Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [6]
When Charles and Willy left—Cy for California, Willy for the oil patch in Montana—I stayed on, and, for the next two years, I listened to the trees. The squirrels would come to me when there was trouble in the nests. I talked to the woodchucks, racoons, beavers, and birds. I lay naked on the gravestone beneath Elephant Rock and read John Keats out loud. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever!” I sang to the loons. I read hundreds of books. When people in town would stop me on the street and ask me if I was okay, I had to think about it.
One day, back in Washington, my mother phoned and gleefully informed me that the island had been sold. They didn’t need the money. I was furious at not being given a chance to buy it myself. I called my father to ask what in the world had happened, but his normal thunder was missing. His best friend had just dropped dead while pushing a lawnmower. I took him to the funeral. We never mentioned Clovelly.
I doubt we ever will.
Sculpture Isn’t…
Down the road from the local community college is a dingy little Italian restaurant. The cockroaches and sleazy leering waiters are the reason that most of their business is take-out. But the food is okay. The wine is excellent. The privacy is indispensable. I like to come in mid-afternoon with a book of poems and my journal, when the restaurant is changing over from lunch to dinner, when there are few if any patrons. I can relax. I can think.
Eating and drinking and relaxing and thinking. It is a wonderfully mammalian process for slipping between worlds.
Over my first glass of wine, I open a book of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and at once I am struck by a seemingly insignificant line. On another day it might have gone unnoticed, sitting there amid dizzying line breaks, but today it boldly steps forward like one of Voltaire’s mighty aphorisms, just puzzling enough to force me to pull together the disparate strings that dangle about my random thoughts into something useful.
“Sculpture isn’t for young men.”
It occurs to me, as I read the line again, that I have only recently entered middle age. I can still pass as a young man. I’ve even been carded for alcohol in the last year or so. But I am no longer young.
When I was fifteen, my parents, fearing that my sister and I were becoming too concerned with frivolous suburban pursuits, sent us to spend the summer in Florence, Italy. We ran out of our summer’s allotment of cash in just a couple of weeks. My sister fell in with a burly bearded sculptor named Arturo Demonica. I found a job in the flea market during the day, hawking leather goods to English-speaking tourists. At night I would drink up my pay at a renovated wine cellar turned bar—a tourist trap, really—situated below street level, owned by those same vendors for whom I worked during the day. In the afternoons, during siesta, I would take a sandwich and a bottle of water to the nearby museum and have lunch at the foot of Michelangelo’s David.
I entered the museum from a damp narrow street, flashed a museum pass to the dozy guard, and down a long echoey corridor, there he was. Tall, beautiful, perfect in every way. Except one.
I would sit on the floor in the circular rotunda, eat my sandwich, and, as I contemplated that calm, unself-conscious naked man gazing out above the heads of his admirers toward the street, I would think, no, something