“Hmmm? ”
“About your past.”
“Yeah? ”
“You weren’t a hooker, were you? ”
“Asshole.” I sighed with contentment and closed my eyes.
Worried as I was about Orson and the three missing children, I didn’t
expect to sleep well, but I slept the dreamless sleep of a clueless
Neanderthal.
When I woke five hours later, Sasha wasn’t in bed. I dressed and went
looking for her.
In the kitchen, a note was fixed with a magnet to the door of the
refrigerator, Out on business. Back soon. For God’s sake, don’t eat
those cheese enchiladas for breakfast. Have bran flakes. Moe.
While the leftover cheese enchiladas were heating in the oven, I went
into the dining room, which is now Sasha’s music room, since we eat all
our meals at the kitchen table. We have moved the dining table, chairs,
and other furniture into the garage so the dining room can accommodate
her electronic keyboard, synthesizer, sax stand with saxophone,
clarinet, flute, two guitars (one electric, one acoustic), cello and
cellist’s stool, music stands, and composition table.
Similarly, we converted the downstairs study into her workout room. An
exercise bicycle, rowing machine, and rack of hand weights ring the
room, with plush exercise mats in the center. She is deep into
homeopathic medicine, consequently, the bookshelves are filled with
neatly ordered bottles of vitamins, minerals, herbs plus, for all I know,
powdered wing of bat, eye-of-toad ointment, and iguana-liver marmalade.
Her extensive book collection lined the living room at her former place.
Here it is shelved and stacked all over the house.
She is a woman of many passions, cooking, music, exercise, books, and
me. Those are the ones I know about. I would never ask her to rank her
passions in order of importance. Not because I’m afraid I’d come in
fifth of the major five. I’m happy to be fifth, to have any ranking at
all.
I circled the dining room, touching her guitars and cello, finally
picking up her sax and blowing a few bars of “Quarter Till Three, ” the
old Gary U. S. Bonds hit. Sasha was teaching me to play. I wouldn’t
claim that I f [ wailed, but I wasn’t bad.
In truth, I didn’t pick up the sax to practice. You might find this
romantic or disgusting, depending on your point of view, but I picked up
the sax because I wanted to put my mouth where her mouth had been.
I’m either Romeo or Hannibal Lecter. Your call.
For breakfast I ate three plump cheese enchiladas with a third of a pint
of fresh salsa and washed everything down with an ice-cold Pepsi.
If I live long enough for my metabolism to turn against me, I might one
day regret never having learned to eat for any reason but the sheer fun
of it.
Currently, however, I am at that blissful age when no indulgence can
alter my thirty-inch waistline.
In the upstairs guest bedroom that served as my study, I sat at my desk
in candlelight and spent a couple of minutes looking at a pair of framed
photographs of my mom and dad. Her face was full of kindness and
intelligence. His face was full of kindness and wisdom.
I have rarely seen my own face in full light. The few times I’ve stood
in a bright place and confronted a mirror, I’ve not seen anything in my
face that I can understand. This disturbs me. How can my parents’ images
shine with such virtues and mine be enigmatic?
Did their mirrors show them mysteries?
I think not.
Well, I take solace from the realization that Sasha loves me perhaps as
much as she loves cooking, perhaps even as much as she loves a good
aerobic workout. I wouldn’t risk suggesting that she values me as much
as she does books and music. Though I hope.
In my study, among hundreds of volumes of poetry and reference books my
own and my father’s collections combined is a thick Latin dictionary.
I looked up the word for beer.
Bobby had said, Carpe cerevisi. Seize the beer. Cerevisi appeared to be
correct.
We had been friends for so long that I knew Bobby had never sat through