LITMIR.BIZ

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a bench and I joined her. We were under a tree, at least, a macadamia, I thought. I peered up into its spiny leaves and let my senses sink into the teeming little society around me, insects, butterflies, birds. A jay on a branch, two shades of heartbreaking blue, warned the world of our presence.

      “Look,” I said to the bird. “I didn’t know this would be so inflammatory, this story. It was fresh on my mind and I wanted to see if I could tell it.”

      “So you don’t think it’s important?” Catherine said.

      I was wondering if she, too, had been clued in on a joke, a drama of the absurd, all for me. I held up my hands to the bird. “Are you in earnest?”

      “Certainly,” she said.

      The bird flew away. I looked at Catherine. No teasing smile. “Well then, really,” I said, “aren’t you overreacting?”

      “Oh, overreacting, overstating! That’s so typical. The North American male academic, reasonable and distanced.”

      “That’s not a bit nice,” I said, hoping it only half-masked my irritation. We sat in hot, uncomfortable silence while I thumbed through my dictionary, as if looking for a word that could rescue the moment. “Why don’t we go back to the patio and get a drink.” It seemed to me a kind and cordial suggestion. I stood.

      “Chill out the fervor with a drink?” Catherine said.

      “The fervor does seem out of place.”

      “Fervor often does.”

      A cloud of insects circled in on me. I batted my hat at them, turning my back to her. It occurred to me to keep on going, walk away, but instead I turned around. Catherine had also stood, behind me. I almost knocked into her, but she held her ground. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” I said. “But I’m not some racist Yankee lunkhead.”

      —Dear God, reel that one back in. Too late. She crowed. “Oh, yeah? Well, whoopdefuckindoo!”

      I did walk away then, mostly because I’d embarrassed myself. I hadn’t gone four steps when she was directly in front of me, facing me and blocking the path. I was beyond exasperation. “What the hell is your problem?” I said.

      “Tiny people is my problem, with their teeny, tiny agendas.” There was that self-important word, my own, from the first day. Doggone if she didn’t remember it. “Can’t see beyond their little miembro,” she said.

      I dropped my dictionary in front of my crotch. Play the clown when all else fails. But that failed, too. If anything, her face was disdainful, cold. “Queen Jadis,” I muttered.

      I said it more to myself than to her, but she heard me and shot back an answer. “Ah yes, the White Witch. What can I say? ‘Ours is a high and lonely destiny’.”

      There we stood on the path, glaring at each other. She was glaring, that is, and I was staring. I was genuinely speechless. First because I’d insulted her outright, and second because she’d just quoted the White Witch herself, with what had been one of my favorite lines from the Chronicles of Narnia, a phony lament by users of evil magic: Sorry, just can’t help it, I’ve got this mystical power. It didn’t help to recall that Queen Jadis was seven feet tall and knock-down beautiful.

      “We appear to be at an impasse,” I said.

      “You give up easy.”

      “I’ve been told that before. And right now I’m very thirsty.” I edged around her and continued up the path, but she passed me again and paced ahead, all the way to the inner courtyard. There we served ourselves from the glass jug of agua pura, gulping down repeated helpings in little paper cups, ignoring each other. At least it was cooler here. We were alone at this spot, though multiple voices drifted out from the peripheral rooms, where ceiling fans whirred. I let those sounds compose me while I watched the color fade on Catherine’s cheeks. I thought something should be said about acting like children. I ventured to do it, properly, in Spanish, but what the heck was the word for “childish”?

      “I should apologize,” she said, beating me to it. “But.” She paused at length.

      “But you don’t know what for,” I said. “That makes two of us.”

      “I know what for, but.” She braked again. More silence. “We must stop this right now and get back to Spanish.”

      But we didn’t. We seemed locked into English, albeit in near whispers, and I had no incentive to change that. We sat down across from each other at a nearby table, where she pulled a pad from her bag and began to write. “A few idioms,” she said. I watched her, empty of interest in any language lesson, agreeing in some deep organic space that my Spanish was the least important matter in the entire world. Her fingers were long and she held the pen oddly, like chopsticks. Her nails were badly bitten. I suppose I had noticed that before, but it hadn’t seemed significant. I wanted to offer her something, a puff on a peace pipe. “I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “Un negocio?”

      “The proper expression is un trato,” she said, without looking up.

      “Puta. I’ll tell you something about my teeny, tiny agenda, and then you tell me something about yours.”

      “Oh, jinkies,” she murmured, still writing.

      “What happened to whoopdefuckindoo?”

      She raised her head, this time with a real smile. Whammo, the sun, just for an instant.

      “I’ll tell you anyway,” I said. “In English.”

      She glanced around. A couple of tutor and pupil pairs had begun to pace the courtyard, passing by us back and forth as they talked. She handed me her notepad. “Write it.”

      Write? That suggested something worthy of record. What on earth did I think I would tell her? She was waiting me out, her eyes on my hand, poised with the pen. I printed: I’m here to find my father’s grave. I looked at my own words. True or not, what else could I say? If it exists, I added.

      I returned the pad to Catherine. She read what I’d written, looked up at me quizzically, read it again, then scribbled an answer. I watched it go down in a big loopy handwriting, surprisingly girlish. Along with thousands of other people around here. I wish you luck. Along the margin she scrawled, How did your father die?

      The bug, I wrote, my mother’s term to the childhood me, and I knew what she meant. In my eyes now it registered as a second class death, a sort of bad joke. Dysentery, I added.

      Catherine nodded and flipped to a clean page. How old were you?

      Seven.

      She studied my face again, a long time, as if searching for the child. “Egg?” I asked, swiping my beard.

      “Your parents,” she whispered. “They were missionaries, right?”

      “Huh? Wild guess!”

      Had I let something out, absent-mindedly? Bits of Scripture clung to my brain like pocket lint, left over from years of Sunday School and church, and sometimes they slipped into conversations, like “a burning bush” and “through a glass darkly.” Those were common parlance, of course. There were others, like “purge me with hyssop,” and “the widow’s cruse of oil”—and “Balaam’s ass,” a great story, good for a Sunday School giggle. But I certainly hadn’t ever mentioned Balaam’s ass to Catherine, or hyssop either, whatever the heck that was.

      “All right,” I said. “I’m an MK.”

      “What?”

      “Missionary kid. But how did you know?”

      “Just a guess. Something about you, I think.” Teasing smile. “Maybe it’s because you don’t swear.”

      “Swear? I do so. —Buggers! There!”

      “Hush!”

      I grabbed the pad. “What do you want, blasphemy, scatology,

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