Old Songs in a New Cafe

by Robert James Waller

  Moving down through the layers, though, we begin to undergo a transformation.

  Slowly, we change from rough-and-tumble scavengers to gentle archaeologists. Perhaps it started when we reached the level of the dolls and stuffed animals. Maybe it was when I found “The Man Who Never Washed His Dishes,” a morality play in a dozen or so pages, with her childhood scribblings in it.

  In any case, tough-mindedness has turned to drippy sentimentality by the time we find the tack and one shoe from Bill, her horse.

  I had demanded that Bill be sold when he was left unridden after the five years of an intense love affair with him were over. That was hard on her, I know. I begin to understand just how hard when Georgia discovers a bottle of horsefly repellent that she kept for her memories.

  We hold up treasures and call to each other. “Look at this, do you remember… ?”

  And there’s Barbie. And Barbie’s clothes. And Barbie’s camper in which the young female cat was given grand tours of the house, even though she would have preferred not to travel at all, thank you.

  My ravings about the sexist glorification of middle-class values personified by Barbie seem stupid and hollow in retrospect, as I devilishly look at the cat and wonder if she still fits in the camper, “Here kitty, kitty…” Ken is not in sight. Off working out on the Nautilus equipment, I suppose. Or studying tax shelters.

  Ah, the long-handled net with which Iowa nearly was cleared of fireflies for a time. “I know they look pretty in the bottle, Sweetheart, but they will die if you keep them there all night.”

  Twister—The Game That Ties You Up in Knots. The ball glove. She was pretty decent at first base. And the violin, Jim Welch’s school orchestra was one of the best parts of her growing years.

  She smiles out at us from a homecoming picture, the night of her first real date. Thousands of rocks and seashells. The little weaving loom on which she fashioned pot holders for entire neighborhoods. My resolve is completely gone as I rescue Snoopy’s pennant from the flapping jaws of a trash bag and set it to one side for keeping.

  We are down to small keepsakes and jewelry. Georgia takes over, not trusting my eye for value, and sorts the precious from the junk, while I shuffle through old algebra papers.

  Night after night, for a year, I sat with her at the kitchen table, failing to convince her of the beauty to be found in quadratic equations and other abstractions. I goaded her with Waller’s Conjecture: “Life is a word problem.” Blank stare.

  Finally, trying to wave hope in the face of defeat, I paraphrased Fran Lebowitz: “In the real world, there is no algebra.”

  She nodded, smiling, and laughed when I admitted that not once, in all my travels, had I ever calculated how long Smith would need to overtake Brown if Brown left three hours before Smith on a slower train. I told her I’d sit in the bar and wait for Smith’s faster train.

  That confirmed what she had heretofore only suspected—algebra is not needed for the abundant life, only fast trains and good whiskey. And, she was right, of course.

  The job is nearly finished. All that remains is a bit of archiving.

  I have strange feelings, though. Have we sorted carefully enough? Probably. Georgia is thorough about that kind of thing. Still, I walk to the road again and look at the pile. The tailings of one quarter of a life stacked up in three dozen bags. It seems like there ought to be more.

  When I hear the garbage truck, I peer out of an upstairs window in her room. The garbage guys have seen lives strung out along road edges before and are not moved. The cruncher on the truck grinds hair curlers and Twister and junk jewelry and broken stuffed animals—and some small part of me.

  She calls from Boston. A Job. Clerking in a store, and she loves it. We are pleased and proud of her. She’s under way.

  The weeks go by. Letters. “I am learning to budget my money. I hate it. I want to be rich.”

  She starts her search for the Dream in a rooming house downtown and finds a Portuguese boyfriend, Tommy, who drums in a rock band and cooks Chinese for her. Ella Fitzgerald sings a free concert in the park. The cop on the beat knows her, and the store is crowded with returning college kids late in a Boston summer. Here in the woods, it’s quieter now.

  Her room has been turned into a den. A computer replaces curling irons and other clutter on her desk. My pinstripes look cheerless in her closet where pink fishnet tops and leather pants once hung.

  Order has replaced life. I sit quietly there and hear the laughter, the crying, the reverberation of a million phone calls. The angst of her early-teen existential crisis lingers, drifting in a small cloud near the high ceiling.

  And you know what I miss? Coming home and hearing her say, “Looking pretty good, Bob! Got your suspenders on?” She could make a whirring sound just like the motor drive on a fine camera.

  Those few moments of irreverent hassle every day are what I miss most of all

  Regrets? A few. I wish I had walked in the woods more with her. I wish I had gotten mad less and laughed longer. Maybe we could have kept the horse another year.

  Victories? A few. She loves the music and the animals. She understands romance and knows how to live a romantic life. She also has the rudimentary skills of a great blackjack dealer. I sent her off with that instead of luggage.

  She has her own agenda. She’s had it for years. It’s not my agenda, not what I would choose, but then she has more courage than I do. She’s out there on her own, cooking on a hot plate in a Boston rooming house, pushing and shoving and working and discovering. My respect for her escalates. She’s going to be all right.

  And I know I’ll sit on the porch as autumn comes this year and other years, in some old sweater with some old dreams, and wonder where she goes and how she goes.

  I hope she goes where there’s laughter and romance, and walks the streets of Bombay and leans out of Paris windows to touch falling January snow and swims in the seas off Bora Bora and makes love in Bangkok in the Montien Hotel.

  I hope she plays blackjack all night in the Barbary Coast and, money ahead, watches the sun come up in Vegas. I hope she rides the big planes out of Africa and Jakarta and feels what it’s like to turn for home just ahead of winter.

  Go well, Rachael Elizabeth, my daughter. And, go knowing that your ball glove hangs on the wall beside mine, that Snoopy’s pennant flies bravely in the old airs of your room, that the violin is safe, and that the little cat now sleeps with us at night but still sits on the porch railing in the late afternoon and looks for you.

  Slow Waltz

  for Georgia Ann

  ______________________________________

  I hear the slap of the clay as you work it, late in the night. And I know you are there in your studio, in bib overalls, an old sweater, and heavy work shoes. Soon your wheel will begin to turn in time with some faint and distant music, and the teapots and lamps and goblets will lift effortlessly from nothing more than moistened earth.

  So the night wind moves the trees outside, and I remember you from a college-town party hall Twenty eight years ago now. Through the smoke and across the tables we were taken with each other from the start. An enchanted evening. Our own private clichÉ. The sort of thing people don’t believe in anymore.

  And then years later I watch you. Coming toward me on your dancer’s walk through the early twilight of high-plateau India. Your sari is silk, and blue above your sandals, your earrings are gold and dangling long. Heads above bodies in white wicker chairs along the veranda of the West End Hotel turn as you pass. Your already dark skin has been made even darker from our days in the Bangalore sun, and there are speculations about you. An Indian man asks, “Is she Moroccan?” “No,” I reply. “She is Iowan.”

  I take another beer from the refrigerator, hoping you stay in your studio a while longer. I want to sit here by myself, listening to the muffled sounds of your hands at work, and think about what it means to be married to you for twenty-five years. In another month, it will have been that long.


  I grew up dreaming of rivers and music and ancient cities and dark-haired women who sang old songs in cafes along the Seine. You were raised to be a wife and a beauty, and you probably would have been satisfied, maybe happier, with a more conventional man. At least it took you a long time to discover what I am up to and to know this race I run, a race between death and discovery. You were plainly discomfited by my lurching from one passion to another, from basketball to music, from the academy to think tanks, from city to city, from the solitude of my study to the dark bars where I am at home with my instruments.

  Early on, with me dancing along early morning beaches and feeding my demons, it was clear that you would need a life of your own if this marriage were to flourish. That was your hardest struggle. It almost broke us apart. But you found something in the clay, something that quietly said, “This is me.”

  And I knew we had won when the woman at the cocktail party gushed: “Oh, you must be the potters husband!” Inside of me, at that moment, I shouted in celebration. Not for myself, or even for us, but for you. Chrysalis had died, you had become. Now the potter’s work and the potter’s trade keep you centered like the clay.

  Love? I cannot analyze that. It is of a piece. Taken apart, it becomes something else, and the gull-like melody that is ours disappears. But even in our difficult times, times when we took suitcases down from closet shelves and stared at each other in anger, love was there.

  Liking is another matter. I can get a hold on that. Most of all, I think, I like you for the good-natured understanding you worked so hard to acquire, even if that understanding sometimes borders on wavering tolerance.

  You understand the need to live with old furniture and rusted cars and only two kitchen cabinets and rough wooden floors and vacuum cleaners that don’t vacuum and clothes washers that operate correctly only when the tab from a beer can is stuck just so behind the dial, so that a little money will be there when I yell over the side of the loft, “Let’s go to Paris!”

  Remember the time I was in graduate school and we had less than $100 in the bank, when I considered trading our doddering Volkswagen for a guitar? You crinkled your face, looked serious, and said, with no hint of the scold, “How will we get to the grocery store?” You said only that. And I was grateful.

  You tolerate one side of the living room stacked with music equipment, while my canoe full of camping gear and two cats tenants the other side, stretching from one corner over to where it inelegantly mingles with an amplifier, several microphone stands, and old suitcases full of cords and other necessary truck. I am working on the gunnels and mumbling about river maps I can’t find and rotten weather and wizards I am going out to search for. Over dinner, you smile softly and ask, “How long do you think the canoe will be in the living room?” The point is made. I will move it out tomorrow. Or maybe the day after.

  You are older now. I can see that if I look hard. But I don’t. I have always seen you in soft focus. I see you standing in the winter on a great stretch of deserted beach in the Netherlands Antilles brushing your long and freshly washed hair in the sea wind from Venezuela. I see you in khaki and sandals at the waterfront cafÉ in French Marigot listening to an island band play a decent imitation of vintage American rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry and ol’ Jerry Lee were part of our courting years, and we grin at the aging lyrics—“Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee….”

  I glance over and see you beside me at blackjack tables around the world. Was it in Vegas where you wore a long gold dress and the fur coat you bought for $50 at a second-hand clothing shop? I think so. We played all night, I remember that, Guilty though you felt about buying anything made of fur, you were the perfect 1930s vamp as I counted cards in my blue suspenders.

  Or I look up ever so slightly from the fingerboard of my jazz guitar and watch as you play the second chorus of “Gone with the Wind,” the one where you do the little two-fingered runs I like so well You are hunched over the keyboard, lightly swaying in pink and white and wearing dark glasses. The sun hammers down, while people dance, by a pool, on the Fourth of July, in Chicago.

  And you are sleepy in bed and lit so gently by early light when I bring you coffee on high, hard winter mornings, while the wood stove putters around trying to douse the cold of the night. I have been up for hours reading and writing. You are no morning person, so talk must come later. Still, I hover around, clumsily, just to look at you and smell the warm, perfumed scent of your body.

  It seems I have spent a lifetime running toward you. I have tossed in my bed in Arabian desert towns and wanted you. I have stared off midnight balconies in deep Asia, watching dhows older than me tug at their moorings and long for the thrash of coastal waters, missing you and wondering about you.

  I am uneasy at being nearly thirty-hours’flying time from you. That’s too far. Then, over the miles and across the oceans, through a thousand airports, I am home, wrinkled and worn, and you are there with a single rose and a small sign that says, “Welcome Home, Captain Cook, Welcome Home.” Late into the night we laugh as I take the gold and silver presents from my battered suitcase.

  I have trusted the years, and I was right to do so. They brought me you. We have watched others’ lives intertwine and then unravel. But we have held together. At least for this life, in this time.

  Yet I am haunted by the feeling that we might not meet again, that this might be just our one moment in the great sweep of things. Once, as I lay on the floor, breathing through oxygen tubes, looking past the somber faces of paramedics, I saw your tears, and I felt a great sadness, worrying not about myself, but rather that I might not find you again in the swirling crowds out there in the centuries to come. It was the loss of you, not life, that I feared.

  For we have come by different ways to this place. I have no feeling that we met before. No dÉjà vu. I don’t think it was you in lavender by the sea as I rode by in A.D. 1206 or beside me in the border wars. Or there in the Gallatins, a hundred years ago, lying with me in the silver-green grass above some mountain town. I can tell by the natural ease with which you wear fine clothes and the way your mouth moves when you speak to waiters in good restaurants. You have come the way of castles and cathedrals, of elegance and empire.

  If you were there in the Gallatins, you were married to a wealthy rancher and lived in a grand house. I was a gambler at the table or the mountain man at the bar or the fiddler in the corner, playing a slow waltz to his memories. The dust from your carriage was of more value than my life in those clays, and it drowned me in longing and sullied my dreams as you passed by in the street. Somehow, though, for this life and this time, we came together. You taught me about caring and softness and intimacy. The task before me was to teach you about music. And dreams. And how to savor the smell of ancient cities and the sound of cards whispering across green felt. This I have done.

  So I rest secure knowing that you have learned and that, in another time, you might recognize me coming across the street of some gamblers town, in high brown boots with an old fiddle case over my shoulder, as your carriage moves by in the dust. And perhaps you will smile and nod and, for a strange and flickering moment, you will remember how the waves of January wash the sea wall at Marigot

  Incident at

  Sweet’s Marsh

  ______________________________________

  I can get excited about river otters. They not only look neat, they also are among those of God’s creatures who take play seriously. If they were human, they’d probably live in California, drive Porsches, and have something to do with the entertainment business.

  So it was that my heart fairly leapt when I read the announcement in The Des Moines Sunday Register. It said that twenty river otters would be released the following Wednesday at Sweet’s Marsh, near Tripoli. I organized my week around that event, packed a sandwich and my cameras, and left for Tripoli early on a bright March morning.

  I figured the crowd at the release would be small—a few people from the Iowa Departmen
t of Natural Resources with the animals and maybe a half-dozen other grizzled outdoor types. After all, I spend days along the rivers of Iowa without seeing anyone other than profiles in cars going over bridges.

  When I pulled into the access to Sweet’s Marsh, a man wearing a camouflage shirt said I should continue straight ahead for parking instructions. I always listen to men wearing camouflage shirts, no matter what they are telling me, so I continued on and parked behind eight other cars on the shoulder of the road. No one was there to provide parking instructions, so, as typical lowans, we just worked it out for ourselves.

  It was at this point I began to experience a slight twitching in my stomach, and it had nothing to do with the coffee in my thermos. You see, I never go to any place where parking instructions are required. That stems from multiple traumatic experiences I had as a child when Jaycees wearing pith helmets and waving canes used to direct traffic at the county fair. I began to associate parking instructions with crowds and noise and other assaults on my tender sensibilities.

  By 9 A.M., approximately sixty people had gathered and were surrounding two small cages containing a few otters for public display. People stood around commenting about the animals’ inherent cuteness and firing away with point-and-shoot cameras.

  “Well, this isn’t too bad,” I thought. Then I saw the state trooper. I also never go to events where state troopers are required. Not because I don’t like state troopers, understand. My experiences with them have been distant, but pleasant. It’s just that the presence of a trooper meant that crowd control of a somewhat higher order might be required.

  I moved off to one side, poured a little coffee into my cup, and considered it all Meanwhile, the DNR folks were busy stringing rope barricades along the south side of the inlet where the otters would be released. I started adding it up: parking instructions plus state trooper plus rope barricades equals uh oh.