Jack (Gilead #4)(38)
“Pork chops would be excellent.”
They had the place almost to themselves. They could talk in the ordinary way of conversation, at least till later, when the piano started up and the crowd came. He had spent days in the library thinking about what he would say to her, drawing the map and the heavenly host on the flyleaf of a big travel book that had not been checked out for years, since before the war, and then only twice. The page pulled loose from its binding very cleanly. Whenever his father found one of his drawings, he’d say, “He’s the clever one. He’s going to surprise us all one day.” He heard his mother say once, “I guess you’re never going to give up on him.” His father seemed to consider, and then he said, “I’m just not sure there would be any point in it.” But the angels went well, they were fat and buoyant, cumulus. Della had to like them, he thought. And she did. Cleverness has a special piquancy when it blooms out of the fraying sleeve of failure. That was his experience, the magic trick he could usually play when he had to.
And here she was. He said, “New tie,” when he realized he was smoothing it.
She smiled and said, “New hat.”
He was in love with her. That did it. That hat brought out glints of rose in the warm dark of her skin. Women know that kind of thing. She, Della, wanted him, Jack, to see that particular loveliness in her. These thoughts interfered considerably with the efforts at conversation he should have been making.
She said, “That bridge you talk about really is handsome. Those huge stones. The walls of Troy must have looked like that.”
“Yes. Herod’s temple.” Then he said, “Have you ever been to Bellefontaine?”
“The white cemetery? Why, no. I haven’t had much occasion.”
Of course. What a stupid question. He said, “I only ask because there is a tree there, a really huge old tree. I’ve probably walked by it a hundred times without noticing anything about it. But one time I happened to look back, and I saw blossoms all over it. Seriously. Big sort of golden-colored blossoms, each one upright, like it was floating on something. And I thought that was an amazing thing. The leaves hide them. But from a certain distance, there they are. I thought that was interesting.” He didn’t think it was even slightly interesting now, listening to himself tell her about it, although at the time it had seemed startlingly wonderful, one of those self-erasing, soul-freeing moments when you might actually say, “I get the joke!” He had felt the lack of someone to describe it to. This quiet, smiling woman had had that place in his thoughts for weeks. And now he was reminded that the places he went and the things he saw, few as they were, were nothing he had in common with her. That musty, unvisited corner of the library where he almost lived was a place he had imagined telling her about. And now he realized that it would be unkind to mention it—the refuge of his poverty and his idleness and whatever else it was about him that brought him to skulk among forgotten books, hoping that old lady had remembered him when she was packing her lunch. Dear Jesus, what a life! And this lovely woman, whose hat was no doubt actually new, wouldn’t have the privilege of reading through all that pathos and pomposity and finding a line here and there worth reading to someone—she having been that someone in his thoughts for what seemed like forever.
She was looking at him calmly, kindly. She said, “It’s probably a tulip tree. That’s really what they’re called. They’re native to North America!” She laughed. “When I was a girl, one of my brothers gave me a book about trees. I knew everything about all of them for a while. Then he gave me a book about dogs.”
“I have a brother. Actually, I have three brothers. But Teddy—he’s a little younger than I am. We were close, I suppose. He’s a doctor now.”
“How often do you see him?”
“Never.” Flinch. “Very seldom. It seems like never.” If he wasn’t careful, he might tell her the truth sometime.
She read his face, and then she said, “I’ve always heard that Bellefontaine is beautiful.”
“If you like that sort of thing.” The waiter put plates down in front of them. Pork chops, a mound of potatoes cratered with the back of a spoon and filled with that oddly species-less gravy. There are probably ten laws in Leviticus that forbid that gravy. He said, “There are some pretty amazing monuments in there, and whole little neighborhoods of Greek temples, probably accurate in every detail, I suppose. About the size of woodsheds. There is one that has a statue of the woman it belongs to lying there under a canopy. All marble, very elegant. The inscription on it says, ‘She died for beauty.’”
“Really! How did she manage that?”
“Arsenic. A gardener told me. She took little dabs of it to make her skin very white, and once she took too much.” Dear Jesus, what a story.
Della said, “The poor dear!” There wasn’t just laughter in her eyes, he could see that. Affection, possibly.
Then he heard a voice he knew too well. There were some fellows, not always the same ones, who made a joke of shaking him down, collecting something he owed, they said, never quite enough to pay it off. He probably did owe something to somebody and was, in any case, usually too drunk to object. He glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, two of them. Della looked at them.
He said, “Excuse me a moment, please,” and left through the kitchen, glad he knew the place. It wasn’t only the embarrassment, being taunted as a drunk and a deadbeat in front of Della, having to put his money on the table and then turn his pockets out. And having to do it sober. He would give in immediately, or he would attempt some sort of self-defense, which could only end badly, since there were two of them. In either case, the ruckus wouldn’t end until they let it, and by then the cops might have come. There would be talk, and Della might be named—sneaky and spineless as it would have been under any other circumstances, often as he had done it under all kinds of circumstances, he was pretty sure this time he was doing the right thing.