Against the Day (173 page)

   
“My
turn to just sit and listen.”

   
“No
choice, pardner.”

Cyprian reached, probably meaning no
more than to squeeze Reef’s shoulder, but Reef frowned and ducked away. “Done
some shitty things, Cyprian, but that’s the one there’s no forgivin. Way my
little boy looked at me, that last time
. .
.
ain’t like he knew anythin was different. That was it. Just a baby.
Always went to sleep never once thinking I wouldn’t be there when he woke up.
But that one morning I wasn’t.” He and Cyprian had a look, too stressful for
either of them to hold for too long. “I don’t even know why I did it anymore.
But that’s too easy, ain’t it.”

   
“How
much of this have you told Yashmeen?”

“No more’n she tells me about her
younger days. Why? You fixin to go run and rat on me now?”

   
“Not
I, but perhaps you should. Sometime.”

   
“Easy
for you to say.”

“
Happens
in jail sometimes
,” Reef theorized. “Seems like that if you’re looking
at much time inside, things just slide into that old triangle of two parents
and a kid, without much plannin it out.”

   
“But
we are not in jail. Are we?”

   
“Course
not. Don’t even know why I said that.”

“You’re free to leave anytime,”
Yashmeen said. “We all are. That was always the point.”

“I might’ve felt free to leave once,”
Reef said. But he wasn’t about to look anybody in the eye.

   
“He
doesn’t know why he said that either,” Cyprian put in. Yashmeen’s

face, poised between anger and amusement, was not a text
either of the young men was willing just then to read.

What
fascinated Cyprian lately about her face was what happened to it when she and
Reef were fucking. True to her promise, she had allowed him to watch them now
and then. As if Reef had arrived as some agent of transfiguring—not so
much because of as
against
his dogged repenetrations— her face,
which Cyprian had once kept, like a photograph folded securely in everyday
memory, as a charm against Balkan misfortune, now, veiled with sweat, grew in
passion fiercely exquisite, revealing to him, as if by rays newly discovered,
the face of another unsuspected woman. Not possessed so much as evicted, for
some unstated use, by forces which had never seen reason to declare themselves.

Far
away in the backcountry of his spirit, perhaps in the coconscious one heard
them on about these days in fashionable circles, he felt something begin to
shift.

Now, after years
of avoidance
, it was
Reef’s turn to dream about his father. Something about the situation he was in
with Yash and Cyprian must have loosened up a seam, and the dream came and
found him. He had thought once that being the Kieselguhr Kid in Webb’s place
would take care of all his mortal illusions, and now look at this that he’d
come stepping into. Webb, even on the trail back from Jeshimon so long ago,
that luminous and strident hallucination—would Webb recognize him now,
recognize his politics anymore, his compulsions? In the dream they were no
longer in the ghostly canyons of the McElmo but in a city, not Venice but
noplace American either, with an unmappable operational endlessless to its
streets, the same ancient, disquieting pictures engraved on its walls as back
in the McElmo, spelling out a story whose pitiless truth couldn’t be admitted
officially by the authorities here because of the danger to the public sanity
. . . .
It was darker out here than he had
any idea of. In the distance Reef caught sight of a procession of miners in
their long rubber coats, only one of them, about halfway along, with the candle
stub in his hat lit. Like postulants in habits, they proceeded single file down
a narrow street like a humid drift lit back or front by the yellow lamp. As
Reef came closer he saw that the bearer of the light was Webb.

“Small
victories,” Webb greeted him. “Just to come away with one or two. To praise and
to honor the small victories where and however they happen.”

   
“Hasn’t
been too many of them lately, Pa,” Reef tried to say.

   
“Not
talking about yours, you numbskull.”

   
Understanding
that this was Webb’s attempt to pass on another message, like up at the séance
in the Alps, Reef saw just for one lucid instant that this

was the precise intelligence he needed to get him back to
where he had wandered off the trail, so long ago. And then he was awake and
trying to remember why it was important.

Their plan had
been
to flee up into the
Garfagnana and live among their kind, among the wolves, Anarchists, and road
agents. Live on beanandfarro soup and mushrooms and chestnuts simmered in the
harsh red wine of the region. Steal chickens, poach a cow now and then. But
they got no farther up the valley of the Serchio than Bagni di Lucca,
birthplace of European roulette as we have come to know it, gamblers’ instincts
prevailed, and all at once everybody was reverting to type. Soon, as if despite
their best intentions, they were rolling in francs. Sometimes they could be
seen out sauntering under the trees, Reef in sparest black, Borsalino brim
shadowing his eyes, lean and attentive, Cyprian billowing in whites and pastels
and extravagantly checked hunting caps, Yashmeen between them in a casino
toilette of summerweight crêpe in palest lilac, and packing a parasol which she
seemed to be using as an organ of discourse. Sometimes the clouds came piling
over the mountains, thickening the light to dark gray, draping sheets of rain
across the hillsides. Swallows lined up under eaves and along telegraph wires
to wait it out. Then the three remained indoors, fucking, gambling, pretending to
lose just enough to stay plausible, bickering, seldom venturing into questions
of whatever should become of them.

What
they would find difficult were not so much the grander elements— they had
discovered that they all three tended politically to be Anarchists, their view
of human destiny was pessimistic with excursions into humor only jail occupants
and rodeo riders might recognize—what really made the daytoday so
laborious and apt at any turn to come apart in disaster were rather the small
annoyances, which, through some homeopathic principle of the irksome, acted
more powerfully the more trivial they were. Cyprian had the habit, of long
standing, though until now no one had noticed it really, of commenting
ironically on nothing in particular by singing, as if to himself, to the tune
of the
William Tell
Overture,

Very nice, very nice, very
niceindeed,

Very nice, very nice, very
niceindeed,

Very nice, very nice, very
niceindeed,
very

Niiice, very
niceindeed!

Reef
imagined that adversity had taught him the art of assembling exquisite gourmet
meals from whatever ingredients the day put in his path, though the other two
were seldom known to share this belief, preferring on more than one occasion to
go hungry rather than choke down more than a mouthful of whatever horror of
Reef’s might be on the menu. All Reef could offer was consistency. “Say surly
topple!” he would scream and there it would be, another evening’s culinary
ordeal. “French. Means it’s on the table.” The pasta asciutta was always
overdone, the soup always had too much salt. He would never learn to make
drinkable coffee. It did not help when Cyprian’s response to the worst of these
efforts was to sing,

Yes! yes! it’sveryniceindeed, it’s

Very, very, nice
in(deedleeedleeedleeedle),

Nice! nice! yes

Very nice indeed, yes,

Very, very, very,
niceindeed!

“Cyprian, better watch ’at shit.”
There would then be a silence, prolonged until Yashmeen, in her accustomed role
of soother and mediatrix, assuming Cyprian was done singing, began, “Well,
Reef, this meal, actually, ehrm—”

Which was Cyprian’s cue to continue,

Very nice very nice very
nicenicenice, it’s

Very, very nice indeed, very

Nice very—

At which point Reef would seize a
dishful of pasta fazool or overdone tagliatelle and throw it all violently
across the table at Cyprian in a great slithering shower. “Startin to goldang
annoy me, here?”

   
“Look
at this, you got it all over my—”

   
“Oh,
you’re both so childish.”

   
“Don’t
holler at me, tell the canary there.”

   
“Cyprian
. . .”

“Just leave me alone,” Cyprian
pouted, removing pasta from his hair, “you’re not my mother, are you.”

“Luckily for you. I should long ago
have given in to impulse, and you would be enjoying a much different state of
health.”

   
“Gogithim,Yash.”

   
“And
as for you—”

   
“You
might explain
al dente
to him, at least.”

   
“Missed
one right by your ear there.”

One day in Monte
Carlo
, who should show
up but Reef’s old New Orleans Anarchist bunkmate Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, on his
way to Barcelona, which was all about to explode, as it had been doing
periodically, with Anarchist unruliness.

“Just give me a minute to find my
elephant gun and a change of socks, and I’ll be right along.”

“Classbrother,” Wolfe Tone declared,
“we need you safe and well. Your fate is not to be in the
línea del fuego.
”

   
“Hey,
I’m as good a shot as any of you stumblebums.”

Wolfe
Tone explained then that, terrible as it might turn out to be for the Anarchist
cause, Barcelona was only a sideshow. “Governments are about to fuck things up
for everybody, make life more unlivable than Brother Bakunin ever imagined.
Something truly terrible is in the works.”

“Out
there.” But Reef didn’t argue. Which should’ve surprised him more than it did.

They accompanied
the Irish Anarchist as far as the
French border with Spain, and took an endoftheseason pass around the French
casinos. But along with the mysteries of Desire, Cyprian was now feeling a
shift in its terms, an apprehension that something was coming to an end
. . . .
The sources of Desire were as
unknowable as those of the Styx. But no more accountable was
absence
of
desire—why one might choose
not to embrace
what the world judges,
it often seemed unanimously, to lie clearly in one’s interest.

“You are not the same person,”
Yashmeen told him. “Something happened out in Bosnia. I feel. . . that somehow
I am coming slowly not to matter as much to you as something else, something
unspoken.” She glided away, as if it had cost her strength to say it.

   
“But
I adore you,” Cyprian whispered, “that can never change.”

   
“Once
I would have wondered how far you would go to prove it.”

   
“As
far as you say, Yashmeen.”

“Once
that would have been exactly your answer.” Though she was smiling, her pale
brow was inflected with some premonition, some soontobedesolate awakening. “Now
I may no longer ask. I may no longer even wonder.”

It
was not the usual lovers’ ohbutdoyoureally? routine. She was struggling with
some deep uncertainty. He was on his knees, as always. She had

two gloved fingers carefully beneath his chin, obliging him
to look directly into her face till she slapped his own away. The classic
tableau had not changed. But in the stillness of both now might be detected a
tonic readiness to rise or turn away, abandon the scene, as if roles in a drama
had been reassigned.

Reef
came into the room in a cloud of cigar smoke, glanced their way, proceeded into
a farther chamber. Once he would have taken their tableau as an invitation, and
once it would have been.

One
day at Biarritz, drifting in the streets, she heard accordion music from an
open doorway. A curious certainty took hold of her, and she looked in. It was a
bal musette,
nearly empty at that time of day, except for one or two
dedicated winedrinkers and the accordionist, who was playing a sweetly minorkey
street waltz. Light came in at some extremely oblique angle to reveal Reef and
Cyprian formally in each other’s arms, stepping in rhythm to the music. Reef
was teaching Cyprian to dance. Yashmeen thought about making herself known but
immediately decided against it. She stood and gazed at the two determined young
men, and wished that Noellyn could see it. “If anyone can get that slothful
mope out on the floor, Pinky,” she’d remarked more than once, “it’s you.”