Chapter 4 #2
The walls were completely covered in bookshelves.
All of Phil’s scientific tomes were there, bearing authoritative, no-nonsense titles like Molecular Cell Biology , and Conceptual Biology , and Life on Earth .
There was a section of independent hippie publications of the 1970s, including a complete collection of the Whole Earth Catalog .
There was a fiction area, and a history shelf, and a poetry zone.
I spotted Earth’s Shadow on the wall, which pleased me.
I’d just pulled down an oversize book of satellite photographs showing demolished rain forests from a God’s-eye view, and was leafing through its dismal, amazing pages, when Phil wandered in. Being a good host, he was keeping tabs.
“Everything all right?” he said, his usual good humor amped up a few degrees from the Negronis he’d been drinking. Not that he was drunk. It was only an extra flush in his cheeks, a warm flash in his eyes. He was never one to lose control.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Just admiring your collection here. So much great stuff.”
“Feel free to borrow anything you want,” he said, settling on the couch beside a shadowy zigzag fern. “We don’t even have most of it out of boxes yet. After three years. Ridiculous.”
“My books are mostly in boxes now, too,” I said. “It’s terrible. It feels like a lobotomy.”
“We don’t ever want to have to pack them up again. Moving books is such an ordeal.”
“Are you planning on going somewhere?” I said, suddenly fearful. Already, I considered Phil and Sarah crucial people in my life. I didn’t want either of them disappearing on me.
“No plans right now,” he said. “But we’ll see. The market dictates. If an opportunity came up I’d probably have to take it.”
“I guess there are better colleges,” I said.
“The college here is okay. It’s more about the town.
Ashland is great for retired people, or people with kids, but we’re not either of those kinds of people.
We’ve still got a lot of work to do. And we decided a long time ago we weren’t going to bring any children into this world. Our little gift to the biome.”
“Where might you want to go?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Vancouver, BC? That’s a nice town. With a nice rain forest attached. We talk about Rome. We talk about Vietnam. So many places you could live, theoretically. It’s an ongoing fantasy. Do you think you’ll ever leave again?”
“Depends on how the next book goes,” I said, sliding his satellite book back on the shelf. I pulled out another. Trees: An Illustrated Celebration .
“That’s a funny part of your life, isn’t it?” he said. “You might always hit it big. Everything could change.”
“But it won’t. It never does. I’ve learned that by now.”
“It might. You never know.”
“Yeah, I doubt it,” I said. “And anyway, it’s not the motivation. It can’t be.”
“What is the motivation then?” he said, genuinely curious.
Phil was a brilliant guy, but like a lot of readers at bookstore Q and As, he seemed to think I could offer him an answer to a question like that.
He thought there was some personal dream I was pursuing with my writing, some agenda of self-discovery or self-glorification.
He thought there was a therapeutic goal in there.
In reality, the goal was even deeper and more ineffable.
It was closer to the pursuit of divine communication.
A way of feeling the presence of fate in my life.
In other words, nothing I ever wanted to say out loud.
“To avoid real work,” I offered.
He laughed and let the question pass. “I once had the idea I’d write real books, too,” he said. “But it turned out I don’t have the drive. I really admire what you do, Arthur. It’s very difficult. I understand that, even from the work I do.”
“Your books are real,” I said.
“They’re products of the academic industrial complex,” he said. “They fill a certain need. Would they exist otherwise? I don’t know. Your books, however…”
“… don’t fill a need,” I finished for him.
“No, not like that!” he said, laughing again. “They create their own need. They make their own context. It’s different. It’s more challenging, I think.”
“It’s all the same thing,” I said. “It’s all sitting in a room, sitting still. Tending the line. That’s what you do, too. It’s what we all do.”
“Maybe,” he said, and sipped his drink. His eyes drifted over the shelves, taking in all those books, with all their captured thoughts. “But not really.” He got up and ambled toward the wall. “Hold on,” he said. “As long as we’re in here, I want to give you something.”
He went over to a corner and knelt and came back with a hand-stitched chapbook. It was bound in heavy, rough-hewn paper. The pages were deckle-edged and yellowing. It was a collection of poetry titled Nature Loves the Number Five . The author was Phil French.
“My Emerson phase,” he said, handing it over. “That’s where the title comes from. ‘Why the star form she repeats.’ A lot of pine trees in these poems. Five needles in their clusters. They’re old poems, but you might enjoy some of them. Maybe even something you can use in there.”
I held the book reverently. “Are you sure? I don’t want to take your last copy.”
“Oh, I have a lot of them, believe me,” he said.
“I understand,” I said, and gave a small bow. “I have those boxes, too.”
We returned to the party, where Sarah was in the living room, talking to some botanists from Phil’s department.
After refilling my glass, I allowed myself to watch her for a little while.
She was like a floating spark in the room, blowing around from place to place, shedding light everywhere she went.
She laughed heartily at a remark by one of the botanists and listened incredulously to another one’s intricate story, though on some level, I could tell, she was forcing herself.
Overall, she seemed a little baffled by this invasion of people into her house, but was trying her best to be a good sport.
I imagined she couldn’t wait for everyone to go home.
Watching her legs, her long, bare arms, I imagined other things, too.
I thought about bending her over the couch and running my tongue over her entire body.
I thought about the damp heat between her legs.
To see her standing there was to imagine the softness of her lips, the softness of her thighs, to picture sliding off her pants and placing my mouth on her belly, edging gradually downward.
It was so strange, I thought, how a person could picture these things unbeknownst to anyone else.
Here I was, standing in the middle of a crowded living room, viewing the most lurid pictures in my head, and yet everyone continued walking around and talking to each other as if nothing was happening.
What a bizarre thing, interior consciousness.
But then, something actually did happen.
Or something might have happened, it was hard to say.
It was so small, so subtle, I’m still not sure.
If it did, it happened half an hour later, while Sarah was standing on a footstool in the kitchen, pulling a stack of dishes out of a cabinet, and I was standing nearby at the refrigerator, getting a fresh drink.
“Hey, Arthur,” she said. “Can you help me out here for a second?”
“For sure,” I said. “What do you need?”
“Would you take these plates out to the table for me?”
“No problem,” I said, and went over and stood at her side as she pulled the plates off the shelf and rotated to hand them down.
“It’s a big stack,” she said. “Are you ready?”
“Yep.”
I raised my hands. As the weight of the plates shifted from her palms onto mine, our fingers lightly touched underneath the bottom plate.
It was almost nothing. The pad of my index finger merely grazed the back of her hand, and slid over a segment of her pinky.
But as soon as the contact occurred, I felt a weird zing.
It was like an actual electrical jolt flaring on the tip of my finger.
Did she feel it, too? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t want to ask.
Her expression suggested she hadn’t felt anything.
But as I took hold of the plates and turned and walked away, I could still feel my finger throbbing from the contact.
The throb stuck with me the rest of the night.
Maybe I’d imagined it, I told myself. Or, more likely, one of us had built up some static charge from walking around the house.
We definitely didn’t have some psycho-electrical connection that caused a spasm at the slightest touch.
When people talked about sparks flying, they were speaking in metaphor.
And yet, I couldn’t stop caressing my finger and remembering the pulsation.
It was nothing, I told myself. It hadn’t happened.
Later still, when the party was really hitting its stride, and people were drunkenly staggering around and the music was loud and a few people were dancing, I caught sight of Sarah across the living room.
This time she was staring straight at me.
She had a look of misty affection on her face.
Her eyes seemed almost swimming with warmth.
It was too much. I had to turn away and pretend I hadn’t noticed.
I told myself again nothing was happening.
Sarah wasn’t staring at me in that way. She definitely wasn’t plotting out her days to run into a minor writer of spirituality texts at the grocery store.
I’d already given up on that idea. But isn’t that the way it always goes?
The moment you give up on something, that’s when it springs to life.