[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
bright. Then where would Dad go?
Cindy felt the luxury of herself, her ampling flesh, the warmth of her legs in
her dress, the possible pleasures of the coming night. Would
Bob notice her, or had the marriage slipped beyond that? Love, no matter how
rich and wet, has dry, crinkled borders and beyond was the sky through which
lovers fell forever.
It had taken fifteen years of a good marriage for Cindy to become confident of
her own beauty. As a girl she had thought of herself as too large. Loving her
was a big job, there being acres of pale flesh to kiss, and a mouth she
imagined able to swallow the heads of
most boys. She had wanted for lovers, too proud to call the boys, waiting in
her room, her imagination soaring in the steamy nights, when the breeze seemed
to penetrate every crack in her body with warm, touching fingers. The trees
tossed and there were words of magic in the air.
A siren rose in the street, fading quickly into the blaring of a radio and
hard laughter. A
window opened, a woman shouted at a boy gluing the flier advertising a rock
club to the wall of a building. Cynthia turned away from the table, drawn by
whatever more was in the world. "The wine's made me flush."
Bob wondered if now was the moment to relate his experiences. "I think I'd
like to see
Monica," he said instead. "Have a chat."
Kevin was toying with his food, his wife leaning back in her chair, shaking
her long brown hair. Beyond the window the night was growing into a density of
a yellow sodium-vapor light. The Columbia Hotel sign came on, and began to
cast its shaking reflection against the ceiling of the dining room. The music
poured out of the stereo.
"I have a story to tell," Bob finally managed to say. He drank the dregs of
his wine, poured himself another glass. Kevin went for the bottle. "No. You've
had yours." The boy stopped. He ate a morsel of cabbage.
"Was there any trouble, honey? Is that why you came home early?"
"I came home early because I had a disturbing dream that perhaps was not a
dream. Not entirely. There were certain indications afterward that the dream,
at least in some way, was real."
They were naturally eager to hear more. But he found he could not bring
himself to tell more. The trouble was his son; the family always shared
everything but this was too much. He could not share this with his boy.
To Kevin he was golden;
his ego would not allow him to compromise that image.
"Dad, come on. That's got to be one of the classic lead-ins. You can't just
say that and then stop."
Page 28
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
He traded looks with Cynthia. She
understood perfectly. "I don't think Dad actually remembers the dream."
"I thought I did but now I don't. It's just, as I
said, there was some sort of a disturbance in the hotel that happened to
coincide with the dream. I do remember I left the room in my dream. And there
had been a disturbance.
Maybe I actually did leave the room. That's why I came home."
"Was anybody hurt?"
"No, son, not as far as I know." He remembered Jeal and the police. "People
were inconvenienced, and a glass door was broken. That's about all."
"Wow, Dad." The boy smiled but it was obvious that he was scared. Bob was
ashamed of himself.
"Eat," Cindy muttered, addressing them both. "I worked hard."
Bob loved cabbage; he ate eagerly. "It's a delicious dinner, hon." There came
to him an impression which before the dream had been fuzzy, but which was now
quite clear. His life seemed a series of paper cutouts, his own
body merely a jointed thing, able to move only on command of some mystery that
could neither be controlled nor ignored. When the music stopped, it was
replaced by the sounds of eating, the clink of knives and forks, the working
of jaws. Three ordinary people consumed an ordinary dinner deep in the flaring
night of Manhattan, while the neon glared on the ceiling and the traffic crept
past below, long lines of honking cars jamming
Broadway.
The clock that had been in Cindy's family since before the Civil War chimed
eight times.
"Any more homework, son?"
"No, Mama. I want a tub bath tonight. I want to sit in the tub and read the
Metamorphosis."
"As long as you're in bed by nine, this can be free time. What did you have
for homework?"
"Do a book report on
The Penal Colony.
Do some algebra problems. Write a poem about a subject of my choosing. The
usual sort of thing."
"You're lucky you're in St. Anselm's. You could be at public school where you
have to carry a knife in order to survive."
"Obviously I wouldn't survive, Dad. As you well know." Bob did not say it, but
he thought bitterly that nobody survives. Nobody. There is a story of some
strange tiles from a floor in
Spain in which the faces of the dead have emerged, terrible, glazed horrors,
apparently hellbound. And in Lake Ontario there is an island that looks from
the air like George
Bernard Shaw, and most of the views in the
Catskills look like the profiles of Dutchmen and Indians, and there is a
plateau on Mars that looks like an Egyptian, and then there's the man in the
moon, that most haunting of natural faces. Maybe we get trapped in matter,
some of us, condemned to contemplate the starry world forever, staring at sky
or cloud, motionless. We discover, then, the simple truth that meditation real
meditation is a stupefying bore. If you must do it forever, even contemplating
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]