Reunion (4 page)

“Not really. It's just one of those chance things. But wouldn't you love to live out here away from the students?”

“I don't know. In the winter … I don't know if I'll ever get used to the winters. I even like a little student noise. Just think of the noise-level I was used to in Karachi. It's all one big bub-hub.”

“Hubbub,” he corrected her.

“You know what I mean.”

“Look, I was raised right next to the streetcar line in Chicago. My bedroom was right above the streetcar stop. And they went all night long. But I never remember being bothered. It's just now, now that I'm getting older … ”

“Oh, you're not getting ‘older,'” she said, “just ‘maturing.' What's the word in Spanish for, like, ‘aging' wine?”

“Añejo! That's the trouble … you get enough añejo and you end up in the wine-cellars of eternity!”

Which gave her the giggles.

A little tabouli and homus into the pocket of one of the pocket-breads. She reminded him of a squirrel tucking away nuts.

She was such a beautiful, perfect little thing.

“What I'd like to do, in a way,” he said, ripping the other leg off the chicken, dipping it in the homus, “is to quit right now, retire, sixty-four, sixty-five. I keep asking myself ‘When have you been most ‘actualized' in life?' And the answer that keeps coming back is ‘Travelling, always something new.' Like today. Just a little variation. If I could just make a million on a book, I'd get a little place in Paris, up by the Gare du Nord, someplace up in the hills, another place in New York so I could see Sarah and Itzak more, maybe even keep the place here …” this dream he had of total Zen actualization,
wir haben nur einmal, einmal, und nichts mehr, gewesen zu sein
… we only have once, once and not more TO BE, never feeling he really WAS, 50%, 60%, maybe right now, under these trees, in this brittle, dry luminous warmth on the edge of chill, up to 80%, at the moment of one of his
rare, agonizing orgasms maybe up to 90-95%, but he wanted more, and all the time, a continuous beyond-orgasm HIGH, even thinking that, yes, he should go back to Columbia, Chile, jungle, desert, join one of the psychedelic tribes like the Desaná, even the Kogi, step permanently through the psychedelic door into what he saw as Presence World where everything was sentient, alive, full of divine ‘presences,' thinking that maybe what he really wanted was to simply go up like a kite and stay up forever, full-time, and never come down again.

A little tabouli, the acrid vinegar-parsley combination practically speaking to him: “I am very good for you. You eat a lot of me and you will never die.”

Then the homus, full of deserts and arabesques, veils and bells and flutes … remembering Cairo in winter, the cold, cutting winds that he'd never expected.

She was all in black velour today, top, pants, black suede boots. Decompressing now, expanding out into the now. Her breasts still growing, waist “tightening,” with all her self-awareness, exercise … a slash of purple lipstick, just a smudge of eye shadow.

Reaching over and ripping out half the chicken-breast, eating it almost like she was making love to it, tiny little sharp terrier teeth.

“I'd like to leave Medicine, really … I know what you mean. I miss my family, Nilifer, my other sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews. Even Itzak and Sarah. We ought to see them more … if I'd had my own children … ”

“If you want to try one of those fertility clinics …” he suggested. The big mystery, even when his equipment was fully
alive and functioning, before the slow venereal shutdown, why hadn't she gotten pregnant when everyone else in the family was as fertile as wombats?

“Not now … if we just take care of what we're taking care of.”

Sally, who saw herself as Ms. Perfumerie, but who mainly lived in depressed fear, trying the whole pharmacopeia of anti-depressant drugs that didn't seem able to touch the heart of darkness within her. Two thousand a month to her, just to keep her afloat in her miniscule little apartment in Brooklyn.

Itzak and his Dyslexia-Attention Deficit Disorder problems.

The Powell School. Private. To the tune of a thousand a month.

Sarah at the Cooper Union. A little room close down by the school. Lots of scholarship money from CU itself, but she still needed fifteen hundred a month to keep afloat, even if she did come home every night to Brooklyn to sleep at her mother's place. And now it looked like she was going to become a tattoo artist. Ten thousand CASH for tattoo tuition, the guy she was apprenticed to not trusting/using banks, everything CASH, no records, like he was selling Crack instead of tattoo know-how. Another thousand for Hannah in Israel, even though she was married. Another year before she finished her Ph.D. Not to mention the phone-call money, the travel money to bring Itzak to Grand Junction for summers, give his mother a little rest now and then. Last year Chanukah. Nilifer never thought she'd be celebrating Chanukah and/or Christmas, but she did, even enthusiastically, in a generous outburst of ecumenicism.

And Hannah had come for a month too, the summer before, a month that had passed like a day.

Sarah couldn't leave New York. Some sort of panic-disorder. Couldn't even go to Long Island or over to Jersey. Just Manhattan-Brooklyn, Brooklyn-Manhattan, back and forth, forth and back. And if she stepped outside of the certain limits that her psyche had imposed on her, she felt like she'd dissolve, like she was made out of sand and water was torrenting down on top of her. So Malinche would insist on going to New York to visit her a couple of times a year, and there really wasn't space for them at Sally's, so they'd go to a hotel and inevitably take Sally, Itzak and Sarah out for dinner a few times … The money just dissolved. Malinche supposed to be building up a private IRA, but never managing to do it. Like she didn't care. Like she either didn't care or didn't believe in a future.

“Well … another year and Hannah will be finished, two years for Sarah. It won't be long. How about trying some painting yourself?”

This incandescent talent that Malinche had for art.

She'd done all the drawings for Buzzy's Indian books, ancient Anasazi and Tolita and Coclé pots, pyramids and pendants, symbols, letters, letter-symbols. She could have been a professional illustrator. Had only gone into Medicine in the first place because her oldest brother was an M.D. and had suggested it to her when she'd finished high school and was all confused and indecisive about careers.

“Maybe … maybe I could just BE too, we could both just BE …” putting down her food and lying back on the blanket, looking up at the willow drooping its lacey tentacles all around
them, “we're not doing so badly today. I feel very much here, here, here … very Zen, centered, like after taking a hot shower, all pores open,” him putting down his food too and lying down next to her, their legs interlocking. She was such a specialist in textures, always the softest velour, cotton, silk. That was how she tested clothes when she went shopping, put the fabric up to her cheek, anything abrasive about it and back it went on to the rack. And under her soft clothes her even softer body, totally receptive to him today, everything else but The Now shelved, locked up, behind closed cabinet doors, Buzz wrapped himself around her, first sexual, then beyond sex, like he was wrapping himself around a cloud of cotton candy, closing his eyes, the only person in his life he could totally trust, not a traitorous fiber in her, exactly what she represented herself to be, neither more nor less, no trapdoors or secret panels but as transparent as pure water, half a mile deep but like looking through a cup of ordinary (unpure) water.

He closed his eyes after he'd checked and seen hers already closed.

Whatever wasps there were buzzing around the gutters, he couldn't hear them, whatever terrorists lurked in the shadows, whatever high winds and assassin viruses or cancers waited for them in the future, everything was laid to rest in their Here and Now, all Evil quelled, squashed, cancelled, in a general moment of truce, amnesty, absolute Grace, Shantih, shantih, shantih, the Peace that Passeth Understanding.

“C
OME ON
! L
ET'S
just take a cab!” said Buzz as they walked out of Midway in Chicago into the arctic wind.

There was an “L” (as in “elevated”) train that you could walk to, but it was a good block's walk, covered, enclosed, to be sure, but nothing could keep out the arctic cold. And he was impatient. It was already noon. Friday. The big reunion began at seven-thirty that night and it would take an hour to get downtown, another hour to get out to Ellen's in Grimore Park so that they could drive from far north all the way back to far south. Not that it made any sense, but if that's what Ellen wanted to do, in all her smother-mother sense of protectiveness, OK. Who was he to resist the hard hand of benevolence from someone he'd known for almost sixty years?!?!

Sixty years! Jesus … the sixty years seemed like they stretched back to the Paleolithic.

Crunched down to the head of the line of taxis waiting outside.

A very black driver in a very yellow cab.

He turned around and smiled and they got in.

“OK, my friend, “the driver said, a somewhat thick accent, “where to?”

“The Art Institute,” said Buzz.

They'd go to the Art Institute. Have lunch in the Member's Lounge, the snobbiest restaurant in the world, not just Chicago, the menus in French, period, you knew French (or faked it) or you didn't eat.

And he wanted to look at the Neolithic Chinese pots. All sorts of links to the South American Neolithic. And there was one Old Fire God from Oaxaca (which his students always insisted on pronouncing O-AX-A-CA instead of what it was—WA-HA-CA, no matter how many times he said it) he wanted to re-examine. Not really a Fire-God at all, but Sun-God. Sun-God + Fire-God, because in ancient times the Sun-God-Fire-God was also the Master Smith when making metals was pure supernatural MAGIC …

“OK, my friend,” the driver said and lurched out into traffic.

“You're Nigerian, aren't you?” Buzz asked the driver, “Not Ibo or Hausa, but Yoruba.”

The driver actually pulling over to the curb in a paroxysm of surprise.

“How the f … how do you know THAT?”

“I don't know,” smiled Buzz, extending his hand over the front seat, shaking the driver's hand, “I dabble in anthropology a little.”

The driver pulling out into traffic again.

“I'm amazed. Do you write books?”

“A few.”

“Why don't you give me your name. I'd like to read them.”

“Well … they're not published … at least most of them aren't. Just a few,” said Buzz, going into his wallet and handing the driver a card.

“And the little lady?” the driver asked, looking at Malinche through the rear-view mirror.

“Pakistani,” said Malinche with a smile.

“Well, I never … ” said the driver, pulling out of the airport into the thick, impenetrable traffic, everything blanketed in white except the dirty, slushy streets.

For Buzz it was like re-entering the dream (nightmare) of his frozen Chicago childhood. Remembering how he'd get into his father's car and his ass would hit the seat and he'd feel the cold go up his spine like a frozen sword. What were all these tropical flowers doing in this mechanized deep freeze?

All the way downtown talking to the driver about his wife (still back in Nigeria) and kids (still back in Nigeria), his trips back to Nigeria every year, building up a little money, trying to save enough to get something going (back in Nigeria).

He was like a seed that had been cast on Chicago ground by chance and just refused to send out sprouts.

“What about Afro-Americans?” asked Buzz out of curiosity, always interested in the limits of adaptability, fences, frontiers, snobberies.

“Never have anything to do with them,” the driver said snootily, adding, as if to be sure he'd made his point, “nothing, nothing at all… ”

“That's kind of sad, though, isn't it … ”

“Not for me.”

As they moved into downtown Buzzy starting to feel at home. He always wanted to come back to Chicago. His Capistrano was Chicago. And not the burbs but the center, old brick, old warehouses, a six, make that seven story old warehouse FOR SALE BY OWNER. The voices inside him talking: “Buy it, get out of Michigan, come down here, start The Small Press Institute, open up the Chicago Writer's Museum, Nelson Algren, Hemingway, stick in Carl Sandburg in revenge for all the bad things he said about Chicago. Have your apartment right in the same building, go to the Film Institute at the Art Institute every night. Endless foreign films. Rev up your German and Japanese. Leap out into (inner) space again. You're too far from the center … ”

The years in Karachi, Caracas, Bombay, Cairo, Tunis, New York, L.A …

Fat Franny had sent him a bio-data sheet to fill out. Questions like “What do you think your more interesting/notable achievements have been in the last 50 years?” and “Do you consider yourself a champion grandpa/grandma? Let's have a countdown on kids and grandkids.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it was all about, a breeding contest … All he'd sent in was his usual one-page bio-data sheet, a partial list of his 98 published books, partial list of the mags he'd been published in, an abbreviated list of grants, fellowships, scholarships, places he'd taught … somehow seeming pitifully anti-climactic when it came down to the bottom line:

P
RESENTLY A
P
ROFESSOR OF
L
ANGUAGE
T
ECHNOLOGIES AT
S
OUTHWEST
M
ICHIGAN
T
ECH
.

Like Napoleon on Elba, Caesar in the Bronx.

“Is this OK?” asked the driver, pulling up in front of the Art Institute.