“Sure.”
And the flood of relief that fills him has other components in it he can’t tag so readily; it’s the kind of pleasure he gets when Tash or Abe give him a call to arrange something, the sense that one of his good friends reciprocates his regard, and will actually take the trouble to initiate a get-together, something that is usually left for Jim to do.
So he goes out and buys spaghetti and the materials for the sauce and a salad. A bottle of Chianti. Back home for some hapless, hopeless attempts to clean the place, or at least order it a little.
Hana shows up around seven.
“I’m really glad you called,” Jim says, stirring the spaghetti sauce vigorously.
“Well, it’s been a while.” She’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring past him at the floor, throwing her sentences out casually. Attack of shyness, it seems. Her black hair as tangled as ever.
“I—I think I’m losing it, somehow,” Jim says, surprising them both. “This trip, it just reinforced everything I was feeling before!” And it all spills out of him in a rush, Hana glancing up now and then as he rattles on about Cairo and Crete and California. He mixes his account of them so that it must be impossible for her to figure out which place he’s talking about, but she doesn’t interrupt until a desperate edge tears his voice. Then she stands, briefly, puts a hand to his arm. This is so unlike her that Jim is struck dumb.
“I know what you mean,” she says. “But look. Your dinner’s almost ready, and you shouldn’t eat when you’re upset.”
“I’d starve if I didn’t.”
But he pours the spaghetti into the colander with a wry grin, feeling a bit more relaxed already. There’s something new floating in the steam between them, and he likes it. As they sit down to eat he goes and puts on one of his amalgamations of classical music, and they eat.
“What’s the music?” Hana asks after a while.
“I’ve taken all the slow movements from Beethoven’s five late string quartets, and also the slow movement from the Hammerklavier Sonata as the centerpiece. It has a very serene effect—”
“Wait a minute. You mean all these movements come from different quartets?”
“Yeah, but they’re unified by a similar style and—”
She is laughing fit to burst. “What a terrible idea! Ha, ha, ha, ha!… Why did you do that?”
“Well.” Jim thinks. “I found when I put on the late quartets I was usually doing it to hear the slow movements. It’s for a mood I have that I like to, I don’t know. Soundtrack, or reinforce, or transform into something higher.”
“You’ve got to be kidding, Jim! You know perfectly well Beethoven would cringe at the very idea.” She laughs at him. “Each quartet is a whole experience, right? You’re cutting out all the other parts of them! Come on. Go put on one of them complete. Choose the one you like best.”
“Well, that’s not so easy,” Jim says as he goes to the old CD console. “It’s odd. Sullivan says in his book on Beethoven that opus 131 is by far the greatest of them, with its seven movements and the spacy opener and so on.”
“Why should that matter to you?”
“What Sullivan says? Well, I don’t know… I guess I get a lot of my ideas out of books. And Sullivan’s is one of the best biographies in the world.”
“And so you accepted his judgment.”
“That’s right. At first, anyway. But finally I admitted to myself that I prefer opus 132. Beethoven wrote it after recovering from a serious illness, and the slow movement is a thanksgiving.”
“Okay, but let’s hear the whole thing.”
Jim sticks in the CD of the LaSalle Quartet performance, and they listen to it as they finish dinner. “How you could pass on this part?” Hana says during the final movement.
“I don’t know.”
After dinner she wanders his ap and looks at things. She inspects the framed orange crate labels with her nose about an inch from their surfaces. “These are really nice.” In his bedroom she stops and laughs. “These maps! They’re great! Where did you get them?”
Jim explains, happy to talk about them. Hana admires the Thomas Brothers’ solution to the four-color map problem. Then she notices the video cameras in the corners where walls meet ceiling; she wrinkles her nose, shudders. Back into the living room, where she goes over the bookcase volume by volume, and they talk about the books, and all manner of things.
She notices the computer on Jim’s battered old sixth-grade desk, and the piles of printout beside it. “So is this the poetry, then? Do I get to read some?”
“Oh no, no,” Jim says, rushing to the desk as if to hide the stuff. “I mean, not yet, anyway. I haven’t got any of it in final form, and, well, you know.…”
Hana frowns, shrugs.
They sit on the bamboo-and-vinyl couch and talk about other matters. Then suddenly she’s standing and looking at the floor. “Time to go, I have to work tomorrow.” And she’s off. Jim walks her to her car.
Back in his ap he looks around, sighs. There at the desk, all those feeble half-poems lying there, broken-backed and abandoned.… He compares his work habits to Hana’s and he is ashamed of his laziness, his lack of discipline, his amateurishness. Waiting for inspiration—such nonsense. It really is stupid. He doesn’t even like to think about his poetry anymore. He’s an activist in the resistance, it’s time for praxis now rather than words, and he only writes when he has the time, the inclination. It’s different for him now.
But he doesn’t really believe that. He knows it’s laziness. And Hana—how is he ever going to show her any of his work? It just isn’t good enough; he doesn’t want her put off by his lack of talent. He’s ashamed of it. He identifies the feeling and that makes him feel even worse. Isn’t this his work, his real work?
48
The pace never slackens for Lucy McPherson; on the contrary, it seems there’s a little more to do every day. One morning she wakes up alone. Dennis is off in Washington and Lucy’s been up later than usual the night before watching the video, and now she’s slept right through her alarm. Late from the word go. She hustles out without breakfast, down to the church, gets the office opened and starts the day’s opening round of calls. The organizational routine ticks off fairly well. The fund-raising is more problematic. Then it’s down to Leisure World for a too-brief visit with Tom. Tom looks worse than usual, complains of coming down with a cold. He listens to Lucy’s associational rattle of news with his eyes, nodding occasionally.
“How’s Jim?” he says.
“Okay, I guess. I haven’t seen him much in the last month. He and Dennis…” She sighs. “Hasn’t he been down to see you?”
“Not for a while.”
“I’ll tell him to come.”
Tom smiles, eyes closed. He looks so old today, Lucy thinks. “Don’t pester the boy, Lucy. I think he’s having a hard time.”
“Well, there’s no reason for it. And no reason he can’t come down here once in a while.”
Tom shakes his head, smiles again. “I do enjoy it.”
Then it’s back on the freeway, to an early lunch with her study group. And back to the office, back to the fund-raising. Lillian comes in at two and they work together at it. Lucy was flagging, but now she picks up; it’s more fun with Lillian there, someone to talk to.
“Well, he did it again,” Lillian says after looking around conspiratorially.
“Reverend Strong?”
“Yep. Right at the end of class.” Lillian is in the church’s little confirmation class, which the reverend teaches on Thursday evenings.
“Better the end than the beginning.”
Lillian laughs. “Less people listening, I know. But still, it isn’t fair! It isn’t the poor people’s fault if they’re poor, is it?”