Part 18 (1/2)

Paul laughed to be in such a conversation, and bent his mind to explicating how we know what we know, in a spume of eloquence that gave him enormous pleasure, riffing on the constantly-s.h.i.+fting boundaries between tacit knowledge and focal knowledge, and how this boundary s.h.i.+ft in itself is a tacit skill and is used to blend new information with old, and even to create new, extrapolated knowledge.

”We categorize the world in order to make sense of it,” he told the boys, at least the closer boy, the one with the nose rings. ”And that gives us unconscious shortcuts. Knowledge is rooted in the tacit. Look, look, this sign,”-staring up at the ABJ All Makes p.a.w.n Shop sign, gappy neon fizzing in the quieting night-”is made up of small characters, originally from the Phoenician. But are we ever aware of the alphabet? You don't have to think-you see the words and know what they mean. How do you know English? You don't put conscious thought into how to speak-phrases come already-strung to the tongue. How do you know how to sing? You just sing!”

The smaller boy had the bar door held open by the big bra.s.s handle, and it looked too heavy for him. Paul hurried the other nose-ring boy inside.

”But this is epistemology-I am on steadier ground with ethics.”

He stopped himself before he told the boys that he was an Anglican priest, because he suddenly found that he was no longer certain whether he was pretending to be slightly drunk to humour them or whether he had slipped ahead of them and was truly drunk. It was like Kelly whatsisname from At Swim Two Birds, listening to the little man discoursing on Rousseau: ”Kelly then made a low noise and opened his mouth and covered the small man from shoulder to knee with a coating of unpleasant buff-coloured puke. Many other things happened on that night now imperfectly recorded in my memory, but that incident is still very clear to me in my mind.”

Where he had been when reading that was still very clear in Paul's mind, sitting on the windowsill at Trinity, perhaps the year before he met Lisanne, perhaps the same year; but before, before. When buff-coloured puke and Rousseau and an addiction to language had seemed all part of one package that he would be untying all his life.

Naturally a wife changes you. As I changed her, Paul thought. He could feel tears coming like blisters, like cold sores ready to sport. He opened his eyes wider and forged his way through the crowd to Darwin, to bid him good night before setting off on the long walk home.

But Darwin reached out a long arm and clawed Paul in beside him to listen to what this guy was saying, and there was another conversation just as fascinating as the tacit knowledge one, this one about some kind of spiritual awakening the guy had had while out all night on a skidoo trip, lost in the wilderness, the moon a pumpkin to save him.

”You never know who's going to tell you the good story,” Darwin said. ”Wherever you go, there's your teacher.”

Paul was thunderstruck by the wisdom of that.

The music was louder than before, it was-someone was playing ”Rock Lobster.” How long had he gone without hearing ”Rock Lobster”? It must be either too long or not long enough. The halls of Trinity came back again. He was old, and maudlin, washed in nostalgia, showing off for the boys.

Paul sank into another trance, watching crazy people gyrating and flailing on the tiny dance floor. Darwin nudged him to go dance, but he was only plastered, not insane. He leaned against the pillar behind him and watched the dancers' s.h.i.+fting, sharding colours. It seemed they were all waving scarves, but those were just their arms.

23. Lonely, lonely.

Paul was not in church. Clary didn't like the replacement priest, a sneakered athletic type. He had an air compounded of insecurity and complacency. Absurd even to be noticing Paul's absence. It would have been strange for him to let her know. They had no connection beyond his pastoral duties. She felt abandoned.

The replacement priest's mouth was screwed up into a sugary ecstasy as he opened his sermon with some sanctimonious claptrap: ”G.o.d flows through you-and because of that so many beautiful things have come your way!”

Her heart was littered with hate. Everyone irritated her-even the children. Lorraine had never taken them to church, and that was a perfectly legitimate choice. Clary could not say, You must believe! You must be good. You can be good without approaching church. If she had not come to church this morning she would have been much more good.

Trevor slid back into the pew after Sunday school. He opened her hand and pressed something into it: a folded paper bird. He said urgently, ”I have to make nine hundred and ninety-eight more of those. Dolly's going to give me hers.”

Bile came springing up in Clary's mouth, that some cruel chance would make cancer the story this week-a thousand cranes to save that little Hiros.h.i.+ma leukemia girl. There was no saving her either, and anyway, this was the end of August; they should have been talking about nuclear disasters on the 6th and 9th, if they had to talk about them at all. She was furious. And there was no Paul. Where was he?

Darwin brought Paul a plate of scrambled eggs. Paul shook his head, but his head was filled with exploding drums of used motor oil. He stopped moving so the bed would lie still.

”There's pills there. You should drink all the water. You'll feel better faster, if you eat,” Darwin said. It sounded like experienced advice.

Paul ate the eggs. Darwin watched Paul eat, then vanished into the bathroom; no singing in the shower. Paul sat with his plate in his lap, remembering his phone call to Candy Vincent at 6 a.m., telling her that he had a serious case of the flu. She'd been very kind. He had never missed a Sunday service before. He wondered, in a detached way, if they had found anyone to replace him. The sun was high and white-a flame-white disc in silken mists above s.h.i.+ning trees, like William Carlos Williams's sun. Waving his s.h.i.+rt around his head, wasn't he? Like the people on the dance floor last night.

”I am lonely, lonely,” Paul sang softly to himself, from the poem, padding downstairs with his plate. n.o.body to hear him, Darwin still in the shower.

”I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” His bare feet made a strange noise walking around on the bare living room floor. He kind of liked the new pared-down look.

Dolly's head was jittering with Hiros.h.i.+ma and radiation, but she had read her Barn book too many times, it was not working any more. When they got home from church she slid it out from under the mattress and dawdled around the house till Clary told her to take lunch out to Gran. She went out the back, and ran all the way down the long side alleys to Key's Books.

But it was closed, because it was Sunday. Dolly felt like crying. Maybe she could get in somehow. She peered in the window, her hands making a dark frame. There was the old guy, sitting at his desk. He was crazy. Maybe he never went home.

He looked up, his old Bible head turning like an eagle, and saw her staring.

She pulled back from the window as he lumbered over to the door and opened it.

”Looking for something?”

She nodded.

”Come in, then. Kids' books upstairs.”

Like he didn't remember chasing her that other time. She slipped past his big arm holding the door, careful to keep her back away from him, where the Barn book was hidden. It meant an awkward turn, trying to keep his eyes on her eyes all the time. She put her hand on the middle book table to keep her balance, and pretended to be interested in those books while he went back to his computer.

Mistress Masham's Repose, she saw under her hand. Mistresses were dirty. But the picture on the front was a girl holding a little barrel with a tiny man in it. She opened it-a map inside the cover, the kind of map she loved. This was a kids' book, even though it was down in the old books. She read the first line: Maria was ten years old... and looked at the ink pictures of the big-shoed girl and the tiny people and their sheep. She went back to the beginning and read down to Unfortunately she was an orphan, which made her difficulties more complicated than they were with other people.

Dolly wanted the book so badly she never thought of stealing it. She wanted to keep it forever, not to borrow it. She left it on the table and went up the teetering stairs, and slid the Barn book back onto its place in the shelves, so she was even with the giant. Then she went back down.

”How much is this?” she asked him.

He blinked away from his screen and glared at her, and held out his hand for the book.

”$4.25,” he said. ”An even five, with the tax.”

”Will you save it for me while I go home for some money?”

His eyes were scary, but she kept looking into them. That's how wild beasts could be tamed.

”Take it,” he said. ”Bring the money later.”

Clary was surprised when Dolly grabbed her arm, and surprised by the pinch of her grip.

”Please can I have five dollars?”

Automatic questions occurred to Clary, but she saw Dolly's desperate face and turned instead to get her wallet. Stupid Sunday school teachers. ”Do you need a drive somewhere? We're out of coffee anyway.”

Dolly shook her head and shot out the back door.

Clary watched her running through the back gate. If it was candy she wanted, fine. Whatever helped.

Coffee. The route took Clary past Paul's house, standing on its corner looking bereft. The gra.s.s was long, the vines reddening and drooping off the roof of the porch. The porch light was on in the daytime, sad-he must have turned it on from habit, waiting for his wife to come home. She drove on, forgetting the coffee she'd gone for until she was at her driveway. She made an exasperated sound which Pearce, along for the ride, picked up. He tshed all the way back to the store, laughing every time she laughed at him. Good to have a baby to make fun of you.

Paul came round the corner of the house, dragging the lawn-mower, in time to see Clary driving away. He looked on the porch to see if she might have left something. Paris.h.i.+oners did, these days, but he would not have lumped Clary in with the set of women likely to drop off a ca.s.serole. He'd forgotten to turn off the porch light.

Was that her driving by again? Perhaps he was seeing her where she wasn't. Heart of silver, white heart-flame of polished silver, burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur. Madonna of the Garden, that was. Te Deums of Canterbury bells. Foolish stuff, not even memorable. More lovely and more temperate, that was better.

24. Stone school.

Life had to continue anyway. Whatever happened to Lorraine, the children had to go to school. Iris Haywood, the princ.i.p.al of Brundstone School, two blocks south and one block west of Clary's house, was married to the parish treasurer from St. Anne's. She had seen Clary with the children on Sundays and had gathered the whole story from mysterious parish sources. She welcomed the children to the school with grave formality, and then sent them to wait in the hall.