Harpo growled at me like the tiger of his dreams.
Jack asked me out for a coffee right then and there, and I thought, whew boy, not another architect. Managed to stay away from that sort for the past couple years, but how much harm in a cup of coffee? Jack was different, it turns out. He seemed to be someone I had always known, like we had met before in a previous life and were meant to meet again. His mannerisms and gestures, the light in his eyes. Even the way he talked. You didn’t have an ordinary conversation, chitchat about the weather, but always a little deeper, and I don’t know, like a haiku or something Japanese. Philosophical, poetical, straining toward the profound. An old soul. Nobody else talked that way with me. Nobody else treated me that way.
And he lived completely in his own head. Which can be an interesting place when he lets you inside. I used to catch him singing to himself when he thought no one could hear, snatches of opera it turns out. Or I’d come over and see him on a whim and he’d be in the middle of some old cowboy movie or anything with flappers or Buster Keaton or the Marx Brothers. But what was most different was that he was forever off on his own desire path. And his dreams were a symptom of an underlying sorrow, I think, a kind of despair.
“Despair? Jack?” My brother did not recognize me in her description.
“Jack would tell me his dreams. Everything he wished to design and see built, of course, but beyond that. What he hoped to create out of empty space, how to give people the places they needed for work or to study or just live. How to make a home out of a house. He was always reading the Poetics, trying to find some key to making it all happen, but I think he truly despaired of ever making it so. Too many hurdles. The bureaucracy of the firm. The conspiracy of other people.”
“You have that anywhere,” said Sam.
She soothed her grief with a sigh. “I’ve been there before, so I recognize the signs. Always wishing but never doing. Always desiring but never searching. His dreams of making all those houses and buildings and cities that he had drawn as a boy. He put his life on hold as he waited for his life to begin. All of it, even me. The shame is we were so close.”
I saw her face surrounded by fireflies.
“The other night we had a few people over from his firm, a cookout to celebrate the beginning of another summer. The couple across the street were sitting on the porch blowing bubbles for their two girls to chase, and then the fireflies came out by magic in pairs and dozens and hundreds. Those girls were full of joy. And then these two jerks from his office were going on about this and that, and at one moment, I caught Jack’s eye and begged him, in my mind, to get me out of here, to take me away from all this. Run off, stare at the ocean together, start a little magic of our own. But I guess he never quite got the signal, and I wonder now if he knew how much he was loved.”
She began to cry again, and Sam finally got the signal that I was sending and rose to his feet and draped an arm across her shoulders. She folded herself into his embrace. “One thing I am sure of,” he said, “was how much he was loved and how much he loved you.”
Thank you, old man, I whispered.
“Perhaps the next time we go around,” Sita said.
“Here’s to the next life,” Sam said. He guided her to the door. She looked back once over her shoulder, and then they left the room. I longed to stop her at the door, hoping to see her one last time, but she did not turn around, so I let it be.
A short while later, the noises downstairs abated as the guests left the house. Good-bye, good-bye, they said to one another. Sam helped Sita with her suitcases, for she was off to Chicago for repair of her heart. When the last one out locked the door, the old empty feeling returned. I was sad to hear them go, of course, but such endings are inevitable.