4

The first thing Pace did the next day at the Art Institute was look at Seurat’s painting. It was much larger than he’d expected it to be and he was pleased to finally be standing in front of it, but he was disappointed that it was covered by glass and at certain angles was difficult to see properly. After he’d had enough of La Grand Jatte, Pace toured most of the rest of the museum, then went outside and stood near one of the lion statues at the entrance and watched the traffic crawl by.

He thought about his parents, Sailor and Lula, and how impossible it seemed to him that neither of them was alive. As long as his mother was still on the planet, Pace felt that Sailor, even though he had preceded Lula to the promised land by fifteen years, through her remained near by, his spirit if not his consciousness embodied in Lula. She was forever “consulting” Sailor, as she put it, considering what he would do or say in a certain situation. At least Pace had had a good last visit with his mother when she and her dearest and most enduring friend, Beany Thorn, had driven down from North Carolina to New Orleans to see him. The fact that Beany had been with Lula when she expired consoled Pace some. Anyway, he was almost sixty years old now and he’d led an interesting life, from N.O. to New York, to Nepal, Los Angeles and back to N.O. The problem, Pace had realized for a long time, was that he had been marked so deeply by the mutual devotion of his parents. Their undying love was a kind of miracle, he believed, and the fact that he never found the Big Love he expected to show up made Pace wonder if his own life had been a failure. Perhaps if he and his ex-wife, Rhoda Gombowicz, had had children, he would feel differently. He’d loved Rhoda but their time had run out thirty years ago. She was gone now, too, of course. After they’d divorced and Pace had taken himself off to Kathmandu, Rhoda had gone back to college and become a primate ethnologist. While doing fieldwork in Rwanda, studying gorillas, she was killed by poachers who had in an effort to cover up their crime dismembered her body and buried the parts in different places in the jungle. Only Rhoda’s head and her left leg were found and returned by the Rwandan government to her parents.

Pace had read about her death and the circumstances of it by chance in a month-old copy of The International Herald Tribune while he was recovering in Bangalore, India, from two broken ankles suffered during a trek in the Himalayas. Rhoda’s murder was investigated but the perpetrators had never been found. Harvard University, which had funded her research, apparently mounted a plaque in Rhoda’s honor on a wall in their anthropology department but Pace had never gone to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see it. He had, however, visited Rhoda’s grave, which, of course, contained only the remains of her head—one ear was missing—and one leg, in a cemetery at Montauk, Long Island, where her parents, Irving and Greta Gombowicz, had gone to live following Irving’s retirement from the New York City Fire Department. Engraved on Rhoda’s tombstone, other than her name and dates of birth and death, were the words: “Her Heart Is With The Animals She Loved.”

It was time, Pace decided, while watching a red Toyota Prius being driven by a woman talking on a cell phone rear end a city bus, to get serious about the Up-Down.