The Syme Papers (28 page)

The pretty one had an orange. I remember particularly that she had an orange that day. And after completing a healthful and hefty plateful of cottage cheese, celery and bean salad, mopped up by a single heretical piece of garlic bread, she sat back in her chair and began to peel. Her hands, plump-knuckled, had a practised air. (The technique applied to peeling an orange has always seemed to me a great giveaway, a keyhole into childhood, in particular, the habits and humours of the orange-eater’s mother: in this case, confident, cheerful, a lady with a nice eye. How I suffer from her now.) The left hand clenched the fruit in its soft palm; the right one, harbouring a Swiss Army knife (a little one, for keys), winched around the turning globe, tearing a single, long, parti-coloured strip from top to bottom. This grew and snaked upon her plate, a pleasing contrast to the white remnants of the cottage cheese it lay among.

I could smell it almost at once, a sudden pungent sweetness on the air, that fizzed in the nose like champagne, and made me sneeze. She seemed to take visibly orange-scented breaths; and the rest of us around the table breathed an enriched, pulpier atmosphere. Her jaw worked squashily as she picked off quarters of the fruit and put them in the pocket of her cheek. She talked on, with a full mouth, in juicier, wetter language. ‘Anyone for a quarter?’ she said, holding a clump of the fruit up for inspection. ‘Quarter? Quarter?’ I didn’t dare to accept.

(Whenever I think of her, even now, the scent of that orange fills my breath, sharp enough to taste. She sweetens a room simply by her own good health, like the first cut grass of spring; by the proof she offers – in red cheeks and bright eyes – that goodness equals joy, and both are better in abundance.)

‘Miss Wielengrad‚’ she said, introducing herself, taking my thick paw as I got up to go; then added, blushing, ‘I mean, Susie.’

‘Miss Wielengrad‚’ I said, stooping to kiss her through the opened window, my leather case propped against my leg.

‘Susie‚’ she answered, turning the obscurest corner of her rich red lips to my pressed mouth. ‘Hello again.’ She said it in the
shadow of my absence, the slight chill cast by nine long months.

‘I had forgotten’, I declared, brisk and happy, pushing my case along the backseat, and walking the long way round to the passenger door, ‘how enormous the nights are here.’ (I walked the long way round, past the trunk and the back of the Volvo, to break our loneliness slowly, gently, chiefly for her sake, knowing that even a dozen steps around the car softens the suddenness of reunion. One, two, three, she could count to herself; here he is again.)

‘Well‚’ she said, ‘it’s been too hot to breathe all week.’

‘Wonderful‚’ I replied, snuffing the evening air rising off the asphalt, smelling the scent of distance across the flat land, the scent I always attribute foolishly to the telephone wires, running along the highway into the horizon. She turned the car away from the overpass, and on to the brand-new stretch of road from the brand-new airport.

‘The quicker we travel‚’ I said, briskly, happily again, looking about me with greedy eyes opened wide by sleeplessness, ‘and with an ever more casual air, the greater our need to arrive
in
and depart
from
places that look as much like nowhere as possible – places that won’t surprise us – places that suggest, after all, we haven’t moved an inch. I believe’, I continued, warming to my theme, ‘that even highways have been specially designed to create an illusion of motionlessness, of going nowhere fast, of identical space. Just look … ’– and I felt the yawn rising – ‘at this … ’– through my Adam’s apple – ‘road.’

I looked. She was looking already. White and long in the half-light of the street-lamps, under a green moon; dry land to right of us; dry land to left of us; billboards, swooping by, in a wedge of half-shadow; shacks, dead cars; a glitter of lights in the distance too far to budge. We seemed to be going nowhere, it is true.

It is my policy, and I believe a good one, always to be brisk and happy in
the
shadow.
The shadow, I should make clear, is the patch of dark and cold cast by that stranger her husband over Miss Susie Wielengrad, when she has not seen me in a while. Susie, I know, being warm and full of light, does not cast shadows; at least, I
rarely suffer from them, submerging myself immediately, happily, in her presence again, no matter the passage of months. I know for a fact (she has told me) that my shadow is broad and deep, chilly, lengthening over time, difficult to side-step. She feels first grey, then cold, then strangely blurred, unclear, wavering within its edges. The closer I move to touch her, the heavier the shadow becomes, the more she shrinks. Consequently, I touch her as little as I may. I become brisk, happy, unconcerned by shadows, almost … cheerful, in a wintry way, it is true.

I cannot dispel the shadow I cast, deflect it, nor warm it; and the alternative, a manner of velvety gloom, to cushion her within it, seems no better. Over time the shadow ceases to afflict her, in the noon of love, as Donne would say. Perhaps I grow translucent to her, and the light of life flows through me once again. Perhaps, unhappy thought, she cannot distinguish my shadow any more in the general darkness – I do not know. Nevertheless, I must bide my time, cheerfully or not, till she emerges. I prefer cheerfully, when I have the faith and strength for it.

‘Yes‚’ Susie answered at last, ‘I suppose it all looks alike.’

Love is composed – as Mr Stephen King (a copy of whose
Lawnmower
Man
bulged in the pocket of my Harris tweed) declared simply of the novel – of Plot, Dialogue and Description. The plot of love is rather long – despite certain climaxes (now and then) spaced between deserts of unevent – and can end only, if it ends at all, unhappily. The plot accumulates – that is the great thing, it grows and grows. I believe so long as it keeps growing, all is well. Some pleasures make a virtue of simple quantity, and love is among these. It is like stew – anything may go in the pot, so long, that is, as the stew increases.

I remembered, as she drove – in the natural silence of the driver, along IH-35 into Austin – another meal we shared in the blue-tabled cafeteria overlooking Lilliput and Van Cortland Park. Again, a collection of teachers: a tall one, a young one, a motherly one, a beardy one, a loud one, a plump and pretty one. Miss Wielengrad declared, for the tenth time, cheerfully exasperated,
resting her elbow on a copy of
Now
Let
Us
Praise
Famous
Men
,
how impossible it had become to find even a decent compatible young Jew for fun/companionship, who loved country walks and books, possessed a GSOH, even a USOH –

‘What does USOH stand for?’ I asked.

‘Unembarrassing Sense Of Humour‚’ she said, and continued, ‘for f/ship or long-term r/ship.’

‘Why Jew?’ said the beardy one, a Jew himself, chewing a dollop of tuna-fish salad forked into a split roll. He sniffed as he ate, and brushed the crumbs off the grizzled hairs about his lip.

‘Don’t get me wrong‚’ she said, ‘I’m very much
reform
,’
but added, brightening and blushing, ‘except I would like a Jewish home.’

‘What is this nonsense‚’ he said, still chewing, ‘about Jewish homes; which, as far as that goes, are rarely done up in the best of taste. I would like a French home; that I understand. I wish to marry a Frenchman; I wish to live above a French wine cellar, these are legitimate considerations. But this is the excellent foppery of the world‚’ he grunted, being an English master, and fond of such things. ‘That perfectly respectable young Jewish men and women, sound of mind and limb, constrain themselves by what they know full well to be ancient hocus-pocus in order to keep alive a tradition they have never believed in. I would require, upon every bar mitzvah, a dish of pork chops to be prepared for the new man, so he may take his place in the world clear-headed. The amount of loneliness spent by decent Jews looking for decent Jews so they can raise decent Jews …’

He would have gone on, but for the sudden pinkness in her eyes, which closed, as if to keep away the sting of onion, nothing more. Nothing at all that she minded, only – then she stood up quickly. ‘I’m sorry‚’ she said, ‘I have to go to’, she said, ‘the bathroom‚’ she said.

‘I was going to say‚’ the beardy one added, somewhat subdued, as she left, ‘I wish my own daughter – had done her bit – in that way.’

The curious fact, of course, is that it was not one of the four Jews at the table but I who followed her, out the back way and down
the steps to the empty drive where the garbage bins stood. I who told her, ‘It was only nonsense‚’ hiding blissfully behind the unspecified pronoun.

To which she answered, ‘Most of us live by faiths we don’t believe in‚’ turning her face into her neck, to hide it.

I had found a woman after my heart! – yes – and kissed her among the trash cans, looking over the broad green of Van Cortland Park, where the bums spread out on the grass in the sunny afternoon. Kissed and consoled her, for she was ripe for consolation, took to it naturally, sweetly appeasable, being easy to comfort as only the good are. There, against the back wall, among the black row of bins, over the smooth white cement glaring somewhat on the bright spring day.

‘She’s fine – she only wanted – the bathroom‚’ I said, sitting down to eat again.

I had forgotten to list – in the grounds of our dispute – this fact: that I was not Jewish. Nor were we driving towards a Jewish home – if she would give the name of home at all to what we had stumbled upon.

The dialogue of love is difficult to reproduce, being often tedious, repetitious, obscure, occasionally, indeed, quite meaningless – an act less of communication than of delicate chisel and sand, carving the shape of shared life from a block of time. How are the boys? I said; she said the boys are well; did they speak of me? I asked; sometimes, she answered; did you speak of me? I asked; when the mood took me, she said. Are they sleeping? I said; they are sleeping, she answered; I’ll wake them, I said; I wish you wouldn’t, she said; I missed them, I argued; you left them, she countered; not long, I replied, not long.

Austin had come upon us, snuck up on the harmless highway while we stood still. First, the strip malls, the low restaurants behind their tall signs, bright and big, and, to my mind, irrepressibly confident and cheerful. Look, they cry, even in nowhere I have the heart to shout out. Then the commercial neighbourhoods, the dental practices and outlet warehouses in quiet bays on
the side of the road. At last, after a bleak stretch, the highway swung through the heart of the city – and the dark glow of the low skyline, the orange of the college tower and the sweep of the football stadium appeared. I opened the window squeaking and felt the rough of the hot air against my face again and squinted through it. The great thing of growing up in a sunny land is that home is wherever the heat comes carelessly, thoughtlessly, as abundant as grass and garbage. From San Diego to Austin seemed a small step.

We turned off the broad highway into the sudden quiet of the slip road, then swung left over the brow of a hill towards 32nd Street. ‘Missy‚’ I said, to leave the keen encounter of our wits and fall somewhat into a slower pace, ‘I’ve stumbled upon it, as I said I would.’

‘Upon what?’ she said, hardly heeding, watching the glow of Safeways go by and the empty slots in the parking lot.

‘My life’s work‚’ I said. And then my tongue loosened at last, and I told her, of our very own American Galileo, buried under the ruins of his plentiful nonsense and the weight of time; unearthed, at last, by me, a little chipped, perhaps, and missing a feature or two; nevertheless, great and grand enough to stand upon the shoulder of the giant he created himself, Alfred Wegener, inventor, explorer, founder in his scientific way of plate tectonics, the planetary technology that drives our continents and oceans. I shall publish – secure tenure – several chairs and fellowships – an international reputation – countless dinner engagements – but I outrun myself, Missy, and wish, for now, to present my piece of fortune only in its own sweetness, its own natural juices. I have brought – will bring – an old thing shining into the world again; and will make good a dead man’s name.

There is a natural disinclination in conjugal life towards … revelation, of any kind. The tendency puts me in mind of nothing so much as a three-legged race, a contest in which I have won a certain renown in the father/son category on the burned, hard fields of Robert E. Lee Elementary School, owing largely to the fact that Pitt’s little legs are little longer than his son’s, but this by the by. In
a three-legged race, the great thing is to achieve and maintain an equal rhythm; she presses her right leg against my left, or vice versa; the two are bound together, forming a stronger, more powerful, but slower, clumsier limb; and so we proceed, galumphing, across the years. There are occasional spills and upsets, of course; she insists that I have over-or understrode, that my leg chafes or tangles, that it rubs against her hip, that I leap slow or fast, and cause her to miss her step; that, in short, I am an awkward brute, and she should think twice before ever binding her leg to mine again. I, for my part, make similar claims.

What, on no account, either party in a three-legged race may begin to do is kick out and run.

Revelation is running.

And I understood this, even at the time. I knew (of course I knew) that she would baulk – not long or hard, perhaps, but a little. We always baulk a little at the changes rung in lovers. And yet, I hoped – we
always
hope – and suddenly saw no reason at all why she could not immediately lengthen her stride and keep pace with me, surging ahead in equal rhythm, strengthening my gait as I lifted hers. There seemed no point in lagging stubbornly behind me, as I turned on a fresh path towards what I hoped would be our fortune.

‘I don’t know anything about it‚’ she said. ‘You’d better talk to Dr Bunyon.’ (It irritated me always this insistence on Doctor; a stupid humility on her part, reflecting her own lack of doctor-hood; I was a doctor; no great trick in being a doctor. Yet she never seemed to believe it in me; as if she had heard, perhaps, that it might be so, but would hold her judgement till she saw the evidence herself.)