The fish get plated alongside scoops of greenbean casserole and hunks of fresh bread. Synn?ve pulls an extra folding chair from a hallway closet, passes some cucumber salad around. Stanley watches carefully before he takes a bite of anything.
Everyone eats the fish whole—bones and all, like sardines—but they don’t taste like sardines. Stanley remembers small fish that his Italian neighbors cooked around Christmastime, in those years when his father was away and his mother wasn’t speaking and he had to take meals wherever he could find them: these taste a little like those did. As he chews he thinks of the seething silver carpet on the moonlit sand, and also of the bag of heads by the backdoor—the tangle of guts, the little mouths working, the cloudy unblinking eyes—making himself think these things. But they don’t really bother him. The fish taste good. He’s hungry. He hasn’t had a proper kitchen-table meal in months.
Welles keeps standing up and sitting down, splashing pale gold wine into half-empty glasses. Soave classico, he says. I’ve had these bottles for more than a year. It’s lucky I saved them! For this meal it’s just right. Fish on Friday! My god, are you angling to re-Catholicize me? Well, it may be working, damn it all, it may be working.
The guy is keyed up, on a roll; nobody makes much effort to share the stage. Synn?ve and Cynthia each get in some good licks, and Claudio slow-pitches a few earnest questions, but mostly they just let Welles wind himself down. Stanley feels like he’s watching a swordfight in an old movie where the hero—Errol Flynn, maybe, or Tyrone Power—holds off a dozen guys at once, only none of them seem to be trying very hard to scratch him. Cynthia keeps raising her eyebrows, smirking. Welles talks with his hands, barely touches his food. Stanley finds it all sort of depressing.
Speaking of Catholicism, Welles says, and then recites part of a poem, something he just wrote. Stanley clenches his jaw, stares at his plate, pushes a french-cut greenbean around with a tightly gripped fork. Thus does faith fold distance! Welles says. So bend the Ptolemaic rays! And Poor Clare perceives, ether-borne, the priest’s vestmented image on the wall. Please stop, Stanley thinks. Stop spoiling it. Stop talking.
I suppose you’ve heard, Welles says, that the pope just named Clare of Assisi the patron saint of television. Two or three weeks ago, I think. Rather more inventive than declaring the Archangel Gabriel to be the patron of radio, wouldn’t you say? But then the church has always been quite comfortable with the concept of the discarnate word propagated through space. Less so with the discarnate image. The pope had to work a little harder to locate divine precedent. Lately, as I write, I’m finding myself drawn to stories such as these. It seems that this is what the new work will be about. The power of the image. The image of power.
Cripes! Cynthia says. Get a load of the clock! We better cut out, kemosabe. The curtain goes up at tick sixteen.
She and Claudio retreat to the entryway, Claudio clasping hands and murmuring thanks as Cynthia passes him his jacket. Stanley gets up, catches Claudio in the hallway, hands him some folded bills. For the movie, he says.
Claudio palms them with a guilty look that quickly passes. You will be here when I return? he says.
Here, or at the squat.
You should stay here, Claudio says. I like it here.
Synn?ve is clearing the dishes; Welles moves through the livingroom—still eating from the plate in his hand—to put an LP on the turntable. Cynthia glides over to the two of them in turn, planting kisses behind their ears. Claudio and I had better trilly, she says. Don’t wait up for us.
Take it slow, Stanley tells Claudio as he steps outside. Keep your eyes peeled.
We will not go to the Fox, Claudio says with an irritated backward glance. We will go to a nice place.
The door closes. Stanley watches them through the window as they chase a couple of cats off the lawn. He feels a funny prickle in his sinuses, a sore tremble in his throat. He wonders what his goddamn problem is all of a sudden.
Music crashes from the hi-fi: a crazy choir chanting in some weird language while woodwinds and tympani toot and boom behind them. Welles leans into the entryway, shouting over the racket: Synn?ve and I will do the washing-up, he says. You should go upstairs and poke through my library. Borrow something you think you might like. I’ll be up in a minute with a couple of beers. Does that sound good?
On the narrow staircase Stanley feels dizzy, slows down. He rarely drinks, doesn’t much care for the drowsy off-balance feeling he gets. He lifts his feet, plants them again. His pulse throbs in his wounded leg.