The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [15]
Soames looked bored. He repeated his previous remark: “Dead skins,” he said.
He was dressed in a white single-breasted suit with wide lapels and vivid burgundy stripes and looked like a Mississippi minstrel. All night he’d managed to be quietly, yet wildly, inappropriate. This was just at the start of March, two months after his stint in the psychopathic ward.
As I left that night, a bit early so as to avoid the others, I reflected that even if I hadn’t liked Kit Nickerson’s performance very much I still had to agree with him, particularly from the perspective of advanced middle age, about the dangers of imitating oneself, repeating old moves, clinging to routines and rituals long after they’ve stopped holding us up, and we’re holding them up instead. About the danger in hiding oneself away from the nauseating vastness of a conscious human life. I was excited, glad I’d come tonight, glad I’d come to the University in the first place.
I looked back toward the lighted kitchen window and I saw Eloise the caterer with her face tilted up, laughing and exhaling a cloud of smoke. Of Flower Cannon I saw only her back and shoulders as she swayed in her gray outfit, wiping down the kitchen counter.
Now, outside the Italian restaurant, by calling back the scene into my mind’s eye, I managed to conjure one almost exactly like it: a solitary moment in the dark, a warm window…and now, right now, as I puffed experimentally on my big Churchill, the woman herself, Flower Cannon, appeared before me in a cloud of cigar smoke.
I stood on a pedestrian walkway. The walkway passed between two buildings, a hotel and a boutique. Framed in a tall ground-floor office window of the hotel was Flower Cannon. She sat in a swivel chair before a computer console, apparently daydreaming at her task, arching back with a weary air, her right arm limp and distended, dangling a pen.
In my head I talked to her as much as I did anybody else, as much as Bill the museum man, even more. You, I told her. You act wild and it’s not fake. You have a kind of blessed ignorance. You are California. What do I mean you are California? I asked her. You’re long and your variousness sweeps down to the Pacific Ocean. There’s no reason not to say these things when nobody’s listening.
Tapping on the glass seemed wrong: I’d only have succeeded in troubling her, probably—a figure in an alley, tapping. On the other hand, that figure was pretty much who I was.
I went around to the building’s entrance to see if I could find her and say hello. The lobby was polished wood and brass—luxurious, silent. I was alone. Not even a concierge or a night clerk. From the front desk I could see back into the office now, where she sat beside her vague reflection in the window.
It was somebody else entirely, a woman quite a bit blonder and with a face deeply tanned for this time of year, working late, taking a minute for her thoughts. It wasn’t Flower Cannon.
I stared at her until a man who appeared to have no function whatsoever here approached me and said, “Sir, we’d rather you didn’t smoke inside the lobby.”
A light sleet was falling as I came out of the hotel. I stepped backward under the awning and watched out for J.J. I thought about my wife. Whereas before I’d chased away any memories of her, now I found myself catching at what I could, and it was less and less. Anne drank a lot of black coffee. She liked cinnamon-spiced chewing gum. Anne was thin, intelligent, humorous, sweet. She fidgeted. She cleared her throat a lot. She frowned when something struck her as funny. Human stupidity tickled her, she wore the world lightly, and that was important to me. I needed her. In the heights and depths, in the most silly and trivial ways, she was my wife. And now here was Flower Cannon.
I wouldn’t say I was infatuated. I had noticeable but manageable feelings for her, helpless lustful feelings, and fatherly feelings, and the mild resentful envy of someone no longer young for someone so full of vitality. Feelings not at all different in kind from those I entertained