One More Thing (29 page)

“That’s okay,” said his father. “There’s a lot you don’t know yet. You’re just ten years old. A lot …” His father sounded unsure. “A lot … Let’s go.”

Don put the two hard hats back on the table, and then put his hand on his son’s shoulder to steady his hurt as they walked to the car.

As they walked, Don Junior tried his best to keep a straight face.

The Bravest Thing I Ever Did

I went to the Transgender Alliance Support Group meeting.

I waited over an hour to speak.

Hearing all the stories.

Finally it was my turn.

“Sometimes, I feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body,” I said.

Everybody nodded.

“That’s how tight my girlfriend’s pussy is.” I smirked, holding the smirk just long enough for them all to get it. It took a while, since this was not what they were expecting at all. But I was also careful not to wait so long that I couldn’t get the cool comic timing exactly right for my exit.

“Smell ya later,” I said with a wink, and walked right out of the room.

It’s not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.

Rome

The couple retired to a villa in Rieti, Italy, that they had learned about from an in-flight magazine feature on affordable retirement destinations. It was about fifty minutes outside of Rome by car, and the husband often went into Rome for errands.

“This car charger isn’t working for some reason. I’m going to head into Rome and get a new one.”

“Don’t they have them in the gas station in town? I’m sure I’ve seen them there.”

“Maybe, but better selection in Rome, probably. Better prices in Rome, too. They’re always going to charge you more at a gas station in a small town. It’s a convenience fee that you’re paying in those places. It’s fine, I was going to be heading that way anyway—I’ve been meaning to swing by Rome to get some garden shears, too. Anything else? I can call you and check when I get to Rome.”

He loved saying “Rome” like that. “Head into Rome,” “swing by Rome.” It was just the nearest place to them. How cool was that! Rome, the city of legends, of conquerors, of history, of myth—this was where he bought
batteries
! The place that people saved up to visit their whole lives: for him, this really was simply the place where he might fill up on gas one day and where the next day he’d have to know the right shop to pick up flowers for
his wife to thank her for making dinner—with ingredients he had also picked up in Rome. Rome! That’s all Rome was to him! Nothing special at all!

“I should be home by five, or six at the latest. It’s Tuesday, so you never know about that rush hour traffic, coming out of Rome.”

“Okay. That’s fine. See you then.”

“See you then!”

And he headed into Rome.

The Literalist’s Love Poem

Roses are rose.

Violets are violet.

I love you.

J. C. Audetat, Translator of
Don Quixote

It wasn’t a good time to be a poet, which is what he was. But it was a good time to almost be a poet, which is what he almost was.

“Have you heard this song? It’s like poetry.”

“I will have to check it out!”

“Have you read this book? It is poetry.”

“Oh, no thank you.”

J. C. Audetat was born with the talent of a poet, the temperament of a poet, and the particular good looks that are not necessary but happen to be ideal in a poet.

But while poetry was what he was best at, there seemed to be no good place for poetry in his day, except for obscure journals edited by people who didn’t particularly impress him and read by people who didn’t impress him, either, probably because they were the same people.

This was the minor tragedy of being born with the skills and ambition of J. C. Audetat, who dreamed of being a great poet, and—in a separate but connected dream—of living the life of a great poet. Unlike the precontent pretenders whom the world seemed to consider his contemporaries, J. C. Audetat cared too much about the world to hide away his life’s work in such a lonely corner of it. He wanted his words to be everywhere. He wanted them in airports, and he wanted them stolen by teenagers, and he wanted them in bookstores that also sold things.

As he continued to write poetry of high skill but irrelevant impact, J. C. Audetat did his best to claim the rewards that would be due a great poet in an adjacent era through adjacent means.

For the moderate riches due a great poet, he took work within an elite and well-paid circle of freelance magazine writers.

For the adoration due a great poet, he made a point of writing his articles longhand on legal pads in fashionable cafes, always looking like a brilliant, beautiful mess, a priceless piece of set decoration for any independently owned coffee shop: the poet completely lost in his work, pausing only to explain—often, and at length, depending on the questioner—what it was he was working on.

This had been going on, anonymously and happily enough, for several years, when a fan of his at a small division of a big publishing house, impressed by his work but in this case just as intrigued by his name, asked if he might be capable of translation. Without thinking too much about it, Juan Carlos Audetat said sure.

Two and a half years later, J. C. Audetat returned to his commissioner an outstanding draft of what was regarded by many to
be the first and finest novel ever written,
Don Quixote
, but in a new translation that brought the “easy humor,”
¹
“heart-stopping clarity,”
²
“proto-Falstaffian mischief,”
³
“class,”
⁴
“intended—but never calculated—immediacy,”
⁵
“O.G. Euro-Hispano
flava
,”
⁶
and “rhythms of speech and thought that we recognize less from literature than from life itself”
⁷
to readers for “the first time in one or—gasp, could it be possible?!—perhaps even many generations.”
⁸

J. C. Audetat’s translation of
Don Quixote
electrified the English-speaking world with the restored size and specificity of the novel’s comedy, its love, its hopefulness and foolishness and hopefulness all over again. The words were clear again, the ideas were big again, and the cover was cool. It was for sale at bookstores on college campuses and at clothing stores next to college campuses and sold extraordinarily well in all of them.

The new translation of
Don Quixote
wasn’t read by readers, but by everyone. For the first time since Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century, it became not-strange for a friend or a neighbor to snort out loud with an involuntary laugh over an image from
Don Quixote
or for someone to say on a second date, “You know how in
Don Quixote
when …?” out of an attempt to connect, not an attempt to impress.

Some even said the translation was “like poetry.”

In the wake of
Don Quixote
’s unexpected and outsize success, J. C. Audetat moved to Paris—or, as he renamed it in his mind, almost-Paris—to live the life of an almost-famous almost-poet.

He found that if he stuck to the right neighborhoods, drank a glass of something hot or cold, and squinted a bit, the Paris in
his eyes would look pretty much the way he had always imagined Paris was meant to look. Which was no small thing.

He took a small apartment and spent the days in cafés, idly turning minor thoughts back and forth in his mind and waiting to be interrupted.

In the moments between the interruptions, Audetat wrote poetry. When he finished something, he submitted it to literary magazines and journals, and by and large they published it, and by and large, those who reviewed poetry praised it.

And that was it.

Maybe that was all being a great poet meant, in his time.

Or maybe he simply wasn’t a great poet.

Each thought calmed and agitated him in equal measure.

Audetat let the afternoons slip away from his table at the Café de Flore while he passed the time with the rarefied nonwriting he had waited for the chance to do his entire life.

He asked to receive his mail at the cafe—a spectacularly inconvenient option he had chosen purely for show that brilliantly burnished the almost-Paris image of both Audetat and the café. Most of the packages contained dusty hardcovers that seemed to have been FedExed directly from medieval Spain, Post-it’ed in man-made colors with shyly formal suggestions that “perhaps this might spark your brilliant imagination with regards to a
Quixote
follow-up.”

The only value of these unopenably dull manuscripts was as a conversation starter.

Hey, what’s that?