All Play and No Work a melodrama                        

47,406 wds          

In the midst of life we are with death

    To the reader; I would not have it surprise you, devoted reader, that all the people in this book who speak on the telephone use land lines. At the time this tale takes place communication had not advanced, if advancement in our present instant, constant, incessant, obsessive ‘connectivity,’ a word to replace connection, it would seem, because a verb is more limber than a noun, is advancement. In conclusion; connection may change, people do not. It is an old story about young people.

In this and other works of fiction there should be no blame or shame for indiscretions committed by characters simply because their actions are viewed by unseen forces. On another level all of us live, we are told, scrutinized by the thirty or forty billion eyes of those who have gone before. All who have ventured to live a full life in exstasis and joy and whose deeds are reported to the wide world deserve sympathy. All here certainly have mine. I myself am not without blemish of body or soul. Moreover, i find serenity in the thought that i may help all who live and may yet be blended and spun into flesh understand the workings of this small corner of the cosmos. These simultaneously lucky and unlucky people who exist on a physical level and might, in their short, joyful, muddled, violent sphere of bone, muscle and tears find a more serene refuge concupiscent with the non-molecular based reality some call ‘spiritual,’ through this novel.  

           Swope McWitty, hobo poet

Chapter One                        

Sven told us when he got back to the car she was already gyrating for him.

“She squealed like a pig,” Sven said, “when i flexed and she saw the veins stand out of my forearms (he held up his arms). I almost took her right there. She said, ‘Oh that’s so . . . I love that!’ We went to her place and it was sloppy, sloppy in her shack, sloppy in her sack with all kinds of clothes and crap lying around everywhere. The room was a mess. I expected it. I gave her the gun a few times and got out fast. It was pretty gruesome.”

“What was it really?” Kenneth said, “Pretty or gruesome?”

Sven stood up fast, leaning, broad shouldered, snarling into Kenneth’s face and in a level, controlled, intense tone, said, “Boy you can cram it, cram it up the crack!”

“Whooooeee,” someone said.

“Down the hatch and up the ass!” Harvey shouted and lofted his bottle, hand wavering and if there had been no wall behind him he would have toppled onto the rug. Harvey was always the first to pass out. Everyone around the table except Sven and Kenneth (momentarily stuck in their abuser/victim roles) immediately laughed. Then Sven and Kenneth joined the jolly crowd. 

From time to time, because his hairline was receding, Sven reached up to gently brush his remaining hair forward. 

      In all there were eight of us; Harvey, Claire, Carl, Jose, Kenneth and his friend and Sven. We were drinking very cheap beer and later Sven pulled out his ‘emergency bottle’ and that finished off the sissies. 

Gale, the woman Sven spoke of and with whom he had not, in fact, had sexual relations, was generally a figure of fun to this crowd. Gale wanted to be glamorous but was born the wrong size and shape. She was short, stout, had a prominent nose and modest chin. Her wealthy family allowed her to indulge a fashion model fantasy. Growing up in Montgomery Co, Maryland, the only child of a diplomat and wealthy heiress, nobody, not even Gale herself could explain (if she wanted to) how or why she became a self described ‘fashion freak’ or ‘maven of the post modern,’ or an alcoholic at age twenty–three. Some people who are drunks at age twenty-three grow out of it, but Gale, we all felt, had the determination to drink unto death. She was on or off, she had no dimmer switch. All of her was there in one place, now, and we anticipated watching her go to the edge and jump. Yet we could be wrong; it was possible Gale might grow fearful, having peered into the abyss, shun alcohol completely and join others who shun alcohol, chain smoke and speak and respeak of what violations she committed while drunk. 

As for being a maven of the post modern, we thought Gale wore some pretty, some ugly, all outrageous combinations. The most striking quality of her 

“look” as she called it was in her polyester, plastic, cotton and wool combinations. In mixing these elements she did not discriminate and the look was jarring, contradictory and all suffered from the comparison. Her severe disregard of textures, not to mention colors; wearing stripes and plaids together, for instance, i thought was very bad. An habitually contrary opinion circulating approved of her daring efforts. Like any great artist, Gale took the risks and if she succeeded the rest of us benefited. If she failed she failed alone.

Eventually the party broke up. The bars had closed an hour or more before, all the beer was gone, the emergency bottle empty and everyone was tired without anyone admitting it. Just before we all left Sven shouted, “Okay, i’m finished with this shit!” staggered into his room and slammed the door. It was a signal to leave. 

Was Sven truly a tough guy? He was born and raised in Montana and had come to Rosehill University directly from an Agriculture and Military (A and M) institute there and, we speculated, this made him feel or think he was required to act like a westerner; rough and rough. When back in Montana would he act like he was from New York? 

“Not New York,” someone said, “Denver. New York is too far away, it’s, like, on another planet.”

And yet, even as a westerner, Sven could not hold his liquor.

        After briefly cleaning the place of bottles and emptying ash trays, Claire and Carl went back to the apartment they shared across the hall. 

“I worry about Gale,” said Claire, sitting on the edge of the bed taking off her shoes and socks. “I don’t like her so much but she’s my cousin and . . . “

”A very different cousin she is.”

“Please don’t interrupt me. It’s so 

hard to see her going down, even if we have nothing in common, only our family relations. She got it honestly; her mother is almost ready to drop dead of it.”

Carl waited until he was sure she was finished speaking before he replied, “She’s old enough to know better and all on her own now. She can only blame herself.”

“I know. In a way, she has always been on her own. She doesn’t blend into a crowd. I wish i could do something for her,” said Claire. She pulled off her t-shirt, slipping the bra straps off her shoulders, spinning the undergarment around and unclasping it with a quick twist and casting it aside all in one fluid motion. She was an artist who also played the flute and her fingers were long and delicate.

Carl did not speak, he could not speak. He was often too surprised by how graceful Claire was and how much he loved her. At such moments he completely rejected his father’s admonition to ‘give just a little.

 “You can love a woman too much,” the old man had said. That old man was very rich and often correct in his assessment of personality, motive and character, but when Carl saw Claire disrobed on the bed, reclining and smiling at him, he was ready to call his father the uttermost fool in all the world and across the vast span of the universe the biggest idiot. In Claire’s arms he knew he held there what his father had never held; a love pure and so complete nothing on earth could supersede or erase it. Carl had removed his clothing fast and was at her side, scooped her up and pressed her to him.

Chapter Two             

The next morning, as Claire and Carl lay in each other’s arms Sven rose and made coffee in his new Mr. Coffee thingamajig recently purchased at the recently opened FamCo half-price, discount everything on sale warehouse-barn in the West End. He felt good and competent despite drinking so much last night and he knew he could bull through to feeling better. 

Meanwhile, as Sven poured the black grounds into a paper filter, two blocks east in her big house on the corner of Peach and Grover, lay Mrs. Imogen Cummins, age 98, a life-long dedicated Daughter of the Confederacy. Having lived in Rosehill all her life, raised a family, enjoyed a luminous position in society and two days earlier cradled in her frail hands on her sunken lap her seventeenth great grandchild, her span of strife in this world rapidly drew to a close. At the moment Sven poured water from the glass pot into the top of his Mr. Coffee and thrust the empty pot under the spout out of which the black brew would flow, Mrs. Cummins reached up, barely able to lift her hand to touch the face of her daughter, Elizabeth, lowered her hand, strength gone, and died. Her body lay on the bed (but not the samemattress) she had slept in for 80 years. In addition to Elizabeth, to whom she was most fond but never explicitly so, one of her grandsons, a nurse and her youngest daughter, Imogene, stood by her.

”Incredible,” Imogene the younger said, “I think i just felt her spirit zip off to another place.”

Elizabeth said, “Imogene, please.”

When Imogen Cummins the elder was ten years old she shook the hand of a former general of the army of the Confederate States of America named Joseph E. Johnston, just then retiring from his post as president of a railroad company. By the time of Mrs. Cummins’ death that company had become the C and O railroad and in the eighty eight years after the little girl shook General Johnston’s hand all its infrastructure and rolling stock was completely replaced, a fact noted here only as a measure of time passed. Mrs. Cummins’ father was an engineer on the railroad, a man of talent who held over thirty patents related to steam engine design ~ he was that kind of engineer, educated first by working for the railroad and then an engineering college, a vocational school that would become Rosehill University. Her father brought Imogene to the retirement ceremony that General Johnston, not a public or even a very limber private personality, found unpleasant. He bowed slightly and shook Imogen’s hand and Imogen said, “Thank you for fighting to stop the invasion, general.” Her father had not suspected his daughter could be bold and it was remarked by more than one observer that the general smiled for the first time that evening. If he smiled again it was not noted.

For the rest of her life Imogen Cummins suffered socially for steadfastly keeping and often inappropriatly expressing her opinions. One, that “General Johnston was 

quite as good a soldier as General Robert E. Lee, and could have advanced southern freedom from northern aggression more had he not been wounded and withdrawn from the field. We certainly would not have had the disaster of Malvern Hill. And he certainly would have saved Atlanta and prevented that devil Sherman from cutting our country in half. He suffered the fate of many an unrecognized man of greatness, to fall out of favor with a politician, Jefferson Davis, a man of low breeding.” Thus in her opinions did Mrs. Imogen Cummins preserve the partisan rift that shook and severed the Davis administration. 

By eleven am when Carl and Claire were waking, the funeral home hearse, not a hearse on the outside but a nondescript van employed for such very private matters involving distinguished persons, had arrived in the alley behind the home of Mrs. Imogen Cummins and her mortal remains were discretely removed. At the moment the van containing the late Mrs. Cummins passed under his apartment window, Sven had brewed and consumed two cups of coffee and had read the paper; scanning the world and national news and sports and reading in depth most of the reports on the local arts and social scene. Ten minutes after the socialite of such long standing left her neighborhood forever, Sven thought about getting some exercise. 

Sven folded down the last page of his paper 

Carl opened his eyes.

      Carl looked at Claire, then looking around their small bedroom and feeling aroused by Claire warm beside him, Carl knew nothing of the passing of Mrs. Imogen Cummins but did know of her distinguished past tainted by a vague infamy. He knew her as the Old Money of the Old Dominion. For Carl that world was taken care of; his inheritance insured he need not be concerned with it. His interest and concern lay beside him and in their future together. He had met, wooed and won this angel so delicate he was often afraid to touch her for fear of bruising her, yet in the night she received his savage thrusts, for he was an athletic young man, with vigor to match his own. He wondered if he should quietly rise and brush his teeth before waking Claire with a kiss. He felt her heat and the musky odor of sweat and old perfume and he loved her and couldn’t help but caress her shoulder and arm and her side and the rise of her hip. She was facing away and as his hand smoothed her thigh she woke and rolled toward him. She immediately detected his aroused condition and hummed, “Hmmmm, what have we here? What are you up for?” She stroked him and squeezed him, giggled and stuck her left forefinger in his belly-button and rotated the fingertip as if boring out an ear, saying, “scoomescoomescoome, squirtsquirtsquirt,” her breath sour. 

Carl left for the bathroom after they finished and Claire lay in bed staring at the ceiling. She had been so excited, vigorous and he had lasted so long due, likely, to

their love making the night before. His excitement was not so quick to drain away yet at the same time he had to uphold his end of the bargain while with her foul breath she insisted on kissing him. Usually he loved her kisses. The moment they met several months ago and she smiled for the first time it was like no one had ever smiled at him before, she was so fresh and he loved her instantly. She gave herself to him so ardently he knew it must be mutual.  Obviously, he thought, they felt the same about each other. 

What he loved about her included her nose which he was uneasy about because it was long and sharp, indicating, (according to his older brother), over-arching ambition and ill-temper. And her ears stuck out a bit more than usual but only on the top which indicted nothing he knew of and he wasn’t  going to ask his brother because his brother was dishonestly inventive. In time he could not imagine under any circumstances loving someone whose ears lay flat against the sides of her head. One evening he was kissing her behind an ear and running the fingers of one hand over her breasts and the other through her hair and they were both feeling the skin heat when she said, “Jug ears.”

Now she came back into the room and was fresh and smiling, all sourness gone and he was the one who lay smelly and unrefreshed. 

The only competition between them was in their opinions on art. Carl was, naturally, the more 

conservative. He had been an art student at Rosie U and Claire currently studied there. They were making plans to find and share a studio. Because neither wanted to disagree with the other they had been indecisive, but that day they planned to go downtown to a dilapidated old building in a poor area where some professors and friends had acquired a lease on the upper floors of a mostly unoccupied Masonic Temple. One floor, the second, housed a karate/boxing gym established by a ghetto/community activist. The activist, The Man, Paul Powers, preferred the word ghetto while the newspapers used community to describe his type of work. Paul Powers was all, one tenant on one floor and the remaining three (the first reserved for possible retail rental) suitable for use as studios.

The organizer of this effort, the man who secured the lease and made most of the other arrangements, was dead. In general, his friends and caring associates did not say he was dead or deceased or passed on but that, “He is no longer alive to enjoy the fruits of his labor.” He was a genial, energetic but not particularly talented artist and professor named Saul Vorster. I mean to make it very clear that Vorster was not a talented artist, in our opinion, but he was a very talented organizer and teacher. He had a bright, appealing personality that came between people and dissolved differences, “a real beam of fucking sunlight,” according to Sven who did love him  like the rest of us even if the light of his love was not reflected in his, Sven’s, attitude. 

     “I thought Saul Vorster was as close to a Christ figure as i would ever see outside of a church,” someone said. 

Unfortunately for us and Professor Saul Vorster, at the end of negotiations that secured the Masonic Temple studio space for many years, an hour and a half after signing the papers, Professor Vorster was sprucing up the place when he fell down an elevator shaft. I know how he felt as he plummeted to his death, but i leave it to you as an attentive reader to imagine the bitter irony that flashed before his eyes in his last moment, that final summation we must all someday face. It is a moment i suspect most people are just waiting around for and trying not to think about. 

But the irony of his fall into the elevator shaft, as i said, was that he had spent his own money and a lot of it to fix that contraption as much as a monster that old and decrepit could be repaired, and then on the day of his demise the item he had worked so hard to make functional failed to work. We thought of Professor Vorster every time we used that elevator. The very box that, it might be said, destroyed him, lifted us to our studios. 

For all the years we had space at The Temple as we called it, there was always a slight but persistent memory; sadness for losing Saul Vorster, always the feeling he had sacrificed for us and we must honor him. 

How? Produce a masterpiece! Yes, in those days of endless energy our only goal was to produce a masterpiece, to rip from the sluggard flesh, the sleep of ordinary colorless normal days, a masterpiece; the luminous, mysterious best of our talent.  Nothing less would do. Memory of the profeww9or moved us in many ways base and noble. I don’t know about the others, but i always took the stairs.

“The nicest guy,” said Sven in a moment of unexpected sensitivity, “and he did it all for us, to get us directly from school into the real art world.” His tone was dreamy.

The administration of The Temple studios passed to a collection of Professor Vorster’s fellow professors, all of whom thought establishing a large community space for themselves and their students, a space large enough for them to work and think in solitude ~ that was the original, limited plan that turned into so much more ~ was a great idea, but none of them wanted to do the work to make it happen. The administration of the space was left to a rotating collection of faculty and students, depending on who felt passionate at the critical moment and yet, even so, it all worked out and the community located on three floors of an old red sandstone building near downtown Rosehill thrived. 

Carl and Claire were lucky to be among the first invited to look over The Temple and consider renting a space. The first in were the professors since they thought  they were doing all the work and deserved first picks. They established themselves in the top floors. This arrangement appeared to favor the upper echelon both physically, as the top floor rooms were bigger and received more natural light and symbolically, reflecting their social position, as it were, on top of student heaped below. This lofty feeling perished when they discovered the five flights of stairs were very narrow and after what happened to Saul Vorster few trusted the elevators which were also narrow and small and slow. In addition to the stairs and the elevators there were problems with the windows, the plumbing, the lights and electrical outlets. And the roof leaked. Someone foolishly entered the basement and survived, warning all who would dare to repeat the expedition that they would likely be devoured by enormous rats. Twenty years before The Temple had been largely abandoned. Now we knew why.

The one anticipated problem that never came to pass was the threat of crime in the poor neighborhood. The presence of the Paul Powers karate/boxing gym on the second floor was respected on the street so those who came and went from The Temple went unmolested.

Carl and Claire, refreshed by love, came out of their bedroom. it was Carl’s idea to go across the hall and wake Sven, who he suspected was not yet up and help start his day by finishing the job of cleaning up the apartment and enjoying breakfast together. But Sven was striding toward them as they left their bed chamber. Someone had rung the door bell and he was going to answer it. 

Sven opened the door to see a person who, merely by being there and smiling, engendered speechless surprise. It was Barbalee, lover of Sven and thought now to be an X. Sven himself in telling the tale of sex with Gale the night before had proclaimed to the world that Barbalee was no longer his amour although he referred to her as ‘my old lady.’ For weeks previous to last night they had not been seen together and all had concluded the split was permanent, that this time the flames of love had truly burned low and flickered out. But who was the ouster and whom the ousteree? 

“Hi honey, nice to see ya,” she said to Sven who managed to grunt. Then she turned to Carl and Claire. “Hey you young lovers, whatcha doin?” Barbalee cried smiling big.

“Good morning, what’s left of it,” said Sven. “Sleep well?”  He was always formal in manner when Barbalee was present.

Carl and Claire both indicated, in one way or another that they had slept well and. . . 

“We’re going to The Temple,” Carl said, “To put in some time.” 

“Then you’ll be real artists,” Sven said without smiling. He had a studio there himself, or half of one. A young professor who also affected a tough manner and 

painted large canvasses mostly of enormous female breasts and buttocks, just the T and A, nothing more, had invited Sven to share a large space. After announcing the deal several suggested the young professor created such images to shore up his flagging heterosexuality and was at any moment inclined to speak truth and come out. When Sven heard this rumor he squared his jaw and said, “If he’s a faggot he’ll get it hard from me,” and made an upward motion with his fist, “Right up it!”

There were suspicions and apprehension. Was such a response surprising, ambiguous and overly vigorous, some kind of declaration of rough affection? Would this rough affection someday collapse into a frantic mixing of manly sweat, limbs and swollen body parts on the studio floor? No one asked Sven what he truly thought and felt. Many wanted to know. No one wanted to ask.

“But first we’re going to stop by The Village for an omlette” Carl said. “Take it easy greasy.”

“Hey!”

“Take it slow, Joe.”

“That’s better.”

After the door closed behind them Barbalee said, “See, Sven, they’re such a couple of love birds, aren’t they?”

“They’ll get over it and have a big fight, best thing,” said Sven, “It’s gotta happen.” Sometimes Sven sounded just like a farmer from Montana. 

       “Oh Mr. Grumpalump. It happens, sure, but people do make up. People do accept responsibility and mature, don’t they? Hmmm?” She reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder, leaning in close.

  “I know you miss me, you can’t lie to me,” she said.

“Like one dog misses another.”

“Mister, i will not have you talk to me like that!” She stood up and took a step closer to him, her hands on her hips. 

“You started it. I'm just being myself.”

“Oh i don’t mind you being your own silly self, but” here she sinuously slithered toward him and slid into his lap, “you do miss me, don’t you?” rubbing her bottom on his top. 

“Oh you did!” she leapt up, then reached down a hand to gauge the extent of his interest. “Oh yes you did indeed miss me.”

“Come here woman,” Sven said with a growl and pulling her to him, yes, he pulled her hard and had a mean and, one can say, brutal look on his face, but very soon, after carrying her into the bedroom, he was very gentle. But it doesn’t always happen that way.

Chapter Three                

Barbalee came from an old Southern family whose first patriarch came from Michigan to work in a defense plant and stuck fast. Barbalee, the last and brightest bulb in the family marquee, #6 of six. At age ten she suffered the loss of her mother. This tragedy marked the entire family and in a sense, rearranged and improved them. Father and the kids found serious new purpose; thesons to make money and the daughters to marry well, except Barbalee. Barbalee chose art.

At the same time she preferred not to struggle alone.

Sven suffered the same family loss. One sunny summer day when he was 14 his mother asked him to accompany her to the grocery store. It was one of those days in Montana, the kind of wide open, airy, clean blue that makes Montana Big Sky Country and she needed help loading and unloading groceries. She suggested he could help her decide what could be new and interesting at family mealtime.

At this phase in his life young Sven was learning to play the guitar and ‘groking’ or ‘grooving’ on the music of Bob Dylan who Sven felt was the only authentic musician of all time. As Sven was then in a state of discontent he told his mother he could not go to the store because there were “too many fences there, Ma.” She was momentarily puzzled; he had never before called her ‘Ma,’ but assured him he would not be lost among or run into any of the fences. He replied, ”You need to go your  way, i need to go mine, Ma.” Sven’s mother shrugged her shoulders and left; she was only getting a few things and as a school teacher knew how to handle distempered youth; don’t fight unless necessary. After she left Sven worked up a song that contained the lyrics, “and be lost in a dream of pickles and skin cream, in corridors of tunes without music.”

In those days, i can’t say for sure now since i haven’t been in a grocery store in so long, there was something like music in grocery stores, but it was meant to comfort and soothe, not confront and make seethe, awakening rage as revolutionary music might and Sven’s mother knew hearing what was called ‘muzak’ would deepen Svenson’s angst. A teacher, she had generous insight in the ways of youth, having faced so many in classrooms and birthing five of her own before Svenson blessed her bosom. He was the last of the litter and therefore special in his own way, so she loved him rebel or no. As she left home in her car, not knowing she had only ten minutes left to live, she thought that, as the youngest, Svenson would be the last to leave the family home after all the others had gone, the last to say goodbye and he was, in fact, the last person to bid her farewell.

On the way to the store a truck lost its brakes at an intersection and Sven’s mother looked up to see a grill, the word Mack and a small dog above it. Having a literary shade of mind, she thought Mack-Smack and nothing else. A policeman at the scene said, “It was instant, no doubt about it, yessir.” 

To this day Sven had never fully recovered from the death of his mother. The feeling of relief overridden by guilt for feeling relief only to be washed back by a new wave of relief confused him. His mind would clear and fog up again. He put away the guitar and for years found it hard to look at the instrument. Music moved him, but Sven was unclear how to be interested in music without feeling loss renewed. In the confusion of shifting moods, the memory of her face and gentle voice inclined him to seek refuge in a secure, safe home. The question remained unanswered. Sven was not old enough to comfort himself with the thought that there may never be an answer, only a mystery.

Many years before now, when we first knew him, he was a hard core existentialist, thinking that is how every great career in art begins. His first year at school he went home for spring break and looked up an old high school buddy. His buddy had not strayed from home so Sven felt deeply experienced having lived away in college first in Missoula, then in Rosehill of the mysterious east. In his friend’s truck they drove around town drinking beer, smoking pot and looking for chicks they knew lived elsewhere. In Billings the most daring thing young people do is swim naked, called ‘skinny dipping’ in the Yellowstone River. 

Sven and Buddy rolled by the grave yard where Sven’s mother is buried. Buddy knew she was there when Sven suggested they take a walk through the forest of stones. She was there, but could they find her? Buddy disliked grave yards, feeling that you should avoid such a place until you can’t, until you’re boxed up and ready to plant, but strolling boldly through a “bone orchard” at night seemed like an adventure a man needs to have so they dismounted. Sven knew where he was going precisely and soon they arrived at the tall stone with flowers carved into the top edge like a lock of hair above a forehead and his mother’s name and dates chiseled below. Sven was confident and purposeful. Buddy was not and grew concerned; it was dark and there were a lot of dead people all a very short distance from the bottoms of their feet and worse, Sven was too determined, too energetic and purposeful, almost angry. 

Standing four square above the mound, Sven mused on the importance of the spot and noted that his father’s name, and his father was still alive, was also on the stone with the date of his birth but no more. 

“It must be rough on him,” Sven said, “to know this is where he’ll wind up.”

His friend thought of a lot of things, later. Now anything he said would be off kilter, so he kept his mouth shut. He thought he was going to break down because Sven started cussing his father and mother. Then he spat on the stone. That was very bad. 

        “Hey you better respect the dead,” said his companion. “They’re all around us!”   

“No shit, Sherlock, they got us surrounded. There’s nothing here, nothing at all, there’s nothing under any of these rocks,” Sven said. “Nothing dead can hurt us here see?” and he jumped up and down on his mother’s grave and kept jumping on the mound of grass crying “nothing nothing nothing here!”

“Hey, come on, Sven, stop it!” the other pulled him off the grave. 

“Let me go!” He jerked free of the grasp and said, “You’re nothing but a goddam coward!” and walked away. He soon disappeared into the darkness. 

So this is what you learn in college, Buddy thought.

As this cautious one did not like being called a goddam coward, he let Sven go, apologized to the stone and walked back to the truck. If Sven wanted to walk home and they never be friends again, so be it, a man ‘s gotta make his own decisions, that was okay by him. ‘No one calls me a coward,’ he thought over and over. When he arrived at his truck, however, he waited awhile in case Sven had mellowed or was lost and needed a hand. Thinking of his own mother who was still alive, he opened and slowly consumed a can of beer, looked up at the stars in the clear night sky, feeling quiet. There’s nothing like the quiet of the dead, he thought, it must be the sound of eternity. 

Soon he heard the rasp of Sven’s footsteps on the road. Sitting behind the wheel, Buddy reached across the seat and opened the door. Sven silently climbed into the truck. Before he could start the engine Sven said, “I’m sorry. I mean it.” 

“Not a problem,“ the friend said, ”it must be hard.”

“It isn’t hard, it’s just fucked up.”

“Have a beer.” He started the engine.

That spring Sven received his degree in fine arts. A month later, in the beginning of the summer heat we had the small party with which i started our story. Now out of school, Sven lingered among friends still studying. With the degree came the question “What next?” and i thought he wasn’t ready to answer, if there is an answer. In or out of school, that particular question continuously repeats itself. He did occasional construction work for several people, one of them a professor who influenced him profoundly. 

Yaroslav Norris was a man completely unlike Sven. Jewish, middle aged, stooped, unathletic, about fifty years old, he smoked a pipe. Professor Norris was an abstract expressionist (the meaning of which i never deciphered and never told anyone i hadn’t deciphered until this very moment) from Philadelphia. Professor Norris or simply Norris as most of us called him was as pale and sickly as Sven was tan, fit and hearty. Norris had a full head of graying hair, Sven was blond and his hair was rapidly retreating from front to back and from                                 the top and center outwards, racing toward nothing, racing toward the nakedness of a dome. Norris was narrow shouldered and hunched. Sven stood bold and straight and wide, like yonder mountain range. Norris fiddled with his pipe as pipe smokers appear to do obsessively, making a ritual of cleaning, filling, lighting and recleaning and refilling and reignighting, rarely all in the same order, whereas Sven smoked cigarettes. Shucking out a smoke with one swift shuck at the same time raising a flame, Sven then sucked each to the butt, cast them aside or stuffed them out. A young man with strong lungs will, without ceremony, fling aside the butt, now ready to face the firing squad. 

The only similarity shared by pupil and professor was an interest in art. Sven often tried to sound like an east coaster from Philly, like Norris, and he mostly succeeded while Norris remained himself-sounding and seeming not to care to imitate his student’s western ways. 

Norris didn’t paint. He had a studio in The Temple so his name would remain on the list of Temple managers. 

In reality The Temple studio ran itself. The owners, a real estate company, were happy to have someone in the building, aside from the martial arts and boxing people, to keep the lights on, the doors locked, fix broken windows, empty rat traps and keep the bathrooms clean.

It was a very casual arrangement, people came and went at any hour, there were parties, orgies, music, dancing, poetry readings and occasionally people lived                                 there. At one time or another everyone in the building with a studio spent the night there. 

For Sven, The Temple was a refuge from Barbalee, who was very good to him but sometimes we get too much of a good thing. She avoided The Temple, knowing that it was an informal continuation of Sven’s school days and maybe her man needed time there to decide what he really wanted to do with his life. Besides this, the place was a mess. 

“That old pile of junk is just so filthy,” she said, “When are you going to get some maids to keep it clean?”

“I’ll get you a broom and mop.”

“You know i don’t do that, and besides, honey, that’s too big a job for just me. I would need a brand spanking new vacuum cleaner, or better, i think you just need to get two maids.”

And thus Barbalee avoided Sven at the same time he sought rest from her.

They played their roles with heart but not well. Beneath Barbalee’s Blanche DuBois and the Paul Bunyan/Stanley Kowalski persona Sven projected, we could see they were sensible people. You will probably notice if doing serious research that in successful marriages partners know when and how long leave each other alone.

Sven shared studio space in The Temple with assistant professor of Fine Arts Rhett Howard. Rhett is a                                    significant name in the south, but Rhett Howard himself was a short, paunchy thirty year old with fat red cheeks and a small, beaked nose over a bushy mustache that resembled the tail of a squirrel. A man could not look less heroic and dashing than Rhett Howard. Yet from knee high up this assistant professor felt compelled to emulate the hero of Mrs. Mitchell’s novel and the man who portrayed him on the motion picture screen. 

Rhett had more to live up to than he or anyone who looked like him could manage. All his early life he struggled with this contradiction; to be plucky and suave when he did not fit the role while at the same time to refute the role and establish his own identity. Only later, years after leaving The Temple and Rosehill did he find a solution; he called himself by his middle name. As Robert or Bob Howard instead of Rhett Howard he acquired at last a suitable combination of name, face and form. 

But in Rosehill Rhett Howard struggled, failed and paid a high price in lost time and health.

Sven, supposed to be one of Rhett’s closest friends and just as tough as he looked, was, behind Rhett’s back and before all others, a ruthless gossip.

At times when Sven got excited he also grew contemptuous and his voice would rise into an apparently involuntary hehehehe, a strangled giggle. 

     He told us what Rhett said about a party at the home of a professor we all knew and thought old and out of date. “He and Norris went there and no liquor was served                             because some Baptist professs the honored guest, hehehehe, and you know what Rhett said, he said, ‘It was like chewing gum at a cocksucker party!’”
    This didn’t get a big laugh or much of any kind of laugh, because none of us understood what chewing gum at a cocksucker party actually meant, but when Sven noticed our lack of amusement and slammed his right fist into his left palm he looked so goofy we all broke up into a “mirthquake” as Kenneth who was from Texas called it. Kenneth was a big guy with size fourteen feet and a very small dog named Hermosita that followed him around and we all wondered when he would step on the dog and the dog would completely vanish. 

The palm fisting gesture Sven used was one of Rhett’s most overused tough guy gestures. It was Rhett at his most articulate.

At the same time Sven was sincerely fond of both Rhett and Norris, the two professors who most deeply influenced him, where quite sardonic when asked about Sven. They were the ladders upon which Sven thought he would climb to art world fame.

Sven knew that when one climbs a ladder behind someone else one must spend a considerable amount of time looking at that person’s ass and be prepared at any time to knock the upper person off, jump off or descend and start again elsewhere. The person one follows up the ladder may at any time turn and say “You may climb no further,” at which time there are the three choices; jump,                                  descend or attack. This last alternative has something of the father/son relationship about it and we all knew Sven had too much respect for his father to consider it. 

Sven would descend, as he eventually did, but at this time playing a tough guy boosting his two favorite professors was a requirement. 

Barbalee kept Sven busy on this day after the party until mid-afternoon. Going to The Temple to get away from Barbalee was his current plan, since they had just made love again and again for the first time in several weeks and he was satisfied and felt no need to listen to her. Having grown, over the last two weeks, used to the quiet and calm of her absence and the freedom of solitude, now the silly country boy thought he couldeasily dismiss her. 

“You can’t go to The Temple!” Barbalee said. “You promised to take me to FamCo Sven honey!”

“When did i promise that?”

“You don’t remember, i can’t believe it, you forgot already, it was last week or so, you promised sweetie.”

“We weren’t together last week or so, we broke up long before that.”

“Oh break up shmake up, you know you said it sometime right after FamCo opened and i can count and that was at least three weeks ago, and besides, honey, we never really broke up, you know what, i thought of you all the time and i can tell, you big man, i can tell just by how strong you loved me you liked to break my body                                 All Work and No Play   191    half in two you were so strong that i was always on your mind and i know it’s a fact.” And she looked at him with big eyes and a saucy smile, cute and small but lusty.

Accused of anything in a loud voice and pleasant tone, Sven melted. They left the apartment to shop at FamCo.

Chapter Four                 

Sven and Barbalee stepped briskly toward the car. Sven did enjoy shopping if it wasn’t called shopping. Walking by on the sidewalk they met Jose.

“Howya doin, buddy?”

“Hi, Jose” Barbalee said with more reserve. When she and Sven met one of his male friends Barbalee felt threatened ~ he had no female friends, not when they were together. Long ago Sven had learned to be proactive in his nonrecognition of the female element. In fact, when anyone came between Barbalee and Sven she grew nervous and sometimes let it show. 

Barbalee had nothing to worry about; she could not lose Sven. He was truly in love with her, in part because her positive, ambitious, personality, energy and insightful mind were like his mother. Barbalee did not physically resemble his mother, but their spirits were the same. Sven had not yet realized this and by the time he did he would be mature enough to accept the attachment without thinking it perverse and unnatural nor did it threaten his reputation. 

Jose said, “Hello, how’re you guys?”

“We’re headed for the new FamCo,” Sven said.

“You don’t say,” Jose replied.

“Yes, i do say and i’ll say it again,” and Sven said it again because that’s what he did when someone said, “You don’t say.”  

Jose chuckled and his dimples and straight white smile, white despite Jose being a heavy smoker, was so 

handsome and wholesome Sven and Barbalee returned smiles and felt good about it. They could not prevent themselves from liking that grin though if you asked them for an objective opinion and they gave it they would say Jose was weird. Taken all in all, Jose’s smile within the parenthetical dimples was his best feature.

“Wanna come with us, Jose?” said Sven.

Barbalee interposed, actually stepped forward and stood between the two me, before Jose could say no. He had other things to do and besides, the shallow, pretentious, materialistic, boring, colorless, simple minded consumerism of stores like FamCo bewildered Jose. Walking the crowded aisles with the bright boxes stacked on shelves ten feet overhead, the volume of possibilities, the amount of work and numbers of workers staggered Jose. This is how he felt about most of society, not alone because he felt excluded from it, but also because he felt it was shallow, pretentious and all the rest. Example; what they do on the one hundred and eighty two days after Christmas and the one hundred and eighty two days before it. 

Barbalee said, ”Come on, Sven, Jose doesn’t want to go out and buy a bunch of junk, even if he had the money.” And she smiled at Jose as if to say, see, i know you have no money.

Sven was crestfallen. Sometimes he was a guy who needs a buddy.

Jose said with a smile, “I already have enough junk.”

      They all laughed, exchanged cordial farewells and parted. 

In the car Barbalee said, “Did he join the army or something?”

“No, he gets his clothes at a thrift store.” Sven said, “But i think he has an older brother in the army.”  

“That’s where he got the uniform? I hope you never take up dressing like that.”

“You have nothing to worry about Hon.” Arriving at the word Hon, the pitch of his voice dropped one octave.

She noticed the drop and shot him a glance. “He better watch out,” she said. “They catch him dressed like a soldier they might give him a gun and send him off to a war if they got one going now.”

Jose, at first glance, could be taken for a soldier except he was unshaven and wore white socks barely visible below his pants half an inch short and his tennis shoes. 

In going on his way, Jose was amused by Sven and Barbalee. Separately they were very plain, common, self-absorbed; together they struck sparks. 

It was a coincidence that they met in front of the apartment. Jose was not going anywhere in particular; he was letting chance lead his way, walking around the neighborhood in his new uniform. He was feeling the sun, imagining himself on leave from a foreign post in a strange city and eager to see if anyone had anything new to say. About what, he knew not. He pondered the  feeling of coming home after long service overseas and the grim memory of burned, split and limbless corpses of friend and foe alike, the stench of rotting flesh and burning vehicles and specifically what it would look like if a shattered skull leaked a bulging and lacerated brain.

“Eternal father, that your arm may shield and your hand give strength of heart unto those in peril for our nation‘s sake.” 

Where had Jose heard those words that seemed to come out of empty air?

“Rest in peace, brave soldier, thy task is done.”

Jose quickened his steps.

One city block from the apartment building where Sven, Carl and Claire lived Jose stepped into a pharmacy/lunch counter/drug store across the street from a small triangular park. After a cup of coffee and a free refill he might sit in the cool breeze and read the book in his back pocket.

Because of a photograph, this pharmacy was his favorite. It was the photo hanging on the wall above the shelves of glasses, dishes and boxes behind the counter that Jose came to see as he drank coffee.

The pharmacist working there who, since his divorce, lived in rooms upstairs and sometimes served customers at the lunch counter, was a jovial, swarthy man of fifty who had had what Jose considered a real life experience; an encounter with greatness, an authentic transforming event and the photo proved it. 

      The first time Jose came into the place he met the pharmacist and heard the whole story. He had taken only two sips of his coffee when an old guy with a disagreeable look and odor addressed the pharmacist, ”What the hell is that picture up there for that you?”

The pharmacist, called on that day to serve the public at the counter, said, “Yeah, that’s me in the middle of them guys, age eleven. You know those guys with me?”

“Of course i do, you think i’m an idiot? They’re the Three Stooges, ain’t they?”

“You are no idiot, my friend, that’s Moe, Larry and Curly,” replied the pharmacist big smiling. “They were up in Baltimore at a show and we happened to be in the right place at the right time so we got to talk to them and they pranked about with us.” 

“What was they like, was they all goofballs or what?”

“Great guys, they were funny, but nice guys. All of them smarter than you’d think.” 

“Is that right?”

From that day on when Jose went into the place to sit at the lunch counter he sat under the black and white photo of the three middle aged men smiling right into the camera with a dark haired, happy boy of eleven. Surprisingly the one stooge with the most intelligent look on his face was Curly and Moe, usually stern, had a wide, goofy smile.

       Jose was an artist in oils who believed motion pictures, though limited in depth and complexity, were the newest art form with possibilities not yet fully exploited. One reason was that the medium was hideously perverted by Hollywood Big Money. The art form had not yet been freed from the chains of finance. Art could never be genuine if locked in a golden cage, Jose thought, and the best use of film art was in leading to other, deeper, permanent (as permanent as war and weather allows) and therefore better forms of expression; film as a signpost, if you will, it can show you where to go but it won’t get you there. For Jose ‘if you will’ was not an odd expression. One of his professors had used it in lectures, but Jose so completely agreed with the pudgy, unmanly, pompous ass of a professor that he added to his own stock of customary expressions ‘if you will.’ It fit his nature, it fit how he looked and what he noticed, not  the person he appeared to be. Jose allowed for much.

On this day Jose was prepared to be in the world and participate in the ebb and flow of humanity. He went forth upon the streets of Rosehill willing to be washed up and withdrawn back down the shoreline of time. ‘And there it is again,’ Jose thought, ‘in that photograph, the shoreline of time.’ 

‘Whose voice in my head is cooking up that malarkey?’ Jose thought. He wanted to push such thoughts out of his mind without closer examination lest 

they came from a nightmare place. It could be a person or place

This is why Jose had recently taken up listening to Bluegrass music. He was also introduced to Old Time music straight from the traditional players and even more authentic as it came from farther from any city center, even the center of a small one. Or so he thought.

Music was what he was thinking about as he sipped his first cup of coffee and smoked and looked at the Three Stooges and the pharmacist in the almost empty lunch counter. Was he early or late? No matter.

Real life, that’s what it was, real life in a mirror. A popular film trio, comedians of the first rank can speak with insight about themselves and therefore us. What is that? That is to be interpreted. For Jose a goofy style and plenty of energy can be as far and complete as a cinemagraphic expression goes, or needs to go. It need manifest nothing more and to attempt more would strain the medium. Sometimes life is a stream of unreasoning motion.

“Hey, Jose, sitting on your lard bucket?” sounded a voice behind him.

Jose turned to see a short, plump, blonde woman with a strong square face, blue eyes behind rimless octagonal lenses and a wide smile. 

“Sure enough, taking my natural rest,” said Jose.   

“Seems to me taking your natural rest’s about the only thing you ever do these days,” the woman said.

       Why don’t you sit down and shut up.” The comment was harsh, and meant to be so, but the smile Jose put behind it was so inviting, fresh and friendly the scorn vanished in a heartbeat.

They liked each other and were curious about each other. They were new roommates in a large house with many others, mostly students. The weekend before she had led him upstairs to her room and was so clumsy, talky, bulging in all the wrong places in the right ways and re-bulging in all the right places in the wrong ways, he almost fell in love with her. Or maybe he did fall in love with her and was yet to accept the fact. He had never known a woman to try so hard and fail so completely. 

But her personality was so interesting and appealing; her eyes took possession of him and he wanted to be with her. ‘Physically we are not meant for each other,’ Jose thought, ‘personality-wise, yes.’ At this stage in his life when he thought someone incredible might be just around the corner he thought he turned the corner

Jose did not have people problems. Men were good guys or jerks, women excited his desire or they did not. After he noticed her physical deficiencies and decided to ignore them no one held his curiosity and interest like Odaleen.  

Odaleen was a mountain girl from Eastern Tennessee and had insight, read people very well and had knowledge of the country folk and their music. Although 

her parents and their friends, the society she grew up in, were scientific, they allowed her cultural interest, but they did not encourage it.  

Since the night of that party when they had made clumsy love, Jose had casually avoided Odaleen, at the same time wishing somehow they would be pushed back together. He was thus divided in himself. If they were pushed together and had to make love he felt her intelligence, humor and authenticity as a person could make up for their lack of physical skill. The word ‘nonconcupiscience’ came to his mind.

Jose thought this as Odaleen sat beside him at the pharmacy lunch counter, smiling and placing a large black folder, the kind used to carry art work, at her feet.

Jose thought, ‘nonconcupiscience, that goddam professor,’ for he recalled now where this word had come from. Then he suddenly, unexpectedly thought, ‘i want to make love with this woman, no matter what. I will flee to the mountains with her.’

“I like the uniform,” Odaleen said. She looked up and down the almost empty lunch counter and frowned at Jose’s cigarette. “Why are you wearing the uniform? Have you enlisted?”

“I got it at the thrift store,” he said. “It seems to fit right well.” 

Odaleen said nothing. She was not comfortable with men, especially men she wanted, whose approval she sought. And then for the man she craved to smoke a disgusting (is there another kind?) cigarette. At the counter they talked about a few more things and people, who was doing what and where etc. He described his conversation with Sven and Barbalee on the sidewalk and at first Odaleen thought it would be nice to go shopping at FamCo, but when she saw the look of disgust on Jose’s face, ‘ghastly,’ she labeled it, determined to say no more. 

The art portfolio she carried in and now lifted from the floor and opened was from her drawing class. She showed Jose a few pieces demonstrating her growing skill in crosshatching. Jose commented on them with a very slight scornful or sarcastic tone; as an artist himself he was not above being envious of the fine work of another. Recognizing his envy, he quickly sought to counterbalance and then eliminate it by praising, for balance, some of Odaleen’s work.  

Jose had decided without putting the scheme into words, just knowing he wanted to do it, that he would take Odaleen back to their rooming house and make love with her. He didn’t know exactly why, defiance perhaps, since they had had such a rough time of it before, or from a sense that patience and practice leads to higher quality. Persistence achieves success. They would do this if she had no other obligations. 

She had no other obligations.

After the second time Jose sat up in bed and began to dress.

       Are you headed off to someplace now?” Odaleen said touching his back.

“Yeah, i’ve got to catch the bus to the west end.”

“Oh, is that your job?”

“Yeah i gotta go take abuse and be spat upon.”

“You pump gas don’t you?”

“And check oil and clean the windows, yeah, its full service so people think it’s their right to heap abuse on you, like if i was a waiter.”

“Well when you come back i’ll be here. I’m studying tonight.” She lay back down on the rumpled sheets and watched him dress. As he was tying his shoes she got up and put a dress over her head and let it fall around her. She wanted him to tell her he loved her and she was the most beautiful woman in the world because he loved her and wanted to give himself completely to her, but he did not make love like he felt this way. He started hard driving and she had to slow him down and after they finished the first time he faded and had to be roused to action again, was better the second time, less hard driving and then he wanted her to do yucky things she would not do. No way Jose.

For Jose, now walking to the bus stop, the love making had been better than that first time a few days earlier, mostly because they had not been drinking. It was better, but still felt strange. Odaleen insisted he first brush his teeth. No one had required him to do that before. Her body was barrel shaped, so for Jose it was 

like embracing an enormous water balloon or beanbag that was lively and loving, yes, but he felt she should strive to be lean and swift. And there were things she refused to do, but then, he had to admit only to himself that he had not bathed in two days. Neither, it seemed, had she, but he was not about to ask about her last bath. Sexual etiquette was confusing, if interesting and satisfying in its way, but he was glad to get out in the air where he could smoke a cigarette and be on the way to work. “Now i’m off to take abuse and be spat upon,’ he thought. It felt good to be going. 

Chapter Five                   

When Jose walked downstairs to the front door Odaleen in her old dress hastily pulled on walked with him and would have kissed him goodbye but he had already fired up a cigarette. She watched him walk to the brick sidewalk, close the gate behind him and walk on beyond the fence all crooked pickets leaning this way and that unpainted and crowded tangled thick with untrimmed rose bushes. Now dressed in a civilian shirt and coat but still wearing his fatigue pants, Jose turned briefly, smiled and turned away. He was off to board the bus and work at a gas station in the west end, a “high dollar dump” providing full service where he would be “abused and spat upon for a pittance,” as she had heard him say more than once. As Odaleen had never had a job she thought this childish whining and at the same time wondered why, if doing such work could truly be so bad, one did it.

Odaleen pondered what might move Jose, aside from wearing a uniform because his brother was in the army. He looked good and was a good lover, only her second, but something about him comforted her even as he thrilled her. Yet he acted like such a low grade loser and a contrary one at that. She wanted him ~ she wanted to believe he had pessimistic insight, a real grasp of the true nature, the core essence of people, though he was powerless ~ or seemed so, or not ambitious to do anything to persuade or dominate people and events.                     

    Walking back along the hall to the stairs to the

second floor and her room, she passed the open doors of the parlor and paused to speak to a young man in an overstuffed chair with his feet up. He was reading a book. 

“What’s going on for dinner, Howard?” Odaleen asked him.

“Chicken’s in the crock pot rat now,” said Howard without looking up. “Or i could make omlettes.”

“Both sound good. Well, whatever’s convenient for you. I like you doing the cooking around here. You cook so good it really doesn’t matter what you fix.”

Now Howard looked up and said, “You’re too sweet Odaleen; you tell me what you want.”

Howard put aside the book and stretched out with his hands behind his head. He was naked, but Odaleen noted that he was not sexually aroused, surely not by the book which was a text on German grammar. Howard was naked but so covered with hair he was almost clothed. When i knew him i thought he resembled a caveman, but Howard was one of the gentlest, most considerate people i ever met. This line of thinking, of Howard as primitive yet kind and courteous suggested to me and p9ssiboy others in our circle that gentleness and consideration were traits dominant even in history commonly believed to be savage. These characteristics, i would like to believe, determined the survival and advancement of the human race as much or more than cunning, the spirit of competition and aggressive behavior.

      Since then i have come to think the progress of the race is determined by a balance of kindness and ferocity, of sound judgment and imagination. Without honest governance and/or ethical and moral business models, these contrary forces have won and lost at the same rate, hence the balance. What happened before recorded history is likely very much the same as what happened after.

Odaleen was not troubled by Howard naked at home. He did wear clothing outside the home but only to avoid arrest. The whole house was comfortable with his nudity though rarely did anyone join him in it. His hairy aspect troubled Odaleen only because she didn’t know yet if his hirsute condition excited or disgusted her.

“Whatever you fix for me Howard, will you please wear an apron, won’t you? I get so worried about spilling hot foods, you know.”

“Of course, Miss Odaleen, i will do that.”

There was nothing more upsetting to Odaleen than the first time she saw Howard and his hairy form standing at the stove frying bacon, grease in the pan popping and spitting. She had to look away. She felt the stinging drops on her own skin, hairless and fair. She shuddered; the thought of hot grease spattering on his most sensitive bare flesh was so vivid.      

In her new home far away in the neighborhood near Rosie U, Odaleen tried to cook. But she only tried to cook when Howard was gone. She liked men and had no                                   problem with naked men, not in the common rooms like the living room or the parlor. Seeing Howard bare in the kitchen and in danger of heat, greases, knife blades and roasting, dicing and slicing appliances made her nervous.

“Well, i’ll be studying in my room when you get the vittles ready.” Odaleen smiled into Howard’s dark eyes which were deep set in his dark face. With his thick brows, beard growing up on his cheeks and hair cascading down his forehead he appeared to gaze at her from a distant, dark place. Distant and dark as i believe was his insight, yet no one he knew was far from his loving heart. 

Odaleen returned to her room, briefly thought of straightening the bed, decided to leave it and then straightened it. It had a musty odor of Jose, reminding her once again that in this house there is no maid. Having to pick up after herself often surprised her, but now she was reconciled to it and even proud of her orderly room. Orderliness was a sign of maturity. Odaleen loved helping keep the house tidy. The sharpness of being on her own without servants had grown mild. In fact, the last time she visited her parents in Tennessee one of the servants surprised her merely by being in the house. That was Geraldine, she recalled with a warm feeling, an older woman who played what she called a ‘snake box’ (small accordion-like instrument) and the banjo.

      My people invented the banjo, you know,” she told Odaleen. At that time in her life, however, banjo playing was not important to Odaleen, so she did not remember the remark.

In her room she gathered some clothes and left to take a shower. As the water flowed over her she tried not to touch the walls but stayed inside the cone of spray. The walls were not completely moldy but there were faint slivers of mold in some of the tile cracks. And the floor was slightly discolored. At five feet three inches, Odaleen fit well under the spray and once thoroughly soaked she turned off the water and soaped herself. To her hair she applied the special shampoo her dermatologist back home had recommended. It was supposed to make thin hair thicker or “rich and luxuriant.” Although she had grown up amid luxuries she never liked the idea of luxury for its own sake. Lolling about and doing nothing, that’s what poor people do, and that’s why they’re poor. No, luxury was an extra, not an essential, and Odaleen inclined to the difficult and good. She did not seek ease, she wanted knowledge, she had an exceptionally varied and active mind. 

Her body, she was certain, was not interesting. She felt good, she was healthy now, but her breasts were small, her butt flat and from her armpits to her upper thighs her torso and trunk were the same all around; shaped like a barrel without any inward curving. Never in her life, at least in recent years, had the meager 

sensuality of her form driven men to ecstasis. She was strong, solid and yet (this Jose saw and wanted but did not yet understand) swift in spirit. Later when she learned to dance this spirit would dazzle quite a few (including me) wh o would be tortured by the inability to possess Odaleen and live in the light from her, shining only a few feet from our touch.  

For Odaleen, her shape was not a problem. She decided long ago she had other advantages based on her own thinking. Perhaps it was suggested by a friend or relative without her making note of when or how it was proposed that, “You can only do things about stuff you can do things about.” And Odaleen grew to believe these words were her own.

After rinsing the soap off in the shower’s blast, Odaleen touched herself just a little and thought again, as she did irregularly, of Jonathan, her tall, eager, stern cadet. They met in Memphis at a military school where she checked out the prospect of being one of their first female candidates. 

It was a wild thought, for her to attend a military academy. And then what, become a soldier? Her mother’s eyes almost popped out of her head. Carry a rifle and shoot people? “You don’t always have to be a soldier after military school,” she told her father. “It’s good discipline.” That was the first time he had ever heard his daughter use the word discipline, he told all, and he liked the sound of it. If she never had discipline before its good she wants some now. Her father, God bless his soul now in paradise, accepted her strange request and put her on the train.

That‘s where she met Jonathan, two years older and soon to continue in his third year at the academy she was sent to inspect. They spent two days together in the Memphis heat, when she wasn’t touring the school and talking to instructors and administrators. The first female cadet must be well inspected, must have the perfect balance of determination and temperament. Her father had made the arrangements; hotel, transportation, interviews. Her wonderful father indulged her completely, but he didn’t plan for Jonathan to join her; Jonathan frisky as a pup in the dark, ramrod straight in his uniform on the sunny parade grounds. She straightened up for him, she tried to be hard for him. In the dark he was also ramrod straight and she did succeed, after many hours, to make him droop. All this eagerness was for her, a dumpy, as she saw herself, country girl from the eastern mountains, too much to maintain. When she told them she was unsure it was certain they would not choose her. 

Jonathan was her first man and she always thought she disappointed him and he hid his disappointment. He was still eager for her. For him she almost changed her mind about the school, but the buildings frowned and the faculty faces looked at her as if to say, “Soon you’ll be our meat.” They held such secrets and worse behind the eyes, so she didn’t return, she didn’t answer Jonathan’s                                letters and when he called she asked please forgive me and never call again. 

The academy was a cage and the inhabitants untrustworthy; something compelled Jonathan and his leaders and comrades to please her now so later she would have to please them and never stop pleasing them. 

An artist must be free. There is no art without freedom, specifically, the freedom to fall out of line. . 

Still, Odaleen wanted Jonathan and had him if only in a fantasy. Some thought or deed oppressed him and she wanted to know it and heal it, but who could bear the cost?

Back in her room in Rosehill, her body damp and fresh from the shower and her brief, spasmodic dream of Jonathan, she put on her favorite dress, the “baggyrag” her mother called it, hoping Odaleen would thereafter eschew it, and slippers and prepared to make sketches of eggs, cylinders and cones as an exercise in crosshatching. 

Vaguely, upon leaving the shower, she became aware of commotion downstairs. This rumble had built steadily, there were more and more people down there sending up  vibrations through the floor and walls and when a fiddle and banjo cut across the air it sounded too much like fun. She put down her sketch book and stick of charcoal and went for a looksee.  

Chapter Six                   

Odaleen in her simple dress that she bought in Triplet, Tennessee one afternoon at a yard sale where her father, against the objections of everyone else in the car, insisted they stop. Since Odaleen insisted her father use his influence to gain her possible admission to a military academy he more often gave way to her; stopping for her on this day so she could buy something ~ a plain cotton dress which her mother described as “a quaint shabby baggyrag.” 

In her baggyrag Odaleen walked downstairs and into the music. As an academic Odaleen’s mother often spoke in what sounded to her daughter like riddles. She understood the riddles and she loved them and her mother but now she thought them fraught with unnecessary complexity. Odaleen could have said inauthentic as well but had already used too many ten dollar words. ‘Useless’ never crossed her mind; a love she could not deny compelled her to call her mother’s riddles merely momentarily impractical. 

Odaleen loved the dress above all others. It was her own, all her own and the feel of it on her porous flesh showered and fresh was a feathery brushing just where she wanted her skin brushed. She loved it as she loved the run down shacks, dead cars rusting and curious, tired, devious and clever faces looking out of the overgrown by-ways of Triplett, Tennessee. 

The living room was beside the parlor where Howard had been reading. These rooms were connected by two 

pocket doors stuck open now because the rollers on top of the doors had gone off track and no one knew how or wanted to get inside the walls to fix them It was rental property, the tenants were students and the landlord’s life-focus at the time was keeping his head down when he teed off. It was another example of OPG ~ Old People’s Greed. They complained but nobody living there cared enough to do anything about it. 

The landlord, who Odaleen had never met, was an old man who had grown up in the neighborhood and now lived in the more fashionable and affluent West End. He had inherited his father’s rug cleaning business located in the Astor Park neighborhood and the business c0nt9nued to make money. He never said he hated nor favored cleaning rugs; it made money so he did not cast it aside in favor of his true passion; real estate. Odaleen’s landlord owned and rented out many properties in the neighborhood and had seen the workers from the local iron mill and prison and inmate families ~ his father’s regular rug cleaning customers, gradually displaced by University of Rosehill students. He respected neither workers nor students, having grown up with and risen above the first, he found the second fickle, frivolous and easy to cheat. But he didn’t call it cheating; he called it shorting. When asked to do repairs to improve one of his properties he rarely acted fast and most of the time not at all. If given an ultimatum and deadline the landlord always hired someone who did a shabby job. If someone 

said the job as completed would fall apart soon he often snorted or heaved a sigh and said, “Well hell, i’ll be dead by then.” He had been saying this for at least thirty years. 

Odaleen didn’t care if the doors dividing the rooms were stuck open as long as they stayed open. In leaving home she discovered she had always preferred open spaces. 

In the living room the last banjo twang and fiddle stroke leapt up and fell on the smiling faces as Odaleen stepped into the room. These same smiling faces turned to her entrance and at this moment a confluence (Odaleen would use and then eschew using a term like confluence) of line, plane and sphere centered on the vortex of her face; all the smiles and eyes in the room were directed her way. As she was short of stature and all the people in the room but one were seated, their faces were on a level two feet or less below her face, an unusual situation, and they all looked at her, she later recalled, with love. 

After this night, in her dreams, Odaleen would enter that room over and over and the small crowd seated therein would glow with love. It warmed her on cold nights, on nights before eagerly anticipated events. Odaleen often spoke and thought of this moment as the beginning of her ‘real life.’ 

      “I was born again,” she said. As the daughter of scientists she was reluctant to say the music touched her                                   soul; she called it her spirit. 

     At that moment she decided to make everyone in that room her friend. This was going to be fun!

“Sidown, whoever you are,” said a face.

“Do you play an instrument?”

“No i don’t,” said Odaleen.

“Well, listeners are good, too.” And they began to play again. 

All her life, until now, she carried an inner weight, a feeling she had to shift from side to side; this was the possibility that everything is unreal, insincere, a manipulation. The music rose once more and although Odaleen played no instrument she felt part of it and this crowd. 

A young woman with a heavy rough face, a small, very friendly smile, spoke to Odaleen. She was the only other person there standing and not holding an instrument. And ~ cherry on top ~ she was also short! Her forehead was wide, her eyes small and shrewd, nose straight and sharp but her smile was genuine and very petite. When the music started again the woman started dancing, a tap-like dance that was more shuffle than tap. 

Odaleen had never seen this kind of dancing but she knew it was a form of mountain step called clogging. The description of it had reached her even in the upper atmosphere of sophisticated familial restraint. The lower legs alone move, there is no swinging of the buttocks or arms, no gyrations of the torso, only the shuffling feet 

moving in time with the music. In clogging all the force and fun of the dance is feet located. Many years later when she was teaching in Northern California one of her students suggested that because the dance originated in Africa and carried to the Americas as tap dancing the white culture met here placed restrictions on the wild, free movements of that original, much like the strict traditional ‘tidiness’ of Irish dance could be a reaction to centuries of English oppression. These are theories; no one living can know for certain why one style is clamped down and the other free. Odaleen thought the theory absurd, for if one could be free why not be free? it was a theory, another theory, like life itself.

As the music and dancing ended Odaleen said. “What’s your name?”

“Kathleen, i mean, what i’m changing it to, Caitlin. I’m Caitlin.”

“Why are you changing it?”

“Well, i’m not really changing it. Caitlin is Kathleen, you know, in Irish. It was anglicized long time ago. I’m just getting back to the original where it all started.”

“That’s what i want to do. My name is Odaleen. I don’t know where my name came from. I mean, i could look it up.”

“Let’s look it up. It sounds good to me, a good old timey name.”

Old timey sounded good to Odaleen.

      The music started and Caitlin started clogging. Odaleen stood with her and very soon they were synchronized. Odaleen learned the dance so fast she later thought it had been inside her ~ she paused as the words ‘subconscious mind’ came and went, replaced by the word blood. Blood, the basis, the foundation of all moved her, thrilled her. It’s how oxygen gets to the bones and muscles. What had she been missing? What else might she find and bring out of blood sparked and crackling? 

On her side of this encounter Caitlin was as thrilled to meet Odaleen as Odaleen was to meet her. “I love that name!” Caitlin said. This surprised Odaleen; her name had never been loved, not even by her own self. Caitlin also noted a similar shortness of stature, a distinct country and therefore authentic flavor in her new friend. 

Caitlin, however, was different in one unremarkable way; she was born and raised in Rosehill and had lived all her life, so far, in the same house. She still lived there with her parents. They lived in The Fan district, called so because the streets going west grew farther apart with many small triangular parks added as new streets commenced and cross streets arched so the neighborhood blocks north and south would not grow too long and it all resembled a fan if viewed from above. There are many beautiful houses in The Fan, one of my favorite places in Rosehill. Odaleen did not live in The Fan. She lived in the Astor Park neighborhood built on a smaller, low hill south of that more stylish district. Astor Park was and might still be a collection of row houses that once sheltered the iron workers for a factory that long ago made cannons and cannon balls for the army of the Confederate States of America. Astor Park now housed mostly poor students. And the foundry where the original tenants worked was abandoned and the long rows of tall red brick buildings with broken empty windows overlook the river.

Caitlin knew all about this deserted iron mill and foundry and the neighborhoods; she was a student of architecture at Rosie U, located mostly between the Fan and Astor Park, and unique because she came from Rosehill and nowhere else, had scarcely spent, in her entire twenty and then some years, a month of days away. Just about everyone else i knew in that small society flew or bussed or drove in from someplace else to live and study at the University.

Odaleen is lucky, Caitlin thought, to live here, in this house on Spruce St. with all these men. She didn’t have to go home, but she had smoked some pot just before Odaleen came in the room, like a real beam of sunlight. Caitlin wanted to stay, to be with Odaleen and the music, but she knew her limits; the pot was catching up to her, she had to move and because she didn’t like to drink; it threw her off balance, or eat; it slowed her down, she had to go home.

       Besides this, her parents expected her to come home. Their tv shows would be just about over and she had to put them to bed. 

Yes, Odaleen was lucky because if she got high and had to move, to escape, she could walk or ride or go up to her room and hide and then come back composed. Did she have a bicycle? Of course she did; there were so many crowded onto the porch one of them must belong to her, so to escape Odaleen could burn some bike energy, come back and all these guys would still be here. Men don’t move much; they sit by the road. 

Caitlin wondered which one of them was for Odaleen, if she had one, or did she have more than one? She had it so good. Caitlin herself would take the red-head, not the naked guy; ooof, too much hair. And she shivered when she thought of all the bugs and bits of stuff that collected in all that hair. 

Howard had so much hair it could be said he was not and could not ever be completely naked. Caitlin had an unconscious aversion to a man’s body hair. A mustache was enough for her, how repellant to wear it like a coat! And always naked, what was he trying to prove? But he was richly endowed in his manhood, though you know, if it’s big at rest it will show no substantial increase when standing in full glory. It’s the little guys that will surprise you. Size indicates potential, not natural talent or acquired skill, yet there’s no harm in having it if a gal knows how to make it sprout. Ah, but all that hair gets                             clotted up with stuff! Speak frankly, she said to herself, look at it directly; it is not stuff, it is stray fluids all crusty and flaking. She knew then, reflecting on her own reflections, that she had to leave. That damn pot, she only pulled twice on that joint and it plunged her into a harsh study of the physiology of man and that’s a lousy way to manage the mind. Then she involuntarily giggled; but a good way to end the evening. 

Caitlin had to turn away, even from the bright face of her new friend because too much was piling up inside her. She had to go home to her ‘little friend’ which she kept locked in the drawer of her night stand. Her ‘little friend’ would calm her, always did.

The musicians showed no sign of quitting soon so Caitlin calculated her exit.

“Do you like to dance, Odaleen?”

“Yes, i do,” said Odaleen although she rarely did and didn’t remember the last time she had danced, probably in third grade.

“I gotta go.”

”No, so soon?”

“I gotta check on the folks at home and i have an early class.” Caitlin had no early class but she did like being home to say good night to her mother and father. They were old; Caitlin had been the last in the litter and never left home. She loved her parents more now that she had them all to herself but they seemed to get older by the day. When she was growing up she was so far                                 back in line, being the youngest, they didn’t pay much attention to her,. There were too many other kids and authority was delegated to older brothers and too many sisters so now, all of them gone into the world, she had her parents all to herself and they were old and falling apart. There’s a down side to everything, even love. Still, at least they were alive and she hadn’t missed all her time with them. 

“Some people i know are getting a dance together, kind of country stuff, real fun, on the weekend, can i call you when i know more about it?”

“Sure you can, or just come by. I’m here, all i do is study.”

Thus Caitlin and Odaleen parted with the music still rising and both in the depth of each heart wanted to stay together forever without goodbye. 

Out on the street and astride her bicycle, Caitlin turned on the light clipped to her handlebars. The light did not go on. She checked the bulb and removed the batteries, reversed them and put them back in the plastic casing and clicked it shut. There was a dim glow, no more.

I ride home in the dark, thought Caitlin, get hit by a car and flung to the asphalt and my skull is shattered. It happens to someone every day, why not me?

But she had to ride, if she wanted to get home before her parents went to bed, worried about her. One night she came in late and they were both cuddled on the                                   couch, fully clothed, the tv on, asleep, asleep and both snoring, one louder than the other, in each other’s arms. It was a lovely sight, sweet but sad. She woke them and sent them off to bed that night but they were aggravated to be awakened so they did not retire into sweet dreams, Caitlin was sure. They hammered her about things the other kids had done that Caitlin knew nothing about. No, the best way was to be on time, make a joke, tell them something loving and send them to bed smiling. They had nothing else to look forward to but rest and dreams. 

Caitlin set off immediately and took alleys most of the way home. She emerged as often as she could where she could cross streets at a stop light. People did run red lights from time to time but the lights also gave her plenty of time to look right and left. One afternoon long ago, when she was a girl, an old drunk was run over on Main or Cary, she didn’t remember which, and his head was cracked open like a melon on the asphalt. It was a hard hit, judging by the blood. There was a big splotch and Caitlin didn’t look close enough to be sure but thought she saw pieces, small lumps of something in the bloody splotch thicker, more like dark red buttermilk with the lumps, and a long stream of blood had flowed from the big splotch to the gutter. So the old man lay there and all the blood in him flowed out his head. He was unconscious for sure and probably instantly killed, like she would be killed. It gave Caitlin the shivers to think of it later and she would shiver again pondering the 

possibility that she could be hit on her bicycle even if her light was on. Drunken people were everywhere. She had even heard of drunks flying airplanes. 

On this night no drunk found her.

Thrusting her bicycle into its accustomed place on the side of the house and wedging the front tire behind the garden hose hanging on the side of the house, she closed the fence gate behind her and hurried in. 

“Oh, you’re home,” her mother said. Her father said nothing, continued to watch the flashing screen.

“I’m home and it’s time for you two to go to bed.”

“Well look who’s the boss. Now you wait a minute,” her father said, “The murderer is about to stand up in the courtroom and admit that he done it, that old man’s mean as a snake and he’s gonna fry for it.”

“She done it,” Caitlin’s mother said. “I’m telling you for the last time that bitch in that office who wrote the fake note and wants to take over the business done it.”

“I’d bet the house if i was a betting man.”

“You’d be out on the street without your slippers.”

Caitlin waited, standing by the couch. On the screen Detective Paul Drake came quietly into the courtroom, up to the defense table and whispered into Perry Mason’s ear. The husky attorney then asked the judge for permission to recall a witness. The judge had reservations but allowed it and with his usual swift, adroit questioning Counselor Mason compelled the witness, not the mean old snake nor the bitch, but the handsome,                              mildly untrustworthy, jilted young lover, to confess. “I did it, i had to kill her.” He did it for love, or, more precisely, because love was denied him. 

“Okay, you all, now you can go off to bed. Go and clean your teeth first.”

“They always twist it up at the end,” said Caitlin’s mother. “That bitch should have been the one to do it.”

“They gotta do that or we’d figure it all out too quick. But if that old crook crossed me i’d cut the balls off sure enough.”

“Dad, that’s no way to talk!”

“Well, that’s what i’d do; he’d be nutless in a heartbeat.”

“Now you go on before you pee yourself,” said Caitlin’s mother. Her father grunted and turned away.

“Off to bed you two, i’ve had a long day.”

“Oh, did you see that young man you were interested in again?”

“Mom, i’m not interested in any young man now, i don’t have the time.”

This mix up had happened before and sometimes her mother called her by one of her sister’s names. 

Her parents were tired enough not to ask what had made her day so long so Caitlin didn’t have to go through it all again or make up anything. They slowly went toward the bedroom while Caitlin turned off the television. That Raymond Burr certainly was a handsome fellow, and smart, she thought.

       Good night, my darlings,” Caitlin said and gave her father a squeeze of the shoulders from behind with both hands. She turned and “Good night, sweet,” her mother said lurching forward with a kiss.

Caitlin in her room upstairs wanted to sleep but too much had happened that day. It was as if she had been waiting all day to understand why her day was spinning around and yet nothing happened, nothing changed, nothing very clear anyway. In her classes, eating lunch alone, studying, fixing dinner and bicycling to the house where she met Odaleen. She didn’t know what was so different today. At Odaleen’s house she had been intent on one of the musicians who didn’t seem to play much, just strummed the guitar and didn’t make eye contact with her at all. She gazed at him very directly at times, but he was always looking at the other musicians. She liked his looks, wanted to know his name and talk to him but had no chance to do it and if he was going to ignore her she would have to ignore him. Then she smoked pot just before Odaleen came in and they danced and then she remembered her folks and had to rush home in the dark, riding and risking getting her skull shattered by a drunk. Then her sad sweet old smelling parents, will it ever end?

Caitlin lay naked in bed in the dark, moonlight from the window casting shadows. Thinking of the men she had known, the few she had known, all of them rough, she knew herself lucky to be shut of them. I am rough,                                 All Play and No Work  226 she thought, so i won’t get a smooth one, most likely. Or maybe my opposite is out there yearning for me.

Her hand strayed down and she felt the skin of her flat stomach and where her hair began and her legs were tense but she stopped. She discovered she was thinking of Odaleen. She pulled back her hand. The palm brushed one of her nipples and they hardened, each feeling like a small knot tied to the crest of each breast. She forced her hands down to her sides and struggled to lock them in place. 

For half an hour Caitlin lay thinking, sleepless. Instead of Odaleen she forced herself to think of the guitar player, but her thoughts returned to her new friend, the friend as tall as she was who wore a country dress and whose smile invited her. There’s only one cure for it, she thought, my ‘little friend,’ and with that thought she immediately felt warmer. Now she would shiver for Odaleen or for the guitar player. Was there a difference? Either one was equal fun. Yes, it was time for her ‘little friend.’   

Chapter Seven         

During the night Caitlin routinely heard the toilet in the basement flush at least three times. Her father was not one to “let it mellow if it’s yellow,” a trend in post-urination current at the time, and he always flushed it away. This night the toilet was silent. Caitlin noticed the irregularity and was happy for her father for being able to sleep through the night. Her father and the house thrown out of the routine excited and lifted Caitlin; her father’s health must be improving. Her orderly mind lined up in vivid dreams of flying over water, penetrating walls, seeing and knowing all that pass through buildings, reading thoughts in faces; all shook her with enthusiasm, plus her ‘little friend’ was a very good friend that night.

Dawn was not early for Caitlin; soon she was ready to go. This day the sun rose twice, once in the east and again when she remembered her new friend, Odaleen.

I have to get her involved in the contra dance, Caitlin thought, it will set her free. She assumed without reflection that Odaleen needed liberation as she felt herself liberated; released into unlimited possibilities and all her past left behind. 

Rough looking but graceful, she could swirl and float like a feather on the dance floor. She loved the faces, the eyes swiftly passing, emerging from the blur of motion, loved it so much it had to be as good for everyone. The biggest mystery is why doesn’t everybody dance?  

There are many theories and, as a student of architecture, Caitlin indulged in them. Her studies at the 

Rosie U were not work, nor were they play. Discovering the way things are put together, buildings, machines, physically and electrically powered devices are an arduous form of exploration akin to the Shackleton or Byrd expeditions. Not so the way personalities are constructed and how and why they malfunction. Humans are imperfect in a perfect world, we are shifting and mysterious. A machine, a math formula, a building will stay the same; people deviate no matter how honest at the moment. Caitlin favored certainty.

 The dance made everyone equal. The movement happens at eye level and in the passage of bodies across the floor in time to the music adjustments are so subtle and swift all eyes obtain the same level and glide one way or the other at the same distance above the floor. This was Caitlin’s favorite equalization theory and equalization promotes physical harmony, at times involuntarily, even unwillingly. The music ends and in silence, the silence of talk and random noise, chaos returns.

On the dance floor, inside the music, Caitlin was no longer only five feet two inches tall. Or better, everyone there was five feet two inches tall. 

Now she was walking toward the school, the air warm, the sun touching the treetops. One cup of coffee, a boiled egg, a pecan cinnamon roll, brushing of the teeth and she was on her way to class, a satchel of books 

slung over her shoulder. She left a note on the kitchen table for her parents reading; i’ll be home at three.

On this day at eight she had her first and favorite class, a lecture and/or discussion of structures. “The principle task of the architect is to create new types of structures,” the professor had said, “Interior decoration comes later.” That old professor’s frown as he spoke these words was a challenge to Caitlin.  In only her second year of study she made plans to explore variations in structure by building a yurt in her back yard. A yurt is a house common in Central Asia shaped like a cupcake.

To Caitlin, the yurt as an architectural form is ideal. 

In a paper for the class she wrote; “A yurt is round. Round is the most natural architectural form. Round is the most common shape in nature. As Aristotle said, “The shape of the universe is necessarily spherical, for that is the shape most appropriate to what is primary in nature.” All space within a yurt tends toward a central focal point. All spaces are equal unless you have a two story yurt. I think that unlikely. Lastly, it is close to the ground and some of it frequently below ground, so it is part of the soil and thus refutes the skyscraper, castle and Tower of Babel arrogance.” The old professor wrote, “Notable, but why arrogance, why not ambition which you seem to have in plenty?” on this paper which is on file in the Rosie U School of Architecture archives. Caitlin was thrilled that 

someone understood her and there might be a difference between arrogance and ambition. 

Today, many years after our story, Caitlin is the chief architect in a Rosehill firm everyone will recognize but she didn’t want me to reveal her company name, don’t ask me why, but if you’re curious just look up the company that designed an office building downtown with rotating turrets like silos thirty stories high, turning on an axis a little each day to give the office moles therein a slightly different view. That was Caitlin’s design as was the restaurant on top shaped like a cupcake. 

All day she would go with nothing to eat and only water to drink. The water cleansed her smile, small but warm.

     In the early air street and sidewalk were fresh and empty. She walked the seven blocks to the Rosie U campus, stopping at the Student Commons building to sit under the dome in the enormous Commons Hall among the empty tables, couches and overstuffed chairs. There at a small table she began to compose her “Statement of Intent.”

The main problem connected to building her back yard yurt; getting permission from her mother. Her father’s customary response to most of her requests was, ”Go ahead and do it, hell, i can’t stop you.” Father was a reliable non-obstacle, but as he did not hinder so also did he not promote, endorse or contribute. He was truly neutral. She loved him anyway. But her mother loved the  wide open yard, a big private space despite being only thirty feet wide with fences eight feet high on both sides and a garage blocking open access to the alley. To her mother it would be unbearably strange to plunk a giant cupcake into the middle of the grass. 

“And what will you put in this . . . yurt?” To her friends Caitlin would say “Anything i want.” To her mother she needed to be specific. Her mother might say, “Yurt, yogurt, sounds about the same to me and i guess both of them full of fruit, too.”

Caitlin wrote what she would reply;”Please mother, it is absolutely the best storage space and because it is low and round the openness of the yard is unbroken. And it is a very popular structure these days.” 

This latter opinion is not substantiated by objectively collected data but how would her mother know that?

Caitlin’s mother was concerned with what the neighbors would say. To her mother, public opinion was stronger than iron bars. If Caitlin could get the neighbors on her side the race was won. However, if her mother found out yurts are not trendy as indeed they were not and probably never will be, she would resist and if the yurt is built and someone, or a lot of people dislike it, what then? Caitlin would first have to make them popular in the neighborhood. How does a person make an odd, small building popular? This mountain hid its peak above the clouds.

       Caitlin was so preoccupied pondering this Central Asian architectural form that she failed to notice two students approaching her. They hesitated, seeing that Caitlin had an intense but dreamy glow. No doubt her gaze, it appeared to them, was fixed upon the translation and transpositioning of a troubling vision into language she had difficulty keeping within the edges of a sheet of paper.

Of the two approaching Caitlin, Phillipa, the smaller and more compactly built of the two who bore despite her generally serious and purposeful attitude, a mischievous spark, had seen Caitlin at a meeting to organize a dance in The Fan and liked her enthusiasm and now prepared to introduce herself.

Phillipa’s companion was not so eager. Lauren was taller, huskier, shy and reserved. What Lauren wanted most in life was first to find a husband and then have a whole bunch of babies. This desire was a motivating force in her life and had motivated her since she first felt changes in her body and her mother comforted her, saying, “Don’t worry Lauren that just means now you can have a baby. You won’t bleed to death, don’t worry.”

Well, Lauren thought, since now i can have a baby let’s get on with it! Soon she learned that first she had to have a husband. Boys! That’s where husbands come from. That’s great, that’s just my luck. But everyone faces hardships, no one, not even the fabulously wealthy, are guaranteed a smooth road. 

       Phillipa and Lauren were standing near, hesitating, each for her own reasons; Phillipa wondering what is appropriate, Lauren shy.  Phillipa spoke first, delivering a clever shaft.

“Did you hear about the circus fire?” This was meant to gently rouse Caitlin from her distant focus.

Caitlin, now wide awake, looked around at them.

Phillipa said “It was intense.”

Chuckling, Caitlin said, “Hey you guys, how are you?” She remembered seeing them at the contra dance planning session. 

They were all immediately jolly, feeling a fresh, open and eager invitation. Caitlin and Phillipa began to talk at once, Lauren listened. The subject of conversation was dancing, of course, because they knew eachother from no other social sphere.

It had been decided to see if they could have their dance at a middle school in The Fan. Someone on the planning committee (four people who were older and more involved and who, at one point in the midst of discussing the possibility of starting a dance in Rosehill paused and mutually understood if not expressed the thought that they had become a committee) was a teacher at the middle school and would see about finding out about the cost and making arrangements, if she could. Some of the others had gone to the school and wanted to see the place again, others worried about the cost of insurance. That needed to be checked out too,                               and advertisement and could they get a band and how much would the band cost and how much would people pay to come to a dance?

The three young women seated at the small table in the almost completely empty Common Hall lamented most the burden of having to buy insurance although they had no idea how much it would cost. It would not be cheap, that is certain. They didn’t understand why iut was needed; no one is ever injured dancing. You know how people are, they can hoist the price clear up to the rafters or joists or whatever you call those beams up there. If they can you know they will.

“Rafters,” said Caitlin. “Joists are the beams holding up the floor.”

“Well then, they’ll shoot the charges right up if they can,” Phillipa said. Her lips when calm were full and sensuous, when angry thin and tight. Her face bore the glow of pink health and reddened with her darkening mood. 

“No matter who gets hurt or if no one gets hurt,” said Caitlin.

“Or whose fun it spoils,” said Lauren. 

Caitlin immediately felt at ease with the big cuddly Lauren and mentally stimulated by Phillipa. She noticed how Lauren often appended or illustrated Phillipa’s remarks and reckoned they had been friends for a long time. 

       They parted with the general plan to do all they could to find a dance space if the middle school be denied them.

“Oh and i have a friend who is a really good dancer. She just started but she’s got lots of natural talent straight from the hills of Tennessee! She’s great, her name is Odaleen. She’ll be there too.” 

Caitlin and Phillipa left for class, Lauren, who had two hours to study or waste before her next class, went to play chess.

Every Wednesday the Hot Spot Book Shop set up four tables in their central reading area for anyone who wanted a game. Lauren happened to walk into this book store as the tables were being set up and said, “I’ve never played chess,” and a kindly face said, “Let me show you how.” 

And so it began.

It was a big change; she was a big husky gal, some called her lunky, a word that made her cringe. She had tried swimming, yoga and weight lifting (reps only, no bulking up) to add grace to her movements and make her form svelte and perhaps even willowy, but these efforts only led to good posture, ruddy good health and the word Amazonian instead of lunky. Only on the dance floor, in motion at eye level with others did Lauren feel equally poised in society and balanced, on time and normal.

Chess was another door opening onto equalization. And besides, one of the guys who played Wednesday                              mornings was sweet on her, she hoped. She thought he was sending signals, time will tell. A math professor, about ten years older but still spry, mentally very alert, sunny, funny, very patient and kind to her though slightly condescending. The only problem; he was kind of a runt. Lauren thought she might be able to encircle him with long arms and touch her fingertips behind her own head. A nicely shaped physique he had, cute but puny. Sitting across the table, they spoke little; Lauren understood from the very beginning that chess was not a game for gabbers. Chess players think, are there to study and think, think about strategy, not chin music. 

This was difficult, at first, but halfway through their second or third game Lauren discovered she liked silence. Silence gave her the opportunity to think about how the pieces would cross the board, places on the board more important than others and around it all, the capacity for the rooks to flank positions. And the queen, how like a woman, flexible, bold, but whose purpose was to protect that slovenly bum king, that symbol of power that just stands around and does nothing, nothing!

At one point in a game Lauren moved a piece, i won’t bother going into the details, and her professorial opponent sat up and said, “That was a good move!” Lauren thought to ask why but said nothing. Let him think i know why, she thought. 

Chess for Lauren became rest, calculation, time to think, her new friend the professor had a skill and helped                                 All Play and No work 237   Lauren discover it. As they had the same interest maybe she could develope the skill.

Their games were swift due to the professor’s knowledge and Lauren’s lack of it, but in the end, after an hour and a half that flew past like ten minutes, for Lauren, he said to her, “You picked that up fast. Will you be here next time?”

“Yes i will,” she said.

He looked at her, paused, Lauren thought, surprised and she smiled and he smiled, she thought, in a way he was not used to smiling.

“Thanks a lot, i’ll see you then,” he said and quickly left. His smile was a bit crooked but white and he wore glasses. He was the first guy who wore glasses Lauren had ever found attractive. Most of those four eyes were either fat or skinny and the professor was skinny but not so much. Hr pancakes and potatoes in cream sauce with oregano would put some eight on him. Lauren was so thrilled to like him and how much fun playing chess could be she bought a book about it. Until that day men who wore glasses were as dull and silly as men who smoked a pipe and played with it or men with a comb-over or men with bow ties or anyone who didn’t make good eye contact. Now at least glasses hanging on a nose were bearable. 

Caitlin in the union, chess with the professor, her morning class, a nice lunch and one more class, then a               

nap; all these combined so well Lauren did not think she could live through a better day. 

It was late afternoon when everything changed. As planned, Lauren met Phillipa at The Village, a popular café on the edge of the Rosie U campus. 

Phillipa was late, a surprising imprecision for her, and when she came in she looked unhappy. Lauren could see her anguish the moment Phillipa walked up to the table. It was so clear the first thing Lauren said was, “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

“It’s so terrible for Caitlin,” said Phillipa. 

“What happened to her?”

“Not to her, her father. He passed away last night.”

“He died?”

“He died in his sleep last night. He died and Caitlin didn’t know it until she got home. Her mother’s gone all to pieces.”

“That’s horrible!”

Chapter Eight                       

In a booth near Lauren and Phillipa sat a stout young man who observed the shock of Phillipa’s announcement of Caitlin’s father’s death and the lamentation to follow. This man knew Lauren and Phillipa, not by name but as two faces at a meeting convened to organize a contra dance in Rosehill.

Upon entering The Village he saw Lauren seated alone, nodded, smiled in his customary reserved manner and sat in a booth nearby. He was not one to introduce himself and attempt to make friends; he was a cautious calculator but for all that i found him to be honest. Had he chewed tobacco my father would have said he was, “A tight chewer and a close spitter.”

A few minutes after he came in and asked the waitress for a glass of beer, Phillipa came in and, standing before the table where Lauren sat, delivered the news. The observer witnessed and was stunned by the news, not the tragedy of the loss, being too far away to hear what had happened precisely, but by the sadness on the faces of the young women. He thought Phillipa could go on stage or film with so much expression. After the emotional effusion of the women subsided the two discussed a plan for the comfort of Caitlin and quickly left The Village. 

The listener wanted to introduce himself into the situation; his ability to express sympathy was above average for he was not only a talented musician but a gifted actor. He hesitated, paused and pondered until it was too late. Good enough, no mistakes were made; he would remember and seek another opportunity. Although capable, he was not comfortable expressing sympathy, In particular, he was unsure about proper duration of eye contact. High emotion made him nervous so he had to remain calm, for sympathy is slow and deep and the slightest hint of a fidget or twitch indicates sympathy has ended. He relaxed and waited for his glass of beer, having avoided a troublesome difficulty that might be useful later, after contemplation.  

        The glass of beer arrived and he sat looking at it, wondering why he had ordered it. Something important had occurred and he wanted to think, not drink. He was a musician and well respected in the small society of students, former students and creative personalities in and around Rosehill University. His stage name was Jubahla. At his birth his mother named him Noel Smitts, a name he loathed and in his heart bitterly reviled. He never willingly told anyone his name was Noel Smitts. If he appeared as Noel Smitts he would be expected to play a lute sing hey nonny-nonny no and that you know would just not go. The image deeply disgusted him, yet he loved all kinds of music. At the moment he realized the force of this love was undeniable he also discovered his soul name, Jubahla. Noel Smitts was his slave name. Like a resounding drum stroke, awakened is Jubahla.

A contra dance was starting in Rosehill and Jubahla wanted to provide the music. For that crowd he could play fiddle, not violin, guitar or banjo and was said to be exceptionally good with all of them. In addition to talent, Jubahla was adept at promoting himself, but he was subtle. In the art of self-aggrandizement he believed it was better to do too little and quickly duck out and proceed to other venues than to do too much and be forced to relive successes over and over or be plagued by the question “What next?” How many talented people, he wondered, had been destroyed by an obsession with that question, “What next?”

In strictly economic terms, Jubahla thought, success was a matter of being paid enough to live until the next creative project yielded more income. For a musician this means arranging to play the same old things over and over in new ways and places. The development of skill is easy ~ all of it is solely within the musician, all within the range of his own love, dedication and will power. He could see a corpse on the sidewalk and step right over it but a damaged fiddle or banjo ripped his heart. The only thing                                           All Play and No Work   241   he truly loved was music and Jubahla had plenty of that. The difficulty is finding a buyer. 

Like many musicians Jubahla was interested and intent on time. He was almost thirty now and looked back with nostalgia on those years when young women like compact Phillipa and husky, towering Lauren took an immediate interest in him. Those days had passed. He wanted to have been a phenomenal success when 21 or 22, like Buddy Holly or John Lennon. Now he felt like he was playing catch up all the time, time was slipping faster and faster beneath his wheels. And at the same time he knew that eternity existed only in the present, in focusing on being good now, completely inside, on and around the music.

The glass of beer was before him so he took a sip. 

When pondering the past, and history is very important in Rosehill, he felt unwillingly sucked down into it. This vacuum, this void perplexed and propelled him to act on one of his few certainties; if a melody won’t leave you learn a new one. Press on!

Jubahla would never tell anyone in his immediate circle of pop, folk and old time musicians that he once heard (on the radio)the classical pianist Arthur Rubenstein say, “If i don’t practice one day, i notice it. If i miss practicing two days, my family and friends know it. If i miss practice three days the whole world knows it.” 

This was Jubahla’s greatest strength; he didn’t need the love of other people. He could be with them, play with them and he could quickly leave any crowd and was glad to do it. His musical skill was all he owned and yet he knew he had to give it away freely and often to people he didn’t care for. The only way to beat back the fear of losing it was to practice every day and then give it away. 

The glass was damp and cold. He lifted it to his lips.

       Now he remembered; he came into The Village wanting to let his mind roam free and bump into what it will; now he wanted to focus his thoughts.  Beermight make his thoughts foggy, loosening the hinges and letting in a lot of extra debris. But it was one glass and he had ordered it and liked the face of the waitress, called a server, and would drink it slowly, see what path his thoughts wandered down and then walk around to clear his head.

While sipping the beer a tall, casually dressed man with a thick beard said hello to him. 

Hearing the voice, Jubahla betrayed no surprise or enjoyment. He knew this man, his name was Ralph and he played a bass fiddle. People taller than Jubahla put him on guard, more so than everyone else, so he pretended at first not to remember Ralph. This surprised Ralph. They had had a long, informative and interesting conversation during and after a jam a few weeks before. 

“I play the base,” Ralph said.

“Oh, that’s right. Have a seat,” said Jubahla.

  As Ralph angled himself into the opposite side of the booth a phrase passed though Jubahla’s mind; ‘long drink of water.’

“Are we any closer to getting that contra gig together?” said Jubahla.

“I don’t know.”

Ralph turned around in his seat and looked for the waitress. She was approaching. 

“I’m counting on there being a long wait and much confusion at first because there are a lot of people involved and you know they might find a church to dance in and that means they could get one of those wheezy old church bands.” 

“I don’t know about that, there were a lot of real young people there,” said Ralph.

“You’re right.” Jubahla agreed with and praised people whose cooperation and support he might need. He was careful to show he valued their ideas and opinions.  

Ralph asked the waitress for a glass of water with a wedge of lime in it. She left them. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

This request for a glass of water made Jubahla tense; if not consuming an alcoholic beverage Ralph would be more alert and clear headed.

“That’s what being a musician is about sometimes; wait and see.” Jubahla wondered if his tone was too authoritarian. But it was better to be too authoritarian than wobbly, most critically with people who say “I don’t know.” And he would not seek to place himself in authority over Ralph until he determined if Ralph was good enough to command. How musically experienced, both physically skilled and intuitively, was Ralph? When they played together he followed well but did not go outside his mood zone; he took no risks. All would be clear; everything a man is, is in his music.

Jubahla and Ralph talked together about music using a lot of professional and colloquial terms that i didn’t understand or remember. Except in the case of harsh experience we remember only what we already half know and i’m no musician. Jubahla and Ralph arranged to get together Wednesday night for the old time jam at Howard’s house in Aster Park. 

“Oh i been there,” said Ralph, “Where the naked guy lives.”

“That’s the one. He’s a real nice guy. Maybe he smoked too much weed.”

“Luckily i’m not his type.”

This small hint of an aversion to homosexuals made Jubahla pause and fall silent. That was not a sympathetic comment, but it was not yet clear homosexuality was a major factor in the way some people live.

      They left The Village together. Ralph said, “If you have a car and don’t mind could i get a lift from you down to the 17th St. Grill, if you’re going that way?”

“No, i’m on foot today,” said Jubahla, “Sorry,” and they parted.

Jubahla’s car was parked a few yards from where they parted. He walked past it and along the sidewalk for half a block before returning to it. He believed in the old saying that you should never give a bass player a ride lest there be no room for you or anyone else in the car. Being fond of creating old sayings, Jubahla had not yet settled on the final form of that statement. He did not know if implicit in the old saying was the general recognition that a bassfiddle player’s instrument could take up two seats, too much space in the car.

As he walked back to his car a rare emotional surge rolled over him and he feared that events could take a turn for the worst, meaning he would not get the gig at the dance and where would he be then? For these kinds of things you had to be in on the ground floor. Once you made the hit it was yours forever. But if you miss it, the wall is so high Elvis couldn’t get over it.

No. Elvis could get over it. Elvis could get over any wall. The wall would be too high for Jerry Lee Lewis to get over. But Jerry Lee would go right through the middle of it. 

The problem was lack of money. Isn’t it always so? His main source of emergency money was his mother and, as he was not married, that was a difficult trick to turn. He sat in his car, paralyzed by thought. He had to visit his mother out on The Bay (The Chesapeake), or maybe he could go practice and forget about it. No, he needed to take action. He needed to have ready money to help rent the dance hall, for if he offered advance money they would have to let him in on the decision making process. So now he would have to drive out to The Bay and ask for money from the woman who named him Noel Smitts. 

What could he bring her? There was a tradition in the Smitts family that true love must be accompanied by a gift.

It was not important that Jubahla’s mother lived on a sailboat docked in Yorkville and therefore she had no room for gifts, and she had all the money she needed; she had been comfortable for decades and rarely ill. After her first husband, Jubahla’s father, died, she met and remarried quickly. She was adjustable, Jubahla thought, like a wrench.

Jubahla never knew his real father except for the one photograph of a stern jawed man, who nevertheless had smiling eyes under the brim of his U S Navy officer’s hat. 

Jubahla calculated that he could borrow money for gas to get from Rosehill to The Bay but what kind of gift could he give? Then it struck him; a fiddle tune. He would write his mother her very own song and call it . . .  The title would come to him as he composed it. As a further incentive he would suggest to her that he could get the dance named after her, making her an honorary patroness. Well, that might be going too far, but still, it smelled like good bait.  

He might be able to get the dance named in honor of his mother, but first he would need an intro. A new fiddle turn, how would it go? Driving home, he tapped out a waltz beat on the steering wheel.  

Now all he needed was money for gas so he could get the money for the dance. Always money for gas, for everything, it was a universal problem. Coin of the realm, give it to Caesar dead and turned to clay who plugs a hole to keep the wind away. Just keep the music going, flowing.  He knew several people to tap for a loan and they would tell everyone in the goddam state about it. It’s no good to be known as a borrower. He knew several people living in Astor Park. They were enough in awe of him to slide him all he needed; ten. Then Jubahla shuddered, thinking of Howard in the house, naked. 

He would have to bear up, not let it show he was bothered by a naked man.  He thought, i’ll try there and see if the roommates are home.

At the same time Jubahla was working on the lyrics to a song he called “Fresh and Hot,” based on a line he heard attributed to the 33rd president of the United States, Harry Truman. In his youth Truman was a farmer, probably the only president aside from George Washington to be so employed. It was clear to Jubahla, who had never worked on a farm, what Truman meant when he said, “If it’s fresh and hot don’t kick it.” The idea, the concept, that which is ‘fresh and hot’ is universal. 

That was the peg, the chestnut or refrain in Jubahla’s song. Nothing had come to him yet, just “If its fresh and hot don’t kick it.” He carried that one line and chanted it like a mantra waiting for the rest of the song to grow out of it. He searched for the natural rhythm in it. “Kick it not if it’s fresh and hot,” as well as seeking out short words (the best kind to use in a song) that ended in the letters i and t without beginning with the letters s and h. It is not good, according to Jubahla the songwriter and maker of old sayings, to shock fast. Bring them in first, then deliver the punch or in this case the . . .  The line was good and it should have been easy. He was trying too hard. How about “Wait until it’s cold and dry,” that could be a second line somewhere in the song. Is there music in it, the very flow of the words themselves melodic? 

But first he had to write a fiddle tune for his mother. That was the gift. Then she would give him a gift; a deciding vote in the creation of a dance in Rosehill or outright control of it all. Writing the tune would be easy; his mother knew nothing of music. A phrase from someone here, a phrase from someone else there with something dropped in the middle and yo mama! 

In Astor Park he stopped in front of the house on Spruce St. and walked to the front door. No one answered his knock. It was not the kind of home where you had to knock, but he did again, waited and then opened the door. Immediately he stepped back and closed it. Something was going on in the parlor and it sounded too good to interrupt. Well so much for Astor Park. He returned to his car. 

As he neared his own house he wondered if one of the guys living there, his roommates, would give him ten bucks for gas. He would have to work in the request subtly, for he already owed both of them about that much. He would have to get enthusiastic, confer with them, share his plan, his dream, a dance! No, maybe not, not now, not before he had a good hook in. If they were both together there it would be impossible. One would have to be out of the house, it didn’t matter which. They were both younger and in awe of him but when it comes to borrowing money from someone to whom you are already in debt, awe wears thin quick. If both are together they will look at each other and at him and at each other and know the shine has dimmed; know the truth. And maybe say no. 

He would have to channel the spirit of his step-father, a man he distrusted but admired and respected. His step-father always knew how to handle people. And he told Jubahla all the secrets. Even as he tricked and maneuvered the step son and terrified him with threats of physical harm or verbal abuse or worst of all, sailing away with his mother (he had owned the boat she now lived on) he also told him it was something he would never do. Never trust anyone who says they will never do something. “See, this is how you manipulate people. Watch my dust.” Jubahla’s step father played the trumpet, coronet, trombone and flute. Mostly it was the trumpet as he stood on the bow of the boat and the melody echoed over the water. The boy (before the coming of Jubahla, when he was Noel Smitts) second strongest memory of his step father was hearing his horn. One day the sound of the horn came out of the fog and for many minutes he listened and saw only fog. Then the bow of the boat flowed out, swirling aside the mist. And there on the bow was his step father with his horn to his lips.

The man treated him rough yet even so Jubahla respected his step father. He was a wise man, he paid attention and he had energy. He assumed his real father was like his step-father, since his mother, like most people, would tend to marry the same kind of person.

The most salient memory of his step-father Jubahla continuously, involuntarily recalled, was of the late afternoon when they dragged his body out of The Bay.

At first, no one could see the body because it was completely covered with crabs. Only the general shape of a man now, this man sized lump of meat was identified by the belt buckle, the belt being the only item of clothing still intact girding the flesh. Dental records later confirmed the identification. As the body was hauled ashore the crabs clung to it, still tearing off bits. Some of the men collected the crabs in a bushel basket.

As he pulled up to his house it was good to see one of his roommates leaving. Jubahla hoped the remaining one was there and agreeable. It would be Jose, yes, that’s good, better than Dave. Dave was agreeable most of the time but he was sarcastic. He made you pay more for a favor and his memory was too good. 

Jose was slightly odd, he liked to walk around in odd clothes, worked in a gas station and complained about the indignity of it, but aside from these minor irregularities was good company. He might be a pauper now and might be one all his life but he was good company and that‘s all that really matters, isn’t it?

Chapter Nine                 

Walking away from Jubahla, Ralph was already thinking of someone else. Most people after meeting and parting from Jubahla struggled to shed a feeling of unease he often engendered with his longer than normal eye contact, long silences and rare but sharp critical, insightful observations. Not so Ralph. Ralph followed the beat and as at all other times went with the flow. 

Ralph was in love. For weeks Ralph had thought of almost nothing and no one but Marianna. His temperament was, i would say, even without Marianna to distract him, forgiving of intrigue and abuse. That is why, after leaving Jubahla on the sidewalk in front of The Village he thought no more about him.

Marianna was very different from Ralph. He was country, she was city. He thought of her involuntarily now and drifted into day dreams of being with her always. She had been touched by an angel, or was an Angel, as the singer crooned, “flying too close to the ground.” Ralph would not admit or think it possible he listened to too much country music. She, Marianna, thought of him as a good prospect; strong with hard working hands and farm boy health, a sensitive, loyal country man who would always be himself, genuine and steadfast. Playing the bassfiddle, Marianna thought, indicated a strong foundation. 

Exploring the depth of his feelings and yet hesitating to conclude, Ralph thought of her as bright and delightful. Persons like Ralph from his rural part of the state rarely use the word delightful because it suggests an excess of frivolity. Frivolity and farm animals don’t mix. He loved her, that was certain, yet he wondered if they could ever overcome their fundamental differences. “Love’s the greatest healer to be found,” crooned the singer, so Ralph walked with confidence. 

Wait, he loved her differences. This feeling puzzled and worried and at the same time warmed him. 

First, she was so short. Of course, everyone was shorter than way over six feet tall Ralph. But Marianna was a lot shorter.

And second, she talked very fast, being from the left side of Long Island, New York. He liked her tone, the rush and pitch and seeming unstopability of her voice like a Charlie Parker solo with love. Typical of the Long Island accent, she guttered or tanged the ends of some words concluding a sentence or beginning a statement with a tone abrupt as the interrogative. Of course Ralph didn’t think of her speech in terms of guttering, twanging or clipped conclusions; he just tingled in the rhythm of it. There was something in her voice that soothed and excited him at the same time. As a temperate personality, he needed very little soothing, so it is possible her energy served to draw him out. Also, the voice came out of her tan square generous smiling face and her head as she spoke gently, slightly rocking side to 

side as if she wanted to look around him because she certainly could not see over him. 

In addition to all this was Marianna’s very black hair. Ralph saw her hair, particularly the glossy ball often pinned into a bun on top of her head, as much as her face, for when they stood together and he looked at her he mostly saw the top of her head. Her thick dark mass of hair was now very familiar to him. As a boy he spent many days in the woods and the rolling hills around his home at the edge of the city. The woods were thick with undergrowth, the very thickets and briar patches Brer Rabbit pleaded with Brer Fox not to throw him in. The sight of her hair like the thickets of his youth inclined Ralph to ponder questions arising in youth when confronted with the thickets of life itself; the dark, swirling, awful struggles, the fears, pain and where is the light? Will he be clever enough to outfox Brer Fox? 

“You’re dreaming again, aren’t you?” she asked and he shook loose and nodded. 

Marianna loved Ralph’s slow, steady always on time consistency. For her a consistent, reliable man was unusual. 

The morning they met on a sidewalk in Aster Park, Ralph was walking his neighbor’s dog. His neighbor was sick in bed. It was a crisp Saturday morning. Marianna was going to look at an apartment for rent. The dog Ralph had on a leash was a mutt, mostly beagle and a mix of many of the other low riding breeds. This dog had 

a strange habit the owner had not told Ralph about. Upon seeing another human being approach the dog stopped and rolled onto its back, not every time a stranger passed, but often enough. This habit would have annoyed many people, not Ralph, who was used to the strange behavior of some animals. It required him to stop walking until the passing human was gone at which time the dog uprighted itself and they continued on their walk. The forced stops allowed Ralph to speak to his neighbors after assuring them that, “My dog is not dead,” and indeed the truth was plain to see for the dog lay on the brick sidewalk of Astor Park wagging its tale, its fearful eyes on the towering forms standing with Ralph.

On this crisp Saturday morning the dog rolled over as Marianna came near. She had seen the pair, man and pooch, from a distance and thought the contrast of lean and stout, high and low curious. Ralph saw Marianna and she saw him, the dog trotting before him, and when they were about ten feet from each other the dog stopped, swiveled and rolled over, thrusting its feet into the air. Ralph gave a tug at the leash but the dog remained on its back, looking up at them. Marianna said, “Is your best friend okay?”

“He’s fine. He just likes to roll over.”

“Do i have to scratch him or something?”

“Not if you don’t want to. It’s my neighbor’s dog. Could be fleas, i don’t know. Go ahead if you like.”

“Awful friendly,” she said. She stroked the dog’s     

tummy a few times.

“Do you live in the neighborhood?”

“Maybe. I’m going to look at a place, you?” 

“Just up the street.” He tugged at the leash. “I hope i see you again sometime, after you move in.”

“I’ll be around.” Marianna walked on feeling for the first time comfortable in the neighborhood.

The dog watched her go, leapt up and pulled Ralph away. He was reluctant to move on; something fresh and new had just happened. Dog and man continued on the brick sidewalk in Aster Park and the man was so dazzled he failed to notice the dog was in control of the stroll. 

 The next morning Ralph woke from a vivid dream. He was with Marianna and they were naked. He rapidly rolled from the bed and felt himself throbbing in his jammies in the dim light before dawn. He felt his way through the dark room to the switch, still half dreaming, expecting Marianna to be in the room on the bed, lying as he had left her in the dream; naked, sprawled open and writhing with lust. He snapped on the light and then snapped it off. What he saw in that flash of light astounded him; protruding from the open fly of his jammies was . . . the suddenness and intensity of his passion was like a physical blow. He covered himself and stood paralyzed until desire and shame shrank and faded into darkness.

It was too early to get up but he couldn’t go back to bed. There he would think of her again and feel the                                  All Play and No Work   255        tremendous desire he could not properly, with self-respect, express. He started early and all day her face and particularly her smile floated before him. 

Ralph had matriculated at Rosie U intending to become the conductor of an orchestra. That was before the bass fiddle got him. He lived in Aster Park a few blocks from a house crowded with students and musicians and they played together regularly and irregularly, depending on musical taste. At home Ralph practiced a few hours, listened to music and played along with it, stepping into the stream. He would then drive to the crowded house to play with whoever might be there. He never called the house to tell them he was coming. Most of the time the phone was disconnected for lack of payment or someone strange and unreliable answered. Many people went in and out of that place and Howard the naked man was not the most peculiar. It was a bus station kind of place but comfortable.

Ralph didn’t like just showing up because he had to take his car. No one can play the bassfiddle and not own a car. Aside from the size of his instrument Ralph said, “I drive a runabout, it’ll runabout a block and quit.” Fortunately he only had a few blocks to drive. Before he bought the old car many years ago he measured the back seat to be sure it was big enough for his instrument to ride with the windows closed. Without his instrument he was a walker. 

       On this day, after speaking to Jubahla, Ralph walked home and started his car, drove it to the music department at Rosie U (around the corner from The Village) where he had been practicing in one of the empty studio rooms and soon arrived at the house in Aster Park. He hoped to play there later in the evening and night.  

The front door he knew was always open and no need to knock but he looked in at the parlor window. Howard sat on the couch and in an overstuffed chair near him sat Lonnie, a musician with a heavy accent part Alabama, part Liverpool, who often talked about playing with many musicians he met in Nashville or Galax or at Merlefest. Lonnie didn’t play the banjo very well. He said, “I don’t have to play it well, it’s a banjer.”  Both Howard and Lonnie were on the edge of their seats hovering, like cowboys over a campfire, warming their ears before a phonograph. 

“What’s happening?” said Ralph.

“Listen to this, Ralph,“ said Howard looking into the small monophonic disc spinner. His hand was on the needle arm and he set it on the edge of the LP.

It scratched and brubbled on the old vinyl record before the most raucous screeching, grating, glass shattering and door slamming tidal wave of sound most would call plain noise, burst out.

Then a melody followed flowing forth, a symphonic willowing which resolved itself into a fast downbeat 

thumping roar blowing strong, stretching into twangulation and a window sash rattling romping beat.

Lonnie laughed but not as loud as the music. “Ain’t that the damnedest stuff you ever heard? They put that on a record!” He had a big white crooked smile.

“Yeah, that’s crazy!”

“That’s Buck Flannigan and the Horny Hipsters,” said Howard. “God i haven’t heard this record since my dad played it to shake up the house.”

The music evolved into a series of talk and rapid drumming. 

“Or we can play this one here,” Howard said and hoisted a red LP with an abstract form resembling a coiled snake on the cover. “Evos Blatos and Sensual Sensations.”

“We done listened to that one,” Lonnie said, “It will git you a hard quick boy.”

“Your dad’s records, Howard?”

“Yeah, he died last year and Sis just brought these by.”

Ralph wanted to ask if Sis was naked, but restrained himself. Howard was odd and sincere. One often felt but hesitated to say he was loveable.

The music was grown soothing but the pleasant interlude now caressing the air would invariably give way to raucous rampaging, riotous rowdiness and, as expected, it did. 

“Goddam that’s great,” Lonnie said.

        Ralph thought, ‘so great even you can play it, Lonnie?’ but he said nothing.

As he had many times since he met Marianna, Ralph wondered what she would think of Buck Flannigan and the Horny Hipsters or Evos Blatos and others like them. He was sure she would listen to them once, as did he, thinking it noise, not music. The child cries out, the child bangs on a metal pot; these can be called the beginnings of language and music, they are not language and music. Noise was the only word for it. Vaguely Ralph felt Marianna might be endangered by such noise when he recalled that she had not only run the turbulent human shouldered waters of the concrete and steel chutes of Manhattan, she had grown up running them. They were her natural habitat as the woods were his. The vast Manhatta! City of orgies, million footed, million faced island of commerce, corruption, love and challenge, as poets called it. As for Ralph, he saw no place in this music for his large lyre.

“That’s kind of weird stuff, i think,” Ralph said.

“Oh it’s just fun,” said Howard.    

Ralph thought, ‘he misses his father.’

“Trashy stuff, yeah, but you know what, you can feel superior to it.” 

“Lonnie, i think you might be a Buddhist,” Howard said.

“Perty close, i’m Baptist. Raised that way anyway so the Lord helps me to carry on. But seriously, not much of                                    it stuck to me, except the music.”

Ralph thought, ‘It’s back to the music again.’

 “The whole question of superiority is right there. They say you can’t be superior to anyone but your own seff (self),” said Lonnie. We all stood back for a moment; such depth, such wisdom so unexpected from Lonnie. “Yeah, i got that one beat,” he said. 

Everyone chuckled. 

“It was easy.”

Ralph agreed but said nothing. Humility and honesty, Lonnie had that mixed with the molasses and corn pone going for him. 

But Ralph now was moving beyond corn pone and every other kind or unkind of pone. He thought, again, of a pretty young woman from Long Island. 

“Can i use your phone?” 

Howard said, “Sure, i think it’s still working.”

The phone worked. 

“Marianna, this is Ralph.” 

Marianna said “Hello stretch.” 

Ralph stopped. A feeling swept over him; no one had ever before called him ‘stretch.’

“I’ve been thinking of you all day,” resumed Ralph, “and think we can go to a concert tomorrow night and we can talk about whatever you like.” 

Ralph’s younger sister had advised him to ‘actively listen’ to women and since he didn’t say much to them or anyone else this active listening sounded easy. She                               suggested his habit of ‘inactive listening’ was probably why, at age twenty eight, he was unhooked-up.

“Oh i’d love to go, so glad you asked. And i think of you too.” She giggled. 

The giggle surprised Ralph. A giggle? Not like her.

“So where we going? What show?”

“It’s a classical concert, do you like classical music?”

“Sure i do i like all kinds of music. Classical’s okay. I don’t very often go out and listen to it so that’ll be nice. Who’s the composer? I listened to John Cage and didn’t understand it and didn’t like it but i listened to Phillip Glass and did. I didn’t understand it either but liked it. Don’t ask me why. Does Phillip Glass write classical music?”

“I think he does. He’s old and i understand it, i get it so it must be classical,” said Ralph although at that moment he didn’t get it. His understanding would come later when, as usual, it was too late.

“Well it’s the old stuff, Marianna, by a Frenchman named Hector Berlioz and i hope you like it. Then there’s some kind of short piece by Maurice Ravel. He’s modern.”

“Just to bring us up to date.”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“I’ll be ready. What time?”

It took Ralph a moment to realize Marianna had accepted his invitation and he hadn’t thought of the time or what they might do before or after.

“Do you think you’ll be hungry before the show?”

      “It can happen.”

“Okay, then i’ll fetch you at six, sound good?”

‘I’ll be ready. Ralph, i think you must be the sweetest guy in Rosehill.”

Ralph had to pause again. “You make it easy.”

“Okay okay, i’ll see you at six. Are you going to be wearing a tuxedo?”

“No, just a regular old tie.”

“See you at six, Stretch.”

Chapter Ten                          

Marianna hung up the phone, then stiffened from feet to forehead as she heard the stout man lying on the couch behind her take a long crackling drag on his cigarette.

“What’s all that shit, hot date?” he snorted.

“You just keep that fat mouth shut,” she snarled back.

“Whoa, college education makes baby fierce,” the man chuckled and blew a smoke ring.

“Yeah and if you got off your dead doopa and looked for a job, or got back to New York . . .”

“Okayokay, you made your point, now you can shut up. You know what i’m up against.”

 “Yeah sure i know, inertia, habitual laziness, a sloth supreme . . .” 

“Yo, big fancy words smarter than me and your brothers and father i guess, so go wave your brains in somebody else’s face.”

“I’m going to class and i would really like it a lot if when i came back you won’t be here.”

“Dream on, you don’t shit on family.”

Marianna collected her books and other school supplies and left. Out on the sidewalk she walked toward Rosie U for several blocks through the old wood framed row houses of Astor Park before her face softened, thinking of Ralph, a southern gentleman, a well raised, considerate true man who, she was sure, truly loved her.

She liked using the word stretch; it made her feel real country. It was the first word that came to her the afternoon she first saw Ralph on the sidewalk; a tall man with a very short dog and how funny the dog rolling over to show her its private parts! Did he train the dog to do that? Later, when they met again at the Student Union and the 17th St. Grill she was thrilled. 

Marianna moved to Rosehill three years before to study at Rosie U. In time she lost, slowly, the urge to catch up with everyone. The struggle to keep up with the crowd was almost like living in Brooklyn and never going to Manhattan, she thought. It can’t be done. Now she knew it made no difference; the world is full of all kinds of different, interesting, loving people. And Stretch ~ Ralph, was so lean and swift and yet solid she was certain he had never eaten a potato. 

Marianna intensely disliked potatoes ~ she had eaten too many of them. For her it was a form of rebellion in adolescence to eat salad and other light, raw vegetables instead of potatoes. Her mother and all her bulky aunts called her youthful diet the “short road to starvation.” 

Her mother and those aunts, especially the aunts, the babushkas, were like potatoes themselves and Marianna looked like them in the black and white photos faded and unclear, when they were young back in the Motherland. She left home for Rosehill and there everyone was lean and swift, like Ralph, while in her memory of home they were all eating potatoes and                               sinking into the ground. Marianna thought of them and said, “I will not sink, i will not become a potato. I will fly.”

Her father and brothers were big men with huge round heads, arms and legs and basketball bellies. When they lay on the beach at Coney Island they appeared unable to rise; beached, small, pale whales. None of them liked to swim; they just got in the water, rolled around and displaced tonnage of fluid and re-beached themselves. Forget global warming and the ice caps melting and rising sea levels; if all such men rolled into the oceans at once coastal cities would drown, islands, small and large disappear and mountaintops grow crowded with refugees.    

Marianna would be lean. She believed her destiny lay in being small, petite, light, even, if possible, winsome. She was born in the United States, an American, unlike over there on the Steppes among the bulky masses. She would be compact, trim; she would not spread out.

Ralph, being the vulnerable type, had shown Marianna, in the several weeks they had known each other, glimpses and glimmers of the same obdurate fortitude she hoped she possessed in full; a spine of steel. She loved to see strength in the man. Yet he did not show it proudly or, more to the point, vainly and with pomp or self pity.  

Obdurate was one of Marianna’s favorite words. She was obdurate and now was trying to be flexible. Ralph was there, obdurate and flexible.

One of her favorite Ralph things was that he played a bassfiddle and this made him look leaner. Man and musical tool looked good: the instrument wide and bulky, the man slight, bending to pluck out heavy tones with his long, fast fingers, master of the monster, Ralph in control.

And yet Ralph was gentle, unassertive, unlike her brothers.

The man on the couch had snickered and shook his head as Marianna left the apartment. 

“Try not to burn the place down,” she said.

He re-snickered, but said nothing. He was the latest of her too many brothers to find her in Rosehill. He didn’t like Rosehill, thought it was boring but then she had heard him say Brooklyn was boring so she had to conclude he carried his boredom with him.

They came to visit her at regular intervals, these brothers, because none of them had steady work and their father and mother, Marianna can hear them now, said, “How about going down there to check on your sister? We haven’t heard from her in awhile.” 

And down they came without a letter, phone call or anything. The first she heard from them was the door bell. 

The brothers were not ambitious and the parents gave them money. They never gave her money; her husband, if she ever got one, if there was a man in the world who would have her, was supposed to give her                          All Play and No Work   266  money. Marianna put it all down to being bulky in America. In America you do not bulk, you move. Americans do not have roots they have wheels. She had told her parents by telephone, “Please do not send down more than one bum at a time,” and her father and mother would not acknowledge it; they pushed the boys to take the bus the three hundred miles plus to Rosehill. She couldn’t stop them, she was just a girl. And it was good for them to see new places and new faces even if they were forced to do it and it generally made no impression on them. They would not get up and go all on their own and sometimes lightning strikes. Apparently it had struck Marianna, why not them? As their father would say, “Marianna is the only one here (Brooklyn) who will go anywhere,” and so far he was right. Marianna made her parents glad and the boys made them sad. Why could the boys not move away and Marianna stay?

In her three years in Rosehill Marianna had undergone changes. She began her studies in Business Administration energetically. All that happened around her she studied as well and with as much interest and soon her books were heavy and dull. Too much, too many choices faced her and she wanted them all. In addition to history, literature and music there was dancing, swimming, volleyball, in which the ability to jump high was as important as being tall, and all the crafts, particularly glass blowing. So far she had made all the glassware in her kitchen and her best item, the huge                                bowl she kept piled with fruit. Or she mixed Sangria in the bowl. Nothing she drank in Brooklyn, including the best Vodka, could make her feel as good as Sangria, like a cloud drifting, like a bird all the lightness of hollow bones. Part of it was the sense of leather the wine gave her. This was the Spanish blood coming through, the blood of the bull, the leather of the saddle, although she never rode a horse or saw a bull. But the oil and pores of the leather breathing like a second skin. When you put on the skin of the animal you become the animal. In her dreams the leather bound her, clothed her warmly and she pulled against it, pulled herself free of the binding of it even as it bound her tightly against herself. 

The strings of Ralph’s instrument drew her tightly in spirals around herself, pleasantly pinching up skin. His body was an instrument so much longer than her body but not her ability to reach and the struggle to reach from one end to the other of him would certainly give her a feeling weightless, her body forming an ever thinning line. Fine, if she could not reach from end to end of him she would stick to the middle. She giggled with the thought and felt herself grow warm inside.

Thinking this way, Marianna embarrassed herself even in the privacy of her own thoughts. From Ralph i must hide such passions, she thought, until we meet in the dark. And the darkness will be split by the light of our love. 

       From the time he called to make the date to the moment he rolled up to the curb in front of her apartment building, thoughts of Ralph hovered over Marianna. He closed his car door and was walking away from it when she came out of the building.

He was silent, wondering what this meant, this being ready to go, unlike all the other women he knew or heard about.  

“You must be hungry,” he said.

 It took her a moment to understand why he said this. “Oh yes i am,” she said though she wasn’t. She couldn’t tell Ralph the truth; her brother was at that moment lying on the couch watching a ball game.

“Do you have a favorite place to go?” he asked.

“Any place with a big salad bar. I live for salad.” 

Ralph was surprised. A husky woman, he expected her to be more like him and prefer meat and potatoes.                                                            

In his car she noticed the distinctly unpleasant odor of fish and feared it might be constant with him. 

“Do you like to fish?”

“That’s shad. My friend borrowed my car when they were running and got a couple of bushels and then went drinking and left them in my car over night. Thanks a lot. But he dressed a bunch out for me. I got plenty filets if you want some.”

“Sure, if you like,” said Marianna, “What’s shad?” Not the best kind of fish if they haul it around by the bushel.

A local delicacy, but we still have to keep the 

windows open. Sorry.”

“It doesn’t bother me. “

“I leave them open even overnight in the neighborhood. I have nothing in here to steal and the car’s so old no one thinks there can be much of value in it.”

So he was part of the neighborhood, or understood it and lived with it, a stable and constant man. Marianna felt she was exactly in the right place at the right time with the right guy never mind the shad. 

They found a salad bar and ate light, then went to the show at the Piazza. It was fine and she felt the romance of the music which Ralph told her was part of the French Romantic Movement in music, even though she didn’t understand it. 

After the concert they went across the street, it was Ralph’s idea, to Jefferson Park to sit on a bench under the quiet trees and talk. 

“We should get to know each other better because i’m getting kind of fond of you and maybe we better watch out.”

Aside from this, he had spent his last dollar on the concert tickets and their dinner.

“I don’t bite.”

They talked about families, Ralph’s older sister unhappily married, the death of his father at age fifty 

one, but mother is getting along fine now, in fact she had to go back to work and loves it.

Marianna told Ralph all she could without mentioning her brothers, one of whom without doubt still lying on the couch watching a ball game or walking to or from the refrigerator. By now he had emptied four or five beer cans and if the game was slow was very likely asleep. Good. If he sleeps now he will be up late watching the tube and the rubble and spit of the television from the other room is less disturbing to her sleep than his snoring.

As they were talking on the bench and Marianna hoped Ralph would put his arm around her and kiss her and Ralph thought about putting his arm around her and kissing her, in the quiet semi-darkness a hefty, stooped man approached them. They were not worried, as they were in a well lighted area along Willow St. 

The man came directly up to them and said, “My name is Catfish, that’s what they call me, and i ain’t a bum. I work for a living. I’ll tell you a joke for a quarter.”

Marianna was silent, Ralph said, “Yeah, i heard about you. Here’s a quarter, tell us a joke, but if you say nigger or any other such i’m taking it back.”

Marianna was shocked to hear Ralph use the second most offensive word in the language delivered so casually, as if after long use. She had heard her father use the word at home, but her brothers, crude as they were otherwise, never used it. In the old country it was                           common to insult black people, despite the fact that Russia’s greatest poet was black. Pushkin was only half black, some said, but that’s black enough, others replied. In addition to this, in a country where black people and other minorities are rare, vilification and suspicion are bound to flourish, more so in a country traditionally overly concerned with invasion. 

“Oh no sir,” said Catfish, “I don’t tell them kinda jokes no more.”

“And keep it clean.”

“Yessir, i may not be a real good Christian but i’m that good a Christian.”

Then Catfish proceeded to tell the story of a man who bought a fancy new sports car to perk up his middle age and make himself feel energized by danger and while speeding along one night he was stopped by a highway patrolman.

“You’re speeding,” the officer said.

“Yessir, i was,” the man said, “but you see, officer, about twenty years ago my wife run off with one of you guys on the highway patrol and, well, y’see, i just thought you was bringing her back.”

Ralph chuckled and Marianna laughed with less enthusiasm. 

“Okay that’s worth a quarter, Catfish, thanks, now my friend and i want to continue our very serious conversation.”

“Okay, you do that,” said Catfish as he turned away, “and God bless you.”

After Catfish was out of earshot Ralph said, “It wasn’t worth more than a quarter, that’s for sure, but we have to keep him in business until he gets better.” 

Marianna was proud of Ralph. He could handle people like Catfish; he had confidence and kindness at the same time.

“I wonder how much he’ll make telling that one joke,” Ralph said.

“Enough for a bottle or two, i guess.”

“Oh, no, i heard Catfish doesn’t drink.”

“Maybe that one is his only joke.”

“They tell me he has plenty, some of them actually funny.”

At that moment Marianna discovered she was in love with Ralph. In fact, she had been in love with him for all of the two weeks since they had met. Possibly she loved him before she ever met him, hoping to meet someone exactly like him. For the rest of their evening together she pondered a wide range of subjects like where they would live and when they would get married and how many children they might have and how much he would earn as a musician if making money as a musician was possible. Most of all she wondered what her family would think of him and discovered that she didn’t care. With Ralph, her family was now in the past. On her doorstep                            ARalph said, “I have to see you again soon, Marianna.”   

“And i want to see you again soon, like, very soon.”

“Whenever you say, any time. Do you like to dance?”

Mariana could no longer resist the desire. she threw her arms up and around him and kissed him. He wanted her, she could feel it as he bent down to take her up. They kissed for a long time. Their bodies fit better than anyone measuring them from a distance might estimate. They stopped kissing and he whispered in her ear, “Oh Marianna Koklova, I love you; i love you my butterfly.”

That one word filled her with joy; butterfly! 

Chapter Eleven               

The next morning, for Marianna Koklova, the day was clear and bright inside and out. All that nonsense called the world was outside. Inside, she was with Ralph. In her depths she knew what the future would bring; she had Ralph and Ralph had her and she knew it and he knew it and she knew he knew it and so did he. Last night she had wanted to pull him into her apartment where they would have started their family but a remnant of her old family was in the way. The sight of her brother sleeping on the couch was too heavy. It occurred to her later that they could have gone to Ralph’s house in Aster Park but as he didn't mention it she said nothing. Perhaps he had his own brother to worry about. No matter, the issue was settled, the question answered and the way chosen. Now or later, they would be together.

Add to the certainty of being loved and loving in return, Marianna this morning was headed for her favorite class in the glass blowing studio. This morning at the furnace everything she made would be long and lean and loving. She would stretch the glass. 

A friendly heat greeted her at the door to the studio, the cozy but stark interior of the furnace room and work tables and there at one end of the tables was Jody, her friend, classmate and twin. They were not official sisters but they could have been; both short and stout, both in their casual conversations admitting to a fear of excessive bulging. And the one aspect of Jody’s character                                Marianna most admired; the willingness to do what she had to do to get what she needed. On this day that seriousness and determination was clear from the first perfunctory hello and continued through the first session and efforts to draw the glass. Jody was heavy handed, it was easy to see. Marianna was sure her sister was laboring under an emotional burden even as she herself was distracted by the exhilaration of love.  

“Let’s go to The Village (a block and a half from the glass studio) and have a drink,” Marianna said. It was unusual to have a drink at noon, but an investigation into the extreme distress of a friend requires extreme measures. Jody was clearly holding something too tight inside. Jody readily accepted the invitation, further evidence that she wanted to rattle her chains and shake the bars of her cage.

One problem with Jody shaking the bars of her cage was that she was a lousy story teller. Jody was a woman of material manipulation, of creation in wood, metal or glass, of making things. She spoke with her hands through the process of building, molding, creating what we rarely think about until we knock it off a shelf or bump into it. 

The two stout students sat in The Village and Jody in distress, limited in storytelling skills, dragged Marianna down a rough road. Marianna, faithful friend, listened patiently, but we don’t need to suffer as well.  

        Therefore i have taken Jody’s story into my own hands, removed stones and briars, added and subtracted parts and shaped it into a more cohesive and concise third person narrative. It all came from her with objectivity keeping it even (except in the uneven parts) and moving. 

It goes like this;

Jody wanted to scream. She was so tired her eyes wobbled all crazy on her; the walls of her bedroom tipped inward, the furniture slanted away and against them colored weird. She felt herself slipping into a dangerous dream. She had had this dream before, of the beach on Nantucket in winter; a broad ice shoreline along a gray sea. White gulls scream on frozen wings. If Harvey didn’t can this tall tale about Mexico (she had heard it before) and make a move soon she would have to do something; fall asleep, fight or die. God!

The telephone rang.

Like shattering glass, the bell broke sharp into the soft bedroom air, then cut again. The young woman’s voice startled Jody. It was Barbalee.

“Jody, i meant to call you earlier,”

she said.

“That’s all right, Barbalee. How ya been?”

Jody smiled at Harvey who lay beside her on the thick carpet looking at her album of snapshots and other    

    When the phone rang Jody sat up to answer it. Now she slumped back on one elbow.                                                      

   “I’m fine, rushed and ragged, how you been?” Barbalee said.

“Oh getting cozy, i hope.” She glanced at Harvey who paid no attention. “Harvey‘s over and he’s telling me all about how he almost got killed in Mexico.”

Barbalee laughed. “He’s so full of shit, ain’t he?”

“Sure is, but i like it.”

“He always talks about those faraway places. Are you sure you want a man with his old head up in the clouds?”
Barbalee what have you been doing? I haven’t seen you in days.”

  “Don’t change the subject on me, Jody girl, i ain’t been but studying this damn biology about to drive me batty. But listen Jody, Sven is at the door and i gotta go. Hold on Sven!” Jody heard Barbalee’s door buzzer over the phone and she imagined Sven’s habitually impatient face. The buzzer sounded again, immediately, twice and Barbalee shouted, “Be right there. Hold on!” Barbalee’s voice lowered and carried an insistent tone. “I want to talk to you tomorrow, we can have coffee somewhere. I got this terrible problem. I don't know a thing about copper and metal working and that kinda stuff. Do you think you can help me tomorrow figure it all out? I know it would be simple for you. You’re smart about that stuff.”

Jody heard Barbalee fumbling with the phone and working her way to the front door buzzer (Sven, now looking out the door to the terrace and beyond to the                            street below). Jody knew the distance from Barbalee’s apartment door knob and what piles Barbalee was struggling through to get to it. The room was very full, very cluttered not with trash or junk, but valued items; quality ownership; unmatched single wine glasses, china cups, porcelain girls and boys in Tyrolean costumes, (door buzzer) small lacquered baskets of ho-hums, as she called anything she had no better name for, vases, (door buzzer) boxes of small items found or bought at thrift stores cheap, bits of twigs, fasteners, curiously shaped rocks or discarded pieces of metal; all objects, (door buzzer)  that brought to Barbalee the mystery of possession, because (door buzzer, twice fast) Barbalee did two or more things at once and Jody had been to Barbalee’s small apartment through the front door whose buzzer Sven placed his forefinger upon once more and Jody could see Barbalee stretch for the doorknob, the telephone cord tight as a nerve about to snap.

But no more buzzer; was the door open and Sven coming in?

“Tomorrow, let’s see,” Jody said.   Tomorrow seemed so near, then far away; through now, her sleepiness, through the possible night with Harvey, if he could be made to act, be a man and commit. And what would the morning bring? Would they still be together? She wanted to leave herself as available as possible for Harvey. 

       “Hmmmm, maybe you could meet me at Moe’s Inn at two.” She looked at Harvey who continued to examine                                the book of snapshots and whatnots from Jody’s year away which included a very cold winter on Nantucket Island. At two he would be at work, if he went to work. If he didn’t work she could invite him to come along. They were all friends or would be moments after they met. That’s the kind of people Jody thought she knew. 

“At two that’s such a terrible time for me, but i guess so.”

“Barbalee, if you want to make it another time.”

“Hold on honey!” There was a fumbling sound like the crumpling of a paper bag on the Barbalee end of the line. “This man is going to tear my door right off the hinges if i don’t get to him so i’ll see you tomorrow at two.” 

“Okay.,”

“You’re sweet. And have fun with Harvey, huh?”

“Bye.” Jody hung up the phone. Her mind, a moment before scattered by weariness and desire, now focused on Barbalee. Barbalee had a cute nose and large dark, smoldering eyes, small full lips, a cute round chin and a trim figure. Short and stout herself, Jody envied pretty women like Barbalee.  Jody’s secret pride which she felt and never understood or spoke of was in being durable. 

Her hands, small and strong with short fingers, were used to labor, just as Barbalee’s hands were long fingered and smooth. Jody remembered Barbalee’s long fingers curve on the objects she crowded into her small apartment. The two friends were alone together and                                   All Plat and No work 280   Barbalee showed them to her, turning each one,       commenting and telling a story, bringing out a mystery fed into them by the light.

Jody was impressed by this profusion of possessions. Cloth, metal and wood for craft projects crowded the corners and under places of Jody’s own rooms; work unfinished, raw material filling her time with more work and with more work ahead and no comfort in completion.   

Barbalee had a man and she held him up to the light. Her man was an accomplishment, her victory. Jody drifted on an uncertain air.

She drifted as Harvey spoke with “his old head up in the clouds.”

Outside the street was chilly and dark. Snow had fallen all day and was still falling. Snow piled up in the arms of the leafless trees, on brown lawns and gray sidewalks. Jody shivered. She felt a snow-like accumulation in the room.

Harvey was long winded but good looking enough to ignore the dull gab and Barbalee was right; he had his old head up in the clouds. As much as Jody hated to admit it, Barbalee was right. It annoyed her when he said, “I’ll remember it later,” and forgot all. He was avoiding responsibility. It would annoy anyone to see the careless shrug of his shoulders. He had a job but it was not steady, being dependant on weather and he didn’t seem to care. He was quick, too quick, to drink beer. He demanded interest, got attention and repeated himself.                               This was the worst thing, because now Jody was so sleepy. All this had to stop. Flush out all that bad stuff! His mouth moved and she watched it, wanting to kiss his lips with her full rosy lips, as rosy and full as Barbalee’s, (not true; her lips were very thin) and put her arms around him. She thought of them doing it on the bed over there as soon as he cut off this bull about Mexico, she had heard the tale before, about getting on a bus! If he didn’t shut up and make his move she’d scream or fall asleep. And she smiled thinking he would carry her off to bed and there be warm in her arms and heart, no more lips and jaws moving, no more talking about it, but a vigorous man on her and then to look out the window at the snow covered night street and feel warm and the slow cars cold, buried houses and feel him warm inside and all around her. Like sparkles on snow, points of saliva pinging off lips and mouths, chins move in and out. Barbalee’s chin when she spoke her chin bobs like half a small rubber ball centered on her chin below the elegant lips, dimpled under the wet lower lip, a ball bobbing squished and unsquished and round and squished and unsquished while her voice strong edged as Jody sees Barbalee’s mouth around Sven, in possession of Sven as she heard once from a dark corner of a party where they all drank too much, say how he was in possession of Barbalee’s lips. Jody would never have such full, very kissable lips. The air is crowded with mouths and lips half-ball chins and more wet lips tiny specks flying off                                      them. From the lights above and the heavy rug between her fingers curled many waving, seeking tongues, mouths at work, mouths at play, talking tomorrow, talking today. Many tongues seeking the opulent fluids of love all flowing into one vast ocean of alkaline cervical lubricant and semen. The carpet has a million tiny tongues that lick Jody’s eyeballs, bathing them in hot saliva. Wet tongues slap face. Out of the flood came Harvey, louder.

“I said, ‘Was that Barbalee?’”

“What?”

“Was that Barbalee on the phone?”
‘Yes yes.” He’s looking at me. How long has he smirked, watching me doze?

“Where were we?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh yeah, Mexico. See these guys 

were coming back from a soccer game and aching for action. The three of us were waiting at a bus stop on this really crowded street and they came in all of them hanging out of this bus door.” 

Harvey flips the pages of the whatnot book. “And since we were three gringos and they figured we would be easy pickings . . . “

“Shut up, Harvey.”

Her darkness turns toward the only light.

  “What?” Harvey looks at her for the first time.

      “Shut up and kiss me honey.”                              

His mouth is open, unmoving. Jody makes her move.

“Crazy woman, get off me!” He giggles like a girl. No serious man would giggle.

“Shut up.”

“Jody.” 

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear another goddam word from you do you hear? Not one more goddam word shut up.” Her mouth clamps into a lipless line. She glares at him her hands bunched into fists. 

That was Jody’s story as she told it, with a little help from me, to Marianna in The Village. 

Chapter Twelve                 

Harvey stepped onto the sidewalk into fresh snow fallen all night, his pace away from Jody’s apartment building brisk. He had ten blocks to walk to his house in Aster Park and his tennis shoes were immediately soaked in the slushy snow. Regarding Jody, many sharp or slushy emotions swirled within him. 

Once she calmed down and had a brief cry, very unlike her, Harvey thought, Jody was a willing and eager lover. She made demands but gave as good as she got. The first question was,  “What next?” and when the answer was no longer, “Wash up, let’s do it again,” what was the ultimate goal? As a personality Jody was very specific, almost stern. Harvey liked this type of person or said he did or wanted to like the type; determined, whole–hearted, unambiguous, but being hooked up to that strength could be dangerous. Such people allow no slack and are notably short on forgiveness. 

‘It’s great,’ Harvey thought, ‘If she’s always on your side.’

Slack was Harvey's strength and weakness. You have to be strong and you have to relax. Harvey had too much of it and he knew it as did many others including his sisters who often criticized him for lacking ambition. Yet knowing this was not enough to energize him. They, his sisters, wanted him to tighten up and be a man around the house. He said, “Mallow out. Take your time.” The only consequence of the relationship Harvey feared was the possibility that Jody might want to crush, squeeze and flush out his slack. Should he put himself in her hands?

Motivation for Harvey was simple; his mind was strongly constructed but distorted by desultory forces that if no strong interest fired him up he had to act now or leave it alone. He was not mentally lazy, he was contemplative and his mind only appeared to be motionless. He was interested in everything so he had to act fast because no subject or activity dominated for long his fractured mindscape. Others called him “ditz” or “dork” (origins unknown) or “lost in the ozone” (late 20th century American counter-culture slang). Harvey liked to think but not to concentrate. 

He suspected Jody held many dark secrets. People with lips like her’s usually harbor a drive to dominate. Her lips were unlovable but she had a talented tongue. He could not yet imagine how deep were her desires and if bitterness was at the core. He trusted her; she had given her body to him. Yet beneath the saucy wench was a heart cold as the frozen sky and beyond the frozen dunes the wind torn shrubby tangles of Nantucket and the iron gray Atlantic. There she imagined all the places in the world she could not go as she walked the frozen sand, all the life outside herself, the only warmth clinched and bound within her. 

Jody had plenty to hide.  

Why, for instance, did Jody spend an entire winter on Nantucket Island? Sometimes she didn’t know the reason 

herself; it just got into her head to do it and she would do it no matter what. No one outright said it was a bad or unpleasant notion but they all seemed to think it was, so that is what she did. If anyone asked she would say, first, “Because i wanted to,” and in another ten years, “to test myself” and later in age “to find my center.” But those days, sorry to say, never came for her. 

But when she was forced to uproot her illusions and face reality, she told herself and no one else her decision to stay on the winter swept sand of Nantucket and endure the frigid lassitude there, it was purely her desire to act on her own, out of her own determination. This was the deed making her who she was, her self-generated truth and of the utmost value. If contrary to every living person on earth and all the stars, so be it; she would hold fast to it until she was dead and gone or all the world admitted she was right. 

Instinctively, Harvey feared Jody’s determination. Physically courageous, Harvey was an emotional coward. For instance, on the night in Mexico City when he stood on the sidewalk waiting for a bus with two American friends, students like himself who had met at his hotel ~ they had all come from a rowdy soccer match ending in a tie and the fans on the bus, all young men shouting and full of fire, leapt off the bus and rushed them. Harvey was exceptionally calm. He saw what was coming, backed into a defensive position and prepared to defend 

himself, and the crowd streamed around and past him. The Mexican boys saw he was prepared to fight and went after the other two who were smaller and running away. They caught them and beat them up, not badly, just a few kicks and punches and a stolen watch. It all happened so fast the attackers had time to get back on the bus before it pulled away. 

When Jody got mad at Harvey she terrified and unhinged him. He did what she wanted him to do which he had to admit was a lot of fun. Her thin lips were not so good for kissing but she had other talents. He had a sense that she was intent on an activity not unlike the softening of metal, the sculpting of glass or the shaping of wood all with the major purpose of drawing forth fluids.   

Aggression was acceptable this first time; passion equaled caring. Her body was small and compact, so she, being the assertive one, was very productive of positive results. Harvey called her dominance of him “the swivel factor,” or “satisfactory spinnage,” and after several hours of it he slept well.

Harvey's walked toward home, light and thoughtful. He was physically satisfied but grew more and more troubled by what might happen next. When Jody discovers who he truly is and how inclined he is to think instead of act, taking it easy until the perfect moment, the consequences could be severe.  

      On that walk home, he stopped for coffee at a pharmacy across the street from a small, triangular park. He had a couple of bucks and an hour before he had to go to work. 

As he passed the park he saw a young man in uniform seated on a bench.

The man was in uniform but something ununiform about him puzzled Harvey. He wore sunglasses with very small rectangular lenses and tennis shoes. In between his glasses and his shoes the uniform looked right, of proper spit and polish. And he had a generous, loving smile. He was dressed in his best and the best of his best was his smile. Clearly here was a young man who enjoyed being a soldier. 

‘Another curious person,’ Harvey thought, ‘this neighborhood is full of them. I am just now close to another odd person who i like, with whom i made love last night several times, yes, though i don’t understand her. And i‘m not sure i’ll like what i find when i do understand her.’ 

Jody had offered him breakfast. He said no, he had to be at work in half an hour. Now he thought it would be pleasant walking in the chill morning and have ham and eggs and coffee in a corner pharmacy like this; it could be in the future. He had lied to Jody to get away and back in his routine so he could think; he was required to be at work in an hour, not half an hour. This is how Harvey arrived on time, by being early.  

       The pharmacy was new to him and he would likely not have found it had it not been located along a direct line route between Jody’s apartment on Statuary Boulevard and his house in Aster Park.  

Harvey entered the shop, a jangling bell sounding behind him. As he walked toward the counter a husky, handsome woman approached and as he sat she said, “Coffee?”

“You read my mind.”

“It wudn’t hard.”

The woman turned and took a pot of blackness off a burner.

“Can i get just some toast?”

“Sure can. Even i can cook toast.” The woman had a big husky laugh and an even white smile.

‘Good God,’ thought Harvey, ‘Are there any gentle, lily-like ladies with delicate southern manners in this neighborhood?’

Harvey poured a small bag of sugar into his coffee and looked around. Behind him were shelves with aisles loaded with soap and other household items. Before him in the shelves behind the counter  were loaded with jars of candy, cigarettes, batteries, film and other more valuable items plus plates, saucers and cups. High up in the middle of the shelf system was a photo on the wall of a smiling dark haired boy with, on three sides of him, the Three Stooges. 

The woman returned with two slices of toast on a small plate. 

“I buttered them for you, that okay?”

“Sure enough saves me the trouble, thanks.”

With her other hand she laid a small bowl of packets of jam on the counter.

“Who is the kid in that picture?” said Harvey.

The woman turned to look up at the picture, although she had seen it many times and said, “He was the pharmacist here.”

“Was the pharmacist? He’s not in the pharmacy business no more?”

“Nope.”

“Why didn’t he take his picture when he moved on?”

“Well, he didn’t prolly because he couldn’t or he didn’t think to find nobody to but in tin the e box with him.”

This statement stopped Harvey who had a piece of jam quivering on the tip of a knife above a square of toast.

“That’s too bad,” he said and continued to apply jam to his toast.

“What’s too bad, that he died or he didn’t get his picture to go with him?”

“Both.”

This lunch counter clerk was another Jody speaking first and thinking later. And what did Harvey do? He let it float away, he rolled on. 

       Harvey’s response to her was so neutral the woman was left without a snag. Without an answer for or against, she merely nodded and looked around for something to do. She turned to offer coffee to the other customers in the place, an old man (her father) at the end of the counter and a young woman making sketches of the ketchup and mustard bottles.

At a leisurely pace Harvey ate his toast, drank his coffee plus the free refill and pondered the photo. He wondered if any of the Three Stooges were still alive and wondered what their real names might have been. Was it possible that as each was born, as each bundle of joy slid out of the chute their parents named them Curly, Moe and Larry? ‘There are so many people whose faces we know and we never know their names,’ he thought, ‘and some whose names we know and still we never learn much about who they are, truly.’

The single thought occupied him all day. We don’t know people unless they reveal themselves, unless they tell us who they are. Harvey’s next question was obvious but, good natured as he was, it didn’t come to him until much later in the day; they might tell us who they are if they know, but how many people truly know who they are?. His conclusion; most people only know who they want to be.

He felt himself on uncertain ground. ‘Is Jody lying?’ he thought, ‘and if she is, why? What does she want from me?’

     As he left the coffee shop he categorized all that had happened between him and Jody as, ‘The Jody business’ and all day images of her returned to him in various forms each with a different caption.  

Chapter Thirteen             

Harvey trusted the men he worked with. They were southerners, called rednecks and disparaged as a class, but these men and now more often than in the past women were basically the same as men and women all over the country. They move material, vast quantities of it; lumber, gravel, dirt, asphalt, bricks and truckloads of manufactured items others like them produce in factories. Everyone in the world depends on them to build houses and roads and fix what breaks. Harvey believed it was better and more interesting to be useful than refined.

Having studied history, Harvey was forced against his natural, compassionate nature to accept the need to create types instead of recognizing every individual story and personality. There are not enough trees to make enough paper to make enough books to describe everyone. To define all with one word is not only unjust, it is deadly to a true and accurate understanding of humanity. Generalization is a bad but unavoidable habit of thought and the honest thinker must look beyond it. 

Harvey saw himself as an honest thinker and at the same time enjoyed framing houses in the suburbs of Rosehill ~ a physically taxing enterprise. He loved it for the exercise and good health. The men he worked with were rough and uneducated and associating with them, Harvey believed, helped him think better, that is to say, in simpler terms. At the end of one of those blazing summer days, as they sat around drinking beer or ‘sody 

water’ in the shade, the day’s work complete, one of the men said, “A man will fuck you over of help you, one way of the other.” 

As an educated person (several years before Harvey received a master’s degree in philosophy and history from Rosie U) he could feel superior to his co-workers and at the same time enjoy their directness and practical, open, honest attitude. True, some were stupid, mean and spiritless and others concerned with very trivial matters, like any other class and category of humanity, but most were worth listening to and Harvey was often profoundly moved by their stories. Aside from this, they were useful; filling an indispensable need and whether the men understood this or not, it inspired Harvey. 

The work day started early. In the heat of summer they took a long lunch break and as the day cooled finished the goal set by the contractor. George, the contractor, believed in bonuses for quality and set a daily goal. He read a book about it but never let it show.  But it was too obvious and did show. Some of them called his ‘incentive packages,’ goals and the ‘total project definition’ of each day as ‘book shit.’ But they didn’t say it to his face. 

The day’s work done, Harvey and the others sometimes drank beer and smoked pot. As the heat subsided in the tall hardwood forests ~ or what was left of them, they sat on piles of lumber or brick or in the 

bare wooden skeleton on plywood floors of the house and talked.

One of them, older than the rest often read the newspaper. He spoke of politics, sports, odd stories or local events but mostly he mentioned investing in the stock market, believing this to be the route to prosperity in his older age. 

“You can’t lick em,” he said, ”so you gotta join ‘em.”

Another worker seated nearby said, “Seems like i heard that one before.”

“Before they took your money?”

“Once you get rich, Floyd,” another said, “You gonna have us build you a house?”

“Not me, no, i’m gonna keep living in town,” said Floyd. “You know the quality of houses is better in town. These suburbs are built cheap and won’t last. Older houses they built them better.”

All of them agreed with Floyd on that point or said nothing.

“Yeah, but out here,” said Harvey, “out here you can get farther away from your neighbors.”

Floyd folded down his paper to the last page and said, “You see, that’s the problem right there, Harvey. You can’t get away from your neighbors. People who flee the city to live out here, why, they’re just hoping someone else will fix all the problems they left behind.”

“They got better schools out here,” one said.    

      “Bigger, not better,” said another with a distinctly North Carolinian accent. “That Randolph school i went to was like a big-ass factory. When i graduated from there i walked up on the stage and in line in front and in back of me was students i never seen before, not once in four years.”

“They do it that way so they only have to build one school and they can spend the rest on liquor and bitches.” This statement, made by a new man they all recognized as not having taken a bath in at least four days, hitched up a pause in the conversation. They all looked at him, then the talk resumed. 

“But they say it’s so everyone can get acquainted with everyone, with all of society, for everyone to be stirred up in the same pot.”

“The melting pot.”

“It’s a big-ass factory.”

Or they talked politics, usually following the theme of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer so what the hell are we working for?

“We are the backbone of society, don’t forget that.”

Harvey remembered but said nothing about reading in The Education of Henry Adams, whose author was the scion of privilege, “We all live off the work of brick layers.” He wanted to tell these men about that autobiography, he thought it would comfort them to know that one man born to wealth and social altitude could come to the end of his life feeling low and useless or at the very least undecided and confused. One might say, “Welcome to the club.” There was only one thing he regretted about working with these men; he could not admit to having read a book.

One day Floyd, who could talk like he talked because he didn’t care about making friends or being like everyone else, brought up the crisis in the Middle East. Most of the men on the crew probably thought the Middle East was Maryland and Pennsylvania. If they did know more than the others they were probably inclined to be neutral because, although they knew some Jews and no Arabs they were often told and believed Jews could not be trusted and Arabs blew up stuff.

“The basic problem over there is that the new kids on the block, the Jews, moved into the neighborhood and they didn’t try very hard to make friends, so they’re all still fighting,” said Floyd.

“Like North and South.”

“Not the same. The Yankees are really not much different than us.”

“They’re an inferior breed. You know they are.”

The men laughed. 

“What’re you, Floyd, some kind of an aighed?”

“The Jews are different, but only because they made themselves different. When they got kicked out of their homeland in the Middle East couple thousand years ago they called themselves the Chosen People round about then but who chose them?” When he received no       

response, Floyd continued. “They chose themselves. The world didn’t choose them; they chose themselves and called themselves chosen because they got kicked out and had to make themselves feel better, make themselves stick together. You don’t want to break off from us, we’re the chosen ones. Now that’s the problem. It made them stick together and survive but nobody likes someone who sets himself apart from the rest, sets himself above everyone. If you’re better that’s no way to get along with the neighbors. But they had to do it; they got scattered all over the place so they had to call themselves chosen in order to keep everyone together. They were driven from pillar to post and their religion and each other was all they had. Now they have a homeland so pretty soon they’ll be just like everybody else. And if they get to be like everyone else they ain’t chosen no more, cain’t be. Nobody’s better than their friends.”

“You Jewish, Floyd?”

“No, i’m from Pennsylvania.”

This caused the men to pause.

“Ain’t that about the same?”

“No, that’s still regular American.”

“But that’s above the Dixon line.”

“Well, that’s true too.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“So you the chosen carpenter Floyd?”

“Yeah, you the Jew on the crew?”                                                                                                                                                             

       Jew on the Crew! The name stuck and until Floyd hurt his right knee and went back to Philadelphia about six months later he was the Jew on the Crew or Crewjew.

   A representative statement; “Hey Crewjew, hoist me up that two by!”

“Well i have a lot to show for it,” said Floyd. “I’ve framed a lot of houses. I love it. I get out in the air and rock and roll.”

Harvey felt the same. Out in the air was better, the edges sharper, colors brighter than inside a classroom. 

And on they went day after day and Harvey enjoyed the fresh air and the show. He was one of them despite his college degree because he worked hard, was fit and kept his mouth shut, mostly. Drinking beer and smoking pot loosened his lips and scattered his thoughts, making him feel mysterious and incomprehensible, but they liked him anyway; he worked hard and kept his mouth shut.

There were those who liked Harvey and said he couldn’t hold his booze and those who disliked him and thought he was a communist or a homosexual who couldn’t hold his booze. All that happened after work when it didn’t matter.

As they were sitting around gabbing like this a man in a pickup truck arrived. They saw him, heard his truck door slam and stopped talking but continued drinking. 

“Hey ya’ll you done for the day?” the man said.

The others nodded, answered very briefly or said nothing. The answer to that question was too obvious, as anyone could see. Look at the house. Most of it wasn’t there this morning. The work had been done and done well as a closer inspection would reveal. George, the man, the boss, contractor and owner of the West End Construction Company, was rarely restrictive in his manner. Someone handed him a can of beer.

“Yeah, this is good,” he said as he drank. He looked the place over briefly and said, “Yeah, good work.”

“I need a couple three of you guys,” he continued, “to come with me to the Carlson cabin. We got an hour and a half-two hours of overtime for you there.”

“Sounds good to me,” Bill said and stood up. Bill rode to work with Harvey and they all knew it so they all looked at Harvey to see if he agreed.

Harvey rarely said no to any forceful request, so he stood up and that was yes.

George looked directly at a third man he knew needed extra money; his wife was in the hospital, and the man grumbled and said, “Yeah, you got me.” 

Grumbling and grunting formed the major portion of this man’s vocabulary so no one was surprised. He was small, about thirty, named Ezra Hardy. As a personality he was contrary but had mellowed since his wife was in the hospital with a difficult pregnancy, their first, and in the week when these troubles began for Ezra Hardy he had been too worried about his wife, child and the medical bills to bicker. The attitude of some of the men toward him began to soften.                                                  

       “Collect your hand tools and get in the truck. We’ll get you some more beer out there after the job,” said George. They all climbed into the cab of George’s truck. It was a King Cab style so they all fit reasonably well. 

The Carlson cabin was in the woods of Hamburg County north of Rosehill. As they drove away from the job site it started to rain. Half an hour later it was raining heavily as they turned off the interstate highway onto a two lane road.

Harvey was bothered by the cigarette smoke in the cab but made no complaint. It diluted the odor of Ezra Hafdy, seated in front. Harvey and Bill were the newest men on the crew and had, as yet, no clout. Besides this, few at the time complained about second hand smoke; it was not yet a political or health issue.

“We’ll stop at the Holly Inn on the way back if you guys get dry,” said George, “I mean, dry on the inside.” 

They had just passed the Holly Inn, a bar in a large, long white building known for a back room with two excellent billiard tables. The owner, an enthusiastic shooter himself, didn’t stop with just the tables but provided a rack of excellent sticks as well. 

“What’s there?” said Bill.

“That’s the Holly Inn, you never been there?” When Bill didn’t answer, George continued. ”They have the best pool tables anywhere.”

“I’d like to get the job done first,’ Bill said. 

A moment of silence passed and George said, “I guess you’re right.”

George liked playing pool so much forgot to think of anything else. As the man who signed the paychecks he was hard to say no to. Being the boss was the first and primary impediment to reason and when he got into the Holly Inn and started to play he was close to impossible to pry loose. He did buy the beer, so if you had no wife at home or in the hospital and liked billiards, George was your kind of guy.

The rain was so heavy George had to drive well under the speed limit. His windshield wipers whipped aside the rain at full speed. They turned off the asphalt highway onto a gravel road that turned and bumped them up into the hills, crossing and re-crossing a rain swollen creek. Everyone was silent. There could be a washout anywhere along the road and none of them relished the thought of pulling the truck out of a sink hole or gully or being swept away by a flash flood. Soon they arrived at a very large log cabin. 

The summit and the building on it were mostly dry. 

This log cabin could not have been Abe Lincoln’s birthplace. It was about thirty times the size of Abe’s natal shack and had clear glass windows, three chimneys and a driveway. The cabin was sold as a kit, an enormous pile of logs with the ends neatly rounded and notched to fit together on a foundation of stone quarried nearby. The entrance was paved with stones taken from the           

cobblestone streets of colonial Rose hill when the bumpy road surface was torn up and replaced with asphalt. The cabin interior was framed out, plumbing and electrical service added and all insulated. George said the owners, the Carlson family, old old money, owned more land and timber in the state than anyone else and to afford that cabin they had to be richer than God. 

George had a punch list of things to do in the cabin, all very minor simple corrections or changes. Old man Carlson made the list and said “Finish this and the last check is yours. My son will give it to you.” George was not only working this late afternoon for money, he was working for freedom. When the list was completed the job, having lasted over eight months, was over and he was leaving for a week in the Virgin Islands with his wife (48) and son (adopted, age six). 

At the cabin George stopped his truck under a wide porte cochere capable of covering several more vehicles. The men left the truck and removed their tools from the covered metal tool box behind the cab. 

Before they could knock the door opened and a young woman said hello.

George paused, silent.

“Come in,” she said. She was slim, medium height and her clothing was of the thrift store type. There were paint spots on her shirt and hands. 

A young man came into the room and said, “We’re just taking care of a few details, George, i hope we won’t 

be in your way.” 

He looked like the woman, possibly her brother.

“Don’t worry about us, we have a punch list and your dad said he left a check.”

“Yep, the job completion check. I’ll get it to you before you go George and he wanted me to tell you how pleased he is with the work.”

“Awright, we should be done in about an hour.”

“Great, you guys want a beer or a coke or something?”

Before the men could answer George said. “Give them a coke; they’ve already had themselves a beer.”

Harvey noticed the young woman was not painting walls or trim; she was painting light switch and outlet covers. The covers were brightly swirled and boxed and some had faces or animal paws or purely abstract forms, all very lively and precise. Harvey glanced at them and told her “These really look good.” 

When Harvey spoke the woman, intent on one of the plates, looked up quickly and said, “I’m trying to focus, could you stop bothering me, please?”

Harvey withdrew, saying nothing. Around a corner Bill was lurking. As Harvey passed him Bill said, “The bitch told me the same thing,” in a low voice.

“Bitch is kinda cute.”

“One thing i know would make her look better,” Bill said.

“What’s that?”

       “My balls hangin from her chin.”

Harvey flinched. Bill came from where they don’t strip off the bark and the rough side is always out. Harvey returned to his work without further comment.

The young woman, Claire, was the young man’s fiancé. He was Carl, son of the wealthy land owner and business man, Carl Carlson. When they were away from the cabin and beyond the possibility of being overheard George said, “They like to keep it simple far’s names are concerned or they have no imagination.” George had worked on the cabin from the beginning, brought in after the planning began. He saw the work from the foundation to the last details, not including the art on the outlet and switch covers. And although he respected Carl Carlson senior for reliability, energy and intelligence he was annoyed at how much Carlson asked him to do for free. “If it’s not too far out of your way,” was the senior’s favorite, overused phrase. George learned that his first mistake had been to leave the line unclear and seek to please his client without clearly delineating expenses. 

”Give a rich man one thing for free and he expects everything else free.”

Bill agreed. “They don’t get rich by giving it away.”

Someone else said, “Then why cain’t i stop giving away my money?”

  “I don’t know. Roll a joint.”

This was after Carl and Claire left. The young man had given George a check which he folded into his wallet. 

 Young Carl  said, “We’ll be going now. I know you‘ll finish just fine. Lock up and thanks. You do real good work.”

After their car rolled down the hill, across the creek and disappeared in the trees. George instructed his men to get a beer from the refrigerator. He was only a little bit mad or disappointed. The check was large and the cabin would look good to future clients but it wasn’t as much money as expected and giving the extras for only a thank you was irritating. The check was only the required amount and without a bonus. He concealed his disappointment, saying nothing of this to his men.

George would have to reward his men out of his own pocket. Now he was going to drink a beer and smoke a joint, but not in the man’s lil’ log cabin. For that they would go outside. The rain still fell. Below the summit the land was very wet. 

The work was soon compete and all they had to do was walk through the house to make sure no tools were left behind. They loaded the truck, locked the cabin and drove down the hill. 

The rain had slowed to a drizzle but the creek at the bottom of the hill was over its banks. An asphalt roadway spanned the creek with three culverts running under its surface all of them about three feet in diameter. The water in the creek was so high it flowed over the culvert openings onto the road. A thin sheet of water flowed over the road surface. 

 George crossed the asphalt covering the culverts and stopped his truck. He got out of the truck.   

“Where the hell’re you going?” said Ezra Hardy.

George paused, annoyed as he often was by the little man’s tone.

“I gotta see this,” George said. He walked onto the bridge. Reluctantly, the others followed. 

George walked onto the center of the bridge and looked at the rain swollen creek being sucked into the enormous culverts, hissing and swirling. Here was the power of nature on display. Bits of wood and branches and debris were sucked into the maelstrom formed by the water bearing down on the culvert openings.

On the down river side where the culverts opened and spewed into the creek the water, brown and white with foam, gushed in explosive bursts from the ends of the separate culverts. 

George briefly looked over the side of the bridge where the water shot out of the culverts. It was the other side where the water was sucked in by its own weight bearing against the bridge that held his attention. Harvey and Bill came up to George. 

“You thinking about gallons per second and pounds and all that George?” Harvey said. 

 “Hell of a lot of all that.”

“Maybe not all that much,” Bill said. He was often likely to be contrary. 

        Harvey was scared. He didn’t like standing close to the edge of high places. The power of this water seemed capable of reaching up and grabbing him. 

Ezra, the last to step out of the truck and reluctant to say much on a normal day, also remarked on the strength of the flood.

“What do you think, George?”

“Beats the hell out of me,” he said. Walking to the truck, he pulled a scoop shovel wedged amid construction debris and carried it back to where the men stood.

“This ought to give us some idea,” said George. 

“Don’t do that George,” Harvey said. “You could lose your shovel. Look at this,” and Harvey threw a small limb into the maelstrom. 

The torrent caught the limb and sucked it straight down. That was proof indisputable of the strength of the flood and would have settled the question and ended further experimentation, for most people.

Not George. He stepped up to the edge and thrust the shovel into the boiling current. The stream sucked it right down.  

Most men would have released the shovel. Instead, George held fast, just long enough for the jerk of it to knock him off balance and pull him into the water. He was sucked down so fast only his boots showed for a very brief moment. In that moment Harvey crouched and grabbed for a boot and in another moment stood up, his hand empty.

       The men on the bridge, too stunned to speak, looked at the water. They stood looking at the racing, churning, swirling water a long moment before realizing George was not going to pop up and spit out a fish. This was no cartoon. They turned and hurried to the other side of the bridge. 

  And they arrived the moment George, who weighed two hundred or more pounds flew out of the end of the culvert. He flew five feet into the air over the hump of gushing water and fell into the rapids, a churning explosion of foam. They saw him surface spitting out water and struggling to find his feet among the rocks. He fell over and rolled, got up and struggled toward the shore and finally stood up in waves that swirled around his knees. 

Bill and Ezra watched their boss stumble onto the shore while Harvey, hardly able to believe how strong the current was, went back to the other side of the bridge. Now he was not as afraid as he was curious to feel the power of that flood. Could it really be that strong? To test the strength of the water he put his toe into it, then the entire foot. That was enough for the water to pin his foot to the culvert edge and it cut into his leg and he felt the pain flash through his body. He clutched the edge of the culvert and turned to Bill and Ezra and the motion of this body turning toppled him over. Bill and Ezra heard him and turned in time to see Harvey like a flash of light go under.

      “These guys are crazy,” Ezra said.

They turned and waited a few seconds and saw Harvey shoot out into the churning rapids and down the stream. George, who had just lifted himself onto the bank, ran downstream thirty or forty yards and jumped into the river. This was a shallow area and he could get to the middle of the stream in time to catch Harvey. He grabbed his employee by the arm and leaned and pulled him toward shore.

“What the hell you do that for?”

Harvey just sputtered and said “That’s some powerful current.”

At the shore he said. “I’m sorry George, i couldn’t believe it. I’m sorry.”

“Are you kidding? Man, that was great!” with his hand still grasping Harvey’s arm George led him up the bank to where the other two stood looking at them utterly amazed. 

“You guys are fucking crazy,” said Bill.

“That was cool as shit, man, i think we invented a new sport!”

“Yeah, but i’m not going to do it again!” said Harvey.

“No way, man, you could get jammed in there sideways,” said George and he was silent and serious looking for the first time.

“Let’s get back to town,” he said. 

“Yeah, what if there was a limb in there and you get snagged on it?”

       Let’s go, i don’t want to think about it.”

“We just wanted to invent a new sport,” Harvey said.

“Okay, culvert diving, Jesus, let’s get dry.”

  In the truck George paused behind the wheel and fumbled out his wallet.

“I think the Carlson check got soaked.”

He opened his wallet and pulled out cash and papers, unfolding them, leafing through them. 

“Here it is, kinda wet.” He spread it out on the dashboard in front of the wheel. It wasn’t so wet the ink was smeared. The paper stuck to the vinyl of the dashboard and some dampness curled the edges. 

“The bank won’t accept that,” said Bill, “not wet like that.”

“Its only damp, not wet. And they better accept it or i won’t be able to pay you guys this week and i could miss my wife’s car payment. She’d’ kill me.” George opened a contractor’s specification book and put the check between the pages.

“This will suck up some of the damp,” he said, “Nothing drier than the specifications” and started the truck engine. “Lucky i had a lots of extra paper in my wallet.”

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

George, usually a fast driver, was slow on this late afternoon/early evening. On a normal day they would have stopped at the Holly Inn to play pool. This time 

George didn’t even look in the direction of the bar with two of the finest pool tables in the county.

Back at the job site in the subdivision where they had worked all day and George had picked them up a few hours before, the men unloaded tools and went to their cars saying little. Ezra Hardy went to his car saying nothing. Harvey came back to the truck where George sat behind the wheel and said, “You think of any more new sports, George, you count me in.” His laugh indicated that he didn’t mean it.

“See you tomorrow.”

Harvey put his tool belt in the back seat of Bill’s car and got in. “You feel like getting a beer for the ride home?”

“You didn’t have to ask me that,” said Bill. Typical of the modern subdivision there was a convenience store at every entrance. They stopped and Bill bought a six pack. Harvey, who had offered to pitch in but was refused, thanked him.

“You’re the hero. You need it more than me, crazy fuckers,” Bill said. 

“Yeah that was fun, about five seconds of terror,” he said, “but i feel good now.” 

“I’ll bet. Well, here’s to being alive.”

Two bottles clinked together.

They said little on the way back to town. Harvey discovered he had made a decision. He had thought of Jody all day, his mind bouncing back and forth, and now in a flash he discovered he had made the decision, settled and done; there would be no more Jody. He had worried about her, about them, all day and that was enough. Harvey would find an easily understandable woman he could trust, who wasn’t hiding a trap. Did such a woman live in Rosehill? Or anywhere?

Chapter Fourteen         

At home Ezra Hardy felt the weight of his wife’s absence. His wife was pregnant in the hospital, giving birth now as far as he knew, so like a haze the question of weight, of losing and gaining it, surrounded Ezra, a sm all, thin man.

He felt wet, wet from the rain and wet from standing on a bridge in Hamburg County watching two fools invent a new sport; culvert shooting. On an average day Ezra Hardy didn’t care much for sports or water. 

Ezra splashed his face with “smelly water,” (cologne) and changed his shirt. He had told his wife he would be there two or three hours earlier. He could have taken the day off to stay with her. George offered to give him the day off, with pay. He, George, thought it would be interesting and even uplifting for the crews if someone they all knew did as wise and exciting a thing as having a child. It could make the wilder ones on the crew more thoughtful of the future and stable. Ezra needed some rehabilitation as he was not popular nor considered wise. 

“I said you can take the day off with pay,” George said.

Ezra Hardy said nothing.

“With pay.”

  “Tell you what, i work all day and you pay me my regular wage for what i work for and you can pay me them relief wages, too.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You do that.”

       But George didn’t know what to think or say about it. In general, George felt sorry for Ezra who made no friends among the men and irritated some of them so much they might try to drop a heavy piece of lumber on him. It was bad for people on a job to hate each other. The condition could lead to injuries or death. People instantly disliked Ezra Hardy and this thoroughly mystified George. It puzzled him so much one reason he kept this pustulous blister of a man on the crew was to see what might happen to him. 

Some men overrode feelings of antipathy for Ezra Hardy and tried to be agreeable, understanding and sympathetic. Ezra Hardy quickly seized this “teachable moment,” though he would never call it that, and made it clear he was in no way open to being agreeable, understood or pitied. Ezra defined men who approached him with kindness as, “Kansas City faggots.” Ezra had never been to Kansas City but like most opinions his did not depend on the close study of relevant data or personal experience. 

In addition to satisfying his curiosity George kept Ezra on the payroll because he worked very hard, did more than a man twice his size and rarely objected to doing anything he was asked to do. Today, for example, with his wife in the hospital bearing their first child, he went to work at the Carlson cabin. 

Now, with a fresh shirt and well scented, Ezra drove to the hospital. Before leaving he bagged up a liter bottle                                      All Play and No Work  316   of a carbonated beverage and a box of chocolate snack cakes. It crossed his mind that the hospital might provide food for the patients, but thought, ‘They don’t give you shit there, not for nothing, that’s sure, and if they do i can always take the extra home.’ He made a quick calculation and concluded the soda and snack cost about three dollars and fifty cents while the room was costing them about three hundred a day and you bet the doctor would charge a hell of a lot more to pull out my boy. She had been there two days; hopefully she would be done with it and get out today.

And the cost of the doctor? The bitch at the admissions desk thoroughly confused Ezra with her talk of this “might happen” and that “might occur” and all he wanted to know was how much it would cost. She would only give an “approximate estimate” and that was probably low. That smiling cunt didn’t like it when he told her where to stick it. 

He slammed the wheel with the palm of his hand, knowing what the hospital was going to do to him. A man on a crew where he worked in West Virginia had a baby, his wife did i mean, and they stuck this tube down the baby’s throat to check on something or get something out of the kid and they messed up the kid’s throat and had to fix it and then they turned around and charged the man for the fixing. He had nothing to do with it; it was their mistake and they charged him for it. And he paid it, pulled double shifts and all but he paid it and                                while he worked overtime his wife was sick at home with the sick baby.

Ezra slammed his hand against the steering wheel again, “Dammit, my old lady’s in the horsepistol.” And a few blocks later he said it louder and slammed the steering wheel harder, “Goddam horsepistol!”  

“You can’t park there,” a man told him as he got out of his car. “Tow away zone. See the sign?”

The sign indicated the spaces were reserved for doctors.

“Shit,” said Ezra and got back into his car. “Goddam niggers,” he said under his breath. The man who warned him about the no parking zone was white as were several others with him. They all wore some kind of green medical looking britches and smocks and why were they all standing around on the sidewalk fucking off? 

Ezra would have liked to lay a patch of rubber in a cloud of smoke as he left to show those pricks but his car wouldn’t accelerate that fast. Instead he departed slowly leaving only a cloud of smoke and parked two blocks away. 

From there he walked through a neighborhood of small, well maintained houses close together, many with elegant iron fences and gates, ornate porches with shiny brass, beveled glass light fixtures and flowers everywhere. This neighborhood on one side of the hospital was filled with flowers. As he walked Ezra, with his bag of drink and treats in hand, noticed the flowers                                  and in a way all the bright swaying colors comforted him; he did not have to water them or pick them or weed them. He was off work and would not have to return and put up with those sons-of-bitches until seven thirty the next morning. And he was going to see his new baby. 

In a corridor of the hospital he passed the nurse’s station on the obstetrics floor ~ he had no need of directions, having admitted his wife in the early morning a few days before. As he passed a nurse spoke to him and he replied, “No you can’t help me. I know where my wife is.”

“Excuse me sir, can you sign in, please?” The nurse shouted to him before he could get too far away. 

“I signed in yesterday. How many times i gotta write my name?””

“All visitors have to sign in every time, please.”

  Ezra grunted and returned to the counter, picked up the pen attached with a string to the top of the clipboard. 

He signed his name ~ a slash, and stalked away. The nurse looked at the signature/slash for a long time. He was halfway down the hall before she figured out who this unpleasant man was, or possibly might be and shouted to him, “Mr. Hardy! Are you Mr. Hardy?” and came out from behind the low wall around the nurse’s station. 

“Mr. Hardy, wait!”

Ezra stopped and turned to her, silent.

      “Mr. Hardy, you need to speak to Dr. Pollard, it’s important, it’s . . .” She appeared flustered, blubberous, stammering.

At that moment a man in a white coat, lean, over fifty and with remarkably clear brown eyes, said, “Are you Ezra Hardy?”

“Yes, what do you want?”

“We’ve been trying to reach you all day, it’s about your wife. And the baby.”

“What about my wife? Is she okay? Where is she?”

“She’s resting quietly in her room, she‘s going to. . .” The man’s voice was entirely too soothing for Ezra.

“Then get out of the goddam way, i’m going to see her.” Ezra Hardy turned and attempted to walk through Dr. Pollard. The doctor was about to knock Ezra to the floor, having taken a deep, instant dislike to him who, like a begrimed and ragged barbarian descends upon the cultivated order of civilization and sows discord, but he did no harm. He lept out of the way. Dr. Pollard was a rational man who frequently reflected on his own feelings, impulses and reactions to received stimulae before acting on them. In this situation, as was his habit, Dr. Pollard restrained an impulse to grab Ezra hardy by the throat in favor of an objective reconsideration. His repulsion for Ezra Hardy, so swift and complete, fascinated him. He had learned from twenty years of medical practice to be superior to violent emotion, including his own. 

      The nurse moved to stop Ezra, reaching for his arm, but Dr. Pollard stopped her.

“Let him go, he’ll know soon enough.”

Ezra pushed open the door to his wife’s room. He was paying three hundred a day for this room he damn well better come and go as he pleased. 

She was asleep, her mouth open, hair all over the place; just like home.

“Hey Mandy, wake up,” he said. He put his bag on a bedside table on wheels, the kind that swings around to fit over the bed. 

Mandy mumbled and rolled her head on the pillow, her eyes closed. Ezra reached out and shook her. 

“Mandy, it’s me. Wake up.”

Mandy opened her eyes for a moment surprised, and then her eyes steadied on Ezra’s face.

“Oh it’s you Ezra.” She looked away.

“I got you some stuff here. You want some soda? I’m sorry i couldn’t get here sooner, i worked overtime.”

“Oh Ezra, i’m so sorry,” Mandy said and burst into tears. She covered her face with her hands. “I’m so sorry.”

“What, what are you talking about?”

“Oh Ezra, we lost our baby. We lost our little boy.” She wept.

“We lost the baby? What happened?” He looked around the room as if the child was there or the answer would be found in the furniture or the lighting and jerked                                back at her. “Tell me goddamit, what happened?”

“He died, Ezra, it was dead inside me, i think, but i was afraid and didn’t want to think it was dead and they pulled it out, they couldn’t get our little boy to breathe. They tried everything.”

“What did they do to him?”

“They tried to save him, Ezra, please don’t be mad. He couldn’t breathe. He never took a breath.”

At that moment Dr. Pollard appeared in the door. 

“Goddamit, what happened?”

Dr Pollard calmly, in a sad tone told Ezra the baby had died of an unusual condition and spoke the name of the condition and the name meant nothing to Ezra. He concluded with the words; “It was not your wife’s fault.”

“Did you stick a tube down his throat?”

The question was so specific Dr. Pollard paused to wonder what procedure Ezra might be referring to. 

“Did you try to fix him and you killed him?”

“No, Mr. Hardy. We did all we could following procedures that have succeeded before. On delivery our son was too far gone.”

The voice of Dr. Pollard, stern and officious, stunned Ezra. He knew there was nothing he could do and getting pissed and screaming was useless now. Later it might be useful, but he didn’t think ahead. He slumped, his thin frame folding in upon itself. In addition to this the full meaning of the loss of his child came fully into his mind; he was alone, he had nothing now. All he had hoped for                                    was gone.

Mandy began to weep anew and he looked at her and said, “Now Mandy, bawling won’t help.”

Her shoulders continued to shake as she wept. Ezra sat on the arm of a chair by the bed and stared at the bedding over his wife’s legs and the rail around the bed.  

Dr. Pollard studied the couple, wondering if there was anything he could do to comfort them. He could do nothing. He would withdraw and leave them alone. “I‘m sorry, Mr. Hardy,” he said, “we did all . . . “

“Save it, i don’t need to hear that shit.”

Dr. Pollard, experienced as he was at the grim realities of death and disease, was not yet experienced in such ‘ill treatment,’ as he thought of it. Silent, he turned to go.

“Wait a minute, Doc,” said Ezra.

The doctor stopped.

“Can you take me to see him?”

“Take you to see the baby?”

“Who the hell else am i talking about?”

The doctor paused, for the first time understanding how good it would feel to kill this man. He looked at him for a long time and also understood that seeing the corpse of his child might be a cure for his bad attitude or it could be a form of revenge. “Follow me,” he said and left the room.

Neither of them spoke as they walked along the corridor, turned into a narrower hall and stopped before                                   elevator doors. Dr. Pollard pressed the down button to summon a car. Standing beside Ezra Hardy at the elevator doors, Dr. Pollard detected a slight dampness arising from the small man and thought ‘He spends his days outside in the weather. He must work hard.’ A mild sympathy was returning. 

They descended to the morgue, Dr. Pollard swiped a card through a monitor on the wall and they passed through tall metal doors swinging into a room crowded with stainless steel cabinets, counter tops and gurneys smelling of chemicals and detergents. The doctor stopped before a metal table on which stood a tray covered with a steel lid like what a turkey might be served on. A rectangle of cardstock was taped to the cover. 

Dr. Pollard stopped, turned to Ezra Hardy. “I have to warn you about this.”

“Shut up and let me see.”

“No, you shut up and listen. We made an incision in the baby’s chest to massage the heart, in case that might work. We had to do it.” He thought for a moment to warn Ezra again and decided to let the man see it fresh for himself. He raised the steel lid.

On the tray was a plastic bag with a zipper along the top from end to end. 

Dr. Pollard set the cover aside, all the while looking at Ezra Hardy. He unzipped the bag and opened it and pulled the sides of it down around the small form. The father’s eyes squinted slightly more, very little more;                                  otherwise his tight lipped, clinched jaw and gaze were unchanged.

On the tray lay a small human shape completely covered from toes to head with tiny wrinkles. The eyes of the pinched in face closed, the tiny toes and fingers clutching, as if resisting. The hands were up at his sides as if ready to fight or reach out. The small, dark, inwardly tending cut in the chest was edged with a dark red crust.

Ezra looked down and sat on a metal stool, looked at the infant again and then the floor. 

Grief began to show through the man’s clinched face. Watching it grow moved Dr. Pollard to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Hardy.”

“I want to be alone with my boy.” Ezra’s shoulders began to shake. “I want to be with him. Can you let me be with my boy?” Slowly, tears fell across his sunburned cheeks. 

“I can’t leave you alone. I’ll be over there. Five minutes.” The doctor withdrew among the tables and gurneys and watched Ezra Hardy. Dr. Pollard thought this man was so unusual he did not notice, as he leaned against a gurney upon which, under a sheet, rested the body of a homeless woman who had been struck by a car six and a half hours earlier on the southside of the city (she had died en route to the hospital). The wheels of the gurney, unlocked, allowed the rolling table to move, causing Dr. Pollard to lose his balance and fall back. To steady himself, he reached back with his left hand and                         grasped the hand of the corpse on the gurney. For a moment he looked down at his hand clutching the sheet covered hand of the woman.  Dr. Pollard had grown used to the many sights and odors encountered daily in his work so much that this accidental contact did not surprise or bother him. He merely dropped the woman’s hand. Later he might, as he sipped his nightly glass of Madeira, ponder the ultimate cycle of life all here in one room, but now he thought nothing more of the homeless woman. He was not moved emotionally. He met with death each day and it no longer grieved him. His own death would not grieve him, he would simply say, “I have come to what must be.” In his dreams he walked among the dead and the dead spoke to him. Now, watching Ezra hardy, he was filled with wonder at the sight of such a crude and ignorant man beguiled and broken by forces beyond his control or understanding. How to give this barbarian self-control and a deeper understanding? He thought this, aside from the immediate task of relieving physical pain, is perhaps the primary task of the physician, for it gave the patient the ability to heal himself. At this moment it appeared to Dr. Pollard to save this man by any means would be impossible

Yet as he had given his life to his profession, he felt that here might be one man he would give the blood of his life to save, to heal that most ultimate of wounds. 

He thought, ‘No, i have too many others to serve.’

      After six minutes he quietly approached, zipped up the bag and replaced the lid on the tray.

“We have to go now.”

Ezra Hardy, still looking at the lid covering his son, the tears on his cheeks, rose slowly and slowly turned, then stiffened. The doctor saw in his shoulders the stiffness as Ezra said, ”I’ll be glad to get the hell out of this place and away from you son-of-bitches,” and walked out of the room. Dr. Pollard said nothing. He watched the man leave the room and soon left himself, not wanting to see Ezra again. At the elevator he did catch up to him, waiting. They said nothing more to each other on the way up. 

Ezra returned to his wife’s room. The doctor made a call to the hospital security unit to have someone come to obstetrics and pause casually, just be there, around the nurse’s station and remain until otherwise instructed. 

Ezra stayed in his wife’s room awhile, talked to the nurse about taking her home. The nurse said the doctor wanted to keep her another night for observation.

“What, and cost me another three hundred bucks for rent? I’m gonna take her home right now!”

The nurse was a new face, had just arrived from another floor of the hospital. She was not the same timid young person Ezra Hardy had signed on with an hour before. This nurse knew how to handle visitors like Ezra Hardy. 

She said, “You take your wife home, mister, you’ll have a dead wife as well as a dead son.”

      “What a bunch of shit,” Ezra said as he turned away.

In her room he told his wife, “You gotta stay another night. They wanna keep you, Mandy.”

“Ezra, i don’t feel so good. Pour me a soda, you got ice?”

He fixed her drink and gave her the box of treats as well, saying, “This will see you through the shit they serve for food in this place.”

When Ezra left the hospital the sun was low in the west and shining off the windows of the apartment buildings and the statue of a man on a horse in the middle of the roundabout in front of the hospital. As he turned to walk to his car a young man in a running suit approached him. Ezra scarcely noticed him until the young man said, “Hey there, howya doing?”

Ezra looked up and said, “What the fuck you want?”

But the man had turned away and continued running. He was Carl Carlson, had recognized Ezra Hardy as one of George’s crew lately working on his woodland cabin and he clearly heard Ezra’s reply. He didn’t turn around because he was already focused again on his breathing, coordination and keeping his ankles flexed. Among the many things he perceived on this his daily run an unpleasant man was not primary. But a moment later his thought centered on the shadowy small man who had spoken so harshly. ‘Maybe that wasn’t him,’ he thought, but it sure looked like him, one of those guys who

worked on the cabin.’

‘Ha, the cabin, that’s a joke,’ he thought, his mind having banished the memory of Ezra Hardy. ‘The cabin, we need a name for the cabin. Cabin in the Pines, Claire called it and the place is surrounded by hardwoods. That’s just like a woman, good God; you can’t say that in mixed company anymore. “That’s just like a woman,” he said aloud again to feel the texture of the forbidden. And it’s not a cabin,’ he thought, ‘not with five bedrooms, two and half baths, a three vehicle carport and a thousand point five square feet of terrace and deck. It’s a mansion pretending to be a cabin.’

He ran on a few more blocks before giving up on the name. The best he could do was Cabin Grande. 

‘Cabin Grande,’ he later thought, ‘that’s just not good enough; it’s oxymoronic. This might take some time. We’ll have to have a serious discussion, spend a long weekend on the outer banks, me and Claire.’ Claire, the thought of her lean form against his slightly less lean form aroused his desire and he thrust his sexual ardor into a burst of speed. 

‘Claire, she’s the creative one,’ he thought as his speed declined and steadied, ‘but only in colors and shapes, otherwise my girl is strangely inarticulate. That girl really isn’t very articulate, but that must be one reason why she’s such a powerful artist. I’m steady and strong, she is flexible and bright. I’ll have to come up with something myself. Not the old man, either, he would                                   only come up with the price; Cabin 1.5. That’s as close as the old man gets to anything.’ 

He ran on.

Chapter Fifteen         

        “At The Temple,” read the note Carl found on the kitchen table in the apartment they shared with Svenson. This was frustrating; Claire was supposed to join him and six others for dinner that night and she just did it again; she fled to her studio. It happened many times before. Every time he forgave her and always would; he loved her. It comforted him to know where she was and what she would do; paint until sunrise. She was obsessed by work at which she was so good in a safe place. She would work until completely exhausted and once aga in rise smiling from the tomb of spent passion. It was her life, she told him, and she could not live without it. It was a spirit that ran through her body at will and all she could do was follow.

Beside the main room of her studio was a smaller room crowded with dust, paint and the smell of paint. Claire opened her small cot where she slept after the passion exhausted her and it was in her sleep that she was saturated, she told Carl, with the essence of paint. “It’s where i belong, it’s where i’m restored,” she said. 

Claire was raised in the hills around Fincastle, her father a game warden, deputy sheriff and a man of the woods who would rather sleep on the ground than in a bed. Claire’s mother was an indoor person and how these opposites comingled enough to produce a child was a mystery. They married and were still married over twenty-five years later together now only on paper. Intimate long enough to conceive Claire was the limit of                                    love or lust. No more children, little time together, both middling content. Her mother told Claire she married her father because he was the only man available and after getting to know him she thought herself lucky he preferred the woods to the house she left only if she had to. Why didn’t she move out of Fincastle? 

To where and with what money?

Her mother loved art and music, taught it and pulled her daughter into it. Her father had the sun and moon so he pulled her in that direction. Ultimately her mother won. Claire’s constitution was not stout enough for mother nature. She enrolled at Rosie U to study art. Her mother could not get out of Fincastle; Claire could, but only for one year. After one year she would have to earn or acquire her own tuition. She met Carl and her financial difficulties were almost over. They would get married as soon as Carl junior “brought dad around.” It had something to do with Carl senior disliking people from up in the hills, people who would “Sell their shirt instead of work,” as one book had it. How could he believe such nonsense? Those people work in coal mines. God only knows!  

Now she was at her studio “hiding from society,” as Carl gently, always gently and never aloud, defined it. Art was her refuge, her first, true love and passion; he had felt her asleep in the night, dreaming of it. She made love like she loved him, but art was first.Carl made up all kinds of sources for the obsession;

       it was where she could please her mother and hide from her father or was it the other way around? With art Claire ordered the chaos of existence, she struggled to put in order on canvass an exaggerated fear of solitude or to create something she believed she could not lose. It was the peep sight in her door, her window, her way of paying attention to everything.

When Carl told her they were building the cabin in the woods a shadow passed over her emotions. It was like her father pulling her once more into the trees. And yet she loved it, too, because she loved Carl. Carl had brought her out of her shell. Out of her shell and into his. His intense devotion and generosity meant almost as much as her art. 

But in his arms she was only briefly secure. He too often overwhelmed her and she had to retreat to her studio.

The other people she was hiding from in her studio this day were their guests for dinner. They were all invited a week before and due to arrive at eight. She would not be there. In that situation it happens too much; she loses track of what they talk about. None of it slowed down enough for her to understand it and all the faces move so fast she can’t see them. That was the trouble with living people; they move. 

There was Sven and Barbalee, Jose and Odaleen and Kenneth if Kenneth could find someone to bring with him. He had an unpleasant habit going on dates; he liked 

touching people. A pat here, a squeeze there, it was annoying. And there might be other faces she didn’t know. Those she didn’t know posed the biggest risk. They could say or do anything and she would start thinking about it and couldn’t stop.

   Yet for all her fears of people and exposure Claire‘s plan of action, her career goal was to move to New York, a place full of people, most of them moving. Once there she would penetrate and dominate the art world knowing well even as she set her heart and mind on the goal that no one dominates the art world from the studio. To secure a place you must talk and listen.  

New York was where people paid attention to art. Claire would find her perfect solitude in bursting, face flooded Manhattan. How was this possible? She didn’t know. All she knew was her destination; how to arrive and how to abide were questions for the future. Claire had faith; she had talent but none to spare and solitude served it.   

Now she had withdrawn to a place where no one could go, not even the man who loved her above all else. She was unkind and inconsiderate and Carl accepted it. He would wait and be prepared to help. This is one of the things he loved about her; she needed him and she accepted his love and help, most of the time. 

Carl knew he could do nothing about it; she would stay in exile as long as it took her creative fire to dwindle. Claire herself knew not how long it would last. 

Meanwhile, Carl had six or more guests to consider.

He could call them and cancel the dinner and tell them all the truth; Claire is neurotic, has gone into hiding thinking she has only now to work and otherwise she will go crazy or something worse. He therefore has no idea when she will be back, when she will “come out of it.” Or he could lie and hope they would forgive her and him and ask no difficult questions. Trapped at the dinner table, he would constantly think of her, never speak of her and talk about other things while thinking of her. 

But they would know; he invited them because they were people who would know. They would all know and forgive. Sven would play the tough guy, Barbalee make fun of her man until he growled at her and hinted at dark secrets her scheming, southern mind cooked up but was too genteel to reveal. Jose would smile and everything would be fine and Odaleen the country girl (Tennessee) who had such a “dazzled to be in the city” look and yet one day he heard her use the word perspicacious, would keep her clear blue eyes fixed on Carl and know the truth. She pulled a simple veneer over a complex mind; she would think of it and know it and not speak of it. And no one could say who Kenneth might show up with or what Kenneth would say or do, least of all Kenneth.

Carl respected his friends and listened to them, was it not certain therefore that they respected and listened to him? “Respect requires respect,” his father told him.                                 All Play and No Work   335          What would you like others to do for you, how would you 

 like them to treat you, were you in their place?

I’d like them to tell me the truth and have confidence in me. This then is the way the problems of relations between people are made smooth; they trust and love. How to solve problems? Openness and acceptance; begin by listening. Listening is so important. Always listen. Carl’s grandfather liked to quote the first president he voted for, Calvin Coolidge, president number 30, who said, “Nobody ever listened himself out of a job.” Silent Cal was a good man. “And what about the Bard himself (when his grandfather quoted Shakespeare the word himself always followed Bard) who said, “Give your ear to many, your tongue to few.”

The dinner Carl now turned to prepare would involve, he was now certain, more than the mere assimilation of nutrition, the consumption of victuals. On this night he would bring out Claire, he would open the door and tell them all and they would form a cadre of support for her, they would provide a vital social network. And further, she must not know of this; she is a solitary soul and must walk her path alone. Of course that’s not how it really works in the art world but don’t mess with the myth. 

“My fiancé is hiding not from you but from her fears, illusions and the great mass of information that continuously flows through her mind filling and paralyzing her,” that would be Carl’s statement. “I keep her rooted                                 and involved in the world as much as i can. She needs this and your patience and understanding the most. That she is a solitary soul and needs your help even though she must go her way alone. I don’t know when she’ll be back but i know she is now trying to tell us something in colors and shapes because Claire is inarticulate in all but paint.”

They were friends, they would understand. 

At The Temple Claire slammed the elevator door, pulled aside the lever by the door and the elevator rose. That metal clang/slam went right into her nerves. The door opened on the fifth floor and she walked to her studio. By the pay phone shining new on the wall she paused, wondering if she should call Carl and tell him now what she left out of the note; our life together will radically change soon, thanks to you, or be ended, thanks to you. Can we go on together knowing, or not knowing? Do we embrace new life or go on as before? No, we cannot go on as before. 

Beside the telephone along with the phone numbers and graffiti and statements denouncing the telephone as a low, non visual form of communication, that is to say, verbal, was a statement Claire had written in a big, generous hand in black ink; “If my big New York dealer calls tell him i’m not in just now,” signed, You Know Who. That was done on a jubilant day, a day of blazing sun and consuming inner light. It was the first day she had stepped into her studio. 

       Now she read the words and shivered. So true then, so much in shadow now. Now one fear combined with another; she had not told Carl how determined she was to reach her goal, had not told him how strongly she intended to live and work in New York. It was assumed. They all felt it, they all wanted to leave sleepy Rosehill for the canyons of Gotham.

No dealer had called. There had been a couple of student shows and people with presumed influence had spoken kindly, without result. Carl, her strongest support, the best, though ablaze with devotion could not tell her how he truly felt, or show his true heart by his own hand, visually. His hand, so subtle and skilled in love, so incapable in the drawing of simple shapes. 

Now how could she explain this; she had planned to live in New York amid all that movement, all that work and excitement and the one burden they could not share, the one piece that would make the puzzle impossible to compete, was growing inside her. The thought that she and Carl had inexplicably, for they had taken all precautions, added this new element deranged her. She could not cut it out; he would have it, she knew too well how he would insist.

“I have money!” he would say, but money is not life, money is only time and time would only sink her deeper into dreary Rosehill dirt.

After leaving the cabin in the woods they went home and while Carl went for his run in the late afternoon 

Claire went to an appointment at the hospital. She told Carl nothing about it. She didn’t want to alarm him and besides, it could be a false alarm. 

Half an hour later Claire left the hospital. After Claire left the nurse who had spoken to her and showed her the test results walked down the hall to speak to another nurse and on the way met Dr. Pollard. A keenly perceptive man, before she could say anything Pollard asked, “Is something wrong, Kimberly?”

His question surprised her into immediately saying, “Yes, there is, i just told a patient she was pregnant and by the look on her face i think i ought to call in some counseling or something. She just staggered away.”   

  “She took it that bad?”

“She could barely speak. She was totally dazed.”

“Is she still in the building? We could page her.”

“I don’t know if she‘s still here.”

“Page her, get her back and let’s talk to her.”

Leave it to Pollard to act quickly. He was a lovely man, thoughtful and prepared for anything. 

His look was so intense she paused. ‘What did he think, was i too hasty?’ she thought. ‘Could be a case of emotional transference?’

“No, maybe i’m overreacting,” the nurse said. “She’ll be all right. In fact, i told her to come back Wednesday and we’ll get another test done. I told her it could be a false positive.” 

“Well yes, there’s always that possibility.”

      “There is that possibility,” the nurse said and thought, but i don’t think so. The nurse did not page Claire and turned her attention elsewhere.

At The Temple, Claire felt it inside her, a tiny curled shape, a bug, a small snake. The nurse had said it might be a misdiagnosis but no; Claire felt it. Even so, if not now, later. Always there is this incessant consumption from without and no barriers to hold it back. She left the hospital that afternoon and rode by the apartment to leave a note on the door and continued to The Temple. She had to work. The Temple was the only place she could think or act. The world was closing on her; she had to withdraw. Carl would not follow her. Carl had agreed and his devotion was absolute. There she could look out the tall windows at the spires and tree tops of Rosehill and she would be restored.

The studio, one large room and a small one beside it, was dark. The first thing she did, always, was to pull aside the curtains and let in the light. She stood looking out over the rooftops and the sky dimming into evening. Tired, she could go into the small room and lay down on the cot, but she had come here to work, not sleep.

In that narrow room she kept her paints and other supplies, a hot plate for coffee and beside it a box of canned food. One afternoon she and Carl made love on the cot but it was uninspired; she could not think of Carl or anything or anyone else there. In the summer if the heat was not bad she spent the night. Some projects                               All Play and No Work   340    could not be left until they were finished. That is how art is done; it consumes all, the artist must be on fire or the magma, the molten core will falter, unflowing and cool into obdurate stone. Once done there’s no going back to it. It’s done. 

Now this, another kind of molten core and not flowing toward anything artistic at all. A child was the last thing she needed or wanted and the first thing she didn’t need or want.

The sky was still bright and there was still time to work in the natural light. Now how to begin? Choose a color, strike a line.

One canvas rested on an easel and three leaned against the wall; a series in green and blue on which she did not yet know how to proceed. With a shudder she recalled her first concept of oval or cylindrical forms with crimson or rose somewhere in the compositions; the thing was already working within her and now the canvases were incorrect, they revolted her.

All her world, her plans, and all his love and her work, were falling into rubble, trash, mountain trash. There was no place to go, nothing to do. Her arms and legs heavy, she could not remember what she was supposed to do. 

She opened a window. Below an alley she had never walked through because she always entered by the front door was lined with dumpsters. Dumpsters, that’s such an insult, who named them, the foul-mouthed trashy pe ople! She withdrew from the window, dizzy from the height and looking straight down. As she withdrew she bumped the back of her head on the edge of the horizontally hinged, levering window sash and felt the stab in the back of her head and neck. It had a steel edge and flange. She saw spots and paused to hold herself steady. The pain slowly ebbed away. She turned back into the studio and sat on a stool. 

Bumping the head had happened before. One summer, surfing in Hawaii, she lost her board. Floundering in the surf momentarily confused, she came to the surface, feet barely touching the sandy bottom and looked around. The board was behind her and smacked her in the back of the head. This gave her a small bump and it was still there. Maybe that was the source of her problem all along; a small bump.

Hawaii was so beautiful, why did she come back to Fincastle? Because having fun all the time is not to be taken seriously. And she had only one person there, an uncle who had invited her, paid her way, but he was lazy and did nothing but his job and eating dinner out and drinking and talking to people. And one night he told her all about the old Hawaiians, the ‘natural people’ who had no birth defects or tooth decay. They had an elder tradition, the uncles teaching the young people about things. Things? Like sex, the uncles, the older experienced men teaching the nieces, for instance, you know. She did know. “And what if the nieces didn’t want                                   to learn all about sex?”

He laughed. “Well they are all on their own then.”

However dreary by comparison, Fincastle and Rosehill were where she belonged. Every day in Hawaii was the same; warm and beautiful and fruit hanging all over the place. She began to hope a tidal wave would wash it all away or a volcano erupt and turn it to ash. Who knew endless fair weather could be so annoying?

“I’m fully in support of your ambitions, Claire, but why do you always want this canvas in front of you?”

“It’s what i love.”

“It’s an obsession.”

“What’s wrong with an obsession?”

“It’s an obsession; it’s like a mirror constantly before you.”

Later Claire had an answer; “Think of it as a window.” When she thought of it now she saw a wide open plain completely empty and nothing in view but the sky, as if she stood balanced on the top of a spire. 

Before her on a small table lay a pair of scissors that she used mostly for cutting canvas and trimming canvas along the edges of her stretchers. They had wide blades and were very sharp. Her father gave them to her, he had sharpened them himself. He might be a fool, according to her mother, cowardly and lazy, but he kept his tools sharp. 

Claire took up the scissors and opened them. They 

were bright, reflecting the sun in flashes as she turned the blade. She unbuttoned and opened her blouse and unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall. Her stomach felt tense. With a thumb she pulled down her panties and drew her thumb across the smooth skin. Holding her blouse up with one hand, she placed one tip of the open scissors to her skin a few inches below the navel.  

Right about there, she thought, that’s where it’s growing in a little curly curl at the end of a tube, right below less than half an inch long as that stupid fucking happy nurse said.

The tip of the scissors blade cut her skin and a drop of blood collected and ran down her skin and disappeared in the forest of curling hair below. She felt no pain. It made her tingle pleasantly.

Claire stood up and looked at her blood. It was a thin line and came from the wrinkle in her skin that Carl often said was his favorite wrinkle, the place he looked for. “Where is my favorite wrinkle,“ he would say and she saw him smiling up at her in the wavering candle light. When he found the wrinkle he kissed it and ran his tonguetip along it, the playful boy. She started a regular regime of sit-ups to tighten the skin and erase the favorite wrinkle but it never worked smooth. Now he would see the cut there and then he would know everything. He would always know everything, find out all about her and drag her out to that damn cabin. She loved him and hated loving him.

       The blade of the scissors glinted in the light. She placed both hands on the handle of the one blade (that is how you do it) with the tip trembling on Carl’s favorite wrinkle. ‘He got inside me and i can’t have anyone inside me.’ Tensing her shoulders and taking a deep breath, she bent toward the blade and pulled it into her womb. The sun leapt into the studio and filled her with burning light.

At that moment, at their apartment, Carl was sitting at the kitchen table in his sweats looking at the note, sipping from a stemmed glass of pinot grigio, thinking of how he would tell everyone. He would trust them to be understanding. He read the note; “At The Temple,” smoothed it out on the table and positioned it before him: evidence. Later he would tape it to a chair that no one would sit in. 

He needed to shower and fix dinner. Yes, that was one advantage to Claire being so single-minded and intense; he had to do the cooking and he loved to cook.   

At eight the guests started to arrive. One good thing about these people Carl thought but under no circumstances would he ever speak of it or even write it in a journal or a letter even to someone he trusted, was that they didn’t know the difference between a fine or not so fine champaign or wine of any sort of perfect or imperfect bisque or even a poorly or truly well prepared omlette. These people were used to eating fast food, the trashy places that had replaced ‘hash houses,’ on the American road. He had heard them refer to a place they                             liked as a ‘dive’ or a ‘greasy spoon.’ If they had eaten enough of their dinner and could not eat more they took what remained home in a ‘doggy bag.’ Yet despite a lack of sophistication in his guests, Carl went out of his way to fix the finest meal he was capable of preparing. He created it as if his parents were coming to dine. It was easy for him to interest his guests; all he had to do was fix something exotic, five star and way over the top. That’s what Sven would say, “Hey, this is some five star shit.”And as they dined, always too fast, he noticed, he could add a country aura or twang by asking, “How’s the vittles?”  

Sven and Barbalee arrived first. Sven had a beer, one of his own from the bag of beer he brought with him, and Barbalee a glass of white wine. She asked for it specifically, knowing Carl would have it properly chilled. She liked feeling elegant. Barbalee said she was eager to talk to Claire about something “important to girls like us” and was disappointed when told Claire wasn’t home. “I don’t expect her soon,” said Carl. 

“Is she all right?”

“At work. I’ll explain it all later. It’s what she does.”

Jose and Odaleen walked through the door five minutes later, then Kenneth and a woman no one else knew; Robin, a tall dark haired, husky law student from Philadelphia.

As he served appetizers Carl told them about Claire (indicating the chair with the note, “At The Temple” taped                              to the it) and how she works and how it was unlikely she was going to be back. “She’s a girl who has to follow her heart,” Barbalee said.

“Great artists do that, it’s in the blood,” said Sven. “Claire is a great artist, she’s going places.”

“I agree, that’s why i find it easy to make sacrifices,” said Carl.

“Oh so you’re not worried about a girl never being home for you and the kids?” asked Barbalee.

 “Once and awhile, not much. And no kids, not for awhile.”

It was after desert and coffee that Carl again spoke of Claire. “I wish she could be here and maybe she wishes it too, but she is driven far out beyond where any of us can help her. I mean it’s out to a place of total focus and without it she would not be able to put so much onto the canvas.”

“It must be hard for you sometimes.”

“Not really. I’ve become very devoted to her vocation. I don’t call it suffering, i just call it what she has to do and what i have to do to help her and the result is worth it a hundred times over.”

“Yeah, art’s not a nine to five job for sure,” said Jose.

“Or a game for sissies,” said Sven.

     “She has to work that way,” said Carl, “because when she was young, and she’s been an artist since she was very little, people have always been denying her time in                                the studio, so she has left a lot of unfinished work in the closet, so to speak, and so when she gets an idea she has to carry it through to the end. Bam. Finish it.”

“Y’know, i went to visit her in Fincastle and i tell you what,” said Barbalee, “that girl has such a controlling mama, that mother of hers runs her life, at least in Fincastle, even the art part of her life. She’s got this big room in the house where she grew up and in it she can make art all she wants but only one kind, the kind her mother likes, strictly representational, y’know.”

“People art,” said Sven. “Rhymes with fart.”

“Shut up honey. And then the poor girl showed me a little closet she had all to herself; the only space she had all to ownself and it was crammed, i mean packed with her own art, not her mother’s, her own ideas of what to paint and draw.’

“I was just going to say,” said Kenneth, “that i’m never happier than when i’m in my studio, my space with time to work in it.” 

“What do you think, Robin?”

“I’m studying law. I guess a courtroom would be my kind of studio or maybe you’d call it a stage and giving a performance for an audience of twelve.”

“And i bet you’d be good at it!” Odaleen said and all agreed, nodding.

“Well said.” 

  Barbalee looked at Robin now as if seeing her for the first time and there was a secret in her eyes.

      Odaleen said, “I’ve never seen Claire’s art work, what’s it like?”

“Beautiful,” said Jose, “well made, intricate, subtle, bold, a lot of things all at once.”

“That’s a good description; a lot of things all at once, inclusive,” said Kenneth.

“And you know,” said Barbalee, “she has all those gorgeous colors, but what i noticed talking to her is she really understands what all our professors tell us. That’s saying an awful lot. “

“Or a lot of awful,” said Sven.

“I think of art as spontaneity but getting there is quite a burden,” said Robin. “My problem would be how to start, how to prepare?”

“You just jump into it anywhere. I’m ready for it all the time,” said Sven. He had finished his six pack of beer and now drank wine, reluctantly. The wine, of course, was very good.

“Oh listen honey, Carl comes from some pretty well to do folks,” said Barbalee, “he and Claire are just the perfect match.”

“Are they mostly pretty or well to do?” said Sven.

“You hush.”

Carl merely nodded.

“Still, the art is the most important thing,” said Sven, “no matter how it comes into being, it’s the one important item. Finish it and get it out there, no matter what.”

      “It’s a question of God or art,” Kenneth said. “Nietzsche wrote that there are only two true reasons for existence, God or art.”

“How about both?”

“But that was his existence,” Jose said. “You know he went insane.”

“Lots of people go insane,” said Kenneth. “Really ordinary people go insane.”

‘That’s back in the old days when there were a lot more crazies.”

“Not really more, i think there were fewer nuts because the earth was cleaner. You know, less pollution.”

“So there might be even more today?”

“That’s true,” said Odaleen, “These days it’s really easy to go insane.”

They talked there at the table until the wine was gone and then pushed back the chairs and talked more. English poetry of the nineteenth century was part but not all of the conversation which included an upcoming contra dance which all agreed would be good to try, at least once, plus the music would be live and some strange events up coming in the Aster Park neighborhood. They all lived in or knew people who lived in the neighborhood so the place itself was a vital topic. 

Across the street from Carl and Claire’s apartment was a small bar named after a famous comedic actor. Photos and paintings of the funny man and his brothers who performed on the vaudeville circuit and starred in                            what was called in that distant time, “The silver screen,” because films were black and white and halfway between black and white is gray, silver to be nice about it. About half the guests at Carl’s dinner party went to this bar, the others left for other places or home. Carl stayed home and cleaned up. He was very happy; he felt they had understood and would be supportive.

Now he would spruce up the place, pack away the leftovers; make the place ready for Claire’s return. To save his strength for the ordeal of taking care of her in her exhaustion he went to bed early. He had not had much to drink. His thoughts were very clear.

When the book he was reading fell from his hands and clunked onto the floor he woke up. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, having dreamed into the pages of the novel, now on the floor. He wondered where Claire was, and then remembered. It was very quiet. The two o’clock crowds had closed the bars and were long gone.

The book he had been reading, set in the American Civil War, 1861-65, had become part of his dreams and shells whistling overhead and exploding with flashes or muffled groans in the rubble still vaguely troubled him. One of the shells had burrowed like a fur bearing animal into the soil at his feet and he waited for it to explode watching a spume of smoke from the fuse issue from a tiny hole in the ground above it. He knew in a moment it would explode and kill him. The book fell and he woke.                                  The room was dark, the images of war vivid before his eyes. They quickly faded. He was safe and the memory of being in action warmed him. The totality of his dreams flooded back into him and he saw the land, the waters, the contest in all its blood, gore and glory. He had been reading first about the naval engagement in Pamlico Sound and then had moved north to view the engagement on the steaming waters of Hampton Roads between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia. These two, the first ironclads fired cannon balls point blank at each other for two hours. This was the birth of the modern navy was born as so much modernity was born in that war and it mixed so well in his own mind he found himself mildly disgusted thinking the damn Yankees had the Virginia, formerly named the Merrimac, built and fitted out in a southern shipyard and then they had the audacity to name it after a river in Maine, in New England! “Hey, fuck you Yankees we built it here! It’s our boat; we name it like we wanna!” Except they didn’t say fuck you in 1862. They did fuck, that’s clear, or none of us would be here, only they never talked about it. They called it making love which is better because people can fuck without love just as we can love without fucking. Indeed the nation was deeply divided, and still is, maybe not as much. Truces are temporary and peace is temporary. People crave excitement too much. Carl knew that in that distant conflict called irrepressible, in a former life, he had been a young officer; he knew it by                               having such a feel for the war. The fact is, many people in Rosehill still fight that war; it won’t leave them alone.

With these thoughts Carl waited quietly to fall back to sleep. It was already after three am. Someone important had once said something important about three am being all about the soul. Claire would be measuring out on canvass her own dark soul now; three am was constantly present in her eyes.

Yes, she had a dark soul, she was tormented, but she had also found a solution. We live with and manage our pain, he thought, and perhaps, in the end, some part of our love and sacrifice endures.

Carl lay awake, waiting, thinking of Claire and their love and life together. He expected to fall asleep without noticing it and perhaps slipping into another dream of a Civil War battle, this time on the other side, for he often dreamed of serving both South and North equally, but never at the same time. Sleep did not descend upon him. For half an hour or more he lay quiet, wide awake. 

The possibility that Claire had taken no food or drink with her to the studio began to trouble him. She could make coffee or open a can of corn but would likely eat nothing and get so strung out and nervous she had a breakdown. It happened before; after a long stretch she became listless, almost catatonic. Very likely in her haste Claire had forgotten to bring fruit or a sandwich. At the moment she could be very hungry. Around The Temple at this hour there were no restaurants open. The closest he                                    could think about was a small bistro at the corner of Third and Broad and that one opened at six am. 

Although he knew Claire would object to the interruption, he rose and dressed, brewed a thermos of coffee and packed some left-overs from dinner in a basket and left for The Temple. 

Arriving there on the quiet, empty street, he let himself in with a spare key all the students with studios in The Temple were given and took the elevator to the fifth floor. From the moment he entered until he reached the fifth floor the building was utterly silent, aside from the creaking and cranking and rasping of the ancient elevator and the floor boards as he walked to her door.

No light shone beneath the door to Claire’s studio. ‘She might be sleeping,’ he thought with relief mixed with foreboding. She was doing the right thing to sleep if she had to. Somewhere in the Bible it said “work while you have the light” and also somewhere else, “rest when you are weary.” He also felt uneasy; if she was asleep so soon the art must not have gone very well. But that’s her problem and like any artist worth knowing and liking she had to live with it. It has always been thus.

Carl set the basket in front of

the door and knocked.

No reply.

He knocked again. Again no reply and no sound of movement from beyond the door.

      Carl knocked again, waited and turned to go, leaving 

the basket for Claire to find when she woke. Rules are rules. As an old guy from Asia once told him, “Elastic rules are a poor man’s tools,” and she had told him there can be no intrusion. This is the respect she required.

He took a few steps toward the elevator and stopped. An uneasy feeling came over him. The dusty air of the dim corridor oppressed him and he felt like he was abandoning Claire, or was he abandoning himself? He turned back to the basket, picked it up and entered the studio.  

The end of All Play and No Work, a melodrama