Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  Involuntarily my eyes scanned the lot to make sure Tee-Bird hadn’t gone without. There were half a dozen cars, including my own, but nothing like a Thunderbird. I canvassed the horizon, looking for a huge blanket I suppose, with Tee-Bird underneath it. It seemed my friend must have walked here, possibly (being down on his luck) from one of the cheap rooming houses off the Square.

  “Here she comes!” he was suddenly exclaiming, and I swung back to see the Boston train come steaming through the scrap poplar like a wounded gasping cyclops. As it screeched and settled, I was looking through the windows for Ellie but they were filled completely with milling young men in rugby shirts, or somesuch, who soon came rumbling down the steps like a herd at the stockyard. More confusion as a family of four got themselves jammed in the doorway, and then there was Ellie after all, handing down a bag of laundry she’d brought. She had her little suitcase too, and of course a book in her hand, and to me she looked so neat and small, she looked wonderful, really, and the sight of her restored me to the high spirits I’d had driving down from the cottage. There is an emotion that hits me every now and again, like a oneness with the world, a simple happiness that just hangs in the air sweetly. It’s not about anything when it happens, but it happened on my way here and it happened again now as I looked at Ellie and was seeing too the ripe tomatoes in her garden, and the clusters of peaches come to perfection by the shed. But the hell with it, because it sounds, when I tell it, like nothing more than being hungry.

  In the meantime, I had all but forgotten my new friend and our odd friendship, as it had come to intervene between the two installments of this great good mood of mine. We had nearly reached the car, arm in arm and all the baggage, when I turned to check on him and there he was right at my elbow and I confess to a real electric shock at finding him so close. But here I got my first clear look at his face and saw it was very ordinary, a face that would be hard to recall, partly for being so empty of expression.

  “No luck?”

  “No, she wasn’t aboard. I’ll try again in the a.m.—there’s one comes in around eleven on a Sunday.”

  “Well I’m sure she’ll be aboard that one,” I said, as he strode on ahead, muttering, though he had seemed philosophical. I charted him as far as Main Street, past the old donut shop. Was he thinking about the wife who had just taken off, or the girl from Watertown who had not just come? Or something else entirely—his altered job status or his bosom automobile. Were any of these things real? Tee-bird?

  “What’s all that?” Ellie asked, jabbing me. I loaded her gear into the back seat and straightened up to appreciate her again. She had not run off, or shacked up, and maybe those were things for which I had neglected to give her proper credit. But I couldn’t answer her question; what all that was I surely didn’t know, barely an idea stirring.

  “One of those people,” I said. “You know, like the ones who see off ships in a harbor town. They like the idea of comings and goings, I suppose.”

  “He seemed like an odd one to me.”

  “Did he?”

  Ellie just looked at me, her wry look, forty years running, and shook her neat little head. “Ben Paterson,” she said, “It’s a wonder you can walk through the world ten steps without me.”

  Devereaux’ Existence

  Harry Devereaux spends much of his time in bars. “I’m a cliché,” says Harry puckishly. “Once fairly prominent and well-respected, but in recent years etcetera etcetera. I’m a symptom of the times.”

  Years ago Devereaux did the dance and recital notices for the now defunct Evening Hub, albeit that unworthy old tabloid carried a Devereaux or two solely as sop and filler. There had been no real gainful employment since his days at the Hub, but Harry felt fully established, as though the post he’d held was somehow tenured, an ongoing honorary chair, a lifetime ticket.

  “I’m a critic,” he would answer, when you asked what he did.

  Devereaux stood on his toes atop a brick and rested his chin on the young woman’s bedroom windowsill, peering between the cotton curtains with a sheepish grin. But the sheepishness was merely a habit of face, an expression, for Harry was having some pleasure and experienced a strong sense of belonging exactly where he was.

  He’d noticed her an hour earlier at The Three Bears Bar, where she and a girlfriend were drinking Dos Equis; she had a presence—call it sexuality—that tugged at him right away. On this sweet and balmy night, all blossoms and breezes, why not follow her home and see what was what? And her apartment building was just two blocks away, close by and quite charming, set back behind a scalloped cedar fence on Fayette, where now he could happily inhale the lilac and quince as well, as he monitored her undress.

  As suspected, the figure was excellent, excellent, and the skin like Cotswold cream. Confirmed! She knew it too, was sufficiently taken with her image in the mirror that she touched herself lightly, here and there. Ah, thought Harry, the beauties of la booze, the fringe bennies, that she should free this comely well-turned lass for careless dreamy self-caress.

  The black sweater came off and, as anticipated, there was the white breast, unguarded. Yet anticipation took nothing at all from surprise or delight. The black sweater, the white breast, the nipple—a good idea, the nipple. How bland the breast would be minus that considered concentric garnish; minus the graceful decoration, the lively coloration, the everlasting elastic nuance of the nipple. And how exciting, moreover, with the nipple!

  Genuinely moved, both by the spectacle itself and his own expert critique of it, Harry began to applaud. Dazed with pleasure, expansive of mood, he would lead the whole neighborhood in a heartfelt ovation to the nipple. Indeed the applause was so heartfelt, so sustained, that he could still feel the lingering buzz of it on his palms as it turned, and he turned, to the sound of sirens. Soon he was smiling at a jitterbugging flashlight beam.

  He motioned enthusiastically to the police officers, coaxing them forward to see the show, only to note in disappointment that the curtain had been drawn. The heroine was still fetching in her sweater and jeans, but really it was not the same. She had lost much in losing her nudity, the careless glow of booze and hair and mid-May nighttime was gone from around her.

  “What can I say?” Devereaux shrugged apologetically to the angry-looking policeman. “You’re too late.”

  Devereaux is aware of his own existence, he recognizes a few of the problems. You cannot have—simply have—an existence, you must go out and exist it. Yet the matter of initiative is vitiated by the matter of alcohol and Devereaux is aware of this too, of his drinking and some of the problems that come with it—alcohol constituting a clean honorable contract with defeat by which it becomes possible, however, to achieve a détente with the anxiety which attends defeat, defeat having become nicely inevitable. Fate is the party of the second part in all of Harry’s contracts.

  Fate, of course, cost him his job at The Evening Hub, took him far from the grandeur of art and gave him over to the squalor of life instead. So what? says Harry. He never considered another job, having felt the one he had just about perfect. There were no slots in his line these days, dance and recital, and what would be the point anyway, with Laura gone and Baby Hannah.

  Odd jobs for dollars, yes. (Very odd jobs, sometimes.) But existence is enough of a job for Harry now, it has become his life’s work, requires all his energies. Where could he hope to find more energy, even supposing a job did come along, something fitting that is …

  Devereaux has resided in alleys and cars, in basements of bars, he has stayed a week or two at your flat, by your leave and without it—less what we now call “homeless” than what we once called a “dropout”—and commonly he sleeps in hand-tailored silk suits of the thousand-dollars-and-counting variety. “Just a little affectation of mine,” Harry explains.

  “Oh for sure,” Harry was saying. “No question about it, booze is the devil in liquid form. I rarely come to places like this myself. But sometimes it can get to be too much, you know what I
mean?”

  “I do,” she said. “Sometimes I wish I would go out and get good and drunk more often.”

  Harry put her age at twenty-nine. She was a school-teacher who giggled a lot, a sweet consistent giggle to reward his typically laborious verbal flourishes. But no such flourishes now; now he was on the move, in plainspeak.

  “I go along and do my job cheerfully,” he said, neglecting to mention that his job was existence, “but then every once in a while I get sentimental and decide to tie one on.”

  “And tonight’s the night.”

  “The Shirelles said it best, Mimi. How old do you think I am?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You see my hair—”

  “Sure, but I can tell it’s just premature.”

  “How old, though?”

  “What does it matter?” she said, reluctant to guess, not caring, guessing forty. Forty was close. Harry’s hair was white as snow but he was only forty-three, plenty of existence left in him.

  “Thirty-six,” said Harry.

  “I knew it was just premature,” she said, uncomfortably, hoping he would now return to the droll style he had earlier.

  “Thirty-six,” he repeated. “My hair went white all at once, overnight, when I was thirty. I lost my wife and baby at sea, in an open boat off the coast of Newfoundland. The Bay of Good Fortune, if you can believe such a broad irony as that. I said how infrequently I come to bars?—”

  “Yes.”

  “Six years ago tonight. This is the anniversary.”

  “You lost them?”

  Harry nodded and paused to sip twice. Then looked up with a lovely grim smile. “God, I am sorry. I’ve gone all maudlin on you. You’re a wonderful girl and I hate to uncheer you in the slightest.”

  “You didn’t remarry?”

  He shook his head no. Devereaux did not like being short and cute as a general rule, but there were times when it could prove serviceable, and tapping into the unfulfilled maternity of a single woman remained chief among such occasions. Right now he made himself so small and cute and vulnerable that the schoolteacher would have to wrap him up and take him home to meet her own need. Sensing this result, basking in the sweet warm humiliation of it, Devereaux pressed for the clincher.

  “You have the same eyes, you know.”

  “As your late wife, you mean?”

  “As both of them, mother and child.” He sipped. “But please don’t think that’s the only reason I am so charmed by you—”

  “Harry, don’t you think maybe we’ve had enough to drink for tonight?”

  “Oh I don’t doubt it for a minute. But then what, you see. Then what?”

  Well then, of course, the bundling up snug and the taking home to cozy. “The sharp compassion of the healer’s art”—Harry quoted as they strolled—“Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.”

  There is a grace below grace, Devereaux believes, that comes with acceptance. There is a humility beyond humiliation, where humiliation becomes simply a way of life, a condition. The essence of one’s existence, one’s grandeur therefore, sole remaining garland for the critic now freelancing, eight years unemployed.

  Brought low, one can love to grovel, even as at the heights one loves to soar. At all costs, Devereaux preaches, litanizes, we must maintain our pride, our sense of belonging wherever we happen to find ourselves. That is the vital thing.

  Harry Devereaux offers to tell me a story. A “true” story, that has happened to him. And I listen up eagerly, for I have just purchased him two rye and want my money’s worth from the little gent:

  “This was years ago, in San Francisco, around the time the hippies were invented in Haight-Ashbury and there was all this fantastic cultural upheaval out there. But literally fantastic: cops smoking joints on the beat, hair growing wild from underneath headbands and flowered hats, pretty girls throwing off their clothes and jumping into the fountain at the Golden Gate Park. Two guitars in every garage!

  “And I was there as an observer, a social critic. To take a pulse, let’s say. And with all that was going on in those crazy days, this was the single most startling thing I observed that summer in San Francisco. This was what got me thinking.

  “I’m waiting for the Geary Street bus, with one other man. A handsome black man, reed-thin, bearing a slight resemblance to the singer Chuck Berry. And on the bus I observe him pretty closely. Soiled white socks—the thin cotton socks—and a pair of worn polished loafers with tassels. A sporty yellow suit with grease spots here and there, and a soft red felt hat. Over his arm (carried, not worn) a blue Brooklyn Dodgers windbreaker with ‘Dodgers’ in white script.

  “Pepper-and-salt moustache, one gray wart in the concavity of his left cheek. I observe him unobtrusively, wondering about him—a fascinating appearance somehow, yet ordinary too. But where is he headed at the end of his day, that’s what catches at me, almost like a game. Home from work? Off to his night job? Visiting a lady? He is holding a blue plastic case in his hands, in both hands, and it occupies him. He turns it over, spins it, measures it with the span of his fingers. Finally he opens the case and removes a cigarette. It takes him three matches to get it lit and during this process I see on his wrist one of those clear plastic bracelets that hospital patients wear, or maybe epileptics. He could be en route to a check-up, or a check-in, for although he carries no luggage he does seem just that sort of nervous to me. Hospital nervous.

  “Well we ride along on the Geary Street car and the farther we go the more curious I get, and the fewer the possibilities remain, until at last we are alone again—no other riders on the bus and one last stop to come—and I think, Aha, the fellow is a muggist, a thief, and fate has made me his next victim. At the end of the line! I do not quite believe this (the man seems so passive, so still and self-contained) but I don’t want to be played for a sucker either, and caught off guard.

  “But no, there is no violence in him, no criminal intent. We reach the final stop, the driver makes his U-turn, getting squared away for the return trip ten minutes hence, and my fellow traveler merely takes out another cigarette and lights it. He is staying on. Yanks his socks up, smokes the cigarette, crushes it out, shuts his eyes. When the trip back into town begins, he is fast asleep, and his hands unconsciously pull the windbreaker up to his shoulders, like a blanket.”

  Devereaux has concluded his story, and he reassures me that it is a true one. Not sure how to respond, I offer him another shot of rye and he accepts, before excusing himself for the men’s room. While he is gone, I glance around the bar, a pleasant dusky room got up to feel like a ship’s cabin, about half full and quietly humming, and I am mildly surprised that it is not early evening in San Francisco, 1967. The bartender arrives with my beer and Devereaux’ latest rye, and gives me a conspiratorial wink.

  “The Geary Street bus?” he smiles. I look at him, I confess, blankly. “That’s Devereaux’ Anecdote. He tells it all the time.”

  Devereaux does not always have the benefit of reflection in the morning, but today there he is in Mimi’s mirror and generally speaking he likes what he sees: the imp, the critic, the boho-aristocrat. A man at play—with situations, with thoughts.

  Is the citizen momentarily without reflection therefore without an appearance? Clearly not and in any case here he’ll be, a cosmic whipstitch later, reflected. The thing is latent, that’s all, like most of life’s possibilities. The tree falling with no one close enough to hear a crash? Everyone’s favorite metaphysical puzzler? Phooey. There is most definitely a sound, take my word for it, says Harry, reality is real even when you don’t stop, look, and listen.

  But perhaps, muses Harry on studying further his mirrored image, a man who eats yoghurt for breakfast is wrong to sport a beard.

  Devereaux’ trial took place in a strange basin of a room, a cavernous old amphitheatre with big bags of cold air rolling around the walls of richly aged oak panels. City of Cleghorn v. Harry Devereaux was called early, running through a string of quickies,
simple matters to clear the docket. But the case proved imperfectly disposable.

  “How plead?” a man asked Harry.

  “How indeed?” Harry replied, pleasantly surprised by this quaint turn of jurisprudential phrasing.

  “Guilty or Not Guilty, Mr. Devereaux. Are you represented today by counsel?”

  “I am pro se, if it please the court, but I make it a real point never to plead. Asking is okay, but pleading never. But I can say with complete confidence that I am guiltless.”

  “Guilty? Plead guilty?”

  “No, sir, guiltless. Without guilt.”

  “Innocent, then.”

  “Oh hardly, mon ami. Shameless, guiltless, aimless. That is Harry D. as he stands before you, mottoistic though she scan.”

  “We’ll take this one after lunch,” the bench interceded here. “When we do resume, Mr.—ah—Devereaux, please bear in mind that you are being tried here, not my patience. Contempt charges loom if you persist.”

  Harry, who had time for a short sip outside, decided right then and there to alter his legal strategy; after lunch, he would argue the case sans perruque, for that must be the problem. And so he did present himself—shameless, guiltless, aimless, and wigless—when after three excruciatingly long and boring hours he finally heard the city’s attorney attempt to demean him in the weariest of voices:

  “… Defendant, moreover, was observed by both the victim and two arresting officers, including Officer Maguire who is in court today to testify. At the time, Defendant made no attempt to deny his guilt and I fear he is just playing games in doing so now.”

  “Objection!” bellowed Devereaux. “Object to the phrase ‘just playing games’ as being highly judgmental. Might also point out that on the night in question, night of May Twen-tee-two, Defendant was also ‘just playing games.’ And what of it?”

  “Please continue, Mr. Mahoney,” said the bench.

  “Also object,” Harry rolled on regardless, “to the use of the term ‘victim,’ the belief here being that the crime of peepage is surely a victimless crime if the expression has any meaning at all, proof being that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the so-called victim doesn’t even know the so-called crime has occurred. When you are murdered, bo, you know it.”