Tapestry of Fortunes A Novel

27


King and I are having dinner in his tiny apartment. When he called me last night, he confessed he was ill last time we were going to do this, and he was too embarrassed to tell me. Something … gastrointestinal.

“Was it—?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, quickly.

King’s apartment is furnished with the kind of mismatched but comfortable things you can still find at the Salvation Army. A sofa, a chair, and a reading lamp in the living room. A braided rug. A stereo. A brass iron bed in the bedroom, a white bedspread, a dresser. An old-fashioned bathroom with a claw-footed tub. A kitchen cluttered with cooking tools, bursting with them. And a tiny wooden table, where we now sit.

“I feel like my life is sort of out of control,” I say, “like I’m just not doing the right things. But it’s odd, because I’m also beginning to feel better than I ever did. Happier, I mean.”

“What’s wrong with what you’re doing?”

“I don’t know. Everything. I have such a strange job. And these roommates. My son thinks I’m nuts.”

“That’s his job. He’s pubescent. He’d think you were nuts no matter what you were doing.”

“Well, yes. But it’s more than that. I feel like I should be … more like other people.”

“I never saw the percentage in that.”

I nod, watch him take a drink of wine. His eyelashes are so black. Long.

“How’s it going with … Laura?” I ask.

“Linda?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“I guess it’s all right. I need to … Well, there’s a lot I want to know.”

“And I’m sure you enjoy it, going out. Don’t you?”

“I do. But the whole thing is very new. I’ve never had much to do with women. There was that one time. But that …”

“What happened, anyway?”

He looks at me for a long time, considering something. Then he says, “Oh, well. It was a joke. Literally. I’d always been really shy, oversensitive—overweight, too, of course. I’d never tried to date, and then, all of a sudden in my first year of college, there’s this really gorgeous girl, after me. I couldn’t believe it. But she was pretty convincing. And we ended up in her dorm room one Sunday afternoon, and I—”

I say nothing, wait.

“We ended up in bed, and I was so …” He laughs. “Well, I got pretty emotional. I thought it meant … Well, I thought it was real, and I thought it meant everything. But it was a joke. The girl, Christy was her name, had made a bet with someone. She got a hundred dollars for sleeping with me.”

“Oh, King. I’m so sorry.”

“Somebody came in just after we finished and took a picture—they’d been standing outside the door the whole time. I guess they passed it all around.” He puts down his glass, leans back. “I never told anyone this before. I never thought I would. But it feels kind of good to tell you, Sam. Anyway, after that, I just gave up on ever … I let myself get completely taken up by what I was studying. Whatever that longing is, whatever it is that makes people want to be together, I made that need get met by what I learned. Everything is there, in science. Even human emotions, I mean. It’s as though they’re represented by certain universal laws. Remember when they found the naked stars—did you read about that?”

I laugh. “No.”

“You know what a naked star is?”

I think for a minute. And then, I can’t help it, I say, “One that just got out of a meteor shower?”

“Very funny. But what they are, are stars with most of their gaseous atmospheres stripped away. And you know why they’re revealed like that? Because of close encounters with other stars. I find something very human about that. Don’t you?”

I nod. Smile.

“I see that kind of thing all the time. It’s thrilling to me. And at the same time, there’s a kind of peace there, in that kind of contemplation, that you don’t get in relationships. At least, I don’t think you do.”

“Why did you stop?” I ask.

“Stop what?”

“Working at it.”

“Oh, I haven’t. Not at all.”

“But you … you know, your job isn’t exactly astrophysics.”

He sits back, looks at me. “Do you ever think about how hard it is to say something and have it be precise? Especially the things you care most about? You hear the words coming out of you and they are just not quite what you intended. You mean red, you’re thinking red, and then out of your mouth comes … chartreuse. And you want to take it back, but then the other person is saying, ‘Oh, chartreuse, I see,’ and it’s too late. It’s gone. I don’t know that in human relationships you ever find the true crossing from here to there. But in physics, it feels like you’re getting there.”

“But—”

He holds up a finger. “I don’t work in it because when I’m away from it in the specific, I’m better able to see it generally. Do you understand?”

I think I do understand. But it’s too hard to say how. It’s an internal acknowledgment, a yearning kind of stepping forward that will not translate itself into any words that I know. He’s right, about the limitations of words. And so I say simply, “I do understand.”

He looks at my plate. “Are you finished?”

“Yes, thank you, it was delicious.” And it was. Rosemary chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, sweet peas. A chocolate cake he’d made. From scratch, of course. “Buttermilk’s the secret here,” he told me. “And you put a little coffee in the batter.”

He takes our plates, puts them in the sink, runs water on them. I sit in my chair and watch him, his slow and careful movements, his obvious contentment. There is a low buzz to the overhead light, and the sound is comforting. I want to stand close behind him, lay my head in the shallow valley between his shoulder blades. Instead, I drink more wine.

“Would you like to go into the living room?” he asks, when he has finished rinsing the dishes. A shy formality.

“Yes.” He gets his wine, and I follow him into the living room.

“Sit anywhere,” he says.

I choose the chair, and he sits at the end of the sofa nearest it. “You know, the thing about the jobs I do … A lot of people think I’m lazy.”

I say nothing. This had occurred to me.

“But I want … time. That’s why I walk dogs. I don’t want to keep on moving up the ladder, trading in one car for another. I want to be appreciative of all that’s here, in a normal life. I want to keep finding out about the things I see around me.” He leans forward, looks at me intently. “How do birds know how to fly south?”

“I don’t know!”

“Yeah, most people don’t. Why don’t you know?”

“Well, I just … I guess I just take some things for granted.”

“But, Sam, listen to this: They have internal compasses, sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field. They calibrate them by sunlight and by the stars. Think of that! Next time you see a bird fly by, think of that! They’re everywhere, Sam, these wonders. Do you remember the last time you really wanted to know everything?”

The answer comes to me like a movie in my head. I am flatchested and pigtailed, bending over the edge of a lake and watching the lacelike line of froth advance and recede, trying to determine what makes the water green. The sun is warm on my back. I am entirely unself-conscious—my body is a sack of flesh and bones whose function is to take me where I want to go. On my dresser at home, I have rocks and various kinds of leaves, a jar with a cocoon inside that I inspect a thousand times a day. I am obsessed with discovering things, as though I’ve been let out of the hatch of a spaceship and told to come back with a full report. For some time, I have nourished a fantasy that a small group of very wise people dressed in close-fitting silver will show up in the middle of my geography class, saying, “We’ve come for Samantha.” And I believe I will rise and follow them, leaving behind forever the lunchbox I am embarrassed about because Veronica always buys the wrong one.

“I do remember when I felt like that,” I say. “I was young. A little girl. But strong! I was so busy. And then I woke up one morning feeling clumsy and worried to death about which shade of lipstick to wear. And then I woke up the next morning and I was married. And then in labor. And then I had the job of caring for a family, which satisfied me—which is a sin now—but which satisfied me because it seemed to be about everything.”

“You were happily walking dogs, so to speak.”

“Yes. Yes.” I think for a moment, then say, “So … you aren’t expecting anything, are you?”

“I’m just watching the show,” he says. “I think it’s so good. I don’t know why people walk out on it in all the ways they do.”

I kick my shoes off, pull my feet up under me. “Einstein didn’t wear socks.”

“I know.”

“That’s all I know about physics.”

“That’s almost enough.”

“Oh, God, King. You always make me feel so … Like I’m fine.”

“That’s because you are, Sam. How come you don’t know that?”

I am embarrassed by a sudden rush of tears. I wipe them quickly away, then laugh at myself. “Oh, jeez, look at this.”

“Maybe we should go out,” he says gently. “Want to see a movie?”

I nod. I felt it too, a sense that if we took one step further in this direction, we would fall off a cliff together. And I don’t know, I still feel made of glass.