Incitements

She had taught so long, had read hundreds of stories, so many catastrophes interrupted by the wake-up alarm, dozens of solitary car rides en route to the true encounter. Inter-terrestrial vagabondage and “Tell me the truth or I’ll shoot.” Suicides contemplated, averted, achieved. Vacationing women of a certain age undressed by their Greek fisherman lovers.

It was wearying to enter the imaginations of young or not-so-young writers who, if they had read anything, mimicked the flamboyant moments, nothing but event, the louder or darker or more unlikely the better. “Please,” she exhorted, spitting into the wind. “Haven’t we all agreed that a butterfly’s death affects the universe? Leave action alone, at least for now. Try for gesture. Make tiny marks, see how they reverberate. Tik Tok moments minus the laughs. Nearly invisible movements. Incitements.” e.g,

She made him laugh: “I used to live on the corner of Graustark and Barkdull. Doesn’t that sound like a dogfight?” At that particular moment in his life, anyone who fomented a smile deserved a second look.

*

When he tossed French fries in the basket he threw them so high it looked like a bird could dive down and catch one in its beak. When she was pregnant she lived on fries – fries and soft-serve – and thought about him, the way the muscles in his arms tightened when he bent his wrist and flipped a couple of dozen at a time.

*

Not asking, not telling. He could tell, though, if only to himself, by the way that newbie folded back his uniform sleeves, as carefully as he might make a bed or soothe somebody’s forehead, somebody sick. Maybe he wasn’t naturally gentle but constraint is a sheepdog, it keeps you in line. Infinite care, slowly, lovingly, every wrinkle smoothed before he lifted his eyes. Those sleeves, so faultless and even, were an incitement. He could hardly bear it.

*

The lawyers, or maybe they were paralegals, pushing their way into the courtroom arms laden with pale cardboard folders, the old-fashioned kind, looked so officious, so damn purposeful. One, in a man-tailored suit, dark dead navy, was gorgeous, hair pulled back tight to prevent speculation, but she had terrible legs and those boxy shoes didn’t help any. They clattered so hard she sounded a whole foot bigger than she was.

*

The Cuban Chevy driver – car slick dark green above, lemon below – dropped us outside the village. We left our luggage in the trunk. Hairsbreath hesitation, probably insulting. “We’re not allowed to carry passengers. Meet me at the fountain.” We walked slowly and wondered if we’d see our suitcases again.

*

The cancer check-in desks are 6 B through F. There is no A. What does that mean, it’s too late for beginnings? It’s hard to meet anyone’s eyes. Either a forthright look is too intrusive, too curious, or possibly people are undergoing some vague sense of shame: I have failed at health; others have done better. A few arrive in wheelchairs and there are always gauze nose-and-mouth masks, but most are indistinguishable from you, me or the clerks behind the desks, so briskly indifferent they could be selling running shoes or rain gear. Almost everyone is accompanied but the accompaniers don’t engage with strangers either because they are occupied by the task of looking casual-while-vigilant. They bend over very frequently to hear a whispered request or a complaint.

Nonetheless, one morning a man – longish gray-tinged hair, its length possibly signaling vanity – exchanges or tries to exchange an interested glance with a woman seated beside her (probable) husband. Her face is unreadable: patient or supporter? The man sends an inquiry, unintentional perhaps, by very slightly elevating one eyebrow. Not even an inquiry, more a noticing. He is there, though, with his wife who is in denial about her imminent doom and who can blame her. She sees her husband’s attention to the fine-featured, unwrinkled blond woman seated opposite them whose hand lies, not active, not passive, on her husband’s arm, and her denial withers for an instant. Delivers her one inch closer, the bastard, the bastard with a future, to what she cannot say.

*

She wanted to celebrate her birthday – they were in Italy, Umbria where olive trees live a thousand years, though she was only turning fifty. She had litheness and gravitas, both: she was a poet, her conversation was light and dark and everyone found the combination charming.

And that was when her boyfriend widened his eyes and raised his voice. “Fifty!” He was finished with her then and there, appalled to learn what he had somehow missed because of her waist that his hands could nearly encircle and her delicate nose and the way she laughed as if they were sharing secrets.

“Fifty!” He said it again as if she ought to find it as astonishing as he did. He was nosing for an exit, his eyes were, ready to repeal whatever it was she’d thought they had together. A man who is aghast turns red in the face, a woman pale.

“And you?” she asked, blinking to keep her eyes dry. “You are exactly how old?”

He looked away. She waited.

“How old did you say? Or did I miss it?” In court, never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer – a lawyer, he had so instructed her and she had duly learned. Attorney was the word he preferred. He was fifty-three.

The only awkward moment came when they glimpsed each other at the airport, lingering on opposite sides of the coffee bar, which was an island. She tried to convince the ticket agent to change her seat – they were 37 J and K, the same seats they had had coming over, view over the wing but there wasn’t much to see, there was so much ocean -- but the young woman said she couldn’t do that. The agent, Francesca, shook her head, rattling her fair pony tail, which was both kittenish and suave where it brushed the collar of her uniform. “Of course you may negotiate with your neighbors when you have boarded.” She smiled encouragingly. “Perhaps someone will be kind and change with you.”

Perhaps. She sat in the lounge, rigid, her back to him. Or perhaps not.

*

“No,” I had to say to her. “Not the summer of love, the long hot summer.”

“I don’t understand. What’s the difference?”

She sounded so eager you’d think I was a movie star. What was she, about ten when we were worrying that the turn of the millennium would make planes fall out of the sky? “Basically, honey,” I said, exactly sure how annoying she’d find the ‘honey,’ “There were two different ‘sixties.’ You didn’t know that?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was clutching her wine glass with both hands, ballast because she knew she was so light she might float away.

“Some people were lying around stoned, playing air guitar, talking about love not war and others – I guess this is less glamorous – were political. Civil rights, you know? Actual war resistance. Too busy to get high.”

She blinked as if I’d taken a step toward her.

“And too many people needed us sober.”

“Oh, that’s glamorous enough!” Her hands relaxed. “And you were which?”

“Guess.” But all she could tell from this distance was that history was too complicated, and patronizing old guys like me shouldn’t wear pony tails.

*

She sat bolt upright, the quilt falling back, cool air on her shoulders. He stirred and turned over onto his back. Down in the alley one clear shot, a crack so clean-edged it sounded the way it would look piercing something. Someone. No fuzzy edges. Pause. Shower of shots then, a spray raining down, no wonder they talk about a hail of bullets: Evil weather. Again, again, uneven, crackling, piercing a dozen holes in the 3 o’clock quiet. Someone is very angry – her first thought, or not quite first: Oh, here, finally. Of course. Someone is being chased, someone is firing into the dark sixteen stories down and out in front someone is running for his actual life. Silence closes around the hole in the night. The holes. Figure/ground. Bullets/silence. No more sleep, surely no dreaming. Thinking is a luxury. All that noticing, observing, sympathizing. Or no: Sometimes the gun comes out because a glance is an insult. A sideways look, a canting of the eyes.

The alley is different now, having borne that running.

“Can you do that?” she challenged her writers.

“Why would we want to?” asked the girl with a piercing, a glittering silver comma, on each side of her nose.