Jacob had to agree that, by this logic, octopuses were above a lot of humans he could think of. Paul, for one. Still, he thought crying over them was excessive.
“They have what are called episodic personalities,” Oliver added.
“What’s that?”
“They behave consistently over the span of a few hours or even a day, but inconsistently over longer time frames.”
“Is that why they call them gloomy octopuses?”
“No, that’s because when they’re mature, they turn gray colored. He’s going to explain it in just a minute. Wait.”
“Hang on. You’ve seen this before?”
Oliver didn’t reply. He always got this way after he’d been caught crying. Jacob knew he probably could respond more kindly or at least bite his tongue but—an octopus?
“Are we just going to stay in bed all day?”
“You can go out if you want to.”
Jacob went. He took the keys to the truck and drove out into Stamford, knowing that a good boyfriend would have talked it all out with Oliver. Listened to him pontificate about cephalopods and empathy and episodic personalities and how his dead father had sometimes been gloomy—and a good boyfriend would have loved him for all of it. Jacob didn’t know how Oliver did it—sat around listening to people being sad all the time. He wished to hell that Oliver and all the others would just do something with all that disillusionment, as he’d done with Ella. You didn’t have to limit it to poetry. Maybe the world wouldn’t be so depressing if depressed people were more productive. There should be a whole Works Progress Administration for the clinically depressed. The DPA! Rise up, ye who are down and out! Tear up the rusting bridges and rip out the cracking highways and build new cities out of the rubble!
He drove to Borders, fifteen minutes down the road. When he got to the store, he ambled through the current releases, the magazines, and the café and eventually located the poetry section—half of one shelf. Paranormal Teen Romance had four. But no matter. He ran his fingers along the spines, searching for the one he’d been thinking about breaking his “no epics” rule for—one that he felt would tell Ella everything he needed to tell her himself but couldn’t begin to say. He’d been debating translations in his mind—hoping there might be an edition available with the original Greek on the alternating pages. But all this proved to be grossly premature, for the store didn’t seem to have a single copy of any edition of The Odyssey.
“Excuse me,” he asked the clerk behind the information counter, a teenage girl who seemed as bored as any six Anchorage House patients. “I’m looking for The Odyssey. Is there maybe a classics section somewhere?”
She shook her head. “Author’s name?”
“Homer,” Jacob said.
“Homer what?”
“Just Homer.”
“Like Madonna?”
“Yes, exactly.”
Her black-polished nails clacked at her keyboard, and she looked up, puzzled. “Nothing under ‘Homer.’ You sure you don’t mean like the guy on The Simpsons?”
“No, I don’t mean like the guy on The Simpsons.”
“Because then I could look it up under Simpsons.”
Jacob sighed, wanting so badly to go off his rails, but for the first time in his life he wasn’t sure of his ability to get back onto them again afterward.
He settled on taking a deep breath and spelling the title out for her, slowly. After a minute she shook her head. “I can put it on order for you if you want.”
“Do you have it at another store?”
She checked and after consulting a manager was able to give Jacob directions to the other store where they had a copy. But when he got there, it turned out they didn’t actually have one. A middle-aged man, as bored as his younger counterpart at the first store, was happy to redirect Jacob to a third store, and there, finally, Jacob did find a copy of the Fagles translation. As he paid for it at the front, he joked to the cashier that he had driven nearly four hours now trying to find the book.
“Sounds like you’ve had quite an odyssey,” the cashier said with a smirk.
Jacob could have kissed him on the mouth. But he settled for asking if he might know how to get back to Stamford.
When he finally returned to the flat, it was already getting dark.
“What happened to you?” Oliver called. “Dinner got here an hour ago!”
“Let me tell you—” Jacob began, thrusting his hard-won copy of The Odyssey out in front of him like a trophy. But he stopped, midsentence, when he came to the coffee table. Oliver was back to watching the BBC America channel. And there on the screen was Sally Struthers herself, in grainy 1980s VHS quality, surrounded by tiny, emaciated African children, chewing on their thumbnails and staring wide-eyed into the camera, through the decades, out into the living room where Oliver was far more attentive to the huge spread of Chinese food that he had ordered.
Jacob had the fleeting feeling that those pale little shrouds of children were actually looking at the Chinese food—waiting for their moment to reach through the glass and steal a wonton. He forgot all about the book in his hand for a minute as the commercial continued—the 800 number flashing on the bottom. Should I call? he wondered. He had always thought these things were scams, or fronts for religious organizations. The sane, human thing to do was to change the channel. To take up club-league kickball. To read all the cartoons in the New Yorker and stuff the rest. To sit down and have some lo mein and talk about his epic journey to find an epic poem about an epic journey. In other words, to live.
“It’s cold, but you can heat it up,” Oliver said, turning back to the television screen just long enough to confirm that his show wasn’t back on yet.
• • •
Jacob carried the book everywhere: under his arm up and down the Stamford antiques district as he and Oliver searched for new light fixtures; on the seat beside him on the bus, underlining passages during red lights; just inside his duffel bag with an Attic Greek dictionary so that he could retranslate stanzas late at night in the common room. He worked on it so obsessively that he nearly forgot that he had promised to fly home to see his parents for his birthday the week before Ella would be leaving. He’d have missed the flight entirely if Oliver hadn’t noticed it on the schedule—months ago Oliver had requested that Friday off so that he could catch a less crowded midday flight and get down to Florida before night fell. (His parents now refused to drive after dark.)
“I need a day off anyway,” Oliver said. “Let me drive you to the airport.”
Jacob didn’t need to pack. They kept a drawer full of warm weather clothes for him down there, and his mother always had a new toothbrush waiting in the holder in the guest bathroom. So he carried the book with him out to Oliver’s truck, slid in beside it, and immediately resumed underlining. After several weeks he was still only on Book 15, where the goddess Athena is urging Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, to hurry home before his mother, Penelope, weds one of her many suitors, and there were still nine books, plus a lot of conclusions he meant to draw at the end. If he was going to get it to Ella before she left Anchorage House, he’d have to really dig deep.
“It’s good to see you studying again,” Oliver commented as they drove over the Whitestone Bridge. Out the passenger-side window, Jacob could see Queens rising up across the river, and somewhere beyond it, he knew, was Manhattan. His old apartment and his old notes and his old life, all waiting there for him to return.
“Are you thinking about going back for your doctorate?”
“Is there something like art therapy but with poetry and books? Is that a thing?”
It had been some time since he’d seen Oliver look pleasantly surprised. “Bibliotherapy! Yes, there have been some good articles written about it. I could pull a few together for you if you’d like.”
“Thanks. I’ve been thinking I’d like to
try it.”
“You mean start therapy?” He actually shouted this, utterly delighted, as if he’d been waiting ages for Jacob to say it.
Annoyed, Jacob explained, “No, I want to give therapy. I mean, I minored in psychology. I think I’d be good at it. If Sissy Coltrane can do it, I can too.”
They rolled on past the New York Times building, and soon Jacob could just spot the remnants of the old World’s Fair.
“Sissy has a certification in art therapy,” Oliver said after a while.
Jacob snorted. “What Sissy has is an alpaca muumuu and a sense of entitlement.”
Oliver groaned. “This is about Ella Yorke, isn’t it?”
Jacob didn’t answer but went back to annotating the book until soon they were winding along the terminals of Kennedy Airport, heading for Delta.
When they finally got to the curb where all the bag handlers were waiting, Oliver forced a smile. “Well,” he said, handing Jacob a small silver case, “if you want to get certified in bibliotherapy, I think it’d be brilliant. But in the meantime, maybe you can use these.”
Inside the silver case were twenty or thirty business cards that in gilt letters read, JACOB BLAUMANN. MASTER AND COMMANDER OF POETRY. SPECIALIZING IN EPIC WORKS. Jacob turned one over in his hands once or twice and then slid the case into his breast pocket. They were beautiful.
“These are perfect,” he said. “Oliver, really. Thank you.”
He couldn’t think of the last time he’d bought Oliver a present, and certainly not out of the blue, and he considered apologizing until he realized that Oliver was trying to segue into something else.
“Jacob,” he began, “I understand how rough this past year’s been on you, but honestly, we might need to face the fact that this isn’t . . . I mean perhaps we ought to—”
But Jacob hurriedly kissed him on the lips and pushed the side door open. Once he was out, he tried to close the door, only it got stuck, and he had to stop and open it again.
“It’s jammed on the seat belt there,” Oliver said.
“I can see that.”
“Just push it back inside.”
“I’m—” He bit his tongue and knocked the belt back inside. Then he closed the door again and waved goodbye. Oliver drove the truck off past the police officers, who were directing everyone away. The door was still wobbling. Way down near the very end of the lane, he watched as Oliver stopped, got out, came around, and with a firm hand this time, convinced the door to stay shut.
Jacob kept notating while he was standing in the security line. When the time came, he placed the book into the little gray bucket, set the notepad on top, and sent it off into the X-ray machine. The business card case he placed, with his keys, belt, three pens, shoes, and cell phone, in a separate bucket.
“Excuse me, sir?” the security guard asked him on the other side, as he reassembled himself. The guard looked at the book and thumbed through the notepad at the scribbled foreign lettering and sketched boat diagrams and maps of routes, as if they might contain secret codes or be some kind of blueprint for a bomb. “Is this everything?”
“Yes,” Jacob affirmed. “This is all I have.”
Progress. One whole book finished between boarding and taxiing, and Telemachus and his father were reunited at last, but then about an hour into the plane ride, the pen that Jacob was using to mark up the book began to leak. Cursing, he tried to mop up the spill with the back side of one of Oliver’s business cards.
“Do you need to borrow a pen?” asked the woman next to him. Jacob looked at her for the first time since she’d sat down beside him. With long red nails, she dog-eared her place in Heaven Exists!, a book about a boy who allegedly died, went to heaven, and returned to report about it.
Jacob thanked the lady for the offer. She fished in her purse a moment, until she pulled out a ballpoint BIC.
“Oh,” he said, hesitating, “it’s blue.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s a blue pen. I’ve been writing all my notes in black. Does that sound crazy?”
The woman didn’t say but looked a little nervous as she tucked her pen back away.
“How is that?” Jacob asked, thumbing toward her book.
She made an unmistakable eh face before asking, “What’s that about?”
“This jerk who gets lost at sea for thirty years.”
“Do you have a big test on it coming up?” she pointed to his notebook, which Jacob then covered slightly with his hand.
“No. It’s a gift for someone.”
“Lucky someone,” the woman said.
Jacob went back to his work. By alternating his leaky pens every five minutes, and mopping up the ink spills in between with the backs of the business cards, he made it through the rest of the section just before the wheels touched down in Tampa.
SEPTEMBER
He hardly recognized his parents. It was like Close Encounters down there in Tampa, as if aliens had abducted the weary, grumpy people who had raised him, leaving behind these revitalized, reprogrammed retirees. His father and mother had once sleepwalked through the first half of the day. Now they woke up every morning at five a.m. and ran three miles together. They split a grapefruit for breakfast, and to cool down they swam laps. And they weren’t alone. The predawn world of Tampa was alive with octogenarians in DayGlo tracksuits, power walking down the little fake streets. Their retirement community was twenty acres lost in time, polished Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles parked in every driveway. Men wearing hats. Women stopping to chat on the corner. In the afternoons his father had tennis lessons with a coach who had formerly trained Tennessee teens for the pro circuit. “He’s got trophies in a case in his living room,” Jacob’s mother exclaimed when he joined her for a cucumber peel in the spa. “He thinks he’s Mr. Big Shot.”
His mother had befriended a woman named Lydia in the condo next to theirs, who had been a chef in Chicago for many years and was now showing his mother how to make cheese soufflés and teaching her about wine. “We’re taking a trip out to the Loire Valley next year. Have you ever been to a real vineyard before?” Jacob found himself saying he hadn’t, already mourning a whole childhood of nonexistent soufflés.
Weirdest yet was how they’d both become more Jewish. They’d stopped going to synagogue when he was a kid, thanks to Gene Blaumann’s compulsion to debate the rabbi every Shabbat before they’d even consecrated the challah. When you were too argumentative for Westchester Jews, you were in pathological territory. But now Gene Blaumann was going to Saturday-morning services? His mother was involved in an outreach program, focused on what she called the “next generation crisis.” The problem was no longer that good Jewish boys (like Gene Blaumann) married shiksa women but that even children of two natural-born Jews were less often devout, to the extent that fewer and fewer were bar or bat mitzvahed.
“Better not let them meet your gay son then,” Jacob said.
But his mother shook her head. “Oh, who cares? They all watch Will and Grace now. Nobody cares you’re gay. Just do me a favor and tell them you go to services for Shabbat.”
Fortunately between the exercising, the culinary lessons, the services, and the card games, his parents were almost too busy to notice he was there. He indexed The Odyssey by the pool most of the day before they dragged him out to Amici’s, the local Italian place that “everybody” went to, for dinner. Nobody was interested in his complaint that it seemed ludicrous to use an English possessive with a plural Italian noun.
“We got you an iPhone,” his father said as antipasto came. “Give it to him, Anjelica.”
His mother dropped her knife on the fried artichoke. “Let him open it and find out!”
“What’s the surprise?” his dad said. “That’s what everybody gets now. Coach told me the 3GS is really good. I got one for me too.”
And before Jacob’s very eyes, his own fat
her produced an iPhone from his pocket.
“You can put all your songs on here. Books too! Don’t have to lug that huge thing around with you all the time. You’re going to mess up your back. Take it from me.”
Jacob clutched the book on the bench beside him as if it were a life vest and Amici’s Family Restaurant were about to get hit with a tidal wave. “Thanks so much,” he said, taking the gift without unwrapping it.
“And you can get Facebook on it too,” his mother said. “Are you on Facebook?”
“No, I am not on Facebook. Tell me you aren’t.”
“Oh, you have to see. Gene, show him how you put all your people in it.”
And Jacob watched as his father held the phone up over the bowl of calamari and scrolled, slowly, through a list of contacts with his thumb. Jacob watched as his mother craned her neck to see who was coming into the restaurant and if it was anyone she needed to wave at. Maybe they were still his parents after all.
“So are you meeting any nice men up there?” she asked.
Not that Jacob was going to answer, but for fear that he might, his father quickly changed the subject. “Why don’t you quit that stupid job and call Phil Jalasko’s son at Sony Records? Poetry’s kind of like music, and I bet you they could use someone smart like you to fix up some of those lyrics. ‘You and me could write a bad romance’—is that English?”
“Please tell me you don’t have Lady Gaga on that thing.”
His father sighed and mashed some buttons. “Phil’s son put some stuff on there. I don’t—I can’t tell how to take things off.”
“Here,” Jacob said, “let me show you.” The next morning they drove him back to the airport and dropped him off at the curb, his father waving his phone in the air, smiling, and his mother crying as she did every time they did this.
“When you get there, if you don’t mind, just let us know you made it, all right?” she asked as she hugged him by the curb.
Why We Came to the City Page 31