A Song in the Daylight (15 page)

“Don’t threaten me with Leroy, Ezra. Offer him the job if you want.” She paused. “He is a fine man and a single dad. Don’t let his theatrical incompetence stand in your way.”

“Come inside.” Ezra prodded her away from the Jag. “I will ply you full of liquor and terrorize you with stories of Leroy. Do you remember how he decided to change the ending of
Hamlet
? He thought Hamlet shouldn’t die in the end, but rather learn the error of his ways and be redeemed with pompous self-discovery?”

“Ezra!”

“What about when Desdemona and Othello kissed and made up at the end? And Juliet woke up just in time to stay Romeo’s hand.”

“All right, enough.”

“Caesar lives!”

“Ezra!”

“The people forgive Antony and Cleopatra for their decadent ways!”

“We’re leaving.”

“Ivan Ilyich gets better!”

“Well, how can it be called
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
then?” said an exasperated Larissa.

“My point exactly. Only you can save us from Leroy, Larissa.”

“I said no.”

“Come inside. Drink till you say yes.”

“That’s how she got three children, Ez,” piped up Jared, pulling a reluctant Larissa away from the Jag. All she wanted to do was ride it on the open road.

But not alone.

After the first time of sitting in a car and eating sushi, an illusory world was established in which it was possible for Larissa to sit with Kai, first in her cream SUV and now in her Jaguar, in the middle of a bright day parked near a chain-link fence separating the parking lot from the cemetery and, without looking at each other, eat raw seafood.

His age was the most ridiculous thing, and upsetting to her at first, but almost immediately the knowledge that he was not even in the flush of young adulthood—but at the end of adolescence, at the very beginning of the beginning of the rest of his life—liberated her from worry. Fretting about propriety had vanished and was replaced by an amused banter, a cheerful demeanor and a guiltless heart. Since any acknowledgement of his maleness and her femaleness on terms approaching equality either of body or of spirit was beyond the realm of possibility (his being
twenty
and all), having a quick lunch with him was pushed beyond the realm of anxiety. It was just a way to pass a few minutes in the afternoon, nothing more, and Larissa thought no more of it. No further justifications were needed. When she recalled her weeks-long agonizing over going to the dealership to look at a car, she was embarrassed at her own silliness. How overwrought! It was outlandish to be concerned about such trivial things. Illusion versus reality. The reality was, he was a boy barely out of high school and needed to have lunch in the afternoon. She was a
grown woman with three children and a busy life who needed to have lunch in the afternoon. End of story. Jeepers.

They sat in her Jag as the breeze rustled her hair and blew their napkins around, and the sound of the road was like a soundtrack of her life. Police sirens, honkings, cars pulling in and out, wheels screeching, life buzzing on, while they sat facing tombstones laid out amid slushy grounds and bare trees, not yet greening, not yet budding. The temperature rose, and once in the middle of March it got to sixty-six degrees! Larissa didn’t wear a coat, just a blouse with a denim jacket over it and jeans. This is what she wore now in these afternoons of her life. Jeans. Because jeans were the wardrobe of the young.

They rolled down their windows, she turned on the CD player, they listened to the Doors and Minnie Riperton. She dis covered Kai knew by heart some of Jim Morrison’s poetry. She was surprised by that; often he would do that: say things that surprised her. “Huh. Impressive,” she said when he told her that the grand highway was crowded with searchers and leavers.

“Jim Morrison or me?” He blinked cheerfully.

She didn’t have an answer, and he didn’t want one. “I know a
lot
of Morrison,” he said. “There was a point in my life when
The American Night
was all I read.
Wonderland Avenue
used to be my favorite book.”

“Used to be?”

“Yeah…I’m less interested in that heroin culture now.” He stuffed his empty plastic containers into the paper bag and refused to say more. “Still a good book, though. Have you read it?”

“No.”

“It’s by Danny Sugerman,” he said, and the next day brought her a copy, all weathered and frayed. “You can borrow it,” he said, “but careful, okay, it’s a first print edition.”

“You shouldn’t give it to me, then. I’m apt to leave it somewhere.”

“Like where?”

She took it. “Did you want to
be
like Morrison?”

“Nah. In Hawaii, we’re more mellow. But Morrison rocks. Just listen to his lyrics, to his voice. I was more into Mahalo music, ukulele riffs, island chants, you know?”

She didn’t know. She wanted to hear more of Morrison’s poetry.

“I liked that he wanted to expand the bounds of his reality,” said Kai, “expand it beyond all limits trying to find the sacred. You know how that can be?”

She wasn’t sure she did but she wanted to hear more Morrison through Kai’s lips.

3
Perpetual Change

L
arissa knew she might be in a spot of trouble when Maggie called about lunch the following week and Larissa lied. Actually lied. Said she was busy. A doctor’s appointment, blah blah, couldn’t make it, and Maggie said, how long is this doctor’s appointment, I’ll meet you after, and Larissa said, no it’s in Morristown, and this doctor always runs late, and Maggie took no for an answer, rescheduling for Wednesday from noon to two, and Larissa didn’t know how to or what to say to Kai, because to say she was busy tomorrow was ridiculous! But to say nothing might mean—would mean—that he’d be waiting for her, and she couldn’t just not show up.

What would Emily Post say about the etiquette on that one?

Dear Abby:

I have this problem. For forty minutes a day I sit in my car with a young man not my husband and we have lunch. We talk about the most trivial nonsense, we are barely acquaintances, but we do this nearly every day. Tomorrow I can’t make it. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to tell him I can’t make it. I don’t want it to seem like there’s
an obligation or like I owe him an explanation, because clearly I do not. Yet to not show up seems odd.

Dear Abby:

Yesterday afternoon, a young man not my husband held open for me the door of the car he sold me, and as I got in, I inhaled to smell him.

Question: Should I now try to smell random men on the streets of my sleepy little town to prove to myself that it was an aberration and that sometimes this is what women of a certain age do? Smell male strangers?

She was eating tuna and cucumber, he a rainbow roll with eel and salmon. His hair was especially kinky today, covering much of his face.

“Masonry is hard work,” he was saying. “But I love being outdoors all day in the summer. Selling Jags is actually harder work for me.”

“So quit.”

“I’d be a fool to quit a job where I make so much money.” He waved his hand in the air. “Ah. Everything is hard. In its own way.”

Larissa thought about her day, of sushi lunches and painting theater sets and ice cream and homework, and shopping, and slowness. A little baking, a little shopping, a little housework. Was that hard, too? In its own way?

Chewing her lip, she said nothing, glancing at his cracked young hands holding the chopsticks, as she listened to Yes on the radio, on low, but unmistakably serenading her about
perpetual change
…the world in their hands, the moon, the stars; the impending disaster gazing down on them, thought
forward to April, to summer. What to do? It’s just a boy I see, an illusion in front of me…

“So what happened to your dad?”

Kai stiffened slightly. With a thin smile he turned his head to her. “Nah, I don’t want to talk about my dad, you know? We weren’t close, he was…Papa was a rolling stone. Every day I worry someone is going to walk through the dealership door and say he’s my half-brother. My old man was into some bad shit, and my mom and grandma raised us on their own. He disappeared; then I heard he went to jail for possession. A little while ago he popped around again. I was his only son.”

Larissa said nothing.

“He disappeared again, like a magic act. We figured he probably went back to his two wives, his three mistresses; that’s what my mother said. But we heard he was sick and in the hospital. Then he died. Left me the bike. I do love my bike.”

“I’m sorry he got sick,” Larissa said.

“That’s okay. People get sick. We have bodies, and our bodies aren’t perfect. Nothing is perfect. Even our souls aren’t perfect.”

So true. But still. “Did you get to see him before he died?”

Kai emitted a short laugh, an exhale. “For someone who didn’t want to talk about it, I sure am talking a lot about it.” He took a sip of Coke. “Yeah. My sisters and I went to the hospital to see him. Even my mother went.” He stopped. “The Catholic nun who did rounds carried a guitar with her along with the Bible, and once she came into my dad’s room and sat with us and asked if he wanted to hear something. Well, he couldn’t talk anymore, he was slipping in and out of consciousness, but Melissa, my older sister, said his favorite song when she was growing up was ‘King of the Road’. Do you know it? Roger Miller?”

Larissa shook her head.

And Kai sang it to her. Just a little, his head bobbing from side to side; it was a lilting melody, he carried a cheerful tune…”
Two hours of pushing broom buys an eight-by-twelve four-bit room…
” and then broke off and said, “Well, this nun chick, I’ve never heard anyone sing and play the guitar like her, not even Roger Miller. It was unbelievable. And my dad, even though he couldn’t speak, and the doctors said he couldn’t hear or see or understand anything anymore, he lay there, and you could almost swear his misty eyes were twitching in rhythm to the tune. My sisters said I was crazy. But he heard every word. The nun told me privately that the last thing to go on a man is his hearing; the dying hear everything, and I knew she was right. I asked her if she knew where he was headed because he hadn’t been a very good man, certainly not a good father, which is the thing that most affected me when I was younger, not having a dad. And do you know what she told me?”

Larissa twitched, misty-eyed herself, to the rhythm of Kai’s words. “No, what did she say?”

“She said, well, you say he’s no good, but look, all his kids are sitting here with him, and his ex-wife, your mother, was here with him. You’re angry for the way he treated her, but you’re here, and she is here. There are some people who die completely alone, no kids, no friends, nobody at the end of their life. So you know, maybe your old man wasn’t all bad.”

A short pause followed before Larissa breathed in and said, “Look at the time.” It was after two. They’d been sitting for over an hour.

Next day. That’s how she moved now. Lunch hour, from one to two Monday to Friday. Housewives and bikers, women and men, mothers and sons, actors and singers, salesmen, stonemasons, shoppers and sinners, lunch hour from one to two, all welcome.

“So where’s your mom now, your sisters?”

“Still in Hawaii.”

“Oh.” Why did that make her happy? Him being here without his family. “What are you doing in Jersey? Seems a long way to go to work at a car dealership.”

“Yeah. But a friend of mine moved out here from Maui. So I followed him.”

“Is that your mall buddy, Gil?”

“Yeah. And his roomie. They go to Rutgers, live in Maplewood. Initially I came to bunk with them till I got a gig. But it just so happened that I got a gig right away, so I got my own crib.”

“Where?” She didn’t mean to sound so high-pitched. But she felt high-pitched.

“A few blocks away.” He was calm in response. He was always calm. “I can walk to work.”

“Maplewood’s a nice town,” Larissa said, in a more even tone. It didn’t seem quite right for college kids. It was more a family town. Like Summit. “Your friends like it?”

Kai cleared his throat. “Unfortunately my buddy Gil was arrested a while back dealing dope on campus. So he’s temporarily out of commission.”

“For how long?”

“Three to seven. Chance of parole in eighteen months.”

“Geez. Three to seven seems steep.”

“I think,” said Kai, “it might not have been his first offense.”

“Oh.”

“The guy had to pay his tuition somehow. Parents got divorced and there were no funds to be had, and yet—well, you know how it is.”

Just thinking about how it was got Larissa all flushed, because Kai said, “Is this making you uncomfortable? The drugs? That’s not my scene.”

“No, I was just…the food went down wrong.” His age was
supposed to be the liberating thing! The thing that made everything else so easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. Almost like sitting with one of her drama students, having a chat in the breeze. Why did thinking of his friends, dealing drugs to pay for their tuition, make her feel so twisted up inside? Could it be because her own college experience of dope and crazy protesting friends was twenty years ago? His lifetime ago.

“Madison is a great small town,” Kai said. “Don’t you think?”

She wasn’t sure. “Like Hawaii?”

“Nah. Too many transients in Hawaii. Too many vacationers. Nothing is permanent there. This good stable life is so strange. So exotic.”

“
This
life is exotic?” Larissa repeated in a flat tone. What was he talking about!

“Honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a town as quaint and cute as Madison. I’m not saying I want to live here forever. I want to see the world. But to settle down? To raise a family? There is no better place. Really.”

“If you say so. But it’s not exotic, Kai. It’s just not. It’s too normal to be exotic.”

“See, to me, the normal is the exotic.”

“Do you know what’s exotic? The Philippines. My best friend lives near Manila; she’s always asking me to go visit her.”