“He wrote a reference for me. It was very good of him.”
Daniel did not say that Peter had owed him.
Back in college, it was Rebecca who had convinced Daniel to take a course with Peter. By his senior year, Dr. Whitbourn had become Peter. One night, over pints of Guinness at the Beerded Matron, Peter congratulated him on his engagement to Ms. Rebecca Menlow. As Peter and Daniel made progress on their goal of drinking immoderately, the alcohol loosened their inhibitions and tongues. The professor told Daniel he was tired of teaching. He had little respect for most of his students, even less for his colleagues. As for the school’s administration, he was too civil to use any of the precise adjectives.
To Peter the whole world was, by and large, a personal insult. He found the glazed boredom in his students’ eyes a direct affront. Ditto for their slouching torsos and unfortunate syntax. Those who were bright he disliked even more for the demands they made on his time. The dean had told Peter he had “great pedagogic talent,” but that was an insult, too, an excuse to force him to expend energy on people destined to remain unsung.
After his fourth beer, Daniel confessed something as well. He wasn’t sure how to handle girls. He had visited America with his father as a child, but living here was different. The idea of women in sequential or simultaneous romantic liaisons was alien. At parties, girls talked about sex like it was just another facet of life, joking about details, comparing notes. He knew there was nothing wrong with this, that it signaled a progress he believed in, but sometimes these principles were easier to praise in the abstract than to live. It was so hard to shake the rule he’d been raised with: that a woman should save herself for her one true love. As Daniel emptied his beer at the Matron, Peter listened, never taking his eyes off his own sweating bottle, refusing the day-old peanuts the bartender shoved into view. Finally, he said, “Daniel, every man has two selves caught in perpetual battle. You should ignore their fights, except for the epic ones. The Sonny-Liston-versus-Muhammad-Alis. Pay close attention to those. And don’t choose sides ahead of time. Just let the best man win.” When fighting with yourself, it wasn’t always easy to tell who the best man was, but this seemed like something to drink to, so they did.
Less than a year after that, Rebecca revealed a secret of her own. Daniel knew Rebecca had been with men before him, but had never imagined there would be any more after him. After they’d graduated in 1968, she’d suddenly withdrawn, insisting she needed time and space. She’d spent that summer with friends in England and France, returning with promises of devotion and love. Daniel had taken her back without question.
Months later, he stared at her across the candlelit table in her beachfront studio, wondering when her speech would end. The candles flickered as she spoke. She insisted the “thing with Peter” had lasted only weeks, during the time she was away. Which meant that Peter had come to Europe to be with her. When she was finished, she sat with her head low. “Say something,” she whispered.
Daniel fetched an almost empty bag of chips. The only ones left were broken and small. Faced with his silence, Rebecca tried to explain herself, her tone shifting between urgency, regret, and defiance.
Daniel prepared for a fight, but not with her. It was a death match between his two selves. He told her it was all right. He kissed her good night and walked out of the apartment, leaving her in her chair with her knees to her chest and her head in her hands. The screen door bounced shut behind him.
Stalking up Ocean Boulevard toward home, he passed the bluff where he’d asked Rebecca to marry him above the emerald-studded sea. He turned right on Montana Avenue. When he reached Wilshire, he picked up his pace, running past gas stations and convenience stores and homeless men who made comments about his speed or asked him for spare change. He had always wished he could fly, wanting to go faster, wondering why his feet wouldn’t simply lift off the ground like the feet of a small Kochi boy alongside the road.
“Run, brother, run,” said a man from his box for a bed. Daniel nearly fell over a shopping cart shoved into his path by another man who was cursing someone called Jane while waving a fist at the moon.
Once he was home, Daniel flipped through the phone book and looked for a place that would teach him to fly. He wanted to rise into the sky in a plane big enough just for one or maybe two, so he could watch the world from above when he couldn’t bear to be in its midst.
Then he revisited a place he had not been in more than two years. When he’d first come to California in 1963, he’d been determined to free himself of old ideas that had no place in his modern life. But it wasn’t as easy as throwing away the broken pieces of chips at the bottom of a bag. He decided to think of ideas as living things that belonged in one of two different houses: the good, modern ones lived in a sparkling high-rise, the old ones in a mud shack in Kandahar. When a belief he didn’t like popped into his head, Daniel would seize it by its imaginary arm, toss it into the mud shack, and padlock the door. In the beginning, Daniel had to play this game almost every day.
The night of August 20, 1967, with Rebecca’s confession about Peter reeling in his head, Daniel walked into his apartment, opened every window, and drank a warm beer while taking a cool shower, lay naked on his bed with his eyes closed, and let a storm flood the Kandahar shack, dissolving its walls and washing away everything inside until all that remained was a pile of sludge and a ruined lock he swore he would never need again.