Part 13 (1/2)

When he took off his hooded rain-jacket, on one temple was revealed a large bruise. Julie didn't ask. He pointed. ”You'd think they'd attack Curly, he's so cute, but more often it's me. Because I've got him, I guess.”

After his bottle, James slept among the sofa cus.h.i.+ons. Julie found her keys. Curly brought coffee, shoving comics and beer cans away to make room for the tray. Sam smoked. Julie inhaled her first cigarette since meeting Jeremy.

In their bathroom were far more bottles tubes jars than she and he owned. His contempt tw.a.n.ged in her ear. On the door hung two silky robes. Emerging, she managed a glance into the bedroom. The mattress was bare, with fresh folded linen stacked ready.

”We'd like to paint it purple,” Sam said, ”but when we go we'd just have to do that boring beige again.”

”Go where?”

”We're planning to buy a house.”

Curly chuckled. ”To be as purple as we like.” He touched Sam's head.

Back in the living room, Julie collected her essentials. How strange, to look out from here towards her present address. Not that there was much to see. In a lower suite, a coffee table displayed a big platter, elliptical and brightly glazed. It drew her eye.

In The Buckingham's lobby stood Mrs. Schatz, dressed for lunching out. That morning the expected news had arrived from Ithaca. Also the Schatzes had decided to get a little dog, to care for.

One Two Three Two One ”WHY GET SO WORKED UP, ELLEN?” My mother often asked that.

Also, ”Why don't you just find someone and move out?”

And, ”Why should you get special treatment?'

My father said, ”Don't slouch dear, you're too pretty,” or, ”Don't sigh so,” or, ”Those maraschinos are for my old-fas.h.i.+oneds.”

”Ellen, leave his cherries alone.”

Standing in their kitchen by their huge fridge, I was twenty-nine. Thirty was clearly in view, other things not. While my Dad spoke on and on, I considered old-fas.h.i.+oned. Whip cream. Log trucks. Fly zone.

”So sweetie,” he finished, ”buy your own.”

”Really, you two,” my mother said. ”How you do go on.”

I didn't see any two, but this isn't the kind of story that describes ad nauseam the characters' feelings, so no more on that. Events only. An old-fas.h.i.+oned. Noun omitted, adjective solo. Then such isolated linguistic phenomena interested me, discrete, unlinked by storyline.

My mother wrapped up her presentation. ”You make me tired.”

Later I carried home from the grocery a jar of maraschinos so large it'd need subdividing to fit into my bar fridge.

By the sidewalk a man on hands and knees examined a stone on the gra.s.sy verge. Gently he touched a curl of grey lichen, smiled up at me. Lawrence Whatsit. We'd gone to the same high school, he a year ahead. Didn't the Whatsits live nearby? And wasn't his mother dead? Lucky Lawrence.He laughed at the cherries. We ate, sitting on the gra.s.s, and licked our sticky fingers and laughed. The lichen frilled up like egg white on a frying pan. (That's the first simile, of very few.) ”Touch,” Lawrence invited. The lichen: a delicate leather. (Also few metaphors.) I smelled it, looked through his magnifying gla.s.s while he explained, but this isn't one of those stories puffed out with data about parrots or antique clocks or saffron, so no more. What happened, the doings that took me every- and nowhere-in this story that's all I intend.

Lawrence concluded, ”Lichens rule the world.”

Then he had to go, for his mother was expecting him. It was the father who'd died. Wishful thinking.

Translation awaited me, so I went home to the top floor of my parents' house, one enormous attic room. Why live there? Private entrance 800 sq ft, FP, HW floors, alcoves, dormers, claw-footed tub. . . Mostly, to annoy my mother. Outside, the wind sang in the trees (personification). As a child I'd dreamed of floating out and over those maples, far away. (Not emotion. Fact.) I had a hot plate and used it, but fiction garnished with recipes doesn't appeal to me.

My parents' TV and bathroom and furniture were all bigger than mine, their magazines glossier, so from time to time I regressed to the lower floors. My father and I would converse.

”YY?” he'd say.

”x.x.x.”

”No, YY! And also YYYYY!” he'd retort.

I'd shout back, ”x.x.x, and XXIV for that matter!”

”What?” He was growing deaf. Shorter, too, with age.

My mother did the ending. ”Oh let up, you two! Such a to-do.”

Our family dialogues could have featured as idiom samples for ESL students. Let up. Really. How you do. Worked up. To-do.

For a translator, idiom offers the most brilliant challenges. (Except poetry. I have not got that far.) Back then I translated botanical articles, conference proceedings, minutes, reports. (Even in such meagre soil, metaphor sprouts). Idiom drew me, still does, a private tongue parenthetical within a given language. Parasitical? No. Idiom enlivens, does not destroy the host.

Like lichens, I told Lawrence, languages rule the world. Nor are they separate, especially those spoken by millions-Mandarin, English, Spanish. Oh, at the centre, where the standard flies, they're distinct, but at the margins the rules get bitten to bits (repet.i.tion, alliteration), and people speak amazing hodgepodges. There's far more margin than centre. Look at any page. See how metaphor slides in? All this and much more I said to Lawrence, but as backdrop that'll do. No elaborate a.n.a.logies between Chinook and the symbiosis of algae or fungi and love. In too many stories, such comparisons drag the doings off course.

At the Whatsits' house, Lawrence's territory was the bas.e.m.e.nt suite. High, south-facing, sun-washed. Small animals jarred in alcohol stood in ranks on his shelves. Skins, skulls. A globe for twirling. A cupboard door that must stay closed till spring because a spider's egg-ma.s.s clung to the hinge. I wouldn't have cared.

When Lawrence and I came upstairs after a morning on his bed, his mother was ready for us with waffles, peaches, creme fraiche.

”I remember you, Ellen,” smiling. Some high school event, awards for science students.

After eating, Lawrence took us back downstairs, only in part to make love again. ”She pushes in too close,” he frowned. ”Keep your guard up.” Too close? Such a thing, in a mother!

Familiar, peculiar, other, darling, such was Lawrence. Botanical Latin was only one shared idiom. Others: our bodies, devotion to work, facing a fourth decade in houses where we'd always lived. Bonded like lichen to stones we were, another simile, my guard down.

Lichens. Lawrence photographed them. For drug companies he a.n.a.lyzed their properties. For universities he identified them. He lectured.

”I'm portable,” he said. ”So are you.” He set his globe twirling. ”Languages and lichens are everywhere.”

To detach, dislodge, float like bursting clouds of spores (another) was our hypothesis. To live nowhere seemed a fine plan. Our preparations for marriage were simple. We saw a travel agent, got new laptops, and at his mother's urging rented a post office box.

My father told me, ”I like him, dear, but that's no way to live.”

”Why such a fuss? We'll have the house to ourselves.”

”What did you say?”

My mother had spoken with perfect clarity.

For nine months Lawrence and I travelled. On airstreams of desire and thermals of spontaneity we floated about Europe, Asia. The green algal cells in the symbiosis, were they him? Or me? Who made the colourless fungal strands? See how metaphor bloats up to excess?

His mother wrote when the eggs hatched. She'd carried hundreds of spiderlings out to the suns.h.i.+ne. Although I wouldn't have bothered, to me her act showed reliability.

Lawrence frowned. ”She's overdoing it.”

I translated. Globally I faxed and emailed, loving how Lawrence and I and our work diffused ourselves electronically. Dispersal. Possibly even then I loved that as much as him.

For my birthday, the mother-in-law sent a pretty book with blank pages. ”Thought you might jot down your doings.”