PANCHO, IT SEEMED TO ME, lived only in the Cave. I rarely saw him anywhere else—or if I did, say at the bookstore or taking a drink at Tia’s with Pamela, he was only a brief visitor, soon to return to his home. I was wrong, of course. Pancho, too, had a whole life of his own. In fact, it turned out that Pancho had a secret life none of us even suspected. Fortunately.
When Pancho was just a kid, his mother had woken up one morning to find that the face of Jesus (if Jesus did in fact closely resemble a California surfer boy, as was popularly believed) had emerged in the tangled glory of the kudzu vine that covered practically the whole south side of their tiny house at the edge of the farm town where Pancho grew up. The image was clear as day, if you squinted some, formed from the very leaves themselves. The photographer from the local newspaper was sent to take a picture of it, and before she knew it, Pancho’s mother had a phenomenon on her hands. The faithful came from as far away as Kansas to witness the “Miracle of God’s Creation,” “Our Lord Among the Leaves,” “Our King Among the Kudzu.” Pancho’s mother, who enjoyed a good miracle as much as the next person, nevertheless figured that God was probably most likely to help those who helped themselves. She started charging a buck to view the vines—two bucks if you wanted to take a picture. She also sold ice-cream sandwiches (seventy-five cents) out of the deep freeze on the back porch and paper cups of ice water (a dime). By the time a cold spell caused the vine to die back to just looking like a regular vine again, she had taken in almost seventeen thousand dollars.
It was a miracle.
She put the money in U.S. government securities and in a couple of well-run high-tech start-ups, so that by the time she passed away and left everything to her only child, she was a surprisingly wealthy woman. Pancho never told anyone about this and never touched the money, being shy and a little embarrassed about it, and the interest just kept rolling in—more every year. We had no idea.
Rosalita had never married Tom. Even though there was no doubt that Tom would have legally claimed Bertie as his own child, he wasn’t alive to do it by the time she was born. Nevertheless, after several months of lawyers filing paperwork, the bookstore became Bertie’s inheritance from her father, held in trust for her by Rosalita. While this was lovely and entirely fitting in a symbolic way, in a financial way it was a mixed blessing at best.
Every month, Rosalita did the books, and every month the numbers looked worse. Rosalita worried and visited Tom’s loan officer at the bank, and then she really worried. Creditors were patient at first, but they had businesses and families themselves and their patience couldn’t last forever. Rosalita didn’t complain, but there started to be a frown line between her eyebrows and an anxious look in her eyes.
Pancho noticed and, although he didn’t say anything right away to Rosalita, he asked me, late one night while Rafi was restocking the beer and Vera was making out the deposit slip, if everything was okay at the bookstore.
“Well,” I told him, “I’m not sure, but I think Rosalita is up against the wall. I think she’s going to lose the store. Last time she paid me, she borrowed the money from Vera to do it.”
Pancho didn’t answer, just nodded his head, frowning. He spent a long time that night trying to touch the spirit world, and although he never said so, I think that in some way it’s possible he might have finally had the success he was looking for.
The next day, Pancho made a visit to his own bank, where they were surprised to see him. Then he came by the bookstore, and he and Rosalita went out back and stood together talking in the yard. Forty-five minutes later, Pancho was flat broke and the bookstore was saved. Pancho made Rosalita promise not to tell anyone, and I’m sure she did her best. But as far as I know, after that Pancho never again paid for a meal at any restaurant in town or for a drink at any bar, no matter how much he tried to.
Eventually, Socrates says, the freed prisoner blinded by the glare of the sun would begin to adjust to the brightness. At first, he would be able to see only the shadows of objects in this new world.
Shadows are tantalizing. In themselves, they are nothing—only the absence of light. To see them is to see what is not there. And yet, on the other hand, shadows are also premonitions of what is real and solid. Their existence as absence is dependent on the reality of a presence.
That is our fear of shadows. They are harbingers—but of what? What lurks behind them? In this, shadows call up all the terrors of our fevered imaginations. The unknown is filled with both dreams and nightmares. Shadows herald their arrival.
Chained in the pit of the cave, the prisoner had an intimate knowledge of shadows, formed his world from them. The routine of those shadows passing ceaselessly to and fro in the firelight was a comfort to him. These new shadows, though, presage the arrival of a dimly glimpsed new world. These shadows are the future. But will it be a future made of monsters or of something better?
The freed prisoner’s eyes slowly adjust to the light. After shadows, he begins to see images reflected in water.
Reflections are tricky things. They are upside down or backward. Space is topsy-turvy and difficult to navigate. If you try to touch a reflection in water, it shatters.
But in that topsy-turvy world, we do begin to see—a tree, a cloud, a man. The images quiver and vanish, they stand on their heads, but they are there. And we are there. We can see ourselves among the reflections, trembling and fragile (as we always are) and upside down (as we often are), but there nonetheless.
The quiet pools of water in the new world are the first mirrors the freed prisoner has ever seen. Plato talks about his seeing the reflections of other things, other men. But standing with his head bowed by the edge of the water, the freed prisoner also sees, for the first time, himself.
Vaslav and Jake talked incessantly now about their plan of attack on Nashville and how they would conquer the music world there with Vaslav’s songs—songs that Jake was collaborating on now, helping Vaslav to write. If Vaslav wasn’t there, Jake and I talked about him anyway. We talked about how he would get on in Nashville. It had been a long time since I had slept in Jake’s bed or even been alone with him at all.
And so I was glad and a little surprised when Jake came, one wintry Sunday morning, to my little shotgun house all by himself, bringing a sweet potato pie from Blossom’s and coffee in paper cups. We ate the first piece of pie in the kitchen sitting at the table and the second piece in bed after we made love. The temperature was dropping, and we wrapped blankets around us and wished we had more coffee.
After a while, we got dressed and sat again in the kitchen. The light coming through the windows was silvery, reflected from the clouds riding low in the sky. Jake seemed far away, lost in thought, and his face reminded me of how it had been when we killed the squirrel.
“You have to do something you don’t want to do,” I finally said to him.
He looked at me, although not quite in the eye. “I guess,” he said. Then he took a breath and looked at me straight. “I guess I have to tell you that I’m going away alone with Vaslav—to Nashville. I guess I’m in love with him.”
It was like all the air was kicked out of my lungs. Like I had hit the ground hard. Like I was still falling.
“What?”
“I love him. I love him more than I can even say.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What about us? What about you and me?”
“I can’t help what I feel. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“You liar!” I yelled at him. “You are a liar! You lied to me! You made me think you loved me!”
“I thought . . . I really thought I did. I thought I loved you. And I do, but in a different way than I thought.”
“But we belong together—you and me.” I was crying now. “We’re too much alike to be apart.”
“No, we’re too much alike to be together,” he said. “I belong with Vaslav.”
I was furious now. “Don’t you say his name! Don’t you say that bastard’s name to me!”
“This isn’t his fault.”
“Don’t defend him! He knew you were mine and he took you from me!”
“I was never yours,” Jake said. “I was never anybody’s—not until I found Vaslav. He’s like a missing piece of me.”
I was crying so hard that I was almost choking. I had a sick feeling, a sinking coldness in my guts. All those hours they had spent together while I stupidly waited for them to come back. Now it dawned on me what they were doing. I had been an idiot all over again, ignoring the truth just like I had with Danny. I should have known Jake was betraying me. I should have known all along that he would.
“You were in my bed ten minutes ago!” I screamed. “You were making love to me! What the fuck are you doing?”
“I wanted to say goodbye to you.”
“A pity fuck? It was a fucking pity fuck? Fuck you, you fucking bastard! I never even liked you in the first place! You were the one who came after me! Get away from me—get the fuck out of my house! Get out!” And I slapped him in the face as hard as I could slap.
He didn’t even flinch—just stood there and took it. But his eyes filled with tears, and he had to blink hard to hold them back. “I never meant any of this to happen,” he said.
“Fuck you!” I screamed. “Get out of my life!”
Jake left my house and drove off in the dusk. I stood in the yard and watched the taillights of Vaslav’s borrowed car disappear down the road. A snowflake drifted lazily down past my eyes. I looked up at the low, cloudy sky and saw that it was starting to snow and that the world was utterly silent.
If you have grown up with snow, you are used to it. But if you have not had much experience with snow, you know how confusing and disorienting it can be. Rain is different. Rain comes down in a way that is predictable, understandable, comforting. It mostly comes down straight—from the top of the world to the bottom. Even a driving, stinging rain, borne along by the wind, still comes down at a straight angle. Once you get your bearings by it, you can plod along under your umbrella, keeping your face dry.
There is nothing straight about snow. It whirls and drifts and meanders all over the sky, different flakes going up and down and sideways all at once. The snowflakes dance all around you, cavorting on a thousand eddies of imperceptible wind. If you look straight up during a rainstorm, you get wet. If you look straight up during a snowstorm, you get dizzy.
It seemed to me there was nothing predictable at all in the world just then. I felt that no matter what, I was doomed to be dizzy forever.
Orpheus was the greatest of all the mortal musicians, second only to the god Apollo himself in the beauty of his playing. And Orpheus loved the maiden Eurydice with all his heart. Eurydice returned his love, and on their wedding day, she danced in joy across a sunlit field on her way to meet her bridegroom. But a viper lay hidden in the tall grasses, and as Eurydice went past, the viper struck out and bit her on the heel and Eurydice sank down dead.
There are not words enough to tell the anguish and grief of Orpheus. His terrible lamentations rang through the fields and forests. He determined to go into the depths of the underworld—whence no mortal came back—to plead with the god of the dead to return Eurydice to him.
He found the entrance to hell in a cleft in a cave and began the descent into the sulfurous darkness. The fearsome three-headed guard dog, Cerberus, rushed at him, growling and baring his blood-drenched fangs, but Orpheus began to play on his harp such lovely and beguiling melodies that soon the ferocious dog lay down and allowed him to pass.
So it went. The wondrous music of Orpheus provided his passport through the noisome wastes where the Furies spent their hours torturing the spirits of the dead for their sins, until at last he found his way to the throne room of the god of the underworld. Hades sat next to his queen, Persephone, and at their feet was Eurydice. Orpheus made his request—that his beloved be allowed to return with him to the world of mortals. And then, in the frozen suffocating gloom of the underworld, Orpheus began to play. And as he played his harp, the heart of Hades softened and relented. Orpheus was allowed to lead Eurydice out of the underworld, back to the world above—but only on the condition that he not look back at her until they emerged into the sunlight and the air.
And so, without looking behind him, Orpheus began to trace his steps back. He led Eurydice through the dank and fetid caverns, past the lamentable damned—Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion—past the suffering Danaïds, past the slavering Cerberus, until finally a light appeared ahead of him. Orpheus felt once more the breath of earth upon his cheek.
All this time, he had heard no sound at all from Eurydice, and he began to fear she was not behind him after all, that he had lost her somewhere along the way or that Hades had broken his promise. With the sunlight just before him, Orpheus turned to catch a reassuring glimpse of his beloved. There was Eurydice, her lovely face still shadowed in the gloom. But just as his eyes found her and his promise was broken, Eurydice was taken, snatched instantly back into the depths, and only the whisper of a haunting farewell was left in her wake. She was gone.
Orpheus and Eurydice did not walk together, side by side, out of the underworld. When you no longer walk together with your love, you run the risk of losing them. The Greeks knew that when you lose someone you love, you may feel that you would walk through hell itself if only you could get them back. But no matter what you do, they will be lost forever just the same.
The snow that started then lasted for four days and four nights, although it might just as well have been forty, from my point of view. The drifts around my house got deeper and deeper until my winding little driveway took on all the characteristics of a mountain pass in Nepal—the kind where you want to make certain you’re securely roped to an especially sure-footed Sherpa. The kind where any novices on their own would surely plunge to their deaths. I decided to stay inside.
The phone line went out during the first couple of hours, but the electricity miraculously held up, and I had plenty of canned tomatoes to live on in an emergency, having gotten custody of them in the split from Danny.
For the first three days, I was quite content to sit around moaning over Jake and eating canned tomatoes on toast. But by the fourth day, I became insufferable even to myself. So I was surprised and rather relieved when, on the afternoon of the fourth day, someone knocked on my door.
It was Danny. His jeans were wet with snow up past his knees. His cheeks were raw red from the cold, and he didn’t have on any gloves.
“Good Lord, sugar!” I said. “What are you doing out in the apocalypse like this?”
“It looks like hell has finally frozen over,” he said. “If I remember right, that was your condition for forgiving me.”
I laughed. “Well, that was one of them, anyway.”
“Why don’t you let me inside your door and we can talk about the other ones.”
“What makes you think you can handle the other ones?”
“I bet if we put our minds to it,” he grinned, “we can come to some arrangement about them.”
I felt a little breathless, like I always had around him.
“Come on, sugar,” he said. “If there’s a snowball’s chance in hell, today is the day.”
I laughed and stepped back and let him in the door. He took off his too-thin coat and stamped the snow off his legs.
“Are you okay?” he asked, looking serious now.
“You heard?”
“I heard.”
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m better now.” Then I leaned forward and kissed him on his cold lips.
Sleeping with Danny again was a shock to my system for a couple of reasons.
The first was the collapse of time. Everything was just the same as it had been before—the way he tasted, the way he moved, the way he held me. It was as if all the months between then and now had never happened. Except, of course, that they had happened. Jake had happened. Between the last time I was in Danny’s arms and this time, I had lived a whole separate life with Jake.
The second shocking thing about making love to Danny was discovering that I felt guilty for betraying Jake, which was pretty ironic, given the situation. I wondered if Jake—in Nashville by now probably, somewhere warm out of the snow with Vaslav—felt guilty about betraying me. (“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arms.”)
“Thinking about him?” Danny asked me in the silence.
“Does it show very much?”
“You’re not quite as tough as you pretend to be.”
“I still miss him,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. It’s no crime to sleep with one person while you’re thinking about someone else.” He grinned. “At least for my own sake, I hope it isn’t.”
“Cad.”
“I don’t think you’d mind knowing how much I thought about you,” he said, pulling me closer.
“Don’t add idle flattery to your list of sins,” I said. “It’s long enough as it is.”
“Maybe. But you have to admit I have my good points.”
I laughed. “One or two.”
“Not as many as Jake, though?” he asked.
“I can’t help it. I can’t help missing him.”
He sighed. “The heart is an unruly devil, that’s for sure,” he said.
“Lord, ain’t it the truth.”
In the morning, the sun was out and the snow-reflected light was hard and glittering. We had a friendly breakfast of canned tomatoes out of the jar together in the kitchen. Then Danny said goodbye.
“No regrets?” he asked, standing in the door.
“No regrets,” I said. “I’m glad we’re friends again.”
Missing Jake was a fundamentally different experience from missing Danny.
Missing Danny had been loud—made loud by the presence of Danny all around town. The consolation drinking had been loud, incorporating both wailing and gnashing of teeth. Running into Danny by accident had been loud because it inevitably triggered the consolation drinking bouts. Even my new empty house had been loud because it was filled so often with my rowdy, supportive friends and, of course, with Jake.
Missing Jake was almost entirely silent, though, because Jake, unlike Danny, was gone. There was no running into Jake anywhere or any tussling over territory or friends. There were no late-night phone calls filled with tears and recrimination. There were no impromptu fights or fits of unexpected rage brought on by chance proximity. He just vanished. It was more like losing Tom than losing Danny. For all intents and purposes, Jake had died.
I was Jake’s widow, but no one knew it except me. So while this had the effect of keeping the breakup Sturm und Drang to a minimum, it did open up novel possibilities for other types of action. In secret, I began my “Pilgrimage of Jake.” Freed from the risk of running into Jake himself while I was doing it, I allowed myself to indulge in a lonesome and morbid daily round of visitations to all of his shrines. I could play his favorite songs on the jukebox in Hell in complete safety, no one but me and the vanished Jake even knowing they were his favorites. Jake would have known what I was doing, of course. But Jake wasn’t there. I could drive down our old back-road haunts secure that he would never pass me going the other way and pity me. I walked by his house in the weed patch every afternoon, although after surprising the new tenant while he was taking a bath, I did stop looking in the windows.
I didn’t moan about him down in the Cave, a respite for which everyone was grateful. I just quietly and determinedly lived in a world made entirely out of his absence, like living in a house where there has been a terrible fire. I mentally set up a cot in what used to be the bedroom and a camp stool in what used to be the living room, but there weren’t any walls and everything smelled like smoke.
My friends were relieved because it seemed to them that I was doing fine. Rafi didn’t need to push beers on me; Vera didn’t need to lecture. Pancho played sonatas of heartbreak at 2 A.M., but they were for himself, not me.
Danny, of course, knew better, and we didn’t sleep together again. Instead he became very gentle and brotherly with me, stopping by the house sometimes to see if I needed anything—groceries bought or spiders killed or lids taken off new jars—or eating breakfast with me in Blossom’s and not saying much, but not asking me to say much either.
“I bought last time,” he said without looking up from the newspaper when the check came.
“Cheapskate,” I said. But I was relieved that he wasn’t trying to be too kind to me.
One cold night, we sat together on my sofa and watched the Low Lifes make their first television appearance, playing a song from their new album on the Late Show. Charlie Blue joked around with the host and sounded witty and looked like a rock star, which I guess, in fact, he was.
“I gotta run, sugar,” Danny said when the credits were rolling at the end of the show. “I’m late.”
“What can you be late for at midnight?”
“There’s a red-headed librarian waiting for me at Tia’s. At least, I hope she’s still there.”
“Still?”
“Well, I might have told her ten o’clock.”
“Bad man. Aren’t you worried someone else might be snatching her up by now?”
“But think of all the fun I’ll have trying to snatch her back.”
“Are you ever going to grow up and learn to behave yourself?”
“Do you really want me to?”
“Not in the least.”
Danny went out into the night, and I went to bed because I was feeling sleepy. I was sleepy all the time now. Widows are notoriously somnolent.
Without Jake around, I had no heart to find Orla’s visits amusing. My intention was just to ignore her knocking on my door. Given that she usually came while I was still sleeping, this seemed like a workable plan. But Orla was nothing if not determined to give me the benefit of her company, and after three days running of getting no answer first thing in the morning, she shifted her strategy and ambushed me while I was hanging clothes on the line in the tepid winter afternoon sunlight.
“Hello!” she called out, crashing through the withered remains of my azalea bushes.
“Oh, hello,” I said, startled, dropping my bag of clothespins so they scattered into the frost-crusted mud.
Orla watched me while I picked them all up, waiting patiently to explain to me why she was there.
“How are you?” I asked her.
“I’m good,” she said, and then paused, looking at me expectantly.
“How’s Lem?” I said.
“He’s good,” she chirped, still waiting for me to come out with it. I had no idea what she wanted, only that the ball was in my court. I cast around in my brain, trying to dredge up the name of one of her many medically challenged acquaintances about whom I could possibly inquire, but none came to mind, and I felt that I should have paid more attention during her previous visits. If Jake had been there, he would have remembered one of them. But Jake wasn’t there.
Orla must have read my mind.
“Where’s your friend?” she asked, looking all around the bleak little backyard, as if Jake might be hiding under the trampled remains of the azaleas.
“He’s not here,” I said as casually as I could, hoping I wouldn’t cry.
“Hmm,” Orla said, pursing her lips. “And here I was thinking that you had finally managed to catch someone.”
I thought about Jake saying, “Remember this now,” and about how the water on both sides of the bridge was smooth and still like a mirror.
“You’re not getting any younger, you know,” Orla said.
I thought about how the sky had been clear turquoise and about how the sunlight came in the car window and fell in a straight line across his hand on the steering wheel.
“By the time I was your age, I was married and had two babies,” Orla said.
I remembered that the air coming in the open windows had smelled of pine trees, but that if I leaned closer, I could also smell, through the beer and the cigarettes, the faint earthy brown smell that was Jake.
“Why don’t you ever marry any of these fellows you go around with?” Orla asked me.
For just that moment, the memory of him was so vivid that I swear I could taste him on my tongue.
“I don’t know, Orla,” I said.
The most beautiful of all mortal men was Adonis. Even the goddesses vied for his attention. But it was Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, who lost herself most completely in him. She had been present at his birth and had loved him from the first minutes of his life. As he grew into a man, radiant and brave, she risked the wrath of her husband, Hephaestus, and her lover, Ares, the god of war, to be with him. Alas for Adonis, Aphrodite also incurred the wrath of her rivals, Persephone, the queen of the dead, and Artemis, the huntress.
The legends tell us that Adonis was fond of hunting and Aphrodite would sometimes join him, abandoning her silken robes and her perfumed couch to dress as a huntress herself and follow him through the woods. At other times, she would glide above him, riding across the sky in her chariot pulled by swans. It was on one such day that Adonis met his death.
He was on his own, hunting in a dense tangle of trees and underbrush, when he cornered a wild boar, ferocious and maddened with fear. Adonis drew his bow and sent an arrow directly to the heart of the beast. But Artemis, jealous of the preference that Adonis gave to Aphrodite, caused the arrow to go astray. Instead of killing the boar, it only wounded it, enraging it. In its pain, the boar rushed forward, goring Adonis with its vicious tusks, tearing the flesh that had been so perfect, ripping away his life.
Aphrodite, from her chariot in the sky, heard the death cry of her beloved. She swooped immediately down to his side, taking the bleeding Adonis in her arms. But it was too late. Adonis was dead, and all Aphrodite could do now was weep for him.
The legends tell us that as Aphrodite held Adonis in her arms there in the darkened woods, his blood fell drop by drop on to the forest floor, and where each drop fell, there sprang up a new flower—the blood-red anemone called the “windflower.” They are his memorial.
The ancient Greeks knew that loss is not always the end. Something new can be born from every ending. Flowers can come from blood.