My only wish was to get the hell out of there, but I controlled myself. If I walked out now, leaving him with a sense of unfinished business, I might never hear the end of this. Better to let him get it off his chest now.
“So what’s this all about, Sam?”
He didn’t reply for a moment.
“Remember that argument I had with Larry?” he murmured. “I said that God either wasn’t omnipotent or He wasn’t loving, but you couldn’t have it both ways? Well, I was wrong. You can have it both ways. And that night I was shown how.”
“Uh huh,” I prompted.
He sat looking at me.
“Well, are you going to tell me?” I asked.
He laughed.
“It’s not something that can be
“But you said I was someone you could tell,” I retorted, childishly pleased to have caught him out.
Sam turned over the bar tab and wrote a phone number on the back. He pushed it across the table toward me.
“Come out and see us some time,” he said. “It’s very quiet, very peaceful. A good place to kick back and get your head together.”
I tried to keep a straight face.
“So what’s the deal on this place? Is it some kind of commune?”
“Kind of. We’ve got some land, all the basic stuff you need for survival. There’s about twenty of us hanging out there. They’re nice folks. You’d like them. Some great-looking chicks, too.”
I imagined a rag-taggle group of aging hippies camping out in some clearing in the woods, their hand-knit clothes reeking of woodsmoke, a pack of grimy children crawling around their feet while they strummed out-of-tune guitars and cultivated a cozy sense of moral superiority.
“I’d really like for you to join us, Phil,” Sam continued seriously “That would complete the circle. And for you it would mean a whole new life, something you can’t even begin to imagine now. But first you have to change. That’s the key to the whole thing. The old must pass away before the new can be born. First you change, then you are changed.”
I had had enough.
“I
“My kind of change outlasts everything,” Sam said softly. “Even death.”
This was intended as a challenge, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. I had made my point. Now it was time to throw in the sweetener and get this guy out of my life forever.
“I really admire you, Sam,” I said. “I like it that you’re still tackling the big questions, the big issues. We were all like that once, but most of us have lost it somewhere along the way. I think it’s great that you’re still out there on the edge, but personally I can’t live like that. It turns out I work best with my feet on the ground. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of that. Maybe you’re more flexible. All I know is the kind of change you’re talking about would break me.”
Sam looked at me solemnly a long moment. Then he smiled, as if dismissing the whole matter.
“Well, it’s been good to talk to you, Phil.”
“Sure has,” I agreed heartily. “If you’re ever in town again, give me a call.”
The idea was to reduce everything that had been said to the level of a banal social encounter. I knew he wasn’t likely to pass through the Twin Cities again.
Sam shook his head decisively.
“Next time, you’ll call me.”
I edged out of the booth, gathering my things around me, asserting my separate existence.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I asked.
“I came to see you, Phil.”
This time I couldn’t ignore him.
“You came all this way just to have a beer with me in a bar?”
He said nothing. Never underestimate the power of silence. It made me lose it completely.
“You should have told me you were coming! We could have had dinner, gone out somewhere … You should have let me know.”
His supercilious smile reappeared.
“That’s not the way I operate.”
And with that he walked away, across the bar, out the door. I left some money on the table and went after him, feeling resentful that he had somehow managed to gain the upper hand, despite all my efforts. But when I got outside, the street was empty. Downtown Minneapolis had changed since the old days. The street life which had flourished then had been exterminated, but nothing had replaced it. Consumers drove in from the suburbs, like me, had their fun and went home. The sidewalks were empty, the concrete slabs decorated with a faint flurry of snow.
I got my car from the parking lot, jammed a tape of the Brandenburg Concertos in the stereo and drove home, seething internally. I felt intolerably nauseous, as though I might throw up not just the beer I had drunk and the pretzels I had nibbled but my very brains and being. The whole weight of my misspent youth rose in my throat like a greasy, undigested feast. The evening had been a disaster from start to finish, a farcical misalignment of intentions and personalities. It was futile to try to revive old friendships.
I had tried to be polite and positive to Sam, praising his refusal to compromise and apologizing for having settled for less. This was hypocrisy, a strategy for sending him away happy, for getting him off my back. The fact was that I had come to terms with life. I had accepted its conditions, signed the contract and was now enjoying the modest but solid rewards. Nothing else was real, and anyone who went on trying to pretend that it was would end up like Sam, marginalized and crazy, someone people shied away from in bars.
The whole episode seemed an irrelevance, a freak occurrence of no relevance to my present circumstances. If it hadn’t been for that chance meeting with Vince, it would never have happened. As I drove up to our modest tract house, identical to all the others in our neat, convenient suburb, I made a vow never to let chance interfere in my arrangements again.
5
Bonnie Kowalski drew up to the curb and yawned loudly. It was OK, she was on time, in spite of the traffic. The guy would most likely be late, anyway. He’d phoned in the day before to check the time of their appointment, even though she’d sent him a confirmation in writing. Your typical academic ditz, thought Bonnie. She’d had lots of dealings with them, the campus being so close, and she’d yet to meet one who didn’t seem to be a few dishes short of a combination platter.
She pried the plastic lid off a cup of coffee which read “The beverage you’re about to enjoy is extremely hot.” Bonnie remembered reading something where some woman had scalded herself and sued the company for half a million bucks. She sipped the coffee cautiously and stared out through the windshield at the big trees in the parking strip, gaunt and bare in the morning sunlight.
When she’d started up the car that morning, to take Nathan to the orthodontist and then on to school, the windshield wipers had started too. Their painful scraping across the dry glass had brought it all back to her: the evening which had started so promisingly and ended so brutally, the suddenness with which everything had gone wrong, their inability to turn it around again, Ed’s cold words and unyielding silences, the fit of anger and despair which had forced her out into the rain-sluiced streets, the fact that he hadn’t come after her. The fact that he hadn’t come after her.
And she hadn’t even gotten laid. That’s what it had all been about originally, and even now, after all these months, Ed had only to give her a certain look, and put one hand on her breast and another on her leg, and everything else fell away. That’s what had always held them together. She’d never known a lover so masterful, so
