The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (32 page)

Besides being cold and wet, I also hate vomiting. And that proved useful, too, because no sooner did I get good and
pregnant than the list of things the smell of which made me vomit increased dramatically. And cigarette smoke was right at the top. I threw out a brand-new pack, washed everything in the house that was at all washable, filled the car ashtray with baking soda, and never looked back.

The downside was that I couldn't bear to be in the Cave—not only the smell of smoke but also the smell of beer made me wretched. One attempted afternoon visit was all it took. From then on, Rafi and Vera and Pancho visited me at the bookstore instead, where I could sit quietly on the couch eating plain saltine crackers and sipping stomach-soothing ginger tea per Rosalita's experienced advice. Though welcome, their visits exhausted me so much that I would go to bed at 8
P.M.
and sleep for fourteen hours at a stretch. I was quite suddenly leading an alarmingly virtuous life. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to heaven is apparently paved with vomit. This must be yet another reason why virtuous people always look so sad.

“You missed a good band last night,” Rafi said, sitting next to me on the bookstore couch while I slowly ate my crackers and his nephew Jordan lay on the rug looking at the pictures in Hamilton's
Mythology.

“I was asleep,” I said. “Or maybe puking. Probably puking.”

“You would have fit right in with the frat boys.”

“And yet I miss it.”

“I'm becoming quite concerned,” he said.

“About the puking?”

“About the baby.”

“The doctor says I'm puking only a normal amount.”

“Let's leave the puking aside for a minute.”

“I thought you were concerned about it.”

“I'm concerned about the baby,” he said. “Pancho says that babies can hear things before they're born—in utero.”

“You're concerned that the baby will hear me puking? And develop some sort of prenatal guilt complex?”

“Puking takes up a lot of your thought, doesn't it?”

“Puking takes up a lot of my day.”

“Did I ever tell you that you're very glamorous?” he asked.

“No.”

“This is why.”

“You can have glamour or you can have babies. You can't have both,” I said.

“I think we've strayed from the topic here,” he said.

“I didn't realize we had a topic.”

“The topic we have is that Pancho read this article,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And the article said that babies can hear in utero.”

“Yes.”

“And you're not coming into the Cave anymore now.”

“Because of the puking.”

“Leave it,” he said, shaking his finger at me. “There is an important issue here.”

“Which is?”

“I'm worried—Pancho and I are both worried—that your baby is not being properly prenatally exposed to the right kind of music.”

“Dive-bar music?”

“Exactly. Is your baby hearing the blues? Being exposed to Muddy Waters? Does your baby even know who Robert Johnson is? If all it ever hears is the stuff they play in supermarkets and doctors' offices, it will grow up to be a fan of adult contemporary or Christian rock.”

“Good Lord,” I gasped. “I hadn't thought about it!”

“The dangers are very real.”

“I see now that I've been flirting with disaster,” I smiled.

He sighed. “You have to admit that you do love to flirt. It's part of your glamour.”

So on rainy days when he wasn't working, Billy Joe brought his guitar over to my house and played old Delta blues to my belly. On sunny days, Pancho came by and sang all the separate parts of Renaissance madrigals, one by one, carefully explaining to my navel how the pieces were supposed to fit together. He would put his hands on either side of my belly and whisper softly into it long explanations of the historical development of polyphony in Western culture. It was remarkable how much he knew.

Blossom was a loving and generous woman. She would no more have let a person go hungry than she would have kicked a dog. Some days when times were bad, more people left the back door of her restaurant with a free supper in a box than ate out front at the tables. Her children were getting grown now, and even though they still worked in the restaurant, the two oldest boys had wives and homes of their own. Blossom was anxiously waiting for the first grandchild. In the meantime, she lavished attention and homemade applesauce on Bertie. And now she joyously opened her arms and her kitchen to me.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Sit right here. I've got a little piece of catfish fixed so nice just for you. It'll strengthen you.” Sometimes it was chicken. Sometimes it was beef stew.

“You're going to be a mama now yourself,” she said one day, looking solemn. “I had better teach you how to make pie.”

I laughed. “It will be a long time before this baby will be old enough to eat pie!”

Blossom looked wistfully at her second-youngest daughter, tall and lovely, taking orders at the next table. “Oh,” she said slowly, “it will be no time at all.”

And so every afternoon for a week, I sat at the big table in the middle of Blossom's kitchen while she taught me to make pastry and then different fillings. Under her watchful eye, I beat eggs and creamed butter and slowly melted chocolate. Blossom wore the demeanor of a high priestess presiding over a sacred ritual, and I paid close attention to everything she said. My gray-eyed little boy slept peacefully inside me.

“Don't you worry, baby,” Blossom said to me, even though I had never said anything about how scared I was sometimes. “If you feed them and you love them, everything else will take care of itself.”

By the time I heard from Jake at last, the baby was getting big in my belly and I could feel him moving, like a rustling of butterflies deep inside me. It was just a postcard, postmarked from Nevada:

Hope you are OK—Nashville horrible corporate suit nightmare—Vaslav never saw Vegas, so we are here—Had a good run at the tables—enough to get us to Brazil—leave tonight—Vaslav thinks Rio is the place to be—letter soon—I think of you. xx, Jake

I put the postcard gently between the pages of
The Dialogues of Plato,
volume two, at the part of
Symposium
where Aristophanes explains that we all have another half of ourselves
out there somewhere, that we are always searching for the part of ourselves that we lost when Zeus split human beings in half as punishment for our ambition. I tucked the postcard between the pages and then closed the book and put it away on the bookshelf.

13

HALCYON

CEYX WAS THE SON OF LUCIFER
,
the light bearer, and Halcyon was the daughter of Aeolus, the king of the winds. Their marriage was one of passionate love and enduring tenderness, and their home on the sunlit Grecian coast was filled with bliss. When Ceyx decided he must journey over the wild and storm-tossed seas in order to consult a distant oracle, Halcyon was filled with foreboding, a premonition of death. She begged him not to go, but even though he loved her, he would not stay. She stood on the rocky coast, desolate, and watched his boat vanish beyond the horizon.

The next day, alone and far from any shore, Ceyx fell prey to the tempestuous seas. The violent waves battered his boat to pieces, and Ceyx himself was dragged to the bottom of the sea and drowned.

Alone in her empty home, Halcyon kept vigil for her husband, praying to Hera every day for his safety, not knowing he was already dead. Finally, after many days, Halcyon's prayers
touched the tender heart of Hera, and she had pity on the faithful woman. That night, Hera sent the god Morpheus to visit Halcyon in her sleep. Stealing into her room on silent wings, Morpheus took on the appearance of the dead Ceyx and, thus arrayed, touched the sleeping Halcyon and entered her dreams.

“Poor wife,” he whispered to her, “I am dead. There is no hope for me anymore.”

At first light, Halcyon, her heart heavy with dread, made her way to the lonely beach and gazed out to the sea. Far in the distance, she spied an object floating shoreward on the incoming tide. She waited and watched, her doom stealing inexorably upon her, as the object came nearer. At last, it reached the shallows in front of her, and she saw, as she knew she would, the dead body of her husband. With a cry, she flung herself into the water. But in that instant, the goddess Hera, from the boundless pity in her heart, transformed Halcyon. Instead of a grief-stricken widow, she had become a magnificent seabird. Ceyx, too, was transformed, rising from the sea on spreading wings. Halcyon soared over the water together with her mate. According to the Greeks, the two birds are seen together always, skimming across the waves, never parted.

And every year, Halcyon and Ceyx build a nest of twigs and flotsam and grasses that they gather from the beach. They build this nest not on the rocky cliffs or the branches of the olive trees or the sand dunes, but on the waves themselves, floating tremulously in the very heart of the swells. Halcyon is charmed, the Greeks say. Every year while she broods on her nest, with Ceyx watching over her, the restless seas become for once calm and tranquil. These are the halcyon days—the days of serenity, when the winds are soft and the seas are tamed, when the faithful Halcyon floats on her twig nest and waits for her children to be born.