Book Fourteen: Fire
110. Selva led us. . . .
Selva led us down the dark second-floor hallway past bedrooms and a room that could have been a library, pausing once to turn on a switch in the upstairs bathroom. The light revealed a palatial bathtub centered in a white-tiled room full of plants, a room so large that the tub, stool, and sink seemed mere accessories. Tall windows in the north wall looked onto the roof of the neighboring house. Whoever’d had the stone house built must have loved long soaking baths, and he’d situated the room so that he could take them with windows uncurtained and still retain some privacy. In general, the house was well-built but not luxurious; this room for bathing and primping was the exception, sumptuous in its fixtures and in its space beyond any private bathroom of my experience. It made the remodeled downstairs bathroom look chintzy. Selva grinned at us and snapped the switch back to darkness, so that we could see the silhouette of a spider plant against the next-door shingles. “Man,” Julia whispered. “You could play water polo in that bathtub.”
While I imagined Leonard Strange and Barbara Justman playing water polo, Selva led us up a narrower flight of stairs to a room full of bookcases and filing cabinets under the eaves. Something about the smell of the room—not smoky or leathery as with some men, but a kind of dusty pungency—identified it at once as Leonard’s study, and we left the lights turned off out of respect for his papers. There was just enough floor space for us to seat ourselves with our backs to bookcases. To my joy, I found myself next to Selva, looking across in the dim light to see Kemp and Julia holding hands. The four of us broke into guilty laughter. “Now,” said Selva, echoing Bob Dylan’s voice and accent, “e-everybody mus’ get stoned.”
It turned out that each of us had brought along a joint of marijuana. “What kind is yours?” Julia asked Ted Kemp.
“This is the Philosopher’s Gold,” he replied grandly. “Two hits, and you’re at the center of the universe. For as long as it lasts, you won’t know right from wrong. What’s yours?”
Julia laughed. “Erotic Bookstore Boo. You want to try out new positions to have sex. What did you bring, Jonas?”
“I call mine Freedom Bird,” I said. “I use it to get me high enough so I can glide on home.”
The three of us looked at Selva. “Mine’s Mermaid’s Weed,” she said, unsmiling. “You’ll be rocked like a sailor in the cold green arms of the sea.”
We set about the business of smoking reefer. We didn’t have much to say—the idiocy of marijuana conversation is known and has been parodied: “It’s like, hey, man, you know, wow! Heh, heh, heh”—and besides, I was too conscious of Selva’s presence to register what was said to me, even if the person speaking it had been able to make sense. Mostly we preoccupied ourselves by picking up things and looking at them; since bookcases were all around us, naturally we took out books and handled them, holding them up to the faint light and running our fingers along the spines and covers, rather like a delegation of well-intentioned Neanderthals. I found that thumbing the page corners made a quick, cool riffle against my wrist, and tried to show Selva, hoping she might find it erotic. Certainly the books’ bindings were pleasurable to touch, and the subtly yeilding density of their brick-like shapes gave them a presence in space that was unlike stone, for instance, and also unlike Jell-o. I put the corner of the book I was holding into my mouth and bit down on it; the taste was bitter as acorns, and my teeth met a spongy resistance that told me it would be unprofitable to bite harder.
It might’ve been forty-five minutes—or it might’ve been ten—before I put the letters embossed in the cover into words and phrases. At first I thought I’d discovered my own name, JONAS, and felt awed at the terrific coincidence. I studied the letters again in the feeble light and fell back laughing at my mistake. They formed the name JONES, not JONAS at all. I tried to show Selva by holding the book’s spine three inches from her face, but she frowned at me as though my behavior were inappropriate.
Discouraged, disconsolate, bitter, bummed, I went back to studying the book cover again. The book was not by JONES but about JONES, someone named DAVID JONES to be exact, and it seemed that this name, while not my own, had once had some kind of vague connection with me. The author’s name, too, was familiar in a distant sort of way. I struggled to recall my previous life—my life, that is, up until I’d smoked my share of this exceptionally primo weed—and remembered terrific violence perpetrated through machines, followed by a quieter interval of reading, beer, and sex. Perhaps this DAVID JONES belonged to the latter period. Gradually the light of cognition began to bore through the cloud that swathed my brain. “Hey, man!” I croaked, my eyes brimming with moisture. “I need this book.”
Kemp looked across at me with deep compassion in his eyes. “That’s cool,” he said soothingly. “Take it easy. You can have it, man.”
It took several seconds for me to realize that what he’d said was an inexact response to what I’d meant. But then a further realization hit me. It was an exact response. I could have the book! All I had to do was steal it. Bursting with gratitude, I marveled that I’d once disliked the fellow. “Ted, you’re a genius,” I said lovingly.
“Thanks,” Kemp said after a time. “I see you as a sincere person.” The women stared. “Yes,” he nodded gravely, “I see you as very sincere.”
Julia was the first to laugh. She started out with a flutey giggle high in the nose that quickly grew to a laugh in the back of her throat, then swelled to a “Ha ha ha” from her powerful lungs and finally to a great “Ho! Ho! Ho!” that rang from her belly muscles as from the skin of a kettle-drum. She bounced and swayed on her substantial buttocks and then toppled over, helplessly clutching her stomach. Selva Andersen joined in in a higher register, uttering a “Ha!” for each of Julia’s “Ho!”s; Kemp and I, perplexed at first, were infected by the women’s laughter and began to laugh uproariously as well. We continued until Julia got up suddenly and pushed her way past Leonard’s desk to throw open a window.
“Julia! Are you all right?” I stood up and went over to where she was leaning out, still holding her stomach and gasping. When I put my hand on her shoulder, she brushed it away.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I laughed so hard I made myself sick. Leave me alone, Jonas Smith. I mean that.”
“OK,” I said, looking past her. “Jeez! Long ways down there.”
The others came over to breathe the cold night air and look down. The hazy sky over Lincoln glowed with reflected light, and my palms glowed with desire as I stood behind Selva and lightly touched her waist. I could sense the female shape of her in the pressure of the dark air against my thighs. Julia scowled at me and then at my hands, disgust and betrayal written on her face. I looked back defiantly and passed my forefinger along Selva’s spine. “Don’t, Jonas,” Selva said. In the darkness, Julia raised a clenched fist.
“How I love moonlight,” Ted Kemp enthused. “So peaceful. Don’t you think so, Julia?”
“I don’t know,” Julia said dully. “I came over here to get some fresh air, is all.”
“It’s peaceful,” Kemp insisted. “The world is full of love and peace tonight. Come look.” Selva straightened, an ironic smile on her lips, and I moved back to allow her and Julia to change places.
Julia stepped forward with a growl. “It looks peaceful,” she admitted, “if you forget that half the men and women in these houses hate one another’s guts.”
“Yes, but think what the other half are doing,” Ted Kemp said.
“And the ways they’re doing it,” Selva said. I glanced at her, surprised; she looked back evenly. “Most of them pretty clumsy, when you think about it,” she added.
“I don’t want to think about it,” I said. “It makes me get too wound up.”
“Poor Jonas,” Julia said bitterly. “So sensitive.”
“And sincere,” Selva said. That set the two women to laughing again; while Kemp joined in, I left the window and went to turn on a reading lamp to look at the book I’d found. It was a textual analysis of In Parenthesis owned by Love Library, two years and five months overdue. I’d been trying to get my hands on it since the fall semester.
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