*Cambridge*
Back in the early 1960’s, after Kennedy and before the Gulf of Tonkin, when Berkeley was spawning Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement and Ludwig’s fountain and Joan Baez was strumming and singing on the steps of Sproul Hall, he read like a man possessed, trying to learn his new trade as he tried to leave his time in Panama behind him. At one point he’d needed a break from Poe and Hawthorne and Melville and he’d gone on a Raymond Chandler binge -- a novel a day with the help of a pack of cigarettes and endless cups of coffee at the Café Mediterranean -- and he still remembered that he’d been impressed in those heady days by what he took to be the anachronism of the writer’s tough-minded romanticism: ‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. He is the hero, he is everything.’ He’d had his doubts especially then, but as he watched Chris, the pub’s owner, come toward him he wondered if Chandler really had been that far off the mark.
“Good evening, Chris. May I buy the publican a pint?”
“A half Abbots, then. Cheers. And where’s Talya tonight?”
“She’s got some letters to write so I came along on my own this time. I saw Debbie behind the bar earlier.”
“Yes, she’s gone up to put our son to bed now, but she should be back down before closing time. In case you don’t get to see her, she wanted me to remind you about dinner next Sunday.”
“Thanks. Talya and I wouldn’t pass up a free meal, especially one of Debbie’s. We’ll come by at eight, okay?”
As he watched Chris move off toward the kitchen he thought of Talya and how she would perceive the choice he had to make. He knew she enjoyed the free time and the opportunities to travel together that their present way of life afforded, but he also knew that to a certain extent -- more so in the last few years than before they’d gone to China -- she shared his concern about the sameness of things lately, about the loss -- or maybe just misplacement -- of that jagged edge to their lives that had to do with discomfort and surprises and even, at times, the double-sided nature of danger and he sensed that she, too, might welcome certain kinds of changes, but her notion of what constituted moral responsibility was a finely tuned thing and there was very little room for adjustment; when it came to certain kinds of compromises he’d always known that flexibility was not one of Talya’s strongest points and he’d often had reason to admire that in her, but this decision was shaping up to be a matter of sometimes subtle and often complicated trade-offs and he suspected that she might not see it that way at all.
The Shadow Knows Page 15