Exile on Kalamazoo Street (15 page)

“Re-entering society,” I finally said. “It almost sounds momentous.”

“Well,” she said, wiping the corners of her mouth with a napkin, “it is sort of a big deal, really.”

“Maybe the TV station can be persuaded to show up, Janis. They could film me emerging from my long hibernation, like Punxsutawney Phil.”

“You wouldn't want that.”

“No, I wouldn't.”

“One day you'll just walk outside. Don't you think, Bryce?”

“I suppose,” I said. “Not very dramatic.”

“Should it be?”

“No. Life goes on.”

We finished and I brought her chocolate ice cream. We sat at the table, full, satisfied, the pleasant crackling of the fire coming from the living room. At one point, though, I looked up sharply, over her shoulder toward the kitchen and side door, convinced I heard a knock. I didn't think it would be a good time for Elsa to show up with nothing on under her coat. And I didn't want to have to turn it down, either.

“Did you hear anything?” I said. “A knocking?” I cocked my head to one side and listened, but heard nothing.

“I didn't hear anything,” she said.

“Wait.” I held up a hand toward her and I concentrated hard. She swiveled her chair toward the door.

After a moment she turned back to me, arching her eyebrows.

“I'm not hearing anything, Bryce. Are you okay?”

I cocked my head one more time, but the only sounds came from cracking embers.

“I'm fine. Just thought I heard a knocking.”

“Expecting someone else?” Janis said.

“Just Jehovah's Witnesses.”

“Are you hearing things, Bryce?”

“Yes, a knocking. Just not this moment.”

She got up and went through the kitchen to the door. Even Black Kitty had come into the room and looked at me curiously.

“Nobody out there, Bryce,” she called loudly. “Should I walk up and down the block just to make sure?”

“Funny,” I called back.

I was both relieved and disappointed. And becoming practical, I fantasized that Elsa would turn up right after Janis left to help top off the evening nicely. That would be the dessert.

Janis brought us both more ice cream and sat down.

“Maybe you should get your hearing checked,” she said. “Or maybe being in the house alone all the time is making you a little buggy. Do you think?”

I shrugged. “It was probably that woodpecker—I hear him all the time. Usually in daytime, though.”

She arched her eyebrows again and ate ice cream.

“So, Bryce, how did it go with the movie people?”

Recalling Marci and Dylan was a sufficient enough diversion and I even smiled.

“It went swimmingly.”

“Swimmingly?”

“We didn't speak the same language, but managed to somehow understand each other.”

“That's what swimmingly means?”

“No, not at all.”

“You're not hearing any knocking now, are you,” she said, smirking.

“Only between the voices in my head.”

“Maybe that woodpecker finally called it a day and went to bed,” she said. “Did the movie people hear it when they were here?”

“It's the woodpecker's night off, Janis.”

“Well, that's a relief. So, you'll have to tell me what the film's about.”

“I will … as soon as I know.”

“You don't know?” she said.

“I haven't given it that much thought.”

“Yet you met with movie people—the ones paying you. That must have been a fascinating conversation.”

“It's quite a pickle, isn't it?”

She reached down and tickled Black Kitty behind his ears.

“I'll help you clear the table and do dishes,” she said.

“Don't even think of it, Janis,” I said as I grabbed our plates. “Go enjoy the fire.”

I cleared the table and stripped off the table cloth and took coffee to Janis; then I washed dishes and tidied up the kitchen. I opted for tea and joined her by the fire. The embers glowed orange and blue. I wasn't sure what type of wood was burning, but the aroma was sweet and pleasant. Black Kitty had been napping in a chair, but now he was awake and seemed mesmerized by the flames.

“He's your sidekick now, Bryce,” she said, inclining her head toward Black Kitty.

“He's a good boy.”

“He helped you through the winter, I think,” she said.

I thought about how Elsa helped me get through the winter, too. I listened a moment for any knocking sounds, but there weren't any.

“It would have been awfully lonely without Black Kitty,” I said, “but you helped me through the winter, too, Janis. Obviously I couldn't have done it without you.”

She sipped coffee and stared back into the fire.

“It was for a good cause,” she said finally.

“A lost cause, at one point.”

“Not true.” She shook her head vigorously and her long brown hair danced on her shoulders. “Only people who won't change are lost, Bryce.”

I nodded. It was a good line. It was true and a good line. A line for a book but an even better line for life.

“Once I was lost, but now am found,” I said. “What's that from?”

“ ‘Amazing Grace.' ” She kept staring into the fire. It gave her face a glow.

“I knew it was some song.”

“Mother sang that song when we were kids,” she said. “Don't you remember?”

Pieces of childhood came back to me.

“Yes. Yes, I do. Sobriety is good for the memory, I guess.”

“And soul,” she said, turning to me and smiling. The side of her face nearest the fire still glowed.

“Ah, the soul. An elusive character.”

“Is it?”

“Maybe not as much as it used to be, Janis. Another benefit of sobriety.”

She turned back to the fire.

“Can you hear her singing, Bryce—Mother singing that song?”

I could. It came back to me. It was far off in my mind, but distinct enough to hear.

“Yes, I can,” I said, smiling and feeling warm inside. “She had a lovely voice, actually.”

“Yes, she did. She sang in the church choir while you were away at college.”

“I never knew that, Janis.”

“She stopped after Dad died. That sucked all the wind from her sails, I guess.”

“That would do it,” I said.

I tried to remember the day he died, but it had been twenty-five years, and the memories were fragments, like shattered glass on a floor. Our mother was killed in a car accident just a couple years after Dad's heart attack. That was far more tragic than Dad's death, far more of a searing pain and loss, and yet it, too, had occurred long ago, back in the cloudy, murky past. Both experiences flooded back into me and my eyes flooded.

“I wish they had lived long enough to see my first book,” I finally said. “Does that seem selfish?”

She shook her head gently.

“It's not selfish. They would have been very proud of you.
I'm
very proud of you, Bryce. You've survived a lot.”

“Both of us.” I extended my tea and we toasted cups.

“To exile,” she said.

“Does exile really make sense to you, Janis?”

She smiled. “Now it does. More than before, anyway.”

We listened to the fire crackle and pop, entranced by the glowing embers. Soon Black Kitty tumbled from his chair and joined us. He sat between me and the fire, gazing into it longingly, it seemed—even lovingly. I wondered what was going through his mind. In my mind I was experiencing a jumble of feelings: loss and pain and confusion and dissipation and recovery and exile—but also hope.

I thought, as I had early in my exile, of “The Dead” and the incomparable passage about snow falling all over Ireland and Gabriel Conroy's epiphany. I thought, too, of what Stephen Dedalus said: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”

My exile was surely about meeting myself. And lately about Elsa leaving her underwear at home. I wondered what she was doing—hoped she wasn't entertaining Matt, the ass outlaw in training, with her 23-year-old shaved vulva. That really was none of my business, I reminded myself. Unsuccessfully.

Through a window in the failing light, I saw snow falling and flakes battering themselves against the glass. The snow had been falling for ages, it seemed, with great purpose as well as great tragedy on some days, and without tragedy on others. Or so I imagined.

After all, it was just snow and did not have much longer to live.

P
urplish-white flowers sprouted in my backyard in the growing expanses where the snow had melted. Rain fell, sporadic at first, and then hard, washing the remaining snow away, except for thin white collars around the trunks of trees. Soon the collars evaporated, too, and the yard was soggy and brownish green as lively brown and black squirrels scavenged for what they had buried in the fall. Mourning doves appeared in pairs and sparrows lined power lines, but no longer seemed to huddle together for warmth. In the trees I saw many vibrant cardinals and husky blue jays, and on one day I spied a hawk circling lazily, high above the trees.

Soon I had days of pleasant enough inertia and I reread
The Great Gatsby
and
A Farewell to Arms.
I enjoyed very much the worlds of those two books and was summoned out of them only to field calls from the movie people. But I managed to convince them the script was going well when in fact not a word of it existed on my laptop screen.

Or even in my mind.

Maybe it existed in some form in my subconscious.

In my conscious mind the debate raged over whether I would actually write it. It was good that I could afford to give back what money I had already accepted.

Mavis kept after me by phone.

“Working hard, Bryce?”

“Hardly working.”

“Ah, that sage Midwestern wit.”

“Colorful, aren't we, Mavis? Ever hear this one: piss up a rope?”

“Now I have. And I'm sorry I did.”

“That's okay. Pissing up a rope is overrated and a bit messy.”

“D'ya think?” she said. “Put it back in your pants and tell me about the screenplay.”

“What screenplay?”

“Cute. The screenplay you took good money for. Ring a bell?”

“I do hear something, off in the distance. It's a bit faint.”

“You'll be fainting, Bryce, when Hollywood asks for its money back. Maybe they send Tony Soprano to collect.”

“Maybe I can get Tony Soprano into the screenplay.”

“Why not? A wise guy Jedi would fit in just as much as anything, I suppose.”

“I'll get right on that.”

“My friend, you better get right on something … anything.”

“Let me play some more with my lightsaber. I'll get back to you.”

“Don't hurt yourself, Bryce.”

Clearly she had a percentage to protect.

And an investment in my future, she claimed.

Ah, the future.

Yogi Berra was right: it ain't what it used to be.

Unchartered territory.

Foreboding horizons.

I had not allowed myself to think much about the future for quite a while.

The future seemed like a novel yet to read.

To write.

Or not.

* * *

Elsa and I had settled into a routine that was not routine. She still lived with her folks, but had a job as a teacher's aide at an elementary school. And graduate school at Western Michigan University seemed on the near horizon to her. I couldn't imagine her parents would have been anything but devastated to know she had taken up with a man old enough to be her father, but I was slowly letting go of the guilt in that area. Our routine was what it was. And our routine was based on her sneaking away from her folks' house at night. If she stayed the night, she told her folks she had stayed with a girlfriend. She didn't always stay the night—guilt, I suppose. She likely had plenty of guilt. Me, not so much. The older I got, the more I was willing to accept the unexpected pleasures, no matter how wicked they might seem to others.

What she told her folks on those nights when she returned home, I didn't know, and I didn't ask. I cared, but not quite enough to ask about it and have to worry about it. I was the recipient of charity, of sorts, my academic gifts to Elsa finally coming back to me in a much more practical form. Maybe it was the universe and fate conspiring to pay me back for what I gave others. I was hoping I wouldn't elevate our fling to anything more than that and begin questioning the value of the gift or the morality of it. I did the math and accepted it with little guilt: 51 goes into 23 quite nicely. And a number of times.

My routine with Elsa was consistent in its inconstancy. Regular in its irregularity. We were ravenous sinners, but our encounters didn't feel sinful to me. They felt providential, serendipitous. Like striking oil or like finding hunks of gold in a stream. They were wet and slippery. There were … fun. Elsa showed up whenever she could and the impulse struck. I was, after all, a sitting target. A fish in a barrel, waiting to spawn.

As often as not, she arrived in her long wool coat and black boots with a good amount of heel, but with nothing underneath her coat except garters and stockings and that shaved 23-year-old vulva. It was a work of art, that young and eager vulva. And finally blooming, I supposed, like it never had before. Learning just how hungry it was. I figured I was seeing a show that Matt never got to see. She would let the coat fall open when I answered the side door. It sometimes hit the floor on the way up the steps to the kitchen. Sometimes it made it as far as the dining room—never as far as the living room, though. And many times we didn't make it upstairs to the bedroom and instead used the sofa, coffee table, and several chairs for our gymnastics, stopping only for water breaks.