A Song in the Daylight

“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 discovered 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 (#ulink_07d1d880-fe17-56c4-a375-30011611fc4a)

Perpetual Change (#ulink_07d1d880-fe17-56c4-a375-30011611fc4a)

Larissa 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.