One Day the Wind Changed (11 page)

For a week after that, it seemed as though my life had been rolled up like a newspaper, fastened with a rubber band, and tossed into the bushes, where it lay hidden, the headlines soon forgotten.

I concentrated on finals. The end of spring term meant the end of my coursework. All that remained was my thesis—something on Melville, I thought—and mailing out PhD applications.

“Melville?
There's
an original topic,” said my thesis adviser. He stroked his sparse red beard. Postcards of famous American writers lined his walls. Ralph Ellison. Flannery O'Connor. Dead lions. What purpose did their work serve, finally? Sociologically, historically, spiritually? Books, drawing dust. I thought of Gary.

The old prof opened a paper packet with his teeth and sprinkled salt over a lox and bagel on his desk. I noticed a trail of salt on the floor. Thirty years of lunches in this drab office? Didn't they have janitors in this building? I had the queasy impression I was walking on the remains of mediocre students.

“You're sure about Melville?” my adviser asked me.

“I guess. I mean, I think so.”

“Well. Get started. Check with me again in about six months.”

It occurred to me I should get another adviser.

Gary had been right about the summer. One late Tuesday night in mid-June, when Finches was nearly empty, two Puerto Rican teenagers stuck pistols in his face and got away with four hundred dollars in cash. “In the old days I would've chased those bastards, and caught them too,” he told me later. “Now—”

The incident shook him so much he quit and took a job in the school library reshelving books. In the hour or so before the library closed each night, I'd walk up and find him in the sixth-floor stacks. We'd chat and flip through the art books on his cart. Rembrandt. Caravaggio. That lovely nut job, Picasso. I'd run thesis ideas past Gary—“Ahab and the Advent of Autism in Nineteenth-Century American Novels,” “Whale as Id”—but his head was still in the ghettos of Houston.

One night, on my way home from campus, I bumped into Billy. He'd waited for me around the corner from my apartment. He sat on a curb with a tattered guitar case. As I approached, he stood and weaved a little. He'd gained weight. “First of all,” he slurred. “I'm only doing this for Suzi. I wouldn't have come on my own.”

I didn't respond.

“I want you to forgive me,” Billy said.

“What for?”

“Hell if I know. Suzi thinks we should beg your goddamn mercy.” He pulled a cardboard pack from his shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. “No, really,” he said. “I took advantage of you. She was too much for me, so I dumped her on you.”

My surprise prompted a laugh from him. “Thought you were getting away with something, did you?”

“No,” I admitted. “I figured you knew.”

“Well.”

“Sorry.”

“Fuck it. Suzi thinks you're a shy little saint or something and we corrupted you. Seems to me we didn't fill you with anything you weren't already full of.”

“When are you getting married?” I asked.

“We're not. I'm leaving town.” He lifted his guitar. “Going to try my luck in Austin. I don't know what Suzi's going to do. Become a nun or something.” He shook his head. “Anyway. I promised her I'd do this one last thing for her. She said I'd be glad I talked to you, someday, when I looked back on all this.” He punched my arm. “I kind of doubt it, know what I mean?” He walked away.

The next afternoon, Suzi caught me asleep in the library and asked me out for a drink. She took me to a new bar in the neighborhood, a dim room with blond wooden floors and candles in golden holders on the walls. The place looked more like a church than a bar. I ordered a beer. She sipped hard cider.

“You look good,” I said. In the three weeks since I'd seen her, she'd lost five pounds, I judged. A white, inch-long scar marked her forehead. Her lips were chapped.

“Forgive me,” she said.

I waved my hand. “Let's not do this.”

“Why not?”

“You're not getting married.”

“No.”

“I love you.”

“Don't,” she said.

I finished my beer. Ordered another.

“‘The ardor aroused in men by the beauty of women can only be satisfied by God,”‘ Suzi said.

“What?”

“That's Valéry. You're the literary guy. You should know that.”

“Okay.”

“It's where I am now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Since Billy and I … you know … I've been comforted by my meetings with the priest. He's helping me gain perspective.”

“On—?”

“I think I knew he was a drunk,” she said. “Billy. I just didn't want to see it. The musician's life-the late nights, the girls in the bar. Naturally, he'd be tempted. All that beard-trimming! What did I think?” She tongued the rim of her glass. I felt a stirring in my body, but apart from it too. Or so it seemed. “I guess I pushed him to settle before he was ready.”

“Suze, do you think … can we figure
us
out, maybe?”

In the candlelight she appeared to be beyond exhaustion. “The thing is, Tim … the ardor? We all feel it, you know. But we have a choice. We can turn it toward the things of this world or we can turn it toward the essences that lie beyond us.”

“I don't know what to say to that.”

She smiled. I'd seen the phrase in books—a
serene smile—but
it had always seemed “literary.” Abstract and meaningless. “You're passionate about the things of this world,” Suzi said. “Stories, poems.”

“And you.”

“Not me.”

“Yes, you.”

She dropped her eyes.

“You're not?” I said. “Passionate?”

“I'm passionate about the church, Tim. I'd forgotten how much. When I was a kid, and my dad took me to Mass, I felt safe. It's like … children and bedtime stories. The familiarity, the sameness.
Beliefis
the gravy on top of all that. When my dad died, I thought I'd lost …
everything
. I was twelve, just starting my
period—very
significant timing, you know.” She laughed.

She'd never spoken of her dad. I didn't know he'd died. How could I not know something this crucial about Suzi? I studied her eyes. What had we talked about, night after night?

We chatted more about her faith. When we parted I kissed her chastely on the cheek. It hadn't been said, but this was good-bye. I didn't think I'd see her again. As I left the bar, my anger at her—it was good to put a name to it, anger, yes,
utter rage—clashed
with a suspicion that I'd let her down, somehow.

By the time I checked in with my thesis adviser, six months later, I'd switched from Melville to Hawthorne, “The Construction of Guilt in
The Scarlet Letter
and Early American Literature.” “Hm. Well. All right,” my adviser said wearily. Salt covered the floor.

I'd been accepted into the English Department at the University of Texas in Austin.

Late one June afternoon I was loading boxes into a rental car. All the things I hadn't thrown away: my turntable, the hot plate. I'd mailed a deposit to an apartment complex in Austin, and made arrangements to rent the car one-way.

The air smelled of rain and the courtyard was steamy.

The beauty passed me on the balcony as I taped shut a box. She wore a light purple skirt and a pale yellow blouse. “Going far?” she said, the only words she'd spoken to me in three years. Her face was lovely beyond belief.

“I don't know,” I said. This felt true.

Before I left, I patted the oak tree where Suzi had banged her head.

I stopped by the library to give Gary some books and a set of albums I no longer wanted. The sixth floor was nearly empty. He sat in an aisle over a book of El Greco prints. “I love his portraits of people,” he said. “They're like funhouse mirrors. Stretchy heads. These weird, elongated hands.” He held up his own hands. He flipped pages, showed me beggars and bishops. “There's something wrong with every damn one of them.”

The satisfaction he took in this made me conscious of his mangled foot. Probably it bothered him more than he'd ever let on. Not just the physical pain, if he still felt pain, but the impairment of his abilities. The poets' mockery. We'd never really talked about it, and I felt, as I'd felt with Suzi in the bar, shame at the superficiality of my engagement with people. Gary turned a page: “Saint Paul and Saint Peter,” in robes like wax. Layered and thick. The saints had large, haunted eyes, melancholy frowns, fingers as lengthy as willows. The distortions gave them an air of transcendence, as though they weren't made of matter, weren't bound by gravity, weren't stuck in the shallowness that seemed to be everyone's lot. I wanted to weep. To keep my composure, I asked Gary, “How's the novel?”

He shook his head. “You know. I'll never finish it,” he said.

“Come on.”

“No, really. But that's all right. What the hell, eh? It's good to have a never-ending task. Keeps you—” He grinned.

“—on your toes!” we shouted and laughed together.

“I'll miss you,” I said.

Gary nodded. He turned another page:
View of Toledo
. The caption said the landscape had been painted around 1567. The buildings looked old all right. Cavelike. Earthen. But I was sure I glimpsed the future there. Why did I feel this so deeply? The limegreen of the arid-seeming hills, the bruised-looking blue of the sky. … they were
photographic
somehow. Like satellite shots. A river divided the scene. Sensual and austere, gleaming brilliantly in an otherwise desertlike atmosphere. Beauty's voice swam into my head:
Going far?
Outflow. Intake. I squeezed Gary's shoulder and walked to the stairs.

In Austin, I wasn't tempted to go hear Billy play. Each week, I'd see his name in the entertainment section of the newspaper, in the club calendars. Mellow, said the listings. A nice, mellow evening.

I didn't listen to the radio. The Sex Pistols. The Clash. Rock ‘n' roll armies. Harmony had bled from the world.

My body felt deceptive: young-looking in mirrors, but out of tune with my real, bewildered self On campus, the sight of couples choked me up. This is what comes from being married to the world, I thought. Wandering in the wilderness.

As my literary studies progressed, I plunged deeper into Hawthorne's murky souls. In his fiction, the future was always glued to the past. He said once that he hoped to “connect” the “legendary mists” of bygone times to the “very present that is flitting away from us.” I scribbled this quote on a note card and taped it to my bedroom wall, next to a poster of
View of Toledo
.

Then a letter came from Suzi. Postmarked Houston. She hoped I'd come see her:

She spoke of her “continuing spiritual journey” and her “baby-steps toward the all-encompassing light.” We corresponded by mail for six or seven months, and even talked once on the phone. Finally she wrote to say that she missed me terribly, and it was important to her to share with me the discoveries of her new life. As a P.S. she scribbled, “I shouldn't admit this, and I do try to fight it, but sometimes I think about you and I get an overwhelming desire to touch you in a naughty way.”

Damn her, I thought.

With my teaching assistant's stipend, I'd bought a used Honda hatchback. It had a hole in the dash where the radio used to be. This suited me fine. On a mild October afternoon, a week before Halloween, I set out for Houston.

I assumed that Suzi's address would lead me to the suburbs, to a nice neighborhood near several churches and strip shopping malls. Instead, I followed the map into the city through largely black neighborhoods just west of a cluster of skyscrapers. I witnessed Gary's novel spring to life, and I thought of writing him a note.

At one intersection, a boy, about fourteen, stepped into the street as cars idled at a stoplight. He gripped a white plastic jug and a flaming torch. He lifted the jug, chugged a mouthful of clear liquid, and brought the torch to his lips. He breathed out fire, a yellow plume, serpent-like. Two little girls clapped from the porch of a rowhouse on a dirt lot close to the street. The boy strolled among the cars, collecting coins for his performance.
Sociologically significant
, I thought. I handed him a quarter.

A block away, Suzi's neighborhood bordered a bodega and a commercial strip with a gun dealer, a bail bondsman, a radio repair shop, and a shoe wholesaler. Boxy houses, all alike. Children's Halloween drawings hung in windows up and down the street: bone-men, devils. A pumpkin lay smashed on a sidewalk. In the overgrown yard in front of Suzi's house sat two small bicycles with pink banana seats. Holes pocked the driveway. A dozen or so wooden shingles had fallen off the roof and were stacked beside the garage. I parked the car. Suzi met me at the door. We hugged. She looked just the way I'd remembered her. Thin. Shoulder-length, bright red hair. A tiny white scar on her forehead.

Much gushing, much laughter. She ushered me inside. The house's interior surprised me. Immaculate. Freshly painted, yellows and greens. Wicker chairs, glass-topped tables, except in one room where there was a small black-and-white TV, a purple beanbag chair, a fraying hound's-tooth couch, and two table lamps sitting on the floor, on an orange throw rug. Painted stallions galloped across the lamps' brown shades. “Dan's inner sanctum,” Suzi said. “I'm not allowed. He watches TV with the girls in here. They're at the store. Back any minute.”

She offered me a Dr Pepper and we sat at a wobbly kitchen table. “I'm so glad you're here,” she said. Cicadas screamed in the backyard trees. Black pecans littered the part of the patio I could see through a small window. The kitchen smelled of apples. “So,” Suzi said. “Tell me about yourself.”