The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (26 page)

The show I made of wanting to be left alone had no effect on Orla—unless it was to egg her on in her periodic visits.

“I tried to call,” she announced gaily, pushing through the front door as soon as I, bleary eyed from sleep and wrapped in a blanket, cracked it open, “but no one answered the phone. I couldn't imagine where you would be at this time of morning.”

It was eight o'clock.

“I was asleep,” I said.

She snorted out a little laugh. “Time to get up!”

I might have told her to go, but Jake was fascinated by her and almost relished her visits. I could hear him scrabbling
around for pants in the bedroom. He emerged looking tousled and beautifully devilish.

“Well, hey!” he would greet her, all smiles and eagerness.

Orla would turn to Jake. “Well, hello there,” she would say, and there would be a pause while she stared at him as if trying to place him and then giving up. “How are
you?
” she would ask, with extra emphasis on
you
to cover up for not being able to remember his name.

“I'm great!” Jake would say, looking evangelically bright eyed. “How are you?”

And then Orla would launch into her story, telling him all about the “female trouble” being experienced by the cousin of a woman in her church or about the beleaguering foot problems being suffered by a friend of a friend. Jake would time her, surreptitiously glancing at the clock on the radio, to see how long she would go without his saying a word. I would leave them to it and get dressed and make coffee and sometimes even breakfast before she so much as paused for breath. The stories were always medical and vaguely gruesome. Her all-time record was forty-one minutes without a stop—this was when Lem's sister's hairdresser had to have a cyst drained.

Quite often, she brought something to give us—worn-out clothes of Lem's that were several inches too short and too wide for Jake, or church tracts for me. Once she brought us some leftover beef stew she had made.

“Lem and I ate all the meat and vegetables out of this,” she said, “but the broth is still good, and that's where all the vitamins are anyway.”

As she finally made her way out the door, she whispered to me, “Is that the same young man as the last time I was here?” When I told her it was, she leaned her head back through the door to call out cheerfully to Jake, “I'll be praying for your
redemption from your sins!”

“Yours, too,” she said to me, patting my hand and smiling.

I closed the door, and Jake laughed until he couldn't breathe. He was still laughing about it later that afternoon when we made our sinful way down to Hell.

We met Vaslav in Hell.

He was Russian, from Leningrad, a refugee by way of Rome, Tel Aviv, New York, and San Francisco—just arrived in town. He was beautiful in the same lean, hard way that defecting ballet dancers were. His fingers and teeth were stained with nicotine, and his ice blue eyes were lazy and half closed. It was early afternoon, and he was very drunk.

He had come south, he said, after reading Faulkner, Capote, and Flannery O'Connor. He wanted to know if we could introduce him to Tennessee Williams. We could not, for many reasons, not the least of which was that Tennessee Williams was dead.

“What do you mean, dead?” he asked.

“I mean no longer alive,” I said. “There aren't too many ways you can be dead.”

“Ah, I am not so sure about that. It seems to me that there are many, many ways to be dead,” Vaslav said. “How long has he been dead?”

“I'm not sure,” I said. “Awhile—maybe ten years.”

“It is so strange,” he said. “It was not written about—his death—in the Soviet Union. But I should have known.”

“Why, especially?”

Vaslav did not answer directly. “I wonder what else I was never told,” he mused. “Of what did he die?”

“Nostalgia, I expect,” said Jake.

“What is this—
nostalgia?
” Vaslav asked, looking perplexed. “A disease?”

“Yes,” Jake answered. “A terrible one. It's when your face turns backward on your head and you become blind to everything around you and your heart starts to bleed very slowly but with nothing to stop it. Lots of Southern writers get it.”

“Why?”

“I don't know,” Jake said. “Probably something in the water.”

Vaslav raised his glass of beer and laughed. “Good news, my friends!” he said. “We will always be safe from it then!”

We all clinked glasses.

He told us he had a suitcase full of songs that he was planning to sell in Nashville next month. He asked if we had ever been to Graceland and wondered how long the drive was—could we make it in one night? Jake, who was still giddy and sociable from his morning with Orla, was intrigued by this. He was not one to pass up an all-night drive, after all.

“It's thirteen hours to Memphis,” Jake said. “But you can do it in ten—you know, if you drive at night. Nashville is closer.”

“And you have friends we could stay with?” Vaslav asked, leaning closer to Jake.

Jake's eyes seemed to be looking at something very far away.

“Let me buy you another drink,” Vaslav said.

We saw Vaslav almost every day after that.

During his speech in Plato's
Symposium,
Phaedrus tells us that Cupid was the child of Chaos. This makes sense. Other legends have Cupid as the child of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. But whoever his parent was, no one, god or human, could control
him. Even mighty Zeus himself was powerless to resist Cupid's arrow. And Cupid was a wild, mischievous youth who relished the torment his arrows brought to those stricken with love. The turmoil he caused everywhere was such that if he was not in fact the child of Chaos, it was clear they were nevertheless close relatives. No one was safe—not even, as it turned out, Cupid himself.

It seems there was a mortal girl, Psyche, the youngest daughter of a king. Her beauty was so great that men traveled from all over Greece just to gaze at her in awe. Not even a goddess, they said—not even Aphrodite herself—could rival the beautiful Psyche. Men began to neglect the temples of Aphrodite and worship this girl instead.

The ancient gods were not a magnanimous bunch, and it was not long before Aphrodite swore vengeance against the hapless Psyche. She planned to induce Psyche to fall in love with and marry a ravening beast, in punishment for her beauty. The goddess called Cupid to bring his arrows and let them do their work against the girl. But here was Aphrodite's mistake: she thought that Cupid, the most feared of all the gods, could control the power of his arrows. That was not so.

From the heights of Olympus, Cupid looked down to the earth to aim his arrow, and there his eyes were arrested by the lovely face of Psyche, beautiful like no beauty he had ever imagined. Seeing her, his hand faltered on his bow, and in that instant, he was scratched by the razor-sharp tip of his own weapon. There was no hope. There was no reprieve. From that moment, Cupid was powerless in his love for the maiden.

There were travails, of course, before Cupid and Psyche could be together. And there was much treachery by Aphrodite in the meantime. But nothing, in the end, could overcome the power of Cupid's arrow. Their fates were sealed by the merest
scratch of it. Eventually Psyche was made into a goddess.

No one—not Psyche or Aphrodite or Cupid—had planned this. Love upsets the plans of even the gods. And no one knows where Cupid's arrow will strike—not even Cupid himself. No one controls love.

Vaslav seduced everyone. The girls who had formerly devoted themselves to sighing over the loss of Billy Joe now fought to buy Vaslav drinks in Tia's. He charmed Vera by good-naturedly beating Rafi at chess and good-naturedly losing to her at pool. The burst of professor patronage following Tom's death had gradually dwindled, but now the bookstore became popular again. Even though we didn't sell many books, the store was almost crowded in the afternoons while Vaslav sat on the couch, passionate and funny, arguing about Eastern European economic policy, holding Emma Goldman in his lap. At times, it felt a little like Tom was still alive. He taught us all how to say “The workers control the means of production” in Russian. He held Bertie in his arms and danced her around the store singing, and then handed her back to Rosalita with tears in his eyes.

We took Vaslav with us to Lost Pond.

“No,” Vaslav said, surveying our cheap vodka bobbing in the water. “No, no, no, no, no. You cannot drink this trash. I have something better.”

And he did, producing from his bag three tiny glasses and an unlabeled bottle of water-clear liquid—Russian firewater that smelled like a meadow and kicked like gasoline.

“My grandmother makes this,” he laughed, “in her bathtub.” He took a sip and smiled. “I think she pisses in it.”

He said, “You must not drink from the bottle anymore. You
have been drinking like capitalist pigs. I will teach you to drink properly—like Russians.”

Sitting on the dock in the moonlight, he drank from the tiny glass with infinite, savoring tenderness.

“Do you smell the flowers?” he asked, holding out a glass to Jake. “Hold it on your tongue. Don't swallow yet. Wait. Wait. Wait. Now.”

Jake and Vaslav and I were sitting at the back-corner table in Hell. Hank Williams was on the jukebox, and Vaslav was singing along, quietly though—two-beer singing: “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill . . .” Vaslav knew all the words—all the words to everything.

“How do you do it?” I asked him. “How do you know the lyrics to all these old American songs? Did you ever hear them when you were a kid?”

“No. I never heard these songs in those days. I learned them all here when I came to America.”

“Are you glad to be here?” I asked. (In the background, Hank's voice was breaking: “I'm so lonesome I could cry.”) “I mean,” I said, “I never asked you how you liked coming here.”

Vaslav looked hard at his beer bottle, slowly running one fingertip down the side of the bottle, leaving a clear trail through the condensation.