Moth

“I talk much last night?” he said partway into a second cup.

“Some.”

“Before you came over here, on the phone? Or after.”

“Before, mostly.”

“Then I told you about Josie.”

I nodded.

“And I was thinking about doing something stupid. I really don’t remember too much else.”

“You weren’t thinking at all: you were feeling. But yes, it did look for a while like maybe you were going to stop being stupid for good.”

“Yeah, well.” He looked around the room, down at the floor. “Anyhow, the moment’s passed. You eat my pizza? Stuff’s great for breakfast, cold, you know.”

“Sorry. It was crawling across the rug, making for the door. I had to shoot it.”

He shook his head. “You’re a sick man, Lew.”

We finished the pot and he called in while I scrambled eggs. We ate, then sat over a second pot of coffee. Heading back to bed finally, he paused in the doorway. Looked down the hall.

“Thanks, man. I won’t forget this.”

“I owe you a few.”

“Not anymore you don’t.”

I found nongeneric scotch in the pantry beside five cans of stewed tomatoes, a stack of ramen noodles and two depleted jars of peanut butter, poured some into a coffee cup webbed with fine cracks beneath the surface, and dialed Clare’s number. When her machine told me what to do and beeped at me, I said:

“This is your sailor, m’am. Who’d like to buy you dinner tonight, if you’re free. Garces okay? Call me.”

Garces is a small Cuban restaurant, tucked away in a decaying residential area a few blocks off Carrollton, as close to a special place as Clare and I had. Family-owned and — run, it started out years back as a grocery store and serves daily specials astonishingly simple and good, including a paella you’d kill for, cooked while you wait, one hour. Paella’s where jambalaya came from, word and recipe freely translated.

I walked six or eight blocks and grabbed a bus on Magazine. Got home, rummaged through mail, listened to messages. Someone I didn’t know wanted me to call right away. The English Department secretary needed to speak with me at my convenience. And Clare said: “Lew, I dodged home for lunch and found your message. Wish you’d gotten to me earlier, now I’ve already made plans. How’re the sea legs? Talk to you later.”

I stretched out on the couch for a nap and thought about Don, how he’d been looking lately, his long slow fall last night, this morning. Probably the steadiest man I ever knew. But you stand there peering off the edge long enough, whoever you are, things start shifting on you. You start seeing shapes down there that change your life.

The phone had been ringing a while, I realized. In my dreams I’d turned it into a distant train whistle.

The tape clicked on just as I answered, and I stabbed more or less randomly at buttons, Answer, Hold, trying to stop it. Taped message and entreaties to “Wait a minute, I’m here, hang on” overlapped, waves colliding into a feedback that made the room sound strangely hollow and cavernous.

“Can a girl change her mind?” Clare said when the tape had run its course.

“Why not? Always another ship coming into port somewhere.”

“Okay. So I’ll cancel this other thing and see you at Garces at, what? Six be okay? Want me to pick you up?”

“I’m not sure where I’ll be before then. I’ll meet you there.”

“Then maybe I can take you home, at least.”

“Just how do you mean that, lady?”

“Hmmmm …”

Where I was before then, as it turned out, was right there on that couch, though I did rouse a couple of times, first to answer the door and tell a private-school girl still in uniform (white shirt, blue tie, checked skirt, black flats) that I didn’t need candy or wrapping paper, later to explain to an elderly Latin man that I liked the grass kind of high there in my patio-size front yard.

Around five I roused more definitively, showered and shaved, and called a cab.

Clare, a Corona, salsa and chips were waiting for me. A speaker set into the ceiling over our table spooled out the news in rolling, robust Spanish. We ordered-rice and black beans, shredded meat stewed with onions and peppers, a Cuban coffee for me; nachos, empanadas and croquetas for Clare-and filled in recent blanks like the old friends we were. I told her about my lead on Alouette and said I’d be out of town for a few days. She told me that Bat had claimed squatter’s rights atop the refrigerator and passed along new revelations from a course in Flemish art she was taking at Tulane.

Somewhere along in there, with half or more of my beans and rice gone, I said something about knowing we’d been kind of backing away from one another these last months, and noticed she was looking into her plate a lot.

“Lew,” she said when I stopped to order another coffee, “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. You know that? I haven’t been backing away. You have. All I’ve done is just keep trying, every way I know, to keep myself from taking that necessary step or two toward you. To close the distance. When the whole time that’s all in the world I wanted.”

My coffee came, dark and heavy and sweet as summer nights, in its stainless-steel demitasse cup and saucer.

“I’ll tell you how you can tell the dancer from the dance,” she said. “Sooner or later the dancer always has to talk about why he’s doing what he does. The dance just happens.” She laughed. “Yeats: what the hell did he know, anyway? Impotent most of his life. Writing all that romantic, then all that mystical, stuff. And a child again, himself, there at the end.”

I pushed beans onto my fork with a chip, doused the chip in salsa and then in chopped peppers from a tiny side dish.

“So. Guess this means you’re not going to take me home, huh?”

“No,” she said, eyes meeting mine. “No, it doesn’t mean that at all, Lew. I don’t know what it means. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe meaning doesn’t have anything to do with any of this.”

She folded her napkin and laid it on the table.

“Coming with?” she said.

Oh yes.

I have been so very long at sea.

Chapter Thirteen

Before the old man finally gave up on it-before he finally gave up on just about everything-he used to haul me out hunting with him the first few times he went out each season. Something was supposed to happen out there in the woods, I guess, with just the two of us, a father and his son, men of a different size observing these ancient rituals together, but it never did. I’d already learned to shoot, with bottles heeled into a hillside out behind our house, and that was the part I was interested in. So I’d just walk alongside Dad with my old single-shot.410 cradled in the crook of an arm and carefully pointing to the ground as he’d taught me, in early years daydreaming about friends and would-be friends in the neighborhood and next weekend’s get-togethers, later about the things I’d begun discovering in books, with the twin plumes of our breath reaching out into the chill morning and reeling back, Dad every so often (it seemed always a continuous action) shouldering his.12-gauge, firing, and tucking dove, quail or squirrel into the game pocket of his scratchy canvas coat. After a couple of hours we’d stop, find a tree stump and have coffee from his thermos, wrapping hands around nesting plastic cups for warmth. On extremely cold days he brought along a hand warmer the size of a whiskey flask; you filled it with alcohol, lit the wick, slid on a cover and felt sleeve, and it smoldered there in your pocket. We’d pass it back and forth the way men pass around bottles of Jim Beam at deer camp, like athletes toasting a victory. But neither of us was an athlete. And neither of us would