Robert Clark

Love Among the Ruins

An excerpt

One
The Beguilement

1

The first time William Lowry wrote Emily Byrne was more than thirty years before, in the war summer of 1968. After he had written the letter and sealed it in an envelope, William asked his mother, "Is it trespassing or anything to go up on someone's porch to put something in their mailbox?"

His mother looked up from her magazine. She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and drew on it quickly and said, "Oh, I don't think so." She put the cigarette back down and took up her coffee mug. "Is it a letter?"

"Yeah."

"Then you could just mail it. Do you need a stamp?"

"They're in the desk in the hall."

"So there you are." She tapped her fingertips on the kitchen table and closed her magazine. On the cover there was a drawing of the president, dressed in knight's armor and holding a lance that drooped like a tired vegetable.

"Thanks," William said. "I'm going to go out until dinner. On my bike."

"Sure," said his mother as she tamped out her cigarette and began to dig in her pack for another. "Pick us up a pound of butter, okay? Money's in my purse." Bill nodded. He went to the little rolltop desk in the hall and got a stamp from the roll in the drawer and fished a dollar bill out of his mother's woven straw bag. He put the stamp on the letter, pushed the money into his back pants pocket, and went out the door, into the hallway of the apartment house, and down the half flight of steps to the back entrance, where his bicycle was padlocked to the stair rail.

Mounting the bicycle, he wove down the alley, clutching the letter against the left-hand handlebar, gaining speed. It took him perhaps ten minutes to ride to Emily's house and he pedaled by at headlong speed, taking in the address-919-with a furtive sidelong glance. He thought he could mail the letter in a corner mailbox, but he realized he had no pen with which to write in the address. And he did not want to take the chance that on the very day he mailed this letter, someone would an hour later drop a cherry bomb into the box or, under cover of darkness, boost up a friend by the knees so he could piss through the open slot onto the letters heaped up inside.

William rode downtown, down the great hill to the main post office by the train station, and he took a pen and wrote in Emily's address and double-checked her zip code in the massive directory, and took the letter up to a window and watched the clerk carry it and drop it into the canvas hamper on wheels. Then, after another clerk came and rolled away the hamper into the back of the building, William went back outside to his bicycle and pedaled up the great hill home.

Twenty minutes later, as he was about to turn into the alley that led to the back door of the apartment house, he realized he had not bought the butter. He spun the wheel around and began to pedal off towards the grocery store, and then he stopped, suddenly aware that mischance was about to settle itself upon him.

He felt inside the back pocket of his pants but retrieved nothing more than the foil butt of a spent roll of Life Savers. He dug into his other pockets, which yielded only his wallet (whose sole occupants, his driver's license and a library card, faced each other on either side of the fold, a diptych of a life as yet unoccupied and so, it might seem, unlived) and twenty cents in change.

William explored his pockets once more, and concluded, more in embarrassment than despair, that the dollar bill had worked its way out of his pocket at some point, most likely as he pumped the bicycle up the hill. His own funds would neither cover the cost of the butter nor allow for the change his mother would expect. He did not for one second consider reporting what seemed to be the truth, which in any case seemed much less credible than any number of other explanations he was already beginning to concoct. He imagined his clumsy shame as he recounted how the dollar bill had, through some kind of Ouija-style self-propelling friction, wiggled its way out of his pocket and fallen unnoticed on the long asphalt path that ascended the cathedral hill; imagined his mother's cresting eyebrows meeting her brow wrinkled in exasperation, then the incredulous sputter launched on an exhalation of smoke, and-worst of all-her laughing at him.

William, had, in the space of perhaps twenty seconds, constructed two narratives. In the first, which he thought would appeal to his mother's sensibility and interests, he had encountered a group of college students downtown who were raising money for the farmworkers in California and was so moved that he handed the dollar over to them without a thought; in the second, which he found the more dramatically compelling, he had been accosted by a group of hoods in the vaguely seedy quarter between Seven Corners and the bottom of the hill and they had taken the dollar and let him escape with his Raleigh and his life.

He chained his bicycle and went inside. He opened the door, went down the hall, and, eyes downcast, found his mother in the kitchen, washing asparagus.

He looked up at her and then addressed the toecaps of his sneakers. "The money? For the butter? I don't have it. . . ."

William's mother set down an asparagus spear on the drainboard and turned to face him. Her mouth formed a tight, brittle smile, and she said, "I suppose you bought magic beans instead." Then she set her hands on her hips.

"No," William said, and he felt himself push off, riding the sled of his fabrication as it barreled down the hill. "There were some Mexican kids. In Rice Park. They said they needed some money to get home to California, to Delano, to pick grapes. And they were kind of tough. So-"

"Billy. Please. I've got people coming for dinner and the election returns. I don't have time. I've got to make hollandaise." Her hands dropped from her hips and shaped a plaintive gesture. "Take another dollar from my purse," she enunciated. "Actually, take two. Get me a bottle of quinine water too. Schweppes, not Canada Dry."

William nodded. His face had colored and now he felt it cooling. He spun around and returned to the straw bag in the hall, the bicycle on the chain and the lock, and rode off. The street was roofed over with elm leaves. He was moving through its shadows like dark places in water, inconsequential as a minnow, ruddy-faced, tight-breathed, with the tingle of being caught out still unreeling itself in his solar plexus.