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By Root 621 0

on a branch whipped by winds. Being upright is a continuous struggle. There must be others at this party to whom he can talk about something, or nothing. He experiences wanly the need for quiet and sincerity, some antidote to cleverness. He could go back to wherever he parked his car, drive home to his empty apartment, and then read until sleep takes him over just before dawn. In all-out verbal gamesmanship, he will be seriously overmatched here. He can’t keep up with these people. Half the time, he regards himself as a hayseed among city slickers. A sudden heavy hayseed loneliness envelops him, as it often does at parties, like the onset of an illness. His limbs feel weighted down, and objects take on the burden of hopelessness. The other faces at the party look as if they had been painted on the sides of balloons, and from the books on the floor he thinks he hears an angry buzzing like the sound of insects.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it?” Coolberg asks.

“No,” Nathaniel says, having forgotten what the “it” refers to. Then he remembers. “Oh, it’s all right. By the way, who’s Siggie?”

“Sigmund Romberg. The composer of Blossom Time.”

Theresa reaches for Nathaniel’s hand. “Don’t leave,” she says. “Sit? Please? Here, beside me?”

Perhaps she likes him. Maybe she’ll heal him of his solitude. And then, as if he had been reading Nathaniel’s mind, Coolberg says, “You know, there’s something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We’re all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish. We’re all making this verbal clatter. We cluck our thick tongues…and speak oh so very politely. Aren’t you cold? Your clothes are soaked. Theresa’s, too. Did you take a shower together? Fully clothed? Why would anyone do that?”

“Oh, I’ll survive.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

What was his question? Nathaniel can’t remember it. He sits down again and leans his damp self against Theresa. She is as warm as a radiator filling with steam.

3

TWO OR MORE hours later (Nathaniel does not wear a watch on principle—he refuses to be a slave to any clock), still damp, and now thoroughly bleary with alcohol, behind the wheel of his rusting dark-butterscotch-colored VW Beetle, Nathaniel maneuvers around the streets of Buffalo in an effort to take Coolberg back to his apartment and Theresa back to hers. When Theresa asks him whether he’s drunk and thus unfit to drive, Nathaniel shouts proudly, “I’ve been driving drunk since the age of sixteen.” He must shout. No intimate conversation has ever been carried on in a VW Beetle; the motor’s chain drive creates too much commotion for reflective conversation. Talking in such a car is like orating into the surf.

At a street corner, as they stop at a red light, Nathaniel sees a woman standing and staring at him mutely. No doubt the look she is giving him has nothing behind it, no intention beyond curiosity. And yet he feels accused. These people follow him around.

The implementation of the favor that he is performing has grown complicated: Coolberg lives farther away from Nathaniel’s apartment than Theresa does, but it is essential that the boy genius be disposed of quickly in case Theresa wants to prolong the evening. Meanwhile, Coolberg has taken up the subject of solitude again, quite loudly. “You know what I think? I think we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them. We scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch.”

Theresa suddenly barks a command from the tiny backseat. “Stop making speeches,” she shouts over the noise of the engine. “Stop quoting. You don’t believe that! That’s not you.”

Coolberg laughs. “Nothing is me.” He looks over at Nathaniel with a boyish expectancy. “Nathaniel, I liked what you said about polio and iron lungs.” Nathaniel tries to remember what he has said about that subject. He doesn’t recall having any opinions about polio. “Let’s talk again. Let’s go to Niagara Falls or something. Have you ever been to the falls at night? The gods come out there in the dark. Really, they