6: Esmerelda shares some news
“Catalina is my wife,” said Cicero, with a degree of finality which betrayed his youthful blunder of considering a clear decision necessarily a correct one.
“Your wife?” Esmerelda had asked him why he had such a beaming look upon entering the room, and he had related his brief encounter with the calypso in question; she hadn’t expected his being so forthright with his feelings.
“Well, it’s just a turn of phrase,” he said, gesturing and glancing about the room. Freed of the weight of his declaration, he became pressingly aware of his exposed position in its center and made for the comfort of the couch, which he sunk into and continued:
“I don’t know—I want—I’d like that, certainly. If it worked out that way. But that was a crazy thing to say. I just mean that I think she’s great.”
“When did you meet her?”
“In high school.”
“Well, that’s a good place to meet someone. And when did you last see her?”
“Well, I haven’t seen her, not in years, since high school, I think. That’s why it was so serendipitous. To run into her over by the park, I mean I know she likes to walk there a lot and I like to run there a lot, but I’ve never seen her, so it was serendipity, right?”
“Right. And she asked you out? Where to?”
“Oh, nowhere in particular—I think she didn’t want to be too forward, no? But she said we should catch up. And get a drink. People don’t get drinks for no reason at all, right?”
“It’s quite the jump from drinks to marriage.”
“Yea,” he said with a heavy sigh.
“Well, don’t be discouraged. I certainly think you should see her; just call her by her name, you know?”
“No, you absolutely should not! Guard your mind from the vile hieroglyphs of this woman!” Gabriel strode into the conversation with his usual disregard for the pleasures of pleasantries.
“What’s the trouble? There’s no harm in seeing her,” said Esmerelda.
“What’s the trouble? The trouble is that he might succeed! And being his roommate I will have to watch court-side as he trades all that he is for a spell of sycophantic love in the spring-time, and then I will be tasked with dragging him up from the mud when she cruelly casts him to the dogs for getting in the way of her consultantic crescendo! It’s not worth it in the slightest—and I am primarily concerned with your well-being, Cicero, and only secondarily my own. Though truly it would pain me to see it happen.”
“You’ve never met her.”
“Please,” said Gabriel, “I don’t need to have met someone to know what they are like. The way you talk about her is information a-plenty; a meeting would serve only to confound my
Lorrie turned the page and found the next one blank. She flipped back and forward again; still blank. She turned the next few pages: blank, blank, blank. Frustrated, she began flipping through the book and found, to her dismay, that the next hundred pages were all blank. She had just settled into with a cup of fresh cocoa, and her dismay soon simmered towards rage.
How could printing fail so catastrophically? Were there not checks in place for this sort of thing? For centuries the industrial leviathans and digital daemons of the old world had spun themselves hot perfecting the production of reams of books, and even now as the dying-star craft slipped into its final phase she could hold in her hand incontrovertible evidence of its frailty. The same pages which had minutes before been vessels of imagination now seemed laughably physical; stamped, pressed, cut and sewn like skin under surgery, injected with IV ink. Every imperfection rose to the surface in solidarity with the missing pages: the criss-cross cut of the corners, the letters slanting towards the top of the page, the peeling of the binding by the cover. Tomorrow morning, she thought, I’ll take it down to the theater and see if I can get a new copy. For now she would continue, and on reading the first line she nearly forgave the missing pages, for they had given up the ghost just in time for a critical juncture….
“I’m moving to New York.”
Oh calamity, how often you call upon feeble men!
“Where?”
“To New York City.”
“To New York City,” Cicero repeated, dumbfounded.
“That’s right.”
“When?
“Next week.”
“Have you decided yet, whether to be a bauble or a trinket?”
“That’s unhelpful, Gabe.”
“A city of sound and fury, signifying nothing! Oh, spare me! Ezzie, please! What a paradise it was before you spoke the name of that great and abominable city! Sit down with us for a moment, let me speak some sense into you! Is it this because of this good-for-nothing Cicero? It’s only been a few months since he moved in, I can take care of him, don’t worry about it, we’ll find someone else, someone worth living with. Or are you hungry? I’ll cut you up some apricots—they don’t have apricots in New York, Ezzie—they’ve got things they call apricots but they are as cold and shriveled as the clouds and the weather and the women.”
His pleas were frenzied and all-at-once, like a tropical thunderstorm. But Esmerelda had a work to do in New York, and Gabriel’s fire and brimstone could not dissuade her. So the next Sunday Cicero found himself wheeling one of her two large suitcases towards the bus stop for the 5. They rode down to Market and got off at Civic Center.
“Can I ride down there with you?”
“Yes.”
She spoke to him, but his answers caught and came out like he didn’t know her.
“We’ll keep in touch,” she finally said, and gave him a warm hug.
“Sure,” he said, and watched her walk off the train. The doors closed behind her with neighborly indifference.
Through a series of imperceptible turns fate marches us towards vistas which we could scarcely have dreamt months ago, yet from which, on arriving, we can trace our path with a mathematician’s rigor; hindsight is deductive. Riding Bart back to San Francisco, Cicero arrived at one of these vistas. He was tilting his head to watch his monochrome reflection dance in the curvature of the back of the green seat before him. His mind frogged from topic to topic in a vain effort to distract himself from the canyon before him: life in a house inhabited by the devil named Gabriel. At last he closed his eyes and saw it in all its sprawling terror and chuckled.