That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  Rosa did not look like Montse or Paco, or her two sisters. Nor, Montse thought, did she resemble Rudolfo. All she had of her natural father was her way of staying apart. She had little interest in the company of other girls and yet everyone liked her. Although Paco was proud of his two other daughters, it was always clear that he loved Rosa best.

  While the others settled locally, Ana in Sort and Nuria in La Seu, Rosa went to Barcelona and studied medicine. She married a fellow-doctor and opened a private clinic with him, using money that his family had given them. When Paco was dying, when his heart was giving out, Rosa insisted on looking after him herself. She sat with him in a private room at the clinic day and night. When he opened his eyes, all he looked for was Rosa.

  By that time Rosa had three sons of her own, and it was in the sons, especially the eldest, Montse noticed, that Rudolfo appeared again. It was in their eyes, their coloring, but also in the slow way they smiled, in their shyness. Each year, when Rosa and her family holidayed close to Santa Cristina, on the Costa Brava, Montse spent two weeks with them. Once the oldest boy could drive, he would come to collect her. That journey, alone in the car with him, gave her pleasure.

  When the man from the electric company came by again, she told him that she did not want to have lunch with him and the general, and that he should not press her as she was not feeling well.

  “He will be very disappointed,” the man said.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she replied, realizing that the edge of bitterness in her voice had given away more than she’d meant to.

  “We are all old now,” she added in a softer tone, “and we can only do what we can.”

  “If you change your mind, perhaps you will let me know,” the man said. He left her a phone number.

  As soon as he had gone she phoned the clinic and left an urgent message for Rosa.

  “I wonder if you could come here on the Saturday of next week,” she asked, when Rosa called her back. “And if you could come on your own. If you can, I promise I won’t ask you for anything for a long time.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  “Is it something else?”

  “Don’t ask, Rosa. Just come that day. Come for lunch. You needn’t stay the night or anything.”

  She held her breath now and waited.

  “I’ve looked at my diary,” Rosa said. “I have a dinner that night.”

  “Great. So if you leave my house at four or five you’ll be there in plenty of time.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “You’re a doctor, Rosa. I’ll be seeing you.”

  “I’ll bring my stethoscope.” Rosa laughed.

  “Just bring yourself.”

  She came not only with a stethoscope but with a device for measuring blood pressure and a set of needles to take blood samples and a cooler to keep the samples cold until she got back to Barcelona. She made her mother remove her blouse so that she could listen to her heart and her lungs. She drew blood slowly without speaking.

  “I’m old,” Montse said. “There is no point in checking me.”

  “You didn’t sound well on the phone.”

  “No one my age ever sounds well on the phone.”

  “Why did you want me to come today?”

  “Because I thought if I gave you an exact day you might be more likely to come than if I said just come any day. I hardly ever see you.”

  “I wish my husband knew me as well as you do,” Rosa said. She seemed to be in good humor.

  The table in the dining alcove was already set. Now Montse put a tray of canelones into the oven and brought a bowl of salad and two plates to the table and some bread. She asked Rosa about her husband and her sons.

  “They are all wonderful. The only worry we have is that Oriol failed chemistry and has to repeat it.”

  “Does he still have that nice girlfriend he had in the summer?”

  “He does, which is why he failed chemistry.”

  When they had eaten, she brought Rosa her coffee at the table near the window.

  “I found a box of photographs,” she said. “Some of them were taken before the war. They must have come from the old house when my mother died. I found them a year ago but I put them away because they made me too sad.”

  She went into her bedroom, where she had the box waiting on the chair where she normally put her clothes for the next day.

  “I wondered,” she said when she came back, “if we could pick out the best photos, the clearest, and if one of your boys, when they have time, could make copies for you and your sisters.”

  She began to put bundles of photographs on the table.

  “This was my grandmother,” she said, holding one up. “She lived with us until there was a falling out of some sort and then she lived with my aunt. She came from Andorra and my father always thought she had money, but, of course, she had none.”

  “Who is the baby on her lap?’

  “That’s me. There was a man who would come once a year with a camera and a booth and people would queue up.”

  They began to flip through other photographs. Most of them were of Montse and her sisters, taken on summer outings.

  “I have some here with no people in them – one of the river when it was flooded, which my father must have taken, and one of the dam being built. I can’t remember what year that was.”

  Rosa moved these aside and began to examine another bundle of photographs of Montse and her sisters and their friends.

  “Those were taken well before the war,” Montse said. “After the war I don’t think people took photographs as much.”

  Rosa was studying a large-format photograph of a group on an outing with mountains in the background.

  “Where is my father in this? Why isn’t he in any of the pictures?” she asked.

  “Your father always took the photographs,” Montse replied.

  She reached for another bundle.

  “He might be in one of these, but he was the only one who had a camera in the years before the war and he liked taking photographs.”

  She glanced at Rosa, who was nodding.

  “Anyway, if you want to take the whole box and select the best ones – and if the boys had time they could make copies. It all must seem like ancient history to them, but maybe it will mean more when they have their own families.”

  “I’ll be very careful with them,” Rosa said, picking up a photograph of herself as a teen-age girl with Paco, smiling, beside her.

  “I think I took that one,” Montse said.

  “I might get it blown up a bit bigger and frame it,” Rosa said.

  When it was time to go, Montse carried the box of photographs to the lift and Rosa carried the medical equipment. Montse insisted on going down with her to her car.

  “If that’s too heavy, just tell me,” Rosa said.

  The car was parked close by. They put the box and the equipment on the back seat, and then Rosa embraced her, before opening the door and getting into the driver’s seat.

  Montse waved as the car pulled away. She knew that she could easily be seen by anyone approaching. She looked up the street toward the town center to check if there was a car coming. The lunch would be over around now, she thought, and Rudolfo and the man from the electric company would pass by as they drove toward Lleida. She waited a few minutes, but when she saw no car she decided to go back inside and clear away the dishes. Later, she thought, she would walk to the town center and do a bit of shopping.

  Soon, she knew, there would be an old man standing at the station in Lleida as the train to Madrid arrived. He would get on the train slowly and then walk along the aisle to find his seat. He would, she imagined, be polite to those around him as he settled in for the journey. Rosa would be on the motorway that led in the other direction, her driving steady and competent as it always was. Montse sighed with quiet satisfaction as she thought of the two of them, moving so easily away from each other; they would both be home before night
fell.

  TWO BOYS

  Lorrie Moore

  Lorrie Moore (b.1957) was born in Glens Falls, New York. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker and includes two novels, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and A Gate at the Stairs as well as her stories, the latest volume being Bark. She teaches English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

  For the first time in her life, Mary was seeing two boys at once. It involved extra laundry, an answering machine, and dark solo trips in taxicabs, which, in Cleveland, had to be summoned by phone, but she recommended it in postcards to friends. She bought the ones with photos of the flats, of James Garfield’s grave, or an Annunciation from the art museum, one with a peacock-handsome angel holding up fingers and whispering, One boy, two boys. On the back she wrote, You feel so attended to! To think we all thought just one might amuse, let alone fulfill. Unveil thyself! Unblacken those teeth and minds! Get more boys in your life!

  Her nervous collapse was subtle. It took the form of trips to a small neighborhood park, for which she dressed all in white: white blouses, white skirts, white anklets, shoes flat and white as boat sails. She read Bible poetry in the shade on the ground or else a paperback she had found about someone alone on a raft in the ocean, surviving for forty days and nights on nail parings and fish. Mary spoke to no one. She read, and tried not to worry about grass stains, though sometimes she got up and sat on a bench, particularly if there was a clump of something nearby, or a couple making out. She needed to be unsullied, if only for an afternoon. When she returned home, she clutched her books and averted her gaze from the men unloading meat in front of her building. She lived in a small room above a meat company – Alexander Hamilton Pork – and in front, daily, they wheeled in the pale, fatty carcasses, hooked and naked, uncut, unhooved. She tried not to let the refrigerated smell follow her in the door, up the stairs, the vague shame and hamburger death of it, though sometimes it did. Every day she attempted not to step in the blood that ran off the sidewalk and collected in the gutter, dark and alive. At five-thirty she approached her own building in a halting tiptoe and held her breath. The trucks out front pulled away to go home, and the Hamilton Pork butchers, in their red-stained doctors’ coats and badges printed from ten-dollar bills, hosed down the side-walk, leaving the block glistening like a canal. The squeegee kids at the corner would smile at Mary and then, low on water, rush to dip into the puddles and smear their squeegees, watery pink, across the windshields of cars stopped for the light. “Hello,” they said. “Hello, hello.”

  “Where have you been?” asked Boy Number One on the phone in the evening. “I’ve been trying to reach you.” He was running for a local congressional seat, and Mary was working for him. She distributed fliers and put up posters on kiosks and trees. The posters consisted of a huge, handsome photograph with the words Number One underneath. She usually tried to staple him through the tie, so that it looked like a clip, but when she felt tired, or when he talked too much about his wife, she stapled him right in the eyes, like a corpse. He claimed to be separating. Mary knew what separating meant: The head and the body no longer consult; the wife sleeps late, then goes to a shrink, a palm reader, an acupuncturist; the fat rises to the top. Number One was dismantling his life. Slowly, he said. Kindly. He had already fired his secretary, gotten a new campaign manager, gone from stocks to bonds to cash, and sold some lakefront property. He was liquidating. Soon the sleeping wife. “I just worry about the boys,” he said. He had two.

  “Where have I been?” echoed Mary. She searched deep in her soul. “I’ve been at the park, reading.”

  “I miss you,” said Number One. “I wish I could come see you this minute.” But he was stuck far away in a house with a lid and holes punched in for air; there was grass at the bottom to eat. He also had a small apartment downtown, where the doorman smiled at Mary and nodded her in. But this evening One was at the house with the boys; they were sensitive and taciturn and both in junior high.

  “Hmmm,” said Mary. She was getting headaches. She wondered what Number Two was doing. Perhaps he could come over and rub her back, scold the pounding and impounding out of her temples, lay on hands, warm and moist. “How is your wife?” asked Mary. She looked at her alarm clock.

  “Sleeping,” said One.

  “Soon you will join her cold digits,” said Mary. One fell silent. “You know, what if I were sleeping with somebody else too?” she added. One plus one. “Wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t that be even?” This was her penchant for algebra. She wasn’t vengeful. She didn’t want to get even. She wanted to be even already.

  “I mean, if I were sleeping with somebody else also, wouldn’t that make everyone happy?” She thought again of Boy Number Two, whom too often she denied. When she hung up, she would phone him.

  “Happy?” hooted Number One. “More than happy. We’re talking delirious.” He was the funny one. After they made love, he’d sigh, open his eyes, and say, “Was that you?” Number Two was not so hilarious. He was tall and depressed and steady as rain. Ask him, “What if we both saw other people?” and he’d stare out the window, towering and morose. He’d say nothing. Or he’d shrug and say, “Fthatz …”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Fthatz what you want.” He’d kiss her, then weep into his own long arm. Mary worried about his health. Number One always ate at restaurants where the food – the squid, the liver, the carrots – was all described as “young and tender,” like a Tony Bennett song. But Number Two went to coffee shops and ate things that had nitrites and dark, lacy crusts around the edges. Such food could enter you old and sticking like a bad dream. When Two ate, he nipped nothing in the bud. It could cause you to grow weary and sad, coming in at the tail end of things like that.

  “You have everything,” she said to Number One. “You have too much: money, power, women.” It was absurd to talk about these things in a place like Cleveland. But then the world was always small, no matter what world it was, and you just had to go ahead and say things about it. “Your life is too crowded.”

  “It’s a bit bottlenecked, I admit.”

  “You’ve got a ticket holders’ line so long it’s attracting mimes and jugglers.” At times this was how they spoke.

  “It’s the portrait painters I’m worried about,” said One. “They’re aggressive and untalented.” A click came over the line. He had another call waiting.

  “It’s so unfair,” said Mary. “Everybody wants to sit next to you on the bus.”

  “I’ve got to get off the phone now,” he said, for he was afraid of how the conversation might go. It might go and go and go.

  In the park an eleven-year-old girl loped back and forth in front of her. Mary looked up. The girl was skinny, flat-chested, lipsticked. She wore a halter top that left her bare-backed, shoulder blades jutting like wings. She spat once, loud and fierce, and it landed by Mary’s feet. “Message from outer space,” said the girl, and then she strolled off, out of the park. Mary tried to keep reading, but it was hard after that. She grew distracted and uneasy, and she got up and went home, stepping through the blood water and ignoring the meat men, who, when they had them on, tipped their hair-netted caps. Everything came forward and back again, in a wobbly dance, and when she went upstairs she held on to the railing.

  This was why she liked Boy Number Two: He was kind and quiet, like someone she’d known for a long time, like someone she’d sat next to at school. He looked down and told her he loved her, sweated all over her, and left his smell lingering around her room. Number One was not a sweater. He was compact and had no pores at all, the heat building up behind his skin. Nothing of him evaporated. He left no trail or scent, but when you were with him, the heat was there and you had to touch. You got close and lost your mind a little. You let it swim. Out into the middle of the sea on a raft. Nail parings and fish.

  When he was over, Number Two liked to drink beer and go to bed early, whimpering into her, feet dangling over the bed. He gave her long back rubs, then collap
sed on top of her in a moan. He was full of sounds. Words came few and slow. They were never what he meant, he said. He had a hard time explaining.

  “I know,” said Mary. She had learned to trust his eyes, the light in them, sapphirine and uxorious, though on occasion something drove through them in a scary flash.

  “Kiss me,” he would say. And she would close her eyes and kiss.

  Sometimes in her mind she concocted a third one, Boy Number Three. He was composed of the best features of each. It was Boy Number Three, she realized, she desired. Alone, Number One was rich and mean. Number Two was sighing, repetitive, tall, going on forever; you just wanted him to sit down. It was inevitable that she splice and add. One plus two. Three was clever and true. He was better than everybody. Alone, Numbers One and Two were missing parts, gouged and menacing, roaming dangerously through the emerald parks of Cleveland, shaking hands with voters, or stooped moodily over a chili dog. Number Three always presented himself in her mind after a drink or two, like an escort, bearing gifts and wearing a nice suit. “Ah, Number Three,” she would say, with her eyes closed.

  “I love you,” Mary said to Number One. They were being concubines together in his apartment bedroom, lit by streetlights, rescued from ordinary living.

  “You’re very special,” he replied.

  “You’re very special, too,” said Mary. “Though I suppose you’d be even more special if you were single.”

  “That would make me more than special,” said Number One. “That would make me rare. We’re talking unicorn.”

  “I love you,” she said to Number Two. She was romantic that way. Her heart was big and bursting. Though her brain was drying and subdividing like a cauliflower. She called both boys “honey,” and it shocked her a little. How many honeys could you have? Perhaps you could open your arms and have so many honeys you achieved a higher spiritual plane, like a shelf in a health food store, or a pine tree, mystically inert, life barking at the bottom like a dog.