Jack (Gilead #4)(36)
This was misery enough to justify a drink. A binge, in fact. But for some reason he just spent most of the night lying on his bed, feeling an elemental loneliness pour into his bones, that coldness that inheres in things, left to themselves. When the heart rests from its labors, for example, that excruciating push of blood. What had happened was just what he had intended, but he had not thought it would catch him off guard like that, all in one instant, without a word to say for himself, though what that word might have been he couldn’t imagine. He had done her no harm at all. One lie that was more her fault than his. No, it wasn’t. She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely. He puts on one suit of clothes, a fraud is what he is. He puts on another suit of clothes—a bum, a grifter. A draft dodger was what he was. Even that was a lie. His name was a lie, no matter who had dampened his brow with it. Also his manners and the words he used and the immutable habits of his mind. Sweet Jesus, there was no bottom to it, nothing he could say about himself finally. He was acquainted with despair. The thought made him laugh. He had to admit that he found it interesting, which was a mercy, and which made it something less than despair, bad as it was.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
Much of the time this was his favorite poem. The second line seemed to him like very truth. It was on the basis of the slight and subtle encouragements offered by despair that he had discovered a new aspiration, harmlessness, which accorded well enough with his habits if not his disposition. Keeping his distance was a favor, a courtesy, to all those strangers who might, probably would, emerge somehow poorer for proximity to him. This was his demon, an eye for the most trifling vulnerabilities. He was doing fairly well until he saw that umbrella. Not true. He had bought that suit to wear to his mother’s funeral. His brother Teddy had found the rooming house where he had been staying and left an envelope of money and a note. This had put Jack to the bother of finding another rooming house. Teddy seemed to have contented himself that the man at the counter was not entirely dishonest and left money with him from time to time, enough so that the man could appropriate half of it and Jack would have something to get by on. Cash meant that Teddy had been there, had once more traveled whatever distance in whatever weather, at intervals that were long but regular enough that Jack could have been there, sitting on the steps, when that brown sedan pulled up. The embraces, the tears. Jack had thought about it, which did not mean he had considered it. In any case, there was the chance, the likelihood, that Teddy, ever the gentleman, was making himself easy to avoid. And he persisted, leaving money on the chance that Jack was alive and got some of the money, accepting the assurances the desk clerk offered him.
For two years the clerk might not have known where Jack was or that he was alive, but he saved up half the money that Teddy left, which was notably honorable. When Jack appeared again, he handed him a note from his father that said, “Your dear mother is failing. She yearns to see you,” and so on, and the note from his brother that said, “I can come for you. Or you can buy a bus ticket. At least try to come home in time for the funeral, which we expect will be soon.” So, the dark suit. Half an intention, fought to a draw by a dozen considerations, the chief one being that he no doubt still had something of prison about him, sullen acquiescence and the rest. They might expect him to see his mother in her coffin, maybe with his father looking on, which would confront him with the meaning of his life, which had no meaning at all but was terrible in its consequences. He had learned to seem hardened against rebuke, and that would be unacceptable in the circumstances.
Terrible thoughts would get him out of bed, out into the weather where the trees and the people were, all, everything, indifferent to his sins and omissions. Why wash, why shave. He went to his bench by the bridge and dozed dreamlessly in the sun. Someone passed behind him and sat down at the other end of the bench. It was Della. He knew it before he had even opened his eyes, and he could hardly believe his eyes when he saw her, sitting there quietly, reading a book. Worse and worse. She glanced at his face, saw whatever she saw, and went back to her book.
He said, “I want to apologize.”
And she said, “No need.” It had to appear that they weren’t there together, so she turned a little away from him. “I was rude.”
A white couple passed arm in arm, talking together in those voices people use when they seem to want to be overheard. The woman—“I’ll tell you what I think!” The man—“I think I already know!” Laughter.
Then Jack said, softly, “No. Not at all.”
The bells struck up that great music of clash and clangor, and when they were done, she said, “I have to go.” She put her book down on the bench, put a pen in her handbag, and walked away. He waited a minute or two, then leaned across the bench to pick it up. It was hardly in his hand when a colored boy in a ball cap grabbed it away. “You were just going to steal that lady’s book,” he said, and ran after her to give it to her. He saw Della thank him, saw the boy wave off whatever she was offering him from her purse, saw her walk away without a backward glance.
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