Kingdom of the Young

by Edie Meidav

  Once the fortunetelling session was over, they stopped by his mother’s who reminded her of the sick granddaughter and how the illness had worsened after which her gypsy suggested they go get coffee in the square where she ran into a friend from school named Lincoln and his new French girlfriend Nathalie. Because they invited her with them to the beach somewhere for a day or two, she made apologies to her gypsy because she needed to think and gathered her backpack from the hostel’s locker since despite his singing en-treaties she had not fully decided to go on living with him. And so she went with Lincoln and Nathalie to stay in their tent on a beach and at night shifted her attention from the massive caterpillar heave of their sleeping bag or how unequal the two of them were, Lincoln less besotted with Nathalie while surely that French girl deserved better. Why had they asked her along after all? The triangle confused since by day she loved Nathalie’s broad-cheeked wistful charm, so bruised and Gallic, all of them rumpled and the two girls buying eternal friendship bracelets from someone on the beach but after a couple of days of sandy headstands, fish dinners and talks containing the magic of the future in which they would never again meet, she said goodbye and headed back, feeling herself wise and weary on the train to Granada. In the main café in town she ran into her gypsy, handsome and magically wearing a green bright button-down shirt she thought she had lost in her hostel. Maybe she had left it at the cave? All he kept saying with a kind of force was: Did you not bring me anything from your trip? How could you not bring me anything? Gone were the songs and wobble. In that second she may have understood him saying that her main failure was that she had not yet given his mother money for the sick grandkid and that for him she may have been something just a bit more or less than a walking dollar sign. Whatever he had professed before, during or after lay intimately close to a performance of feeling. I cannot let you go-o-o. She had windmilled into his story in which feeling was king. Would it matter that she had been set in his midst? After her, would there not be other travelers, toting their guitars, waists, hunger? After he left, she stayed in the café, mournful. A drummer she had seen in a circle, a drummer from Sierra Leone named Prince, came up to ask why so sad? And she told him and watched his moonlit drum circle that night before going to stay on his floor where she pretended to sleep when he began to touch her bent elbow after which she became the one living with him, eating peanut sauce with rice next to the hands of all his friends also dipping into one bowl. The drummer played bass guitar, a simple unskilled stuttered reggae one-two, but really loved drumming more and said he wanted to marry her which seemed a plausible version until the day she took him to the doctor for his cough and there in the waiting room he told her that he always thought the children of a blonde woman and a black man were the most beautiful so that she saw he lived in a saga that had little to do with her and so returned to Connecticut where at the post office she kept getting letters saying I want to come, I really want to marry you, but did not keep up correspondence because too easily she recognized the particular American fairytale the drummer wanted to live. And when years later her children called to her from downstairs, in another story she probably failed to recognize, a heated moment of dissatisfaction, she came across these yearning letters nestled into the blue plush case with the guitar long since broken, the blue still so untouched and bright, something you might pet to make the fur angle to catch the light, while she considered what yarn she might be able to spin for these children about the great and almighty Alhambra or the song of the gypsies but then realized, too, she had never once seen the Alhambra from the inside and anyway would whatever tale she might summon ever count as anyone’s idea of a gift?

  THE KING OF BUBBLES

  Overheating in the tub next to the pool, birthday next day, a face notches less recognizable each morning. Meeting someone these days means whoever you say you once were matters less. Once you get older it becomes easier to say who you are not, a long scroll to be written there, longer than your life actually lived. So many paths turned away from: never a king of industry, for one, that path abandoned before anyone finished saying Constantinople, but who even said Constantinople anymore anyway? Once you may have been a history major, breathing the dust of old editions while full-tilt windmilling at the future. Now you have become a service-minded figure near retirement going around enlightening the masses. So some efforts fizzled, could have happened to anyone. These days, you wave your card, a flag of defeat. Educational consultant, you being an older male consulting re: what again? These days, you flash your hanging badge like you too could qualify for an IEP write-up, almost like cute smiley or slack-jawed special-ed kids with their notes from home dangling on their chests. Please be sure Muffy wears mittens when the thermometer drops below twenty because she has Raynaud’s syndrome. Or: Don’t let Ricardo stare too long at screens because of his Irlen syndrome. While your syndrome might be despair or call it a blood-sugar lull circa eleven most mornings and later again at four and most Sunday afternoons once tasks are done. Real task, of course, is to stitch together a life above despair, like those stakes in a hammock you tried putting up each summer for your sons, a device damned from the get-go. Once the hammock snapped on their mitts and you were blamed, why not, you were capable of absorbing all, you the half-brawny man polite and absorbent, standing ready. As a kid, the best report cards called you polite, but what good do manners do anymore? You pushed your politeness into consultancy to warm your wallet while you consulted about what again? Too much of your professional advice begins with the phrase what I have seen is that. A gentle drumroll of wisdom wrested from syncopated years. One of your sons, the angry eldest, took the hammock off your hands, shepherding it to the dump while the other sons send seasonal gifts: a massaging armchair, a car-seat back support, a panic button, gifts meant to shore up and not shred old dad, but do they think you’re some lonely stiff to be pitied? All three sons busy swaggering toward the unfinished freeway of their future while you sit on a throne of beads with a design ripped off from a porn store, a gift from the least estranged, the savvy middle son who never brags of a great childhood, none of them do, but why care when yours also lacked note, singular trauma or exaltation, obvious war scars? Anomie and distance also pock a person! And if you have ended up at a career pinnacle, teaching people how to serve the children of the future, the truth is you probably surrendered long ago, the first time you saw tests fail the brightly underserved. Probably or never, all the above, none.

  Sink a little lower in the hot tub. This new year includes a massive self-improvement kick because why not link with the lemmings? Resolve to resolve by joining this mildewed dank warren of a health club where your point on the spectrum of age clarifies itself within the family of man, flapping paps in the locker room, all the hearty male enfolding of good cheer, no towel slaps, only old men folding towels to place under veinous feet. Never before have you seen men place towels under their feet anywhere but within these labyrinthine halls, so might it be true these men know something about staph and habits of self-preservation which fail you? As the gym had grown, it had accommodated, just like you and the towel-footed, this gym with vascular corridors that keep dropping another room at the end of another artery. Traversing the place is to navigate a maze of aspiration, wafting limey cologne and acid sweat, one of the scents more regretful, but which?

  Much better to be in this swampy gym tub than in the huge, hygienic and better-equipped place in town filled with fledglings, in which, on each of the few times you entered, you were marked not within the family of man but rather with perma-age, all the rings on a petrified tree. Many of those gym’s kids may have been students for whom you once sacrificed, but what again had been your altar, what had you risked, what had been the terms of sacrifice and had you ever really agreed at the outset? Or what did it mean anyway, to make someone’s education better? Who needed life lessons more, slumpers in the classrooms or you, and do you anyway believe in measuring anyone’s schooling? Does it matter who sits in which confi
guration or whether students are taught toward the test, mainstreamed or segregated? What anyway does not come down to a fight against isolation?

  The grown children align with their mother. That is their truth, as one said, and they hold that waterproof truth tight against everything and you, especially since last year when papers finally went through, papers that could have gone through twenty years ago at your first dalliance. Here you are lacking both a note from home or much of any home at all, taking as evidence the recently rented railroad apartment, fairly unfurnished, in which you sleep, not having reached the ramen and peanut-butter-with-a-spoon phase if having already skidded into the open-newspaper-and-older-trash stage, your own metric on no assessment scale yet devised.

  Some guy named Karl, beyond everyone else’s yardsticks, goes around town in an admirably huge tent-like camel jacket. How does he keep it all together? That jacket so unstained? Wearing pink watershoes, he looks at no one over his immaculately tended handle-bar moustache while wielding before him paperbacks of unusual provenance, a field map to the stars or the Dordogne, once The Magic Mountain, the book always changing, its surprise consistent as the frequency with which you find the guy sideways, lying on a carpet in a local drugstore or bookstore, taking upon himself a cleaning task involving the dismantling of some aspect of the store. And why not? Managers let him be because Karl is a good guy, they say, and yours is a progressive town, allowing all comers and takers if mostly the latter. Perhaps you might be considered a taker and Karl is a free-for-all giver. A clerk will say: Oh yes, there goes Karl cleaning my missed spot! After which the clerk goes on to mourn what this town used to be back when people cared more for their neighbors.

  Karl knows something. How is it that from the hot tub at four on a Wednesday you find yourself in full-on Karl envy? The guy has his place. Touchpoints. Maybe the thing is to find places to set down, good as a spaceship determining to teeter on one particular mountain rim. Just today, on the way to the gym, there Karl had been, striding purposeful down the street past the pizza place, holding in one hand a rotted grapefruit and in the other a book with a hot pink cover, both with such a firm grasp: to speak your job’s jargon, his hands are permanently tasked.

  Just then it comes over you to notice the girl across the tub, though usually you might not, except that is one fulsome lie, you still always notice girls, inappropriately, except or especially during a dalliance, your noticing with its own life, a rising and falling torqued empire noted in no history book. Could you be forgiven? To move toward life: When could someone have declared that wrong? What empires would have never risen had emperors quashed all life urge? While your gift as a consultant lay in how readily you noted what others could not. People on the job used to call you Bug, as in Bug who noticed everything, this their praise for your ability to analyze. To have eyes only for one? How could noticing many have become a crime?

  But how confusingly this hot tub girl stares back. Not like you are deformed. On a spectrum, you are no Toulouse-Lautrec or whoever that runty painter with the stubby legs and hypertrophied manhood was, you being more the opposite, but there you have two hazel eyes unblinking at you. Gleaming beautiful eyes and perhaps the sneer the young use as a talisman to ward off the old and vampiric. She looks away because it must be too hard to take you in. Fine and well though fuck her rises as well, plums pushed forward in her plum bathing suit, so why bother staring when you are not such a terrible specimen and not just because you send year-end contributions for heifers or leave ramen and peanut butter in brown bags for the Scouts’ hunger drive. Some have said you are not exactly an irritant. Easy on the eyes, your last dalliance commented, hair less black but so what, you aren’t yet at the hair-dye or folded-towel-under-feet stage, so what could be so disconcerting to Miss Plum, probably in her midtwenties, few disappointments known, Miss Hazel Plum who must have had her share of swimming lessons, being daddy’s favorite, probably a cheerleader, skin that smooth brown suggesting more nurture than nature, tanning salons, G-string perfection.

  A small boil starting in the chest and not from the hot tub. Damn if you are not ready to get out if not ready for her to see too much, even if you are no Toulouse-Lautrec but the opposite, you with long legs, good at least one part of you stayed semivaliant against gravity, but foolish to give in when you have fought bigger fights and won.

  Believing you know others’ thoughts happens to be your occupational hazard. As a young man, before the wife and joyless lawyer paraded in with their papers, there had been that much older lover with her infirmities of the flesh you could not help seeing as a betrayal, a moral sloth and admission of chaos, a hazed attention to which you would never succumb. Freckled arms—not you! Though was it the case that this Plum with her stare might be mocking you as if slothful, today, on your birthday? Clearly she too could be, taken to pieces. This hot tub only big enough for one of us. Thought-telegraphing her way: One day, Plumette, the sun will set on your empire. You too will be old. Try looking elsewhere but this Plum but her eyes stay too bright. Behind in the big pool, ten dancing geriatric Esther Williams types in the big pool aim for arabesques, older women treating the pool as if it were a kiddie amusement park like the kind to which you used to take the sons, women being commanded by a young instructor marching poolside, exhorting them to wield odd foam swords. These Esther Williams people had gotten some memo you had not. Time to learn the moves, ladies. Swish swish wield, slide pump reach. A few smiling men among the Esthers. Declawed, denutted. Reach a particular birthday and suddenly everyone learns old-people pool moves? Not you. That tree of knowledge you could defy. Better to stay in blissful ignorance, though this gym has a way of seeming like old-people purgatory in which there is no way to avoid knowledge. Swish swish reach. Higher! The instructor shouting: Give me some life, people! What you know to do in a pool is crawl which is how it will stay. The crawl, if barely. Not even a flip at the end of a lap. Just touch the edge, turn, perform another lap with, okay, sometimes an affirmation in your head. What is so wrong with that? You listen to the audio in the car. I am strong, then crawl along, Strong! Strong! a highly peaceful repetition to consider while swimming. Afterward you feel yourself a better man. If someone tested your immune system, you would be found younger, the way they found that people at a reunion hear gossip and music from their youthful days and suddenly their immune system strengthens. So what do these types find in their old-people aqua-dance? Community? Their energetic instructor prancing poolside, maximus bared to indoor elements and older gazes, exhorting them: Greater height, friends! Shouting over a soundtrack with a repetitive chorus: Love shack, baby, love shack.

  Across the far end of the pool, obeying the song’s injunction, a tall boy nuzzles his ginger-haired companion, actually sliding under her hair so as to better kiss the back of her neck, both filled with that unblemished self-regarding performance of youth, deep in the morning-after prize that will continue for a few months until it fades, you want to tell them: Love shack, baby, sure, enjoy your little moment.

  Probably these two are also students for whose education you had sacrificed hours on a tired rear, hours spent sitting which turns out steals minutes from your ischemic health. For you there will be no prizes, just decency its own reward, though it remains unclear under which banner decency parades. Plum with her short gamine hair has actually gone so far as to turn the back of her neck to you, and what film does the line come from, j’ai toujours aimais ta nuque, and if you only took more omegas or vanquished the right computer games, your memory would give you back the full-color romance of seeing that film with the wife in your early years. Here you have Plum turning her nuque like she really cannot stand one more moment looking at you, the geezer, and so what if you too could nuzzle such a neck, surely that nuque much nuzzled, by whom though, a young pimply lothario or a big floppy sugar daddy, or maybe she was into women like your wife says she maybe now is. Comment allez-vous? What is Plum doing now? A subtle ballet move, another fool mistaking the future as a l
adder, one big set of rungs for latitudinal acts of self-improvement.