She was going to keep the conversation superficial, nurselike—escort-like.
He went ahead and said a necessary thing that wasn’t superficial. “Well, you saved my life.” It came out as superficial, surprisingly so.
She smiled. “Well, this tea is definitely …” she said. And then went for the cliché, “Just what the doctor ordered.”
“It’s delicious.”
It tasted like hot water. But that was fine.
“What airline are you going out on tomorrow?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Southwest.”
“Good. Good. That’s what I thought.” She sipped her tea. “That’s easy. It’s the first terminal you come to.”
She looked around the room and set down her cup, with a clink on the glass tabletop. The jacket she’d taken off was strewn across a big square ottoman, and she leaned far over the arm of the chair to snag it. And put it on.
“Well, that’s all something I guess I’ll never tell anybody about,” Mark said.
“Ha,” she said, zipping up her jacket. “I suppose you’ll never have an occasion.”
“An occasion?” He didn’t understand.
“An occasion to bring it up,” she explained. “It wouldn’t come up in casual conversation.”
She picked up her tea, and she started plugging away again at getting it all down.
“No.” Mark was watching her in a state of gratitude. But gratitude for more than just the Heimlich maneuver. “It wouldn’t.”
“What wouldn’t?” He’d taken so long to respond.
“It wouldn’t come up in casual conversation.”
She stared down into her teacup, and then took another swallow. After a minute, she said with mild amusement, “No, it wouldn’t.”
“Tell me,” Mark said, “What albums does Rod’s guitar playing appear on? Would I know any of them? Did he play with anybody famous?”
“Oh yeah, he’s on some real stars’ albums. Like huge megapeople. You wouldn’t have heard of any of them but they’re big names.”
“Like who?”
“Nobody you’d know, though. It’s a different world.”
“Well, they’re stars, aren’t they? Try me. When I get home I could buy the albums and hear Rod’s guitar playing.”
She lowered her teacup and started listing, “Loxy Standish … ? Road Rash … ? Tim Glennon … ? Tim Glennon was in the Deceivers in the ’80s. Tory Amberson? She’s huge.”
Mark had to roll his eyes. “Sorry.”
She smiled. “Well, it’s all available. It’s all out there. I’ll bring some CDs for you tomorrow. For you to take with.”
Her cup was all empty now. She lowered it to the glass of the coffee table without making a click. The thick book of hotel amenities was there, and she aligned its edge with the table edge, square upon the glossy visitor’s-guide magazine, just exactly as the housekeeping staff had aligned it the Friday before, before this guest’s checkin, and then each afternoon, in maids’ visits, realigned it. Blythe patted her own knees, twice, lightly, and said the words Gotta go.
And so he would see her to the door. There was still tomorrow. On the threshold they put their arms around each other and avoided looking at each other; they were so much like children who’d gotten in trouble. But then their eyes met, and for that instant, they seemed almost to share a little soft mirth and shame, then they exchanged the see-you-tomorrow words, and she went.
Closing the door, he turned back to his empty room. This would feel good now, the recovery of his place. And turning his mind to Lotta and Audrey and Berkeley. Reinhabiting his solitude. That was fast, getting rid of her. She would be descending, too, in relief at the efficiency of the goodbye, the refusal to linger and dwell. All they might have dwelt on was how meaningless, in the end, had been their days of flirtation. He always did want to get back to his wife, and Blythe always wanted to go on alone. That little admission had been in their eyes, there at the threshold: that they were lucky how meaningless it had been. So blessedly weak is man’s heart that meaninglessness is his constant rescue. Philosophers pretend meaninglessness is a bad thing. Instead, the ignorance and the shallowness are the medium that buoys us up. They exalt us every instant. There were his pajamas, the ones Audrey had given him last year. And his toothbrush was in the bathroom. One reaches out and touches things, gets ahold of things, and thus gets orientation.
Shirt buttons needed to be—one at a time—with a twist and a pinch—undone. Pants pockets needed to be emptied. The eight ibuprofen tablets—four from each pocket—were laid out in on the tabletop in a symmetrical ring around his wallet.
When he inserted himself inside the taut cool envelope of a hotel bed, he knew sleep would come fast. His tired mind would begin its old corkscrewing motion, taking root. The sensation that one has a “self” blossoms, and then dissolves. His throat, inside, was a little bruised. But air flowed in and out. Looking forward to tomorrow, he could imagine and almost literally feel—because you do get things just about in the form you envision them—feel the pressure of the airplane seat against his spine on takeoff, when, on the 5:05 PM flight in seat 8A with Lotta beside him, the inertial g-forces would pull him into the airlines’ upholstery, cradling him in acceleration, and he and his daughter would be lifted forward to San Francisco. He would regret nothing when, tomorrow, he watched the great city fall away below him in its mellow air, the city that would always hold Blythe Cress, then the great white sickle would slice slow under the plane, and the glittering blue ocean would tilt. That two plus two would eternally equal four—and always, eternally, had equaled four, even in the emptiness before the beginning of time—would always feel like a column of light standing in his heart. Even if there were only a vacuum. He was impatient like a child to mention it to Audrey. See if she comes back with anything. Because it was interesting, and it seemed like good news, and it was beautiful, it had immanent beauty in the mathematician’s sense, as if the principle alone furnished the kind of radiance to have made matter originally bead up out of nothing. The whole feeling, in general, could almost make him wish he’d gone to Karlsruhe, but he didn’t yet want to confess an oddball new idea to anybody. If he knows anything, he knows he will continue for some while with no clear feeling about this number idea. It might be a problem. It might be a serious problem.
Copyright © 2011 by Louis B. Jones. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Louis B.
Radiance : a novel / Louis B. Jones. p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-582-43880-1
1. College teachers—Fiction. 2. Physicists—Fiction. 3. Lyme disease—Patients—Fiction. 4. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 5. California—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. 7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3560.O516R33 2011
813’.54—dc22
2011002822
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Radiance: A Novel Page 19