Exile on Kalamazoo Street (11 page)

“But what do you really think, Paul?”

He hesitated. “Certainly it wasn't a stinker.”

“But ….”

“Well, it wasn't as much fun as the other two, Bryce. I guess that's how I'd put it. That doesn't make it bad. It was just different than the first two. A new direction, perhaps.”

“A dead end, you mean.”

“I wouldn't go
that
far, Bryce.”

“How far
would
you go?”

“It's different among friends,” he said. “The politics of criticism are different.”

“We're still friends?”

“Of course. Did you think we weren't, Bryce?”

“I don't know,” I finally said. “It's been a long few months, I guess.”

“Exile can't be easy.”

“But it's been necessary.”

“I guess I see that, Bryce.”

“Do you?”

“I don't know. I'm trying to. What matters is how
you
see it, I suppose.”

Black Kitty slipped off the back of the chair and into my lap.

“I'm still working on how I see it, Paul.”

He nodded. “Understandable.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Reasonably.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You really haven't been outside at all?”

“Not since Christmas.”

“Not a foot outside?” Paul said.

“No, that's the rule. The prime directive: no foot set outside. No full foot.”

“No full monty?”

“No,” I laughed. “Certainly no full monty.”

“How about toes?” he said, grinning.

“Once. One time I dipped my toes in the snow. Not as much fun as dipping toes off a dock in summer.”

“I can imagine,” he said. “So, when does it end?”

“What do you mean?”

“This … exile,” he said.

I rubbed Black Kitty behind the ears and watched his eyes slowly close.

“I guess it ends when it ends. All things end when they end.”

A
bruptly, rudely, winter declined its invitation to leave. The morning after Paul's visit, I woke up to drifting flakes, and the backyard was painted white again. Squirrels perched on branches and seemed as disappointed as I was. But it was not very cold. I stuck a bare foot out the sliding deck door and knew the snow would melt quickly. The forecast predicted rain soon, though the forecast had not predicted snow.

My sister Janis—named for Janis Joplin and not resembling Joplin in appearance or behavior—showed up at a little after five with supplies. I invited her in, which surprised her. She had cut her long blond hair into something that struck me as perky, trendy. It framed her broad face nicely. I supposed she was still young enough to worry about trends and what vacuous people on TV looked like, despite leaning a bit too far toward the limited Republican view of the world. Still, the haircut suited her.

“How's that old black cat?” she said in the kitchen as she slipped off her navy peacoat and brushed her new bangs out of her eyes.

“He's around here somewhere,” I said as I emptied grocery bags on a counter and she handed me butter, milk, eggs, and yogurt for the refrigerator.

“Is he good company?”

“He doesn't say much. We communicate nicely by telepathy, though.”

She laughed and stacked cans of cat food on a shelf.

“You always liked cats, Bryce. Even when we were kids.”

“Cats always seemed to speak my language, Janis. And I guess I speak theirs.”

She leaned her back into a counter and watched me arrange things in the refrigerator.

“I still remember that big old orange one, Bryce. When we lived in Indiana.”

“EH,” I said as I closed the refrigerator door. “That was one hell of a cat.”

“He liked to sleep on my feet,” she said, “keep them warm.”

“Mine, too,” I said.

“I didn't know what EH stood for until I was in high school and you'd gone off to college,” she said. “I just thought it was initials and kind of a weird name.”

Memories of childhood washed over me: some good, some not so good. Dead history.

“Everyone thought I was odd to call a cat Hemingway, so I shortened it to EH,” I said. “I had just read
The Old Man and the Sea
in junior high school.”

We went into the living room and Janis sat on a sofa. I rummaged through the bookshelf next to the fireplace and found my battered old copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
. To myself I read the brilliant opening sentence about the tragic old man who could not catch a fish. The cadence and rhythm of it was still remarkable to me.

“Read it aloud, Bryce,” she said. “Just some of it.”

I read the wonderful opening sentence and several paragraphs after that. Then I closed the book and studied the cover a moment before finding it a more prominent place on the shelf.

“His writing is sort of like music,” she said.

“That's one of the secrets to writing, I think.”

“Making it like music?” she said.

“Yes, making it have rhythm. Making the language of a book have rhythm, that is. That's what carries the story.”

She nodded. It was very quiet for a moment.

“I could make tea,” she said.

“Go ahead. Lots of honey in mine.”

I listened to Janis rummage around in the kitchen. Black Kitty finally showed up, fresh from taking a nap upstairs on the bed.

“Were your ears burning, Black Kitty? We were talking about you.”

Black Kitty jumped onto the sofa and settled next to me.

Janis brought the tea and sat on the sofa. Black Kitty rolled over on his back, placed his paws against her leg, and purred.

“I guess he forgives me for capturing him that day,” she said.

“He's thanking you, I suppose.”

“I'm glad you have him.”

I studied her face a moment. She was still pretty, still youthful.

“Are you worried about me, Janis?”

“No. You seem okay. You look good … healthier. The hair takes some getting used to, but then you always were a bit of a rebel.”

“A rebel? Was I really?”

“You didn't accept things as you heard them, I mean,” she said. “You often went your own way.”

I leaned back into the sofa, slipped my hands behind my head, and stared up at the ceiling.

“And then I suppose I lost my way,” I said flatly.

“Yeah, I suppose you did,” she said, “but that's no sin. That's life.”

I wanted to ask her about her recent divorce, how she had adjusted, but I felt the subject was something to avoid. She was still adjusting to her daughters—my nieces—shuttling back and forth across town between her and her ex, who was a dentist. I had not seen them since exile began. Janis had managed her ex's dental practice, but now had a job managing another one.

“How's work, Janis?”

She shrugged her shoulders dramatically.

“It's going good so far,” she said. “This time I won't marry the dentist.”

“Probably a good idea.”

“He's too old, anyway,” she said.

“You're sure?”

“Oh, absolutely. He's sixty-four, for goodness' sake.”

“Just keep reminding yourself that,” I said.

We both laughed and sipped tea. It was the first time in years we'd had a relaxed conversation of any depth. The main reason for that, of course, was my drinking and carousing.

“Do you miss teaching, Bryce?”

I contemplated that question a moment, recalling a few teaching memories. Student faces were, of course, a blur.

“Some days I do, yes.”

“What about writing?” she said.

“Do I miss it, you mean?”

“Do you?”

“Of course,” I said, after staring for a few seconds at the blackened fragments of consumed wood in the fireplace, “but writing's different than teaching.”

“How so?”

“It requires a different energy, I guess.”

“Do you think you'll write again, Bryce?”

It was a good question. No specific answer came to mind and I sipped tea to buy time, but that didn't really help.

“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe. It didn't end so well the last time.”

“But you made good money from writing.”

I nodded. “Did you read the last one?”

“Some of it.” She looked down at Black Kitty curled against her. “I didn't always understand it. Are you too disappointed?”

I weighed that a moment.

“Not really. Hell, Janis, I didn't understand all of it, either.”

“Goodness, Bryce, you wrote the thing!”

She smiled and I smiled, too, and I really didn't feel very bad at all. The book seemed to be far enough out in my wake to finally joke about.

“Maybe the first two cancel out the last one,” I said.

“Of course they do. That's how you should look at it. And you can always write another.”

I frowned at the notion of starting a new book and stared into the dead fireplace. Maybe writing was not yet far enough in my wake after all. Or maybe I was just too touchy and really needed to get over it.

“Maybe,” I finally said. “It's complicated.”

“You could write about a man who never leaves his house, Bryce.”

She looked hopeful and I knew she was just trying to be helpful. I studied her face, which didn't seem to betray judgment and instead looked rather neutral, though she had always been good at disguising her emotions.

“It's not like I won't eventually leave the house, Janis. Staying here has served a purpose.”

She nodded and put her teacup on a coaster on the coffee table.

“Well, you can afford it, Bryce.”

I mulled that concept over for a moment.

“Do you mean financially, Janis? Or something else?”

“Financially, I guess. What other consideration would there be?”

I rubbed Black Kitty behind his ears and he turned back toward me.

“Oh, how it looks, I suppose,” I said. “Self-imposed exile in a house all winter. People talk about things like that.”

“It would be different if you were on welfare or something,” she said.

After a few seconds I said, “In a way, I am.”

She blinked several times, but didn't say anything. Then she got up and collected our empty cups and took them into the kitchen. I could hear her run water to rinse them.

M
y phone almost never rang, which was a good thing. I was usually startled just by the sound of it. And I almost never made calls except to order a pizza from Santorelli's or to remind Janis of something when she shopped for me. And, of course, Elsa never called. It wasn't a ‘call first' kind of thing that we had—whatever it was that we had, which was still a mystery, but a pretty pleasant one. All mysteries should involve a naked 23-year-old woman with a shaved, 23-year-old vulva.

Elsa would show up unexpectedly from time to time, with no pattern to the time-to-time part of it, and we always ended up in bed for an afternoon or an entire night. Sometimes days went by between sudden visits—she always knew where she could find me—and I was okay with that. It helped lessen any notion I might have of a relationship with or responsibility for her.

On this day, amid fleeting thoughts of Elsa's mercurial unpredictability and her 23-year-old, shaved vulva, the phone rang. Black Kitty was keeping my feet warm as I reread
Tender is the Night
on the sofa. In the background I played the Stones' album,
Let it Bleed.
The phone seemed louder than it should, insistent. Perhaps the overall quiet in the house—just the occasional metallic clicking when the heat came on—made the ringing of the phone seem too loud, out of proportion to its usefulness. I actually moved too slowly to answer it, and it stopped, but as I sat back down on the sofa it rang again, and that made me curious to know who was so persistent and why.

The caller was my agent—former agent?—Mavis Thompson of Mavis Thompson and Associates Literary Agency, of the Pretentious Nation of New York City. I assumed she was my
former
agent because we had not talked in quite some time, and because I had not written a damn thing in an even longer time, and of course, the last book had been a stinker, regardless of how Paul tried to spin it. The last book was the one I gave Rev. Mortensen. He'd handled it like a turd suddenly dropped in his hand. I figured his opinion of me could surely not drop any lower, but there was always that chance and one could hope.

So, in the midst of exile in a Midwestern burg desperately waiting for winter to really get off its fat ass and leave—I assumed the burg was desperate but I could not be sure since I was in exile—a call had come in from New York.

The big old goddamn apple.

The freaking center of the freaking universe.

A legend in its own mind.

Civilization.

I had spent time in New York when I was actually writing books that made sense … and money. I was not fond of the place. Midwesterners aren't born with the automatic notion that everyone else lives in the wrong place. But New York had some terrific bars—that little Irish basement across from the art museum. Whiskey River had flowed through it like Niagara Falls. All the bartenders in that bar knew me well.

“Mavis Thompson,” I said into the phone. “I'm surprised you still have my number. And that you would call it.”

“I had to look for it, Bryce. I won't kid you. I found it on the wall of the ladies room, where you must have scrawled it.”

“Probably a fan, Mavis.”

“You keep believing that, Bryce.”

“And perception becomes reality, Mavis.”

“In your dreams. So … how long has it been?”

“A couple years, at least. Should we try and calculate it?”

“Any interest in that, Bryce?”