It was one of those cases that looked heavy—it looked like mine, which was full of printed matter—but its lightness was tempting. It made me want to walk away with it, walk all the way out of my existence and into his. He was going home to eat beans out of a can and sketch fractals into his design book. There were no flea circuses in his life.”
“No Julia in his life, either,” I said, wishing for a cigarette or something to do with my hands. I was learning the ways of the world; one of them being that the presence of a certain type of curly-haired man—your type—will cause you to fidget and fidget until the only way to reach some level of calm is to touch him.
“Right,” he said.
I waited seven heartbeats and then I said: “Yeah, your kind isn’t so rare. Spoiled brat. When he’s a bachelor, life’s tough because he has everything he needs except Miss Right, and when he finds a sweetheart with the full package—beauty, brains, sweet temper—she’s too much, she’s smothering him.”
He poured the rest of the glass of water into the harbor. “Guess I wasted my breath, huh?”
“Guess you did.”
—
at seven a.m., as the three of us walked back along the dock in Worcester, the sun shone onto us through wooden slats and Mia pulled off her wig, ran her fingers through her bouncy black hair, and laughed at my expression. She was writing a piece for the Telegram & Gazette. She was going to call it “The Secret World of Blondes.” I wondered aloud what she’d managed to find out.
“It’s going to be the final nail in the coffin for blonde-brunette relations,” Arturo predicted. “That or she’ll win a Pulitzer.”
“Very funny . . .” Mia blew him a kiss. She’d promised to give me a lift, so we climbed into her pink roadster and sped away. The road got brighter the farther east we went, and we passed trucks coming into the city. I think Mia wanted to swap some tales about the experience of being blonde, but I didn’t feel like doing any more talking, so I pretended to be asleep. Then I guess I got too committed, because the next thing I knew we were parked outside the boarding house and Mia was tickling me under the nose with a feather.