An Excerpt

Yes, an excerpt. A brief one. From something that's loosely strung together, but keeps wanting to be pulled taut. Perhaps, if you grab one end and I grab the other, we could tighten things a bit. We'll have ourselves a high-wire balancing act. Pull! Pull! One of us will be imperiled. Shall we meet at your end or mine? Or, a tin-can telephone. Speak up! That'd be safer. But talking's just not the same as being there. If neither of those is satisfactory, we could garrote one another with piano-wire. But that would be to the detriment of understanding. Rather, we should just tune up the piano. I'll cover the left hand. You get the right. And together… Anyway, a brief excerpt:


    At ten o’clock he rose from the chair at the kitchen table, walked to a side-table in the living room, and turned on a lamp. He lurched, blew air out from his throat, and flopped into his fabric-upholstered Lay-Z-Boy recliner. There were coils protruding from the patterned-taupe cushion. Five half-smoked cigarettes were piled in the bottom of a cut-glass ashtray on the table with the lamp. There were two Pall Malls, which were his, and three Marlboros, badly crumpled, which were his daughter’s. The light struck the ashtray and scattered into rainbow-colored fragments that played on the man’s shirt and on the polished tabletop. They were like sun-dogs in January. The light sunk into the barren and frost-bitten fields, into the furrows—into the dark wood of the tabletop.
    The man reached out and held his hand up to the light, slipping it under the lampshade and feeling the metal cage. He liked the burn of incandescent bulbs—the wasted heat, the thin, powdery glass. There was great warmth and sensitivity in dim yellow light, he thought. It was a private light, a consoling light. A light in which one might hide a part of oneself. No pale ghosts to confront, their emptiness laid bare in washed-out brightness.
    In the garage, there were ghostly fluorescent tubes that clattered on and hummed and hung from metal chains, and that glowed green when switched off. His son had put the lights in above a workbench, red and full of drawers, most of which were empty. The man didn’t use the bench much—it was a failed and long-forgotten Father’s Day gift that was supposed to make up for half-a-dozen missed birthdays—and he didn’t linger in the garage, except when looking at his old Riviera and fidgeting with its antenna.
    On the wall opposite his chair, in the shadows just above the lampshade’s scalloped cut-off, hung a picture. There were two kids—a girl, maybe twelve, smiling and holding up brushes and wearing a paint-covered smock, and boy, a little younger, looking up at her and clapping.
    He thought about the car as he sat and breathed and felt the heat from the lamp. He’s have to have it washed and detailed if he wanted to take his wife down south in it. He’d at least have to vacuum it. She only needed a little hollow in the trunk—the compartment under the floor where the spare went, probably. He wouldn’t need the tire, and he wanted to keep her covered.
   
    There was already a stone in the family plot with her name on it and two numbers with a short line running in between. The stone was right up alongside old slate and limestone markers—flaking and crumbling—that belonged to her great-aunts and great-uncles, many of whom died in infancy, or when they were five- or six-years-old. The second number was the one that mattered: 1982. In the first place, it mattered because it was wrong. It should have read: 1983. She’d been shortchanged a year by the stonecutter. Not that it had been much of a year. It had been spent mostly in hospitals in Arizona and Minnesota—they’d driven back north at the suggestion of her doctors. The heat was too much for her, they’d said. In the second place, right or wrong, the number mattered because she was dead.
    Her husband contemplated the drive down to Savannah, Georgia. He imagined how it would end. He’d take I-16 until it met up with 204. The Buick’s white-walled tires would snap over the expansion joints, ka-thunk. Or, if he was driving near its ninety-mile-per-hour limit, they’d issue a resounding crack, like he’d slapped his wife, which he had once, and which he'd regretted. And then he’d turn onto Kollock Street, take it southwest past Terrace Street, past West 39th, and then he’d swing around in the crescent-shaped driveway and he’d come up to the iron gate, overshadowed by old-growth trees, and he’d see the sign: Laurel Grove Cemetery. The groundskeeper would be solemn but impatient, and he’d send out a few gravediggers with shovels and a backhoe. They’d stand at a semi-respectful distance with their hands in their pockets, smoking, fidgeting a little, waiting to shovel the dirt back and pat it down, and he’d say his good-byes and put the urn into the too-big hole. That’s how it would go, he figured. And that couldn’t possibly be the end. Just couldn’t be.