The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (29 page)

“Fuck you!” I screamed. “Get out of my life!”

Jake left my house and drove off in the dusk. I stood in the yard and watched the taillights of Vaslav's borrowed car disappear down the road. A snowflake drifted lazily down past my eyes. I looked up at the low, cloudy sky and saw that it was starting to snow and that the world was utterly silent.

If you have grown up with snow, you are used to it. But if you have not had much experience with snow, you know how confusing and disorienting it can be. Rain is different. Rain comes down in a way that is predictable, understandable, comforting. It mostly comes down straight—from the top of the world to the bottom. Even a driving, stinging rain, borne along by the wind, still comes down at a straight angle. Once you get your bearings by it, you can plod along under your umbrella, keeping your face dry.

There is nothing straight about snow. It whirls and drifts and meanders all over the sky, different flakes going up and down and sideways all at once. The snowflakes dance all around you, cavorting on a thousand eddies of imperceptible wind. If you look straight up during a rainstorm, you get wet. If you look straight up during a snowstorm, you get dizzy.

It seemed to me there was nothing predictable at all in the world just then. I felt that no matter what, I was doomed to be dizzy forever.

Orpheus was the greatest of all the mortal musicians, second
only to the god Apollo himself in the beauty of his playing. And Orpheus loved the maiden Eurydice with all his heart. Eurydice returned his love, and on their wedding day, she danced in joy across a sunlit field on her way to meet her bridegroom. But a viper lay hidden in the tall grasses, and as Eurydice went past, the viper struck out and bit her on the heel and Eurydice sank down dead.

There are not words enough to tell the anguish and grief of Orpheus. His terrible lamentations rang through the fields and forests. He determined to go into the depths of the underworld—whence no mortal came back—to plead with the god of the dead to return Eurydice to him.

He found the entrance to hell in a cleft in a cave and began the descent into the sulfurous darkness. The fearsome three-headed guard dog, Cerberus, rushed at him, growling and baring his blood-drenched fangs, but Orpheus began to play on his harp such lovely and beguiling melodies that soon the ferocious dog lay down and allowed him to pass.

So it went. The wondrous music of Orpheus provided his passport through the noisome wastes where the Furies spent their hours torturing the spirits of the dead for their sins, until at last he found his way to the throne room of the god of the underworld. Hades sat next to his queen, Persephone, and at their feet was Eurydice. Orpheus made his request—that his beloved be allowed to return with him to the world of mortals. And then, in the frozen suffocating gloom of the underworld, Orpheus began to play. And as he played his harp, the heart of Hades softened and relented. Orpheus was allowed to lead Eurydice out of the underworld, back to the world above—but only on the condition that he not look back at her until they emerged into the sunlight and the air.

And so, without looking behind him, Orpheus began to
trace his steps back. He led Eurydice through the dank and fetid caverns, past the lamentable damned—Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion—past the suffering Danaïds, past the slavering Cerberus, until finally a light appeared ahead of him. Orpheus felt once more the breath of earth upon his cheek.

All this time, he had heard no sound at all from Eurydice, and he began to fear she was not behind him after all, that he had lost her somewhere along the way or that Hades had broken his promise. With the sunlight just before him, Orpheus turned to catch a reassuring glimpse of his beloved. There was Eurydice, her lovely face still shadowed in the gloom. But just as his eyes found her and his promise was broken, Eurydice was taken, snatched instantly back into the depths, and only the whisper of a haunting farewell was left in her wake. She was gone.

Orpheus and Eurydice did not walk together, side by side, out of the underworld. When you no longer walk together with your love, you run the risk of losing them. The Greeks knew that when you lose someone you love, you may feel that you would walk through hell itself if only you could get them back. But no matter what you do, they will be lost forever just the same.

The snow that started then lasted for four days and four nights, although it might just as well have been forty, from my point of view. The drifts around my house got deeper and deeper until my winding little driveway took on all the characteristics of a mountain pass in Nepal—the kind where you want to make certain you're securely roped to an especially sure-footed Sherpa. The kind where any novices on their own would surely plunge to their deaths. I decided to stay inside.

The phone line went out during the first couple of hours, but the electricity miraculously held up, and I had plenty of canned tomatoes to live on in an emergency, having gotten custody of them in the split from Danny.

For the first three days, I was quite content to sit around moaning over Jake and eating canned tomatoes on toast. But by the fourth day, I became insufferable even to myself. So I was surprised and rather relieved when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, someone knocked on my door.

It was Danny. His jeans were wet with snow up past his knees. His cheeks were raw red from the cold, and he didn't have on any gloves.

“Good Lord, sugar!” I said. “What are you doing out in the apocalypse like this?”

“It looks like hell has finally frozen over,” he said. “If I remember right, that was your condition for forgiving me.”

I laughed. “Well, that was one of them, anyway.”

“Why don't you let me inside your door and we can talk about the other ones.”

“What makes you think you can handle the other ones?”

“I bet if we put our minds to it,” he grinned, “we can come to some arrangement about them.”

I felt a little breathless, like I always had around him.

“Come on, sugar,” he said. “If there's a snowball's chance in hell, today is the day.”

I laughed and stepped back and let him in the door. He took off his too-thin coat and stamped the snow off his legs.

“Are you okay?” he asked, looking serious now.

“You heard?”

“I heard.”

“I'm okay,” I said. “I'm better now.” Then I leaned forward and kissed him on his cold lips.

Sleeping with Danny again was a shock to my system for a couple of reasons.

The first was the collapse of time. Everything was just the same as it had been before—the way he tasted, the way he moved, the way he held me. It was as if all the months between then and now had never happened. Except, of course, that they
had
happened. Jake had happened. Between the last time I was in Danny's arms and this time, I had lived a whole separate life with Jake.

The second shocking thing about making love to Danny was discovering that I felt guilty for betraying Jake, which was pretty ironic, given the situation. I wondered if Jake—in Nashville by now probably, somewhere warm out of the snow with Vaslav—felt guilty about betraying me. (“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arms.”)

“Thinking about him?” Danny asked me in the silence.

“Does it show very much?”

“You're not quite as tough as you pretend to be.”

“I still miss him,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“No need to be sorry. It's no crime to sleep with one person while you're thinking about someone else.” He grinned. “At least for my own sake, I hope it isn't.”

“Cad.”

“I don't think you'd mind knowing how much I thought about you,” he said, pulling me closer.

“Don't add idle flattery to your list of sins,” I said. “It's long enough as it is.”

“Maybe. But you have to admit I have my good points.”

I laughed. “One or two.”

“Not as many as Jake, though?” he asked.

“I can't help it. I can't help missing him.”

He sighed. “The heart is an unruly devil, that's for sure,” he said.

“Lord, ain't it the truth.”

In the morning, the sun was out and the snow-reflected light was hard and glittering. We had a friendly breakfast of canned tomatoes out of the jar together in the kitchen. Then Danny said goodbye.

“No regrets?” he asked, standing in the door.

“No regrets,” I said. “I'm glad we're friends again.”

Missing Jake was a fundamentally different experience from missing Danny.

Missing Danny had been loud—made loud by the presence of Danny all around town. The consolation drinking had been loud, incorporating both wailing and gnashing of teeth. Running into Danny by accident had been loud because it inevitably triggered the consolation drinking bouts. Even my new empty house had been loud because it was filled so often with my rowdy, supportive friends and, of course, with Jake.

Missing Jake was almost entirely silent, though, because Jake, unlike Danny, was gone. There was no running into Jake anywhere or any tussling over territory or friends. There were no late-night phone calls filled with tears and recrimination. There were no impromptu fights or fits of unexpected rage brought on by chance proximity. He just vanished. It was more like losing Tom than losing Danny. For all intents and purposes, Jake had died.