Читать книгу Physics of Sunset - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 9

5

Celestial Elevations

HE HAD KISSED another woman once, someone he hadn’t yet known well enough. Anna Bell-Shay was shy, squirrely, a close friend of their neighbor Veronique. Anna and her husband had come to dinner a couple of times at Carlo and Julie’s. She was a writer, a poet, one of the vague women Alec thought of as being members of the Horizontal School.

He’d found Anna sitting outside on a low stone wall at the party of friends in the neighborhood. This was after the earthquake when whatever held Alec attached to the earth had begun to let loose of him. For a week or ten days when rescue teams were still pulling living people out of the rubble, everyone exhibited a great capacity for joy. People were talkative, briefly united by the shared catastrophe that seemed to reach so deeply into every aspect of their lives. This was later in November, the Bay Bridge had been reopened, things were settling back: modern life again began to atomize.

It was a big party on a mild night. She had excluded herself and was sitting alone in the quiet dark, drinking wine and staring in through the big window of the dining room at the crowd around the buffet table.

Anna and her husband had the lookalike marriage Alec called the Bub and Sis, like a type of deli sandwich. Each was tall and blond, each had a wide angular face, strong, purely American features. Her eyebrows were so pale they scarcely showed. This was an endogenous marriage, like that of first cousins, rare in California, more common in the East.

Bub was of one type Alec actively despised—Columbia had its share of these. They were feckless, good-looking, rich—they never balanced their checkbooks. Blue-eyed, ankles tanned, they golfed, went sockless, came mewing around women who seemed to like them, though what was the exact appeal? Bub, in Anna’s case, was a musician who taught at Mills. She was clearly too smart for him. He was charming, nothing more. At dinner Alec had been bored and more than a little annoyed that men of this type exhibited such ease in getting good-looking women.

Anna patted the spot on the low wall beside her. Alec sat. It had been a clear fine day and still was warm enough that they could sit comfortably outside. The evening was peaceful; light through the window pooled on the flagstone and moss just beyond their feet. Neither felt moved to speak. The clouds above were still brightly lit, but here below in the shadow trail of the house next door, they were sequestered by the quiet and by the gathering darkness.

The sun was going down and the last light glinted like hammered copper along the rippled glass of the upstairs windows. This was a big hills house, a Maybeck, brown-shingled, effortlessly perfect and of its time. That he be half as good as Maybeck or Julia Morgan was all a man might really hope for. Birds were screaming raucously. This was only a few blocks below Descartes—Alec had come out the kitchen door to see if there was a way to sneak home by going over a back wall or up the path past Indian Rock. He could go home and sit in his car for a little while, read a couple of paragraphs of physics—this was the end of the eighties, so he’d have been reading A Brief History of Time, which was simply too difficult. Or he might go home and listen to the ball game on the car radio, drive back down to get her. He could be gone an hour before Gina even missed him.

“Nice party,” Anna said.

“Tip-top.”

Each fell silent once again.

“Actually,” she said. “I left because I couldn’t really stand another second of listening to the sound of my own voice.”

“That’s the one good thing about smoking cigarettes,” he said. “It gets you bounced right out of a place like this.”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “But I would if you happened to. If you smoked, you might have run out and you’d have to leave to go buy some and I could get a ride down the hill with you.”

“Too bad about cigarettes,” he agreed. “I liked it when there were cigarettes.”

They were both quiet again. Alec felt compelled to add: “There isn’t anything that’s come along that helps so much with social awkwardness.”

“Don’t talk if you don’t want to. What I hate most about parties, really, is that everyone nervously talks so much.” He nodded, each was silent. They stayed that way for a little while, then Anna said, “I was stuck in a corner with people discussing the homeless, and someone said they’d been put on earth to teach the rest of us gratitude.”

“Gevalt.”

She smiled at him. “The whole discussion began to make me so angry I started stammering, and I tossed my drink back so fast my brain felt like I’d been given a lobotomy with an ice pick.” Her face was now alive with self-amusement. “Then someone else told that person to stop calling them ‘the homeless’ since this term can be seen as one of derogation, both fixed and judgmental. I honestly could not stand it. So I came out here in order to drink antisocially.” She swirled imaginary wine in a glass that was now completely empty. “God, how I wish there was still something at times like these. Hashish was great—I wish there was still hashish. People were no less stupid when there were drugs, but at least we didn’t have to notice everything stupid everyone said and then remember it in such exquisite detail.”

Alec groaned. “Christ,” he said. “I’m just too old to be doing this again—my memory’s shot. I honestly can’t remember the names they changed everything to the last time. I can’t even remember that they changed the name of Grove to M.L.K. The whole title of that street is now written out ‘Martin Luther King, Jr., Way (Old Grove Street)’ on the plans at City Hall. It happened ten years ago, more! I should have adjusted by now. My father spoke Yiddish first, then English, but at least he only had to learn his second language once. And now my nine-year-old daughter comes home to inform me in her superior nine-year-old way that I have to upgrade to the new format.”

“Format?”

“She tells me I have to go out and rebuy all the music I own on records and on tapes or I’ll die without getting to ever hear what music really sounds like.”

Each was silent, each thinking about what music really sounds like.

“Life does sometimes seem like it’s becoming one constant upgrade,” Anna said. She sighed. They were quiet, then she said, “It was better when there were cigarettes.”

The birds had quieted. The night was so peaceful, they both heard it when his stomach rumbled. “Are you hungry?” she asked. She dug around in her bag and brought out a packet of airplane nuts. Anna handed these to him. “The crowd’s gone from the table. We can go back in if you like.” She said this, but neither of them stood. She dug around in her bag again, pulled out a tangerine and a pack of saltines, handed them to Alec.

They spoke quietly for another little while, had those few moments full of humor and good will. He kissed her when they each stood to say goodbye and go back in. They kissed, this felt perfectly natural. They may have lingered slightly, but not long enough that anyone watching them through the window would have been able to really tell.