Reunion (18 page)

Crazy that his father had ever left his career as violinist and gone into Medicine at the behest of his slave-driver mother. What he was was a crazy Irish gypsy violinist, period. Never had liked, wanted Medicine, when he'd gotten to age 65, one year after his heart-attack, retired and said “Don't ask me anything about Medicine, I'm out. I finally made my escape … ”

It was like his father's presence was still somehow in the air here.

His father's presence and his own childhood ghost, Time Past and Time Future all contained in Time Present leading down a corridor to a door forever unopened …“Come on, pal!” said Buzz, walking down to Curtiss Hall.

The door was open and the light switches on the back wall. Turned them all on and the stage was bathed in deep rouged and buttered light.

“C'est temp de comencer,” he said and got up on the stage. Front stage center. He remembered the rich Chinesey robes he'd worn. He had to give his mother credit for that. As Wardrobe
Mistress she was tops. In fact that's what she should have gone into, gotten on the stage, all her looks, energy and vanity, no business like show business like no business I know. It had been so weird when he'd been in productions at the Civic Opera House, say in the children's chorus in Boris. He'd walk to the Illinois Central train all the way from his house, say a mile, then take the train downtown and walk over to Wacker Drive, and then at midnight walk back all alone, re-take the train, walk home alone from the Chatham stop. All his makeup on. His costume. Everyone else's parents brought them down and/or picked them up, only he was like orphaned.

And it had always been that way.

The Lone Lox, Lone Ranger, Stranger …

“OK, pal, ein, zwei drei,” and he began to sing something he hadn't sung for fifty years:

OH ISIS AND OSIRIS FAVOR THIS PAIR WITH WISDOM'S LIGHT, LEND THEM YOUR AID IN THEIR ENDEAVOR,

HELP THEM TO FIND THE PATH OF LI-IGHT,

HELP THEM TO FIND THE PATH OF LIGHT …

It flowed out of him like fresh maple syrup, like yogurt from a yogurt machine, water from the tap. He was fourteen again and there next to him were Tamino and Tamina, and his stage-enemy (secret friend) was the Queen of the Night played by Louise Altis, who was a little older than him, maybe fifteen, sixty-five now. And Sheldon Patinkin was Papageno, and Mrs. Metzger had gotten him this special private coach, Andy Foldi, and …..

Jesus! All of a sudden he stopped. It was all there for an instant, Mrs. Metzger with her bright black eyes at the piano looking up at him, thundering away on the keyboard, cute little chipmunk-lemur Louise. And who was that girl with the red hair and the green lipstick and green fingernail polish? He kind of even remembered the name of the polish—Chen Yu. Wasn't that it? Nancy Sterling from Senn High. That was a reunion he should have, all the kids in his life that he really shared something with, not just mechanically stuck in the same room, but coming together from all over Chi-town, birds of a feather flocking together …

Mrs. Metzger and the whole bunch of them THERE, THERE, THERE for a moment, and then totally and irrevocably gone and he was this silly old sixty-four year old standing up on a stage alone starting to garble up the lyrics.

Stopping. Tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Very good, very good!” Malinche applauding.

Great sport. Great person. Not a malicious fiber in her. Like the lion in
Born Free
who had never learned how to hunt, kill, be a lion.

“Th … th … that's all folks!” he Porky Pigged and came down off the stage, they hugged each other, turned off the lights, walked over to the window facing the lake, lead on lead, Whistler's Mother, a study in Grey, the lake frozen way way out, over to the right the planetarium and aquarium and Field Museum, over to the left the new high rises and Navy Pier, the Art Institute, the closed-down Buckingham Fountain, Michigan Avenue full of people, the Art Institute still one big knot of congestion.

“I miss the city,” he said, conjuring up the image of Grand Junction, the one main drag, half the stores empty store fronts, a couple of pizza places, a convenience store, which wasn't quite a drug store, but almost, an Italian restaurant, two tanning parlors, a couple of jock-strap and sweat-pants and gym-shoe places … bor—ing … economic blight … small town stuff.

In a way Malinche was right when they'd drive into some other neighboring small(er) town and she'd shrug and get all claustrophobic: “It's so depressing!”

It was so depressing.

His (their) lives were so depressing.

And if he'd stayed here forever and married, say, the redhead with the green lipstick or Louise Altiss or Nancy Sterling or … or … or … Theresa McIntosh … Petra …

“The worst part,” he said, putting his arm around Malinche as if to reassure himself that, yes, he was still alive and still had an arm to reach out with, “the worst part is that no matter what path you take, how much you do or don't do, how many kids you have or don't have … you still … you know … ”

“I love you,” she said all bundled in black, a touch of almost-sun across her face, a slight thinning of cloud-cover, bright black mascaraed eyes and a bright raspberry slash of lipstick, black velour sausage-tight pants, and black tights under that, the perfect body and the perfect spirit to go along with it, thinking you never know what you have until you don't have it, like he'd never known what he'd had in Chicago until he didn't have it any more … OR HAD HE … ? No … he had to admit that the whole time he'd been growing up, engulfed by music and dance, opera, plays, films, he HAD been aware that it was some
sort of blessed, enchanted life … the horrible part had been that when he'd left medical school and gone on his own, his parents had never forgiven him and withdrawn everything they could, all the little financial cushions and buffers, niceties and extras, “You wanna be on your own, you sonofabitch, you BE on your own.” His little old cultured violinist/opera-usher father turned into Le Chien du Monde …

“Come on, Cholley, let's eat!” he said suddenly back in his skin, The Now, not wanting to blow these few hours they had left.

“Cholley?” she asked, “who's Cholley?”

“Whoever you want it to be!” he said, “maybe Charley Chan—there was a great Chinese restaurant called Ho Sai Gai down on …” Down on what? “Let's just take a taxi down to Water Tower Place, it's always good down there … ”

“OK.”

Walking the whole way down, wanting to savor it as long as he could, loving the bannisters and stairways, the intricate ironwork everywhere, all the light-fixtures, like some sort of enchanted dwarf-smith's masterpiece, Albrecht in the
Ring
… like they couldn't have left an inch undecorated with a leaf, vine, tendril, curlicue, dwelling on metal and wood and stone …

“It's so far down!” she said.

“Come on, young'un,” he said, grabbing her hand. After all, he was the Old Man of the Mountain, not her, imagining, the whole way down, renting an office here someplace, two little rooms, and turning it into a front for a place to live, LOX ENTERPRISES, only the main enterprise would be to go to the Film Institute every night at the Art Institute, maybe still an
undiscovered resource the way it had always been, and seeing endless German films,
Die Zweite Heimat
, like the last time they'd been here, each film, what three hours long, and it lasted a week. Like
Alexanderplatz
. He could jump into the ocean of heavy, ponderous German film and swim there happily forever.

And then, imagine, coming back to his office/nest at night, living inside the architectural dream called the Fine Arts Building. Like a mouse in Frank Lloyd Wright's pocket.

A little sauerbrauten here, a little Rumanian roasted duck there, here a duck, there a duck, everywhere a duck, duck …

And then off to dreamland in the empty building at night, as quiet (quieter!) than in the middle of a Kansas farm, the best of both worlds, Kultur and Quiet, an old man's dream … and he was old, all of a sudden, very old, legs and arms and back. Down to the third floor, suddenly getting off the stairway and walking over to the elevators again, pushing DOWN. The (other) old guy elevator operator up to third in a flash. Confused.

“I let you off at Curtiss Hall, and now … ”

“He wanted to walk down,” explained Malinche, “the fact is that he doesn't really want to leave at all. He can't fool me. What's the word … lingering … he's lingering … ”

“Lingering?” said the elevator operator philosophically, “well, you can't blame him. I'm not here because I need the money, believe me. I just don't want it to ever stop. I just can't figure out God. All the trouble that goes into making us and then, swat, we're a piece of goo on a wall. All the trouble that goes into making a worm in order for a bird to gobble it down. Big fish, little fish, coyotes and rabbits … ”

Floor one.

So that's what he did all day while he sat there in the elevator, during what must have been long hours between customers—I ASCEND/DESCEND, THEREFORE I AM.

“Listen, thanks,” said Buzz and shook hands with the skinny old white-haired (all over the place, even more disheveled than Buzz) guy.

“See you in another fifty years!” he said, “Watch out for the Queen of the Night!”

Buzz stopping.

“Wait a minute … ”

“It's very simple,” explained the elevator operator, “maybe I was a little distrustful. You know, I'm kind of security for the building too. What if someone comes in and starts sawing up a stairway or something. Every little piece of this place is ‘historical,' you know what I mean? So … I went down one floor and walked up, listened a while … in fact,” stopping, choking up, hardly able to talk, all of a sudden like all the mortar in his soul had pulverized and all he was was a jumbled heap of stones, like the ex-Maya temples that Buzz would come across from time to time in the Yucatan jungles, “I wasn't going to tell you, but I was there at one of the performances of the
Magic Flute
fifty years ago. Madame Metzger gave me tickets. She always gave me tickets. I was twenty, just starting out … ”

“Jesus!” said Buzz, coming back into the elevator, the guy getting up, both of them embracing, crying a little, then separating, Buzz unable to talk at all, waving, face down, hurrying out of the lobby, out toward the doors, stopping for a moment, Malinche holding on to him, him thinking that in another fifty years … quickly zipping up his brown suede coat,
Malinche bundling herself all up, pulling on her black suede gloves … a tweak of sex as he looked at her … liking the way she was aging, like an old, meticulously cared-for Samurai sword, all it does is look more and more deadly (read “effective”) as the centuries pass on …

The melting, disintegrating moment passing (almost), out into cold, hailing down a cab, amazingly quick. They didn't even have cabs (except by appointment) in Grand Junction, inventing a lyric and singing it to himself to the accompaniment of a twanging mental guitar. No one to go with to no place, no time in the twenty-four, no thing on a non-race, hell, what a bore … pretty bad, but he never claimed he was a lyricist … only put him in front of a piano and suddenly it would pour out like jars of sapphires, rubies and pearls, in the depths of Aladdin's cave.

“Water Tower place, please.”

“I have to go around. You know,” said the driver, kind of café con leche colored, straight black hair and plenty of it, but his features could have been Polish, German, nothing orientalesque about the eyes, no prominent cheekbones, brachycelphalic …

Big story. Around where? Patagonia?

Starting down toward Soldier's Field/the Field Museum … OK, let him play his games, Buzz's voices suddenly talking to him, you know where he is from, you have seen him before in your dreams, follow the voices that tell you the inner/outer truth, TRY US, GIVE US THE ULTIMATE TEST …

“Go around my kazanska!” said Buzz.

The driver suddenly pulling over to the curb.

“I will ask you to get out, please. I do not have to play games with immigration. You can subpoena me, whatever you have to do, but not this way … ”

“Kazanksa, zanska, anka, ankle,” said Buzz, not moving.

“Anka is Sanskrit for ankle,” said Malinche.

“I know,” said Buzz, “but the question is, does he know?”

“Kazanska is ankle in my language,” said the driver.

“So you really are a Kogi?!?!” said Buzz, overjoyed, as if the sun had come out and the temperature gone up eighty degrees and the whole of Michigan Avenue had been turned into grasslands.

“You know what I am, Mr. Immigration!” said the driver.

“I've got nothing to do with immigration,” said Buzz, “I'm kind of a Chicago Mama. Without the Coca.”

Malinche getting the giggles.

“A Chicago Mama?!?!? What's going on?”

“I'll explain everything on the way to Water Tower Place,” said Buzz, reassuring the driver, would have reached up and touched his shoulder, but there was a whole system of plastic security shields between the front and back seats.

“I'm almost legal,” said the driver, still refusing to budge, “I'm marrying a citizen-woman in June. I'd marry with her now, but she thinks it's bad luck to get married with anyone in this kind of weather … you have to get married when things are … how do you say … spouting … ”

“Sprouting,” corrected Buzz.

“That's what I meant,” said the driver, a little more reassured now, pulling away from the curb.

“Ka … kal … everything growing, a—kal—forest, right?” The driver peering intensely into the rear-view mirror, trying to see Buzz's face, “I don't really believe you're not immigration. How could you know what I am?”

“Oh, just a lot of experience with skulls and things,” said Buzz.