LITMIR.BIZ

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These were tiny birds that zipped; flitting birds.

      I had grabbed the last empty chaise. Raymond was in the water. Above, a breeze moved the mighty palms and they hissed like shaken pom-poms.

      I fixed on a conversation the foreign scholars were having at a nearby table.

      “Today, I’m happy. Things look a little better.”

      “The weather?” someone asked.

      “No, I mean in my country. The military removed the state of emergency, so who can tell? Perhaps they fear the October elections.”

      A man with a Czech accent said, “It’s better for us as well, but we don’t forget what happened after Dubcek.”

      The roar from the Gulf Freeway hadn’t quit—a hushing noise, like a river flowing over a low dam.

      “I watched your new film, Bolo,” said an American with a comic’s quick delivery. “Are you crazy? I didn’t understand one thing.”

      “Nothing you liked?”

      Someone said: “Most ideas we have aren’t ours. We just think we thought of them.”

      “Is that your idea or someone else’s?” asked the American.

      “Wait, wait, wait,” the man named Bolo began.

      “Uh oh,” the American said. “Echolalia.”

      “So obvious,” the Czech said and I heard his bored sigh.

      “Example?” someone asked.

      Raymond was swimming a careful sidestroke the length of the pool.

      “Jiri,” the Czech said, “that is not your firsthand knowledge.”

      “Letters from my father, the papers, yes. Reliable origins, I’m sure,” a voice said.

      Bolo said, “Various texts, but they congeal. If I were filming this, I’d include Amida’s frock, her little radio playing Vivaldi. . . .”

      “Scarlatti,” the Czech said.

      “We men, sitting a certain way, competing for her attentions . . .”

      “Selection, no?” someone said. “What it means to be an artist.”

      “That is again, Jiri, not your idea but a received one,” said the Czech.

      I elbowed up and, dragging my chair behind me, moved away from the scholars. They were reminding me too much of Cambridge.

      Raymond sharked the pool from edge to edge now, wriggling along the basin submerged. He did well in the water, although there seemed not enough of it for him.

      He vaulted out, switched around so he was seated with his shins dangling over the cement ledge, his burnished back to me. “I’m ten years younger,” he said without turning.

      He knew I was watching him, though.

      Raymond pulled his Levi’s on over his soaked trunks and made three more calls.

      “Jesu Christay,” he said, banging the receiver. “We just can’t get this old truck painted.”

      “Raf,” I said.

      “I mean, damn! He could be in Saskatchewan or in the next room,” Raymond said. He braced his back on the headboard, finally squinting at me in my poolside outfit: a tank top and jeans hacked off high on the thigh. “Are you real skinny? Or am I just used to different?”

      “My weight could be down.”

      “No, maybe that’s how you all’re supposed to look these days. Maybe Luisa should tighten it up a button or two.”

      “I’m probably too thin . . . haven’t been eating much the last few weeks,” I said.

      “Hunger strike? Or’d the cook run off with Raf?”

      “Raf is the cook, in fact,” I said.

      “Don’t get scratchy with me, darlin’. I know marriage is sacred, even if yours has gone screwy. But I’ll tell you true, I’m glad I’m not married to Raf. Was he embellishing or you really teach at Harvard?”

      “I do but it’s nothing hard,” I said. “A lot of the time it’s like being a camp counselor.”

      “Raf was bragging on you,” Raymond said.

      He lit a cigarette, still studying me. His hair was towel dried, tousled. “So, what’s your uh—what do you teach?”

      “Poetry. Writing it. Reading it some.”

      “Brr,” Raymond said.

      “Poetry forms especially,” I said. “Fixed forms are my area and what I try to write.”

      “Publish any of it?”

      “Four books.” I nodded. “And I’m halfway through another. Well, maybe not halfway. Haven’t got much done since Raf left, though I’m supposed to be writing full-time. I have a year’s leave from teaching. June to next June. I got an arts grant bigger than my Harvard salary.”

      Raymond said, “The more I see you, the more I think it’s a good skinny you are.”

      “What do we do now? I mean, about Raf,” I asked.

      “Oh, there’s still some brick walls we can beat our heads against,” said Raymond.

      Before he left, he said, “ ‘How is the gold become dim,’ Lamentations: four, one.”

      He said tomorrow I should try an address near Viet Nam Plaza, close to the downtown. “No, wait on that until I can take you,” he said. “Or pack a rod, I most strongly advise.”

      And on, “ ‘I am the man that hath known affliction. . . . It was I whom he led . . . where no light is,’ Lamentations: three, verse—don’t remember.” He left.

      The Firecat had cream-colored seats, a radio-cassette and c.d. deck, smoked windows, burglar alarms, willful air conditioning.

      But I was late getting started, having put off awakening till noon and then spent an hour with the street map just trying to figure a route to Viet Nam Plaza.

      As I drove along the South Loop now in dusk’s glow, the banking sun and rising moon were comically big, vermilion.

      I exited where my map was marked with Lumolighter; piloted down a ramp, passed the Phan Dai Butcher Shop, and entered a hopeless ghetto.

      The downtown buildings—banks and towers from before the crash—with their height and cool angles and slick panes, loomed close but unreal as Oz beside these junkyard streets.

      Like a little bit of Saigon, this village was—Hau Dac Ti Place: bombed-out restaurants, shelled shops. The houses were lean-tos, and there wasn’t one lawn.

      My fingernail creased the street map balanced on my thigh. I needed to find Astro Ave.

      The address Raymond had given me was for a converted filling station: a windowless building with CATFISH DEN painted along its forehead. Another sign read, BILLIARDS, WINE SET UPS, AIR COOLED! Razzle-dazzle lights spangled on a third sign out in the gravel parking lot. Most of the letters were bashed out on that sign. I couldn’t guess what it said—L T QU STL Y HA.

      The temperature was a hundred and seven. The air smelled of crude oil. It felt wet but there would be no rain, not here or anywhere else according to the headline of the Chronicle.

      Actually, the address was for the place upstairs, which was a natural-wood box on stilts. The area beneath the box was filled with candy-colored car seats, parts of cars, two refrigerators, a Danish Modern couch.

      The only way up was an unrailed flight of steps. But up there, life! In three windows buzzed noisy fans.

      The woman who answered my knock said, “You’re from Raymond?”

      “I’m

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