Reunion (5 page)

“Perfect.”

Buzz wanted to give him a good tip, in spite of his narrowness. It came to $23.50 on the meter. Twenty-five seemed good. So he handed him a twenty and a five.

“Thanks a lot. I've really enjoyed talking to you.”

The driver seemed less than enthusiastic, and after he got out, Buzz rethought it:

Pulled out another five and tried to run after the cab, but he was already half a block down, another fare quickly slipping into the cab … and away he'd gone …

“Jesus! I'm such a retard!” he said to Malinche.

“What happened?”

“I under-tipped him. Dramatically.”

“Forget it. What's the difference … ”

Starting to walk up the steps. Friday. Quarter to one. But the steps were jam-packed with crowds, this massive sense of human-cattle presence, a big sign up in front between the aging, oxidizing blue-green bronze lions:

T
HE
G
ARIBALDI
C
OLLECTION
—U
NITED FROM THE
F
OUR
C
ORNERS OF THE
W
ORLD

“I thought Garibaldi was an Italian patriot!” said Buzz as they forced their way up through the crowds. “This is like Ellis Island in 1850 … ”

Malinche shrugging her shoulders very eloquently, she was a goddamned mime when she wanted to be—I DON'T KNOW AND I DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

A kind of middle-eastern United Arab Emirates looking guy with a bull-horn (with a green jacket on with CC Inc., C
ROWD
C
DONTROL
printed on it in big urgent red letters), very thick accent, screaming “No members' tickets valid until 4 P.M., no members' tickets valid until 4 P.M. We are sold out until May 15
^th
. Please do not crowd the stairs. We are sold out of regular tickets until May 15
^th
… ”

“Let's go somewhere else! There's that little place on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building,” said Buzz. “This is absurd. Who is Garibaldi anyhow?”

Another shrug of her shoulders.

“I like it here,” she said, “I like the French menus. They're a real challenge.”

And she wasn't kidding, was always self-testing herself, pushing herself to new limits. Like the way she did her nightly exercises down in the basement gym that she'd put together all on her own, a little more weight every day on the weight-lifting machines, just a little more time on the exercise-bike every day. Push, push, push, push.

“OK.”

Pushing his own way in through the front doors, taking out his wallet, looking for his Life Membership card.

Sonofabitch, he didn't bring it!

Walked over to one of the little old lady volunteers at the counter, blue hair, blue eyes, blue dress.

“I'm a life member. I forgot my card today.”

“That's no problem. Let me see a driver's license.”

Which he handed to her, she pushed a couple of keys on the computer in front of her, and a day-pass slid out of the printer.

Very nice.

She was very nice.

“Who is Garibaldi, anyhow?” he asked, “I thought he was an Italian patriot.”

She pushed another button and four tickets for the Garibaldi exhibit came out: T
HE
G
ARIBALDI
C
OLLECTION
—U
NITED FROM THE
F
OUR
C
ORNERS OF THE
W
ORLD
. Not that they'd do him any good, if members' tickets weren't operable anyhow.

“Well, there was a Garibaldi who was an Italian patriot,” she said, “only this Garibaldi was a painter, a friend of Monet's. Henri Garibaldi. His real name was Giaccamo Garibaldi, but he changed it to Henri when he moved to Paris.”

“Ahhhhhhhh … you're very knowledgeable about things,” he said, thinking she must be in her mid-sixties, about his age, checking the name on her I.D., Margaret Baxter, thinking, for a moment, you never know, he might know (have known) her …

“I try.”

“Thanks a lot.”

A nice big Cheshire cat smile.

Walking in past the guard, past the museum store with a line waiting to get in even there. He always liked to go in and browse. You never knew what you'd see. Like the time he'd bought Coe's
Breaking the Maya Code
there. Never had heard of the book,
on his own had concluded that the Maya letter was a variant of the old southeast Asian good-luck sign which was a variant of the Old Thai letter “S” so that Buzzy felt like he was moving toward a deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs by way of Southeast Asia, which was where he believed the Maya had come from in the first place. And then he saw
The Breaking of the Maya Code
and for a moment despaired, until he brought it home and started really reading it and found were both C
HA
.

S
HA
/C
HA
… he had begun to decipher Maya glyphs using Southeast Asian symbols and letters! But he never would have found out if he hadn't been browsing in the Art Institute bookstore. Nothing like it in Grand Junction, that was for sure. What was so “grand” about it anyhow, for God's sake … and what was it a junction for?

He would have loved to have gone in and browsed a little, but there was another guy standing out in front shouting, “Take your time, ladies and gentlemen, please, everything is under control … ”

Which it obviously wasn't.

They checked their briefcases.

His idea.

“We take suitcases, we're going to be carrying them around all day. What do you need for overnight, a pair of panties, a toothbrush … ”

As if to underline and emphasize the brevity of their stay. As if to trumpet out “Enjoy! Whatever you have in your hands, in front of your eyes, will be taken away in 30 hours … ”

Like their whole visit was cursed, under some evil spell.

Past the old Oaxaca Fire-God with its 18 little circles in each earring which proclaimed that the shriveled-up, beak-nosed old man god who looked like an old Jew (or Lebanese), was really a sun-god because if you took 18 and multiplied it by 20, the number of your fingers and toes, you came out with 360, the closest you could get to the number of days in a 365 day solar year (without fractions) … something he'd never noticed the whole time he was growing up in Chicago until once, what, fifteen years earlier, he'd been in Chicago for a literary convention, and he'd come over here with Diane Kruchkow, his old poet-editor pal from Maine, and she'd asked him, “What's that statue all about?” and he'd actually looked at it and seen the eighteen circles in each earring, and his brain had started to turn like a squeaky water wheel, every letter in Hebrew has a number value, and the number value for the two letters in C
HAI
(Life) add up to 18 … so that L
IFE
becomes the number for the solar year which is the life of the universe …

Past the Ryerson Library, which they had radically spiffed up.

“Where I wrote my M.A. thesis,” he reminded her.

Looking in. The same old green library lights, but everything else cosmeticized, brightened up. He'd liked it “contracted” and old looking.

“I remember,” she said.

Title of his thesis: “Rediscovering the Greeks—Classical Studies During the Renaissance.”

Which was kind of weird for an M.A. in the English department, but his advisor was a frustrated classicist, Father Edward Surtz S.J., specialist in Sir (Saint) Thomas More, Henry the Eighth's Number One Man in government, and when More
had disagreed with Henry's divorces, it was OFF WITH HIS HEAD.

Bluebeard.

Behind all myths always …

Remembering all the hours, days, months he'd spent in the library there slaving away. Supermotivated. After all after he'd just flunked out of Medicine and he'd come home every day and his mother would greet him with “Hiya, flunkie, I hope you worked hard, flunkie, flunkie, flunkie … ”

Forced into Medicine by his M.D. father. Hated it. And now that he was married to an M.D. understanding why he hated it, in all the multiple ramifications of his hatred …

Wanting to go back into the library and sit down and let the Past crowd in around him, wanting there to be a door somewhere that you opened with a glowing, radioactive key, and you could walk in and there would be the entirety of the Past unchanged, and you yourself unchanged, back to the wildly dedicated, optimistic maniac you were, when every day flamed up around you like a bonfire and you yourself were filled with the holy fire of belief in a sacred singing, ringing Future.

Only now that he was in that Future, that Expanded Moment of Perpetual Fulfillment seemed to be even further away, always elusively around one more bend, on the other side of one more hill….the closest he came to it just being HERE among the old familiar (albeit refurbished) items, old fire gods and old Maya/Thai letters, old green library lamps like sacred relics that you felt that if you touched, your spirit would be whole again, always that apocalyptic implication of resurrection, the last seal opened and, whoosh! … the word was beatitude … what was
Heaven like? Neither up nor down, forward or backward, no going toward but totally already there, like a peacock's tail spread out iridescently into the air of total fulfillment, all shadows gone.

“It's so crazy,” he said as they walked past the Neolithic Chinese pots that always reminded him so much of South American pottery of the same time-frame, all kinds of little tuggings inside him to go take a look, like there was always one last pot that, if he really saw it, saw what was really there, would irrevocably prove the ancient links between Asia, Europe and the misnamed New World, “all my cousins here in Chicago, I haven't seen them for twenty years. That's the hell of being an only child, they've got their brothers and sisters, it all hangs together, what do I have but a Past in my head that I can't go back to … ”

“You've got me, six kids,” said Malinche.

“Right! Richtig! Aber Ich habe zu veil Sehnsucht! Too much ‘longing'!”

“For what?”

“For where and what I was, I guess,” he answered, confused for a moment, as if the message were that, yes, in his lost Chicago years, Mass and Communion every morning, classes, meditations, reading St. John of the Cross in the evenings, always in a state of perpetual fasting, not really in the Twentieth Century at all but in some sort of desert saint time-warp, like St. Simon Stylites, atop a pillar in the middle of the Negev, he had reached some sort of Zen Center inside himself and everything he'd done had radiated out from there so that.…, “remember that poem by Hopkins, ‘The just man justices, keeps grace, keeps all his goings graces.' I was like that … ”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“All his goings graces … ?”

“I don't know, I don't know,” he said and walked on through the armour and arms exhibit which he didn't relate to at all, thousands of people crowding every square spot, a long line already beginning in the middle of the armour and arms, another sign T
HE
G
ARIBALDI
E
XHIBIT
L
INE
B
EGINS
H
ERE
, going off into some gallery to their right that he didn't even remember, something new, who knows … turned left and started walking through the Southeast Asian/East Indian stuff, feeling at home with the Sivas and Vishnus, Ganesas, Kalis, Buddhas, more old friends, even during his tortured year at Med School, coming down here every Friday afternoon and just being here, as if he were almost beginning to become again like now, as if he wasn't 63, a month away from 64, as if Malinche wasn't his fourth but about to become his first wife, like the kids were all still to be born, still blessed imaginary beings in Time Future, instead of goofball fuckoffs (most of them) in Time Now, that nightly call from Conchita, “Hi, Dad, I was really feeling suicidal today, and I ate ten pounds of caramel corn which isn't as fattening as steak, but … and the staff down at La Clinca hates my guts, in fact when I confronted the secretary with the fact that she hates my guts, she said ‘Maybe if you had less guts to hate … ' What does that mean, huh, huh, Dad?”

The worst of the bunch, spending her days earning lunches at La Clinica, taking her daily dose of Haldol in front of witnesses, just to be sure she took it, the taking of her daily medication (poison) the closest she ever came to anything close to “order,” a “job,” “routine,” the rest of her life a spillover of psychotic
confusion. And he'd only see her once or twice a year for a couple of days each visit…down to Texas … which he hated, except for Austin …

“I think I'll have the sirloin tips,” said Malinche as the air began to fill with the jumbled smells of sauces and meats, sweets, garlics and meringues and wasn't that one acrid exclamation mark in the air some sort of burnt shallots + wine sauce combo … ?