Читать книгу American Histories - John Edgar Wideman - Страница 12

DARK MATTER

We go out to dinner and discuss eating.

We go out to dinner and discuss the economy’s downswings and upswings.

We go out to dinner and discuss the importance of staying physically fit and the difficulties in busy, aging lives of maintaining a consistent, healthy program of exercise.

We go out to dinner and discuss Vladimir Putin’s rumored kleptomania, how the U.S. State Department allegedly advises a famous coach who just returned from conducting basketball clinics in Russia that maybe the best course of action would be not to lodge a complaint with the UN about his NBA championship ring which had gone missing under extremely suspicious circumstances, while the coach was a guest at Putin’s dacha, but to live and let live and they, the U.S. Government, would ante up for a replacement ring.

We go out to dinner and discuss choices after a waitress—long legs, minidress, coffee-au-lait-colored skin, intricately cornrowed hair—squatted in the darkness at the end of our table, peering over its edge as she articulated in her oddly precise diction subtleties we could anticipate, surprises far beyond anything words on the menu able to express. Wonderfully enticing items, she convinced us, not because we believed she’d peeked at the chef preparing them but because she was a tasty appetizer we were already sampling down there between our table and the next row of tables, her pretty legs folded under her, big eyes, pretty face popping up Kilroy-like where we had no reason to expect a face to be.

We go out to dinner and discuss public schools supposed to educate thirteen-year-old colored boys, public schools that taught them nothing, or schools anyway that did not teach them not to shoot each other inside school buses. Public schools where white cops learned it was okay to shoot down unarmed thirteen-year-old colored boys in the streets.

We go out to dinner and discuss growing up, the love-hate of family relationships, parents and parenting and learning to forgive mistakes, our parents’ mistakes, our children’s, our own, and why should anybody believe things might ever be different, people being people as far back in time as people remember, same ole, same ole selfishness, rivalries, cruelties unto death. A couple mornings after that night, I rode down in the elevator with my bagful of glass, plastic, cans, and miscellaneous other recyclables our building asks residents to sort out and deposit in slots in various colored containers in the basement, and on the way back up accidentally stopped one floor short of mine and risked knocking on 801’s door, though it was Sunday and barely 10:00 a.m., but thank goodness, L responded almost immediately, almost as if she’d been awaiting my knock, and that sort of relieved the pressure, because it meant I was not necessarily disturbing a neighbor’s sleep or privacy or worse. Without exchanging a single word with me, L went to fetch her husband, and suddenly there he was, beside her just outside the door, him puffy-faced, spiky hair askew, wearing a Peanuts pj top and sweatpants, me in cutoffs, T-shirt, standing in the hall, fresh from trash dumping, wondering why I’d knocked. Then L with a stoic smile moved a few steps backward into the apartment so we—two upper-middle-class, differently colored, orphaned males—could hug. As we separated, nothing to say. He knows I must know his father gone now like mine. Dead in Dublin from a stroke suffered the same night we had been out to dinner in a restaurant and he had discussed his father’s loneliness since losing his wife of fifty years, his father’s helplessness, speechlessness palpable while they spoke on the phone.

We go out to dinner and discuss relativity, dark matter, climate change, the origins and inevitable demise of the life-form we represented, our guilt collectively or individually, yea or nay, for circumstances in which we find ourselves.

We go out to dinner and discuss Breaking Bad, the nationwide epidemic of crystal meth, rural versus urban poverty, the former attorney general’s height, the INS, IRS, ISIS, bedbug-sniffing dogs.

We go out to dinner and discuss those missing.

We go out to dinner and discuss us, the ones present who weren’t so bad off, after all, if we looked at the options.

* * *

We go out to dinner and discuss retirement and my old buddy sitting across the table from me laughs loudly at himself laughing at me, grad students in Spain where some Spaniards called me El Moro, and one called me a big Chinaman, me laughing and splashing around once in a puddle of my vomit several feet deep according to my old buddy. His vomit, too, he boasted, him laughing and splashing in it, too, and why in the world, what in the world, what got into us, man, back in the day, what were we thinking, man, all that booze, booze, booze like no tomorrow.

We go out to dinner and discuss the Twin Towers, and they trundle through the restaurant door in blackface, huffing and puffing past a crowd of multicolored patrons to pull up chairs and sit at our table, cute lobster bibs tied round their necks, smoking cigars in a clearly marked no-smoking zone, two good ole boys just happy to be out and chilling in a trendy place, folks like us, though those guys being twins and quite large, something odd, different about them their bonhomie can’t disguise.