Читать книгу Physics of Sunset - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 7

3

Bodies at Rest

IT WAS A few minutes after five on a warm October afternoon, the first unremarkable day in that remarkable week, the only one in which Alec Baxter’s whole evening had been laid out pleasurably and he knew just what to expect. The A’s were two games up. Instead of sitting shiva on the cardboard boxes the rabbi dropped off at the house on 219th Street in Queens, instead of observing phone silence, staying home in order to say prayers and light a memorial candle for his father, Alec flew right home. Back at work, he seemed to have forgotten all about it.

A brilliant California day , with the sky towering up into great struts of cumulus. Alec was happy, was walking free, had come out the other side of the worst of the suffering.

He was free, also hungry. He was out on Solano Avenue going into Zachery’s to pick up a couple of half-baked pizzas. He was making his way to Fran and Jerry Bloom’s, who lived above him up the hill on Descartes. It was at the Blooms’ that the members of their two families would convene to eat stuffed pizza, Chicagostyle, and worship in the Church of Baseball.

The streets were strangely empty. Thinking of nothing so much as his hope for a Giants win, he heard the clap of its coming before he even felt it. This was just as he walked through the open door of the pizza shop. It slammed in, faltered, then seemed to renew itself by taking hold of the ground where he was suddenly rooted.

There were two girls at the register, each one gripping the countertop. “Get down,” he ordered them. He bellowed this as if to steady not only them but the entire world. Their open faces emptied of expression—girls with big eyes only staring up at the place where the pendant lights were swaying. These were jokey Tin Man light fixtures, ones hung on long attachments, galvanized, swinging in a perfect description of the waves of shock.

His heart went out to them. All these loud and buoyant girls—were they all to die like this with their hopes unmet? He thought of his own daughter, his son. Parents in Berkeley sometimes dreamed their children’s names, so the children were named with hope for an imagined future—the parents’ own longings and wishes written out in a way that was achingly transparent.

The interior walls were eighteen feet high, the ceiling open to the metal roof, its members cross-beamed by structural steel. There was such a hollow at the core of so much in California that even the word building didn’t necessarily mean what it might have in the East. Stores and even schools were cheaply and idiotically made of unreinforced masonry—these were the very places his wife and children spent half their waking lives. Across the room the ten-foot stacks of cardboard pizza boxes began to shake apart, slick white boxes skewing out across the tile floor, as if an imperious God was giving a demonstration of the verb to undulate. The boxes, two-feet square, tumbled out, strewn like a deck of waxed and magnificent cards.

The floor was cool, smelled of bleach. It was concrete, scored to resemble bricks and dyed Tuscan red, so well waxed it looked like tanned leather. Materials were a matter of life and death to Alec—you could literally die here of the shoddiness of the solid world, of the duct-tape-patched-together life, the one lived on the cheap. Concrete was one substance he ardently loved; this love gave him solace now. Alec let his cheek rest on the floor against the hard chill of it. He loved its pliability, how it started out as such thick liquid to be molded, poured, pressed, shaped, scraped for texture—a stone that could resemble anything, depending on the craftsman’s artistry. Concrete had such flex before it hardened, such give, like a young person’s life. Now it was only the fragile skin beneath which beat the heart of the living world.

The quake boiled for a good fifteen seconds. Plaster, already brittle, cracked. The high walls that had been sheared shook but held. They were stabilized too by the grids of the brick-red metal roof.

Tears had suddenly come to him, began to stream his face. It wasn’t grief that rocked him, rather the keening disappointment that his evening’s selfish pleasure had been so quickly wrecked. What was wrong with him, that his best and truest feelings were left like luggage in the East? It is by losing faith, his father said, that a Jew becomes American.

Alec was alone except for the pizza girls. He was hungry and he was tired; he’d wanted only such a simple thing: to go up to Jerry Bloom’s. Jerry worked at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He was a Bronx Science whiz kid, a type of goofy genius—he and Fran always laid out quite a spread. Jews knew a thing or two: the close relationship between loss and gluttony; also, the way you had to bury quickly to get it done before sorrow annihilates.

Jerry always kept a fifth of Stolichnaya in the freezer. The two might have taken that bottle and tiny glasses stuck like thimbles onto Jerry’s big cartoonish fingers and gone alone out onto the deck into the fading light to smoke cigars. They would look out over the water as its color deepened and the bay filled with dusk; they might speak with hushed voices while staring off, speak of Ted Williams and John Coltrane, then offer a few toasts to Alec’s father as the sun went down, never mind they lacked a minyan.

Alec lay with his palms flat, his rough cheek against the cool floor of the pizza shop. The girls called out to him, asking if he’d been hurt. People came out from the kitchen, streamed around the counter, Alec wrongly becoming the focus of their attention. Had he been hurt? they kept asking. He struggled to sit up. He was weeping; he couldn’t answer them.

Later he came to think it was the earthquake that had broken him, that in that moment the abyss had opened and he glimpsed the moment of his own death. He had been terrified. He saw that he lacked a certain structural integrity. He thought of himself as morally scrupulous—Gina called it rigid. Alec had always been more strict with himself than he was with other flawed and more primitive beings, a group that included his wife and children. The rules with women were more fluid, he felt. Women were hard on one another, yet made allowances. They were more elemental, less high-minded, which is why Alec had been able to forgive Gina for her crimes against him.

He raised his palms, which were bruised from the panic with which he suddenly hit the floor. He was shaking his head to try to say it: my father is a few days dead; I don’t know where my family is. He was a man who never wept, who hadn’t cried at his father’s funeral. How many days now since he’d eaten. How long since he’d slept. Alec was hardly recognizable to himself. He needed something to eat, needed also to sit quietly for another minute to adjust to this world, the new and vaulted emptiness in which no father stood above him.