The Apple Trees at Olema (11 page)

 

And so in the high-ceilinged kitchen, in the cricket-riddled air drenched with the odor of clover, we remembered Vic Doyno in the snow in Buffalo, in the days when the war went on continuously like a nightmare in our waking and sleeping hours.

 

Vic had come to work flushed with excitement at an idea he had had in the middle of the night. He had figured out how to end the war. It was a simple plan. Everyone in the country—in the world, certainly a lot of Swedish and English students would go along—who was opposed to the war would simply cut off the little finger on the left hand and send it to the president. Imagine! They would arrive slowly at first, the act of one or two maniacs, but the news would hit the newspapers and the next day there would be a few more. And the day after that more. And on the fourth day there would be thousands. And on the fifth day, clinics would be set up—organized by medical students in Madison, San Francisco, Stockholm, Paris—to deal with the surgical procedure safely and on a massive scale. And on the sixth day, the war would stop.
It would stop. The helicopters at Bien Hoa would sit on the airfields in silence like squads of disciplined mosquitoes. Peasants, worried and curious because peasants are always worried and curious, would stare up curiously into the unfamiliar quiet of a blue, cirrus-drifted sky. And years later we would know each other by those missing fingers. An aging Japanese businessman minus a little finger on his left hand would notice the similarly mutilated hand of his cab driver in Chicago, and they would exchange a fleeting unspoken nod of fellowship.

 

And it could happen. All we had to do to make it happen—Vic had said, while the water for tea hissed on the hot plate in David's chilly office and the snow came down thick as cotton batting, was cut off our little fingers right now, take them down to the department secretary, and have her put them in the mail.

 

 

D
UCK
B
LIND

He was a judge in Louisiana—this is a story told by his daughter over dinner—and duck hunting was the one passion in his life. Every year during the season when the birds migrate, green-headed mallards and pintails and canvasbacks, blue-winged teal and cinnamon teal, gadwall and widgeon and scaup carried by some inward reckoning down wide migration routes in orderly flocks from Canada to Yucatán, he rose at three in the morning and hunted them. Now, at seventy-five, he still goes every day to the blind; he belongs to a club with other white men who, every morning, fathers and sons, draw lots before sunup and row quietly in skiffs to their positions. When he misses a shot, he shakes his head and says, “To shoot a duck”—it is what hunters often say—“you have to be a duck.” And many mornings now he falls asleep. When five sprig circle, making a perfect pass above his blind, and all the men hold their breath and hear the silky sound of wind in the oiled feathers of the birds, and nothing happens, only silence, one of his companions will whisper to his son, “Goddammit, I think the judge is asleep again.” And if it happens twice, he says, “Lennie, you better row over there and see if the judge is asleep or dead.” And the son, a middle-aged man, balding, with thick, inarticulate hands, rows toward the judge's blind in the ground mist, and watches the birds veer off into the first light of the south sky.

 

 

Q
UARTET

The two couples having dinner on Saturday night—it is late fall—are in their late thirties and stylish, but not slavishly so. The main course is French, loin of pork probably, with a North African accent, and very good. The dessert will be sweet and fresh, having to do with cream and berries (it is early fall), and it feels like a course, it is that substantial. They are interestingly employed: a professor of French, let's say, the assistant curator of film at a museum, a research director for a labor union, a psychologist (a journalist, a sculptor, an astronomer, etc.). One of them believes that after death there is nothing, that our knowledge of this is a fluke, or a joke like knocking on doors as children sometimes do, and then disappearing so that the pleasure has to be in imagining the dismay of the person who finds the entryway empty. Another believes dimly and from time to time not in heaven exactly, but in a place where the dead can meet and talk quietly, where losses are made good. Another believes in the transmigration of souls, not the cosmic reform school of Indian religion, but an unplanned passage rather like life in its mixture of randomness and affinity. The fourth believes in ghosts, or has felt that consciousness might take longer to perish than the body and linger sometimes as spectral and unfinished grief, or unfinished happiness, if it doesn't come to the same thing. They are not talking about this. They are talking about high school (children, travel, politics—they know more or less who is paying for their meal). Four people, the women with soft breasts, the men with soft, ropy external genitals. In chairs, talking. It is probably the third Saturday in September. Maybe they have had melon or a poached pear. The hostess, a solid, placid woman with unusually large knuckles and a good amateur soprano voice, has begun to pour coffee into cream-colored cups.

 

 

A S
TORY
A
BOUT THE
B
ODY

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn't understand, “I've lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I'm sorry. I don't think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.

 

 

I
N THE
B
AHAMAS

The doctor looked at her stitches thoughtfully. A tall lean white man with an English manner. “Have you ever watched your mum sew?” he asked. “The fellow who did this hadn't. I like to take a tuck on the last stitch. That way the skin doesn't bunch up on the ends. Of course, you can't see the difference, but you can feel it.” Later she asked him about all the one-armed and one-legged black men she kept seeing in the street. “Diabetic gangrene, mostly. There really isn't more of it here than in your country, but there's less prosthesis. It's expensive, of course. And stumps are rather less of a shock when you come right down to it. Well, as we say, there's nothing colorful about the Caribbean.” He tapped each black thread into a silver basin as he plucked it out. “Have you ever been to Haiti? Now there is a truly appalling place.”

 

 

J
ANUARY

I was making this gathering—which pleased me, the waxwings that always pass through at this time of year, the discarded Christmas tree they perched in, and the first January storm, as if I had finally defined a California season—when Rachel came down the walk and went into the house. I typed out the poem—the birds giddy with Janus, the two-faced god—and then went in to say hello.

I was surprised by two feelings at once; one was a memory, the other a memory trace. The memory, called up, I think, by a glimpse of Rachel's sculpted profile against the cypresses outside the kitchen window just before she turned to greet me: I thought of a day twelve years ago in early summer. Rachel had just had an abortion and we all went for a walk in San Francisco near the bay. Everything was in bloom and we were being conscientiously cheerful, young really, not knowing what form there might be for such an occasion or, in fact, what occasion it was. And Rachel, in profile, talking casually, the bay behind her, looked radiant with grief. The memory trace had to do with car keys and two women in a kitchen. Someone was visiting my mother. It was a rainy day so I was inside. Her friend, as adults will, to signal that they are not
going to take too much of your time, had car keys in her hand. Between Earlene and Rachel, there were three oranges in a basket on a table and I had the sweet, dizzying sensation that the color was circulating among them in a dance.

Rachel is looking for a house. A realtor had just shown her one. Looking at the new house, she loved the old one, especially the green of the garden, looking out on the garden. The old house has drawbacks, long rehearsed, and the new one, with its cedar shingle, exposed beams, view, doesn't feel right, it is so anonymous and perfect; it doesn't have the green secrecy of the garden or the apple tree to tie Lucia's swing to. Earlene is asking questions, trying to help. A few minutes later, when I pass through again, they are laughing. At the comedy in the business of trying to sort through mutually exclusive alternatives in which figures some tacit imagination of contentment, some invisible symbolizing need from which life wants to flower. “I hate that old house,” Rachel is saying, laughing, tears in her eyes. But that is not mainly what I notice; I find myself looking at the women's skin, the coloring and the first relaxation of the tautness of the sleeker skin of the young, the casual beauty and formality of that first softening.

 

 

T
HE
A
PPLE
T
REES AT
O
LEMA

 

 

M
ISERY AND
S
PLENDOR