Spectrum bends, rack after rack after (mirrored) rack.
Entering Bullock’s, Magnin’s, Saks: thirteen counters of perfume each.
Perfume! Earrings, scarves, necklaces, nylons, stationery, chrome columns, blouse racks, sportswear, shoes—
You complete the list (every day).
Jim walks through this place untracked, his uneasiness bouncing back from every mirror, every glossy leaf and fabric. The memory of his night in Egypt is overlaid on his sight like the head’s-up display of a fighter pilot’s helmet. IR images in a faint green wash: of beggars in Cairo, too poor even to live in the jammed miserable tenements around them. How many people could live in a structure like SCP? The luxury surrounding him, he thinks, is a deliberate, bald-faced denial of the reality of the world. A group hallucination shared by everyone in America.
Jim wanders this maze, past the sleepwalkers and the security police, until he has to sit down. Disoriented, dizzy, he might even be sick. Some mall kids hanging out by the video rental window stare at him curiously, suspecting an OD. They’re right about that, Jim thinks dully. I have ODed on South Coast Plaza. The kids stand there hoping for some theatrics. Jim disappoints them by getting up and walking out under his own power. His damaged autopilot gets him through the maze of escalators and entry levels to the parking lot, to his car.
He calls Arthur. “Please, Arthur, give me some work. Is anything ready to go?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact there is. Can you do it tonight?”
“Yes.” And Jim feels immense relief that he can act on this feeling of revulsion.
That night he joins Arthur enthusiastically as they stay up all night to arrange a successful strike against Airspace Technology Corporation, which makes parts for the orbiting nuclear reactors that provide the old space-based chemical lasers with their power. Off to the rendezvous at Lewis and Greentree, in the little warehouse parking lot; the same men load the boxes into Arthur’s car; and they’re off to San Juan Hot Springs Industrial Park. Despite security precautions that include fence-top heat-seeking missiles, the strike succeeds; in Airspace Tech’s main production plant, all that was composite has fallen apart.…
But the next morning, back in his ap, exhausted to emptiness, Jim has to admit that the operation hasn’t changed all that much for him. He’s still sitting in his little ap under the freeway looking around. Nothing in it soothes him. He’s heard his music too often. He’s read all the books. The orange crate labels mock him. He’s looked at the maps till he knows them by heart, he’s seen all the videos, he’s scanned every program in the history of the world. His home is a trap, the complex and massively articulated trap of his self. He has to escape; he looks around the dusty disorderly room, with its treasured shaft of nine A.M. sunlight, and wonders how he ever stood it.
The phone rings. It’s Hana. “How are you?” she says.
“Okay! Hey, I’m glad you called! You want to come down to my place for dinner tonight?”
“Sure.”
And the flood of relief that fills him has other components in it he can’t tag so readily; it’s the kind of pleasure he gets when Tash or Abe give him a call to arrange something, the sense that one of his good friends reciprocates his regard, and will actually take the trouble to initiate a get-together, something that is usually left for Jim to do.
So he goes out and buys spaghetti and the materials for the sauce and a salad. A bottle of Chianti. Back home for some hapless, hopeless attempts to clean the place, or at least order it a little.
Hana shows up around seven.
“I’m really glad you called,” Jim says, stirring the spaghetti sauce vigorously.
“Well, it’s been a while.” She’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring past him at the floor, throwing her sentences out casually. Attack of shyness, it seems. Her black hair as tangled as ever.
“I—I think I’m losing it, somehow,” Jim says, surprising them both. “This trip, it just reinforced everything I was feeling before!” And it all spills out of him in a rush, Hana glancing up now and then as he rattles on about Cairo and Crete and California. He mixes his account of them so that it must be impossible for her to figure out which place he’s talking about, but she doesn’t interrupt until a desperate edge tears his voice. Then she stands, briefly, puts a hand to his arm. This is so unlike her that Jim is struck dumb.
“I know what you mean,” she says. “But look. Your dinner’s almost ready, and you shouldn’t eat when you’re upset.”
“I’d starve if I didn’t.”
But he pours the spaghetti into the colander with a wry grin, feeling a bit more relaxed already. There’s something new floating in the steam between them, and he likes it. As they sit down to eat he goes and puts on one of his amalgamations of classical music, and they eat.
“What’s the music?” Hana asks after a while.
“I’ve taken all the slow movements from Beethoven’s five late string quartets, and also the slow movement from the Hammerklavier Sonata as the centerpiece. It has a very serene effect—”
“Wait a minute. You mean all these movements come from different quartets?”
“Yeah, but they’re unified by a similar style and—”
She is laughing fit to burst. “What a terrible idea! Ha, ha, ha, ha!… Why did you do that?”
“Well.” Jim thinks. “I found when I put on the late quartets I was usually doing it to hear the slow movements. It’s for a mood I have that I like to, I don’t know. Soundtrack, or reinforce, or transform into something higher.”
“You’ve got to be kidding, Jim! You know perfectly well Beethoven would cringe at the very idea.” She laughs at him. “Each quartet is a whole experience, right? You’re cutting out all the other parts of them! Come on. Go put on one of them complete. Choose the one you like best.”
“Well, that’s not so easy,” Jim says as he goes to the old CD console. “It’s odd. Sullivan says in his book on Beethoven that opus 131 is by far the greatest of them, with its seven movements and the spacy opener and so on.”
“Why should that matter to you?”
“What Sullivan says? Well, I don’t know … I guess I get a lot of my ideas out of books. And Sullivan’s is one of the best biographies in the world.”
“And so you accepted his judgment.”
“That’s right. At first, anyway. But finally I admitted to myself that I prefer opus 132. Beethoven wrote it after recovering from a serious illness, and the slow movement is a thanksgiving.”
“Okay, but let’s hear the whole thing.”
Jim sticks in the CD of the LaSalle Quartet performance, and they listen to it as they finish dinner. “How you could pass on this part?” Hana says during the final movement.
“I don’t know.”
After dinner she wanders his ap and looks at things. She inspects the framed orange crate labels with her nose about an inch from their surfaces. “These are really nice.” In his bedroom she stops and laughs. “These maps! They’re great! Where did you get them?”
Jim explains, happy to talk about them. Hana admires the Thomas Brothers’ solution to the four-color map problem. Then she notices the video cameras in the corners where walls meet ceiling; she wrinkles her nose, shudders. Back into the living room, where she goes over the bookcase volume by volume, and they talk about the books, and all manner of things.
She notices the computer on Jim’s battered old sixth-grade desk, and the piles of printout beside it. “So is this the poetry, then? Do I get to read some?”
“Oh no, no,” Jim says, rushing to the desk as if to hide the stuff. “I mean, not yet, anyway. I haven’t got any of it in final form, and, well, you know.…”
Hana frowns, shrugs.
They sit on the bamboo-and-vinyl couch and talk about other matters. Then suddenly she’s standing and looking at the floor. “Time to go, I have to work tomorrow.” And she’s off. Jim walks her to her car.
Back in his ap he looks around, sighs. There at the desk,
all those feeble half-poems lying there, broken-backed and abandoned.… He compares his work habits to Hana’s and he is ashamed of his laziness, his lack of discipline, his amateurishness. Waiting for inspiration—such nonsense. It really is stupid. He doesn’t even like to think about his poetry anymore. He’s an activist in the resistance, it’s time for praxis now rather than words, and he only writes when he has the time, the inclination. It’s different for him now.
But he doesn’t really believe that. He knows it’s laziness. And Hana—how is he ever going to show her any of his work? It just isn’t good enough; he doesn’t want her put off by his lack of talent. He’s ashamed of it. He identifies the feeling and that makes him feel even worse. Isn’t this his work, his real work?
48
The pace never slackens for Lucy McPherson; on the contrary, it seems there’s a little more to do every day. One morning she wakes up alone. Dennis is off in Washington and Lucy’s been up later than usual the night before watching the video, and now she’s slept right through her alarm. Late from the word go. She hustles out without breakfast, down to the church, gets the office opened and starts the day’s opening round of calls. The organizational routine ticks off fairly well. The fund-raising is more problematic. Then it’s down to Leisure World for a too-brief visit with Tom. Tom looks worse than usual, complains of coming down with a cold. He listens to Lucy’s associational rattle of news with his eyes, nodding occasionally.
“How’s Jim?” he says.
“Okay, I guess. I haven’t seen him much in the last month. He and Dennis…” She sighs. “Hasn’t he been down to see you?”
“Not for a while.”
“I’ll tell him to come.”
Tom smiles, eyes closed. He looks so old today, Lucy thinks. “Don’t pester the boy, Lucy. I think he’s having a hard time.”
“Well, there’s no reason for it. And no reason he can’t come down here once in a while.”
Tom shakes his head, smiles again. “I do enjoy it.”
Then it’s back on the freeway, to an early lunch with her study group. And back to the office, back to the fund-raising. Lillian comes in at two and they work together at it. Lucy was flagging, but now she picks up; it’s more fun with Lillian there, someone to talk to.
“Well, he did it again,” Lillian says after looking around conspiratorially.
“Reverend Strong?”
“Yep. Right at the end of class.” Lillian is in the church’s little confirmation class, which the reverend teaches on Thursday evenings.
“Better the end than the beginning.”
Lillian laughs. “Less people listening, I know. But still, it isn’t fair! It isn’t the poor people’s fault if they’re poor, is it?”
“I don’t think so,” Lucy says slowly. She remembers Anastasia; got to visit her again next week. “Sometimes, though, you wonder.… Well, you can see where Reverend Strong gets his ideas.”
Lillian nods. The lesson last week was based on the parable of the prodigal son. Why, the reverend demanded, should God value the prodigal son more than the one who had been faithful all along? This was clearly unfair, and the reverend spent over half an hour discussing the problems in the Greek text and the likelihood of a mistranslation from the original Armenian dialect. “So that by the end of it,” Lillian says with a laugh, “he was basically saying that the Bible had got it backwards!”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He said that it was the elder son who would always be God’s favorite, for never having strayed away. The ones who stray can’t be trusted, he said. You can forgive them but you can’t trust them.”
Lucy shakes her head. The parables—some of them are just too ambiguous. The prodigal son story never seemed quite fair to the elder son, it’s true, and as for the parable of the talents … well, the way the reverend can use these stories! She finds it hard to think about them. And these are New Testament stories, too, the ones she has really committed herself to. The story of Job, and God and Satan betting over him—of Abraham and Isaac, and the faked sacrifice—she doesn’t even try to understand those anymore. But Christ’s parables … she’s obliged to acknowledge the authority of them. Still, when the reverend can take the parable of the talents and use it to prove that the poor in OC are poor because it was meant to be … and imply that the church shouldn’t waste its time trying to help them! Well, that was the reverend’s fault, but the parable sure gave him room to run with it.
So Lucy and Lillian discuss strategies for getting around the reverend’s biases. The programs that are already under way are the obvious channels to work through; keep the momentum going with those, and the fact that the reverend will never start another won’t really matter. It’s a question of fund-raising, of getting volunteer help, of going out there and working. Between them they should be able to do it.
There’s only one problem; they need a new fund-raiser with all its funds tagged for the neighborhood poverty program, or it won’t survive. It’s the kind of thing Reverend Strong is sure to deny approval for. “I’ve got a plan,” Lucy says. “See, it’s me that the reverend is beginning to associate with these programs, and now it’s getting so that every time I suggest something he turns it down. So what we should do, I think, is present the mail campaign idea as yours—something that you and the other people in the confirmation class thought up.”
“Sure!” Lillian says, pleased at the subterfuge. “In fact I can suggest it to the class, and then we can tell the reverend about it together!”
Lucy nods. “That should work.”
They discuss the upcoming garage sale. “I’ll try again to get Jim to come and help,” Lucy says, mostly to herself.
Lillian cocks her head curiously. “Do Jim or Mr. McPherson ever come to church anymore?”
Lucy shakes her head, coloring a little. “I tell them they should, but they don’t listen to me. Dennis thinks he’s too busy, I guess, and Jim has all sorts of reasons why it isn’t a good idea. If he came and heard a sermon like the reverend’s last one he’d go crazy. Even though he sounds like the reverend himself sometimes. But he just doesn’t understand that the church isn’t the individual people and their weaknesses. And it isn’t the history, either. It’s faith. And I guess he doesn’t have that, at least right now.” She sighs. “I feel sorry for him. I suppose I’ll talk to him again.”
“Maybe you can talk to them both together.”
“Just getting them together would be the problem.”
“Why’s that?”
Lucy sighs. She doesn’t like to talk about it, but … she’s noticed already that what she says to Lillian stays with Lillian; even Emma doesn’t hear it. And she needs to talk with someone. “Well, they’re not getting along. Dennis is tired of Jim not working in a better job, and Jim is mad at Dennis because of it. Or something like that. Anyway, they’ve had a couple of arguments, and now Jim isn’t coming around anymore.”
“They need to talk to each other,” Lillian says.
“Exactly! That’s just what I say.”
A small smile from Lillian, but Lucy doesn’t notice it. Lillian says, “If I were you I’d try to get them together and talking again.”
“I have been, but it just isn’t working.”
“You have to keep trying, Lucy.”
Lucy nods. “You’re right. I will.”
And that night she tries, to the extent she can with Dennis back in Washington. Well, it’s simple enough; she needs to get Jim up to dinner some time when Dennis is home. She gives Jim a call. “Hi, Jim? Mom here.”
“Oh hi, Mom.”
“How was the trip to Europe?”
“It was really interesting.” He tells her briefly about it.
“It sounds like you had a good time. Listen, Jim, how about coming up for dinner next week? Dad will be back home then.”
“Oh.”
“Jim. Dad hasn’t seen you for over two months, isn’t that right? And it isn’t right. He needs you just as m
uch as you need him.”
“Mom…”
“Don’t Mom me. All these silly arguments, you should have more faith.”
“What?”
“You’ll come next week?”
“What?”
“I said, you’ll come up next week for dinner?”
“I’ll try, Mom. I’ll think about it. But he’s just going to think I’m leeching dinner from you guys again.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jim.”
“I’m not!”
“You are. You’re both too stubborn for your own good, and you’re just hurting yourself by it. You come up here, you understand?”
“All right, Mom, don’t get upset, okay? I’ll … I’ll try.”
“Good.”
They hang up. Lucy goes out to the video room, into the chair. The cat sits on her lap while she reads from next week’s lesson. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, the verses swimming into double focus as she tries to stay awake and concentrate on them. On the screen a hot-air balloon is floating over a snowy peak, in a dark blue sky. The verses are floating about, big and black on the white page … She jerks to, finds it’s after midnight. She’s been sleeping in the chair, the Bible open on her lap. She lifts the cat off, gets up stiffly to go to bed.
49
Hana’s too busy to see Jim for several nights running, and he goes down to Sandy’s party depressed. She’s working, he’s not. What must she think of him?
At Sandy’s he stands leaning against the balcony wall, watching cars flow through the great interchange pretzel of the five freeways. Something to stare at for hours.
Suddenly there’s Humphrey’s younger sister Debbie Riggs, standing beside him and elbowing his arm to get his attention. “Oh hi, Debbie! How are you?” He hasn’t seen her in a while. They’re good friends, they’ve known each other since junior high; in years past she’s been sort of a sister to him, he thinks.
“I’m fine, Jimbo. You?”
“Okay, okay. Pretty good, really.”
They chat for a bit about what they’ve been up to. Same things. But there’s something bugging her. Debbie is one of the most straightforward people that Jim knows; if she’s irritated with you she just comes right out with it.
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