Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  Orville began each day by checking in on Bill and ended each night with him, too. Babette would sit on the other side of Bill’s bed as Orville examined him. He came so early in the morning and so late at night that often Babette was in her flannel nightgown and her ram’s horns of curlers.

  Over the years, he had seen a few patients who had come up out of coma, and he had learned that sometimes they could dimly hear and sense what was going on around them. He was careful what he said in Bill’s presence and asked others to be careful too. Babette, with Orville’s encouragement, would talk to Bill, tell him the news, the weather, the gossip, and replay the status of the grudges. Bill himself had once told him that coma is a balance of the soul between the living and the dead, a kind of tug-of-war between powerful adversaries so equally matched that the little flag tied to the midpoint of the rope trembles constantly with the effort, even if it does not perceptibly move. Those of us who are braced solidly in life can be of great help, for the dying sometimes sense that we are reaching out, pulling hard, back. The rope, stretched taut between life and death, is not like other ropes—there’s always room on it for more hands. For Bill there were hands aplenty. Four generations of Columbians came by.

  Orville repeatedly did a checklist of his treatment of Bill, always coming to the dead end of medical knowledge. He had fitted his mentor into the tight boxes of diagnosis (occlusion of the middle cerebral artery resulting in contralateral hemiplegia, hemianaesthesia, and homonymous hemianopsia), of treatment (none, really), and prognosis (despite Bill’s being left-handed and thus having more bilateralization of brain function, poor). One side of Bill’s face and one side of his body were paralyzed. Every time Orville saw Bill’s face he could not help but see the half-fallen face of his mother.

  The end of Bill’s first week back, the 27th of August, would be the day that Orville fulfilled his mother’s will and the day that he had arranged to fly to Rome. As it approached, he realized that there was no way he was going to leave Bill in such dire shape.

  On the 26th he called Celestina at her apartment in Rome. No answer and no answering machine. He tried several times, all day long, into her night. Nothing. So he sent a telegram.

  MY FRIEND DR. STARBUCK IN COMA

  CANNOT LEAVE HIM YET

  CALL ME ALL MY LOVE ORVILLE

  A few hours later she called, waking him. It was two in the morning on August 27th.

  “Allora, you are not coming?”

  Orville heard the tension in her voice. She seemed on the edge of significant anger. “I am coming, baby, but I can’t leave yet.”

  “This Dr. Starbuck, he is your guru?”

  He was surprised at the word, but then not, and said, “Yes.” He explained what had happened.

  “Ah . . . Sì, sì. I get it.” She said this in a somber, thoughtful tone.

  Most of the time as they were falling in love, Celestina had been lighthearted, funny, and outrageous. But once in a while a dead serious look would come over her face, and they would have remarkable, revealing conversations about things he’d come to imagine as impenetrable—life, death, love, the soul, transformation, forgiveness, compassion, loving-kindness. By that time he’d mostly given up on these themes. Her Buddhism had given him a whole new way of understanding them, and he loved her for this.

  Now as she went on, her tone was steady and sure, like the day on Lago d’Orta. Hearing her this way again now made him yearn to be with her. She has changed, he thought, she’s onto something. There’s a whole world of possibility now with her.

  “Transizione dell’anima,” she said, somberly. “The transit of the soul.” A sigh. “I regret to say, caro, it is for you another gift.”

  “I think so, babe, yes,” he said, smiling. How he had missed this, her!

  “And have you seen the first gift, your mother flying around?”

  He realized that he had not seen Selma airborne since the night of his surprise birthday party, the night Miranda and Cray had come back. She’d flown a lot when they’d been away, but not since they’d been back. Like Selma, he was superstitious, and now asked himself: Is there a link? The dead don’t fly in the face of love?

  “No,” he said, hiding these thoughts from her. “Not since my real birthday.”

  “Ah. Then it is now safe to leave.”

  “Yes.”

  “So then, caro, when?”

  “I’m not sure, sweetheart. With Bill it’s day by day.”

  “Okay. Eccolo. We stay in the most intimate touch. Stay in the ‘now.’ If we touch the ground of the present moment, we touch the peace and joy. Full of peace and joy, when we do come together toe and toe again we will see each other as if for the first time, and the very sensuality will blossom off the charts. Conclusione? Uno: stay in the present. Due: we talk every day, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And I will wait for you.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “Hello? Hello?” He was afraid that she would turn back into her old self, turn flighty, and slip away.

  “Sì, sì, I was just thinking.”

  “What?”

  “How you and I, such passionate lovers, are sciocco.”

  “Sciocco?”

  “Silly. Comico. Like everybody.” She seemed sad. “We are all ridiculous, but created by God.”

  “God?”

  “Who else?”

  “Not the Buddha?”

  “The Jesus and the Buddha, sì, sì. I have read recently I Vangeli Gnostici—The Gnostic Gospels. From age sixteen to thirty, Jesus travels in India and walks with the disciples of the Buddha. It is all the Divinity, so why split the hairs?” She yawned. “I have not had my espresso. I called you at once. So now I go to work.”

  “Where?”

  “Chase Manhattan. Teaching the greedy to let go. Today I teach the story of the Buddha and his monks meeting a cow farmer. The cow farmer is frantic. He says, ‘I lost my cows! They are valuable and they are gone! I have to find my precious cows—have you seen them?’ The Buddha says, ‘No, we have not seen your cows.’ The farmer runs off, crazy. The Buddha turns to his monks and says, ‘Aren’t you glad you don’t have cows?’”

  Orville laughed with her. “It’s a wonderful story, baby.”

  “I love when you call me ‘baby.’ Allora, dear heart, this year has brought us closer. We have each changed in the same way, do you feel it?”

  “I do, yeah.”

  “It will be the dynamite. But be aware, Orvillo, we cannot go back.”

  “What do you mean?” He felt himself tense up, on guard.

  “We can’t go back to what we had, to what was. We have to find out what is.”

  “Hold it. You always said that what was, is, and what is, will be—”

  “—will be, sì, sì. But with us it has to be new, or nothing.”

  “I can’t take another ‘nothing’! What do you think? You think it’ll work?”

  “With what we had—and with no more worry about money? Of course, caro, of course. Certo! Ciao, ciao!”

  “Ciao.” As he hung up, he felt a hit of apprehension. Something rankled. And why at the end had she again brought up money? But as he thought about it, he realized how right she was. They couldn’t go back. It had to be new. Scary, but true.

  Later that day Orville fulfilled the terms of his mother’s will and was given something shy of a million dollars and the deed to his mother’s house and the title to the Chrysler and the trunk space. He felt a flicker of relief that money would no longer be an issue for him, but only a flicker. He was surprised at how little it seemed to matter.

  “Now you have to make out a will,” Penny said that afternoon.

  He realized that he was now the guy with the cows.

  “Fine,” he
answered. “I’ll pull a Selma. Leave it all to you if and only if you shave your head and wear sackcloth continually for a year and thirteen days. Or to Milt if he pierces his ears and nose and penis and attends the Baptist Church religiously for the same 378 days. Deal?”

  “Sadist.”

  “Exactly,” he said, feeling afresh the enormity of what his mother had done. From the grave, to actually do that to someone? To not let go? What gall, to treat someone you say you love like that. He felt a surge of anger and looked up, hoping to see her, to yell at her or try somehow to bring her down—to do something. No luck.

  He phoned Celestina, venting his spite.

  “Momento,” she said, and the phone flew down, clonkk. He waited. She came back and read him a verse from something called The Upakkilesa Sutra.

  In this world

  Hate has never yet dispelled hate.

  Only love dispels hate.

  This is the law,

  Ancient and inexhaustible.

  “I agree,” he said, “but I’m not there.”

  “Not even in being the good doctor to your Columbians?”

  He was taken aback. At first he had resented the Columbians, had contempt for them. Now he realized that somewhere in the arc of the year things had changed. Now, mostly, he didn’t.

  “Hello?” She was calling into the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I’m still living with a lot of bitterness inside. I’m no saint. You know that.”

  “None of us down here are saints.”

  “‘Down here’? You mean ‘up there’ there are?”

  “Of course. But let me be essenziale, simple, and Christian—in your case, ‘do unto others as has not been done unto you by your mother’—this is the very Selma gift!”

  The money part of his will turned out to be simple: half to Amy, half to Cray.

  The house and car were harder. He toyed with the idea of giving both to Miranda but knew she wouldn’t take them. He thought of donating the house to Columbia for some kind of institution, say a Sanctuary for Songless Lovebirds or a state-of-the-art Plotkin Whorehouse or a Home for Abnormal Idealists. Or, all in a single breakage-proof structure built like a nuclear bomb–proof bunker, a combination Home for Songless Idealists and Plotkin Whorehouse for Abnormal Lovebirds.

  He asked Milt to put the house on the market, take his commission, and wire him the cash.

  And the Chrysler? He decided to give it to Amy. He would have it stored and serviced until she was able to drive in five years. If the windows were tightly closed, it might even still smell of Selma, which she would like.

  The trunk space he kept for himself.

  · 31 ·

  About a month later, at the end of September, Orville sat in the kitchen facing the strangely early fall. High above Columbia, there had been a breakage in the weather pattern. Up north, something had fractured. A slippage of frigid air down from Hudson Bay brought a premature cold snap. Chlorophyll drained from the veins of the leaves, revealing their true colors—scarlet, yellow, gold, purple, brown. The joints where the stems met the twigs weakened, trapped by the fatal genetics of autumn. The leaves needed only a rainy wind to let go and carry them fluttering down.

  A mass of warm spongy air sailed innocently up from the Gulf of Mexico. Encountering the higher cold, the wet sponge was wrung out and its contents fell on Columbia, bringing two days of snippity wind and insistent rain, ripping the stems from the twigs, laying a rainbow of dead leaves all over the backyard.

  Orville sat with the bird at the kitchen table of what was now his house, staring out the window at the flurried descent of the leaves. His big old friends the beech, the maple, and the larch were letting go in true copper and scarlet and needles of gold. He was stalling, surprised to find himself reluctant to go spend Saturday afternoon with Miranda and Cray and Amy out at Miranda’s house. He felt torn apart—lonely, but being with them might make him feel more lonely. Loneliness when you’re alone is hard, but loneliness when you’re with people you love is hell. The problem, he realized, was that with the coming of fall, with the real start of the year, based on the harvest not on the calendar, everyone but him had started a new cycle.

  Cray and Amy were back at school, so he didn’t see them nearly as much. Miranda was diligently finishing up the final details of her thesis, “The Columbian Spirit: Breakage and Resilience.” Mrs. Tarr was ecstatic about it and had shown it to a few of her antiquer friends who “loved it!” and passed it on to a New York agent who had unwittingly bought a grand house in the bad part of town and who said it had “great commercial potential—it’s so funny, this place!—there’s already a buzz!” The agent wanted her to revise it with an eye for publication, emphasizing the irony, the humor. Miranda was scared, excited, and hard at work. She had a chance to connect her work to the larger world—and she could use the cash. A big chance, yes. He had not seen much of her. When he did, it was hard to get a fix on her. She seemed preoccupied with her own future—her writing, Cray. He felt even more adrift among the Columbians.

  They’ve all got clear purposes, he said to himself, staring at the captive bird. They’re gaining substance, stepping out briskly upon the autumn ground on their way to appointments, someplace else. Me, I’ve lost substance, purpose. Columbians act as if I’ve already left, forgotten but not gone. I’m floating—much like Selma!—apart and above the town, unloved and dead.

  But, he countered to himself, he was surely loved and alive with Celestina. The two of them had kept in touch pretty well, speaking to each other nearly every day. The amazing thing, to him, was how rich and expansive their conversations were, full of humor, allure, sensuality and the promise of great sex, mixed with the Celestina Polo School of Buddhism, which now seemed more relevant to his pain. It was an alternative view that made sense.

  On the phone with her everything was heightened for him, as if without eye contact or the chance to lay hands on her—on her lips, her eyelashes, her breasts, her thighs, and her toes—it was all so much easier. Looking straight into a woman’s eyes and at the same time dealing with his and her feelings had never been easy. But he had come to understand over his years with women—his first love Laurice, Lily, Celestina, Miranda—that not looking into their eyes was, for women, much harder. Eye contact was a turn-on for them. Somehow his connection with Celestina had deepened, no question. Would it hold up eye to eye? He’d soon see.

  Orville got up from the kitchen table and put Starlight back in its cage. He wiped the dollop of lovebird poop off his shoulder and went out the front door.

  “Fake! Fake!” A cry came from across the square. Through the leafless trees Orville saw Henry Schooner on his front lawn playing soccer with Maxie. Orville headed over.

  Henry had a cigar between his teeth and a beer can in his hand. He suspended the beer from the top rim, between thumb and index finger, with surprising delicacy. Here’s a man, Orville thought, who really knows how to hold a can of beer. He had learned something in the navy after all. My tax dollars at work.

  Henry’s campaign was sailing along. With the Republican incumbent deciding not to run, with the district being overwhelmingly conservative Republican and riding along in the “Morning in America” Reagan theme park, and with a hapless Columbian novelist named Leston Moore as the Democratic nominee—Leston’s main support was from the CAVE people of the town, and his campaign slogan was the inane LES IS MORE—Schooner looked like a shoo-in. The Honorable Henry Schooner, my representative in Congress? Unreal.

  Henry didn’t seem to notice Orville approaching. Unusual, that, Orville thought. He stepped behind a tree, peeked, and listened.

  “Damnit! I’m tryin’ to teach you to fake. You know what a fake is, doncha?”

  “Nope,” Maxie said, head down. He seemed cowed, beaten down.

  “It’s when you act like you’re goin’ one way and you go
the other way. You fool ’em. A fake is when you fool ’em, fool ’em all, and then you go by ’em and score! C’mon. Try again to stop me. Be tough, be tough.” Henry dribbled the ball toward the kid, juked one way, the kid went for it, and Henry easily jived the other way and booted the ball past him into the goal. “Damnit, Maxie, you went for it too easy. Don’t lemmie fool ya. Focus on what the other guy’s tryin’ to do to you. Get into his head. Be tough be sharp, be tough be sharp. Mentally tough, physically tough. Focus!” He relit his cigar. “This time you try fakin’ me out. Be tough be tough!”

  Maxie got the ball out of the goal and they reversed positions. Maxie started coming at Henry. Henry seemed to relax, to move slowly to let the boy beat him and win. Maxie made a clumsy, halfhearted attempt at a fake, and Henry couldn’t help but take the ball away from him.

  “Damnit, Maxie, you weren’t tryin’.”

  “Was, too.”

  “That was a try?” The boy nodded. “Bullshit. I told you a hundred times I don’t care if you succeed as long as you give it your best shot. And you didn’t and it”—he seemed to try to control himself but could not—“it pisses me off!”

  “I did.”

  “That’s your best shot? That little girl bullshit move?” Another sullen nod. “If that’s true, we got ourselves a big problem.” Maxie said nothing. “You’re not focusing, son, not really focusing on faking. And not being aggressive. Life’s about focusing, faking, and being aggressive, okay?”

  “Can I go in now? I’m cold.”

  Henry stared bullets at him. He seemed on the verge of exploding. Even from a distance, Orville could feel the ice in that stare. It was a glimpse of Schooner he hadn’t had over the course of the year, but it was familiar because it was the Schooner he’d known before.