A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (6 page)

Inside, the restaurant was decorated precisely as Latangi had described, with embroidered Bible verses framed on the wall, display shelves of ceramic statues of praying hands and twig-bearing doves and Baby Jesuses lying in miniature mangers and Ten Commandments tablets shaped like matching tombstones. But the music—coming from a boom box positioned behind the register—was not at all what Henry would have expected. Instead of gospel—or even pop or R&B—the music playing was Miles Davis, a live version of “If I Were a Bell,” Davis's fluttering trumpet speeding through the melody, somehow managing to suggest both uncertainty and resolve. A young girl, a teenager, her hair pulled tight behind her head, smiled at Henry, picked up a laminated menu, and led him to an open table.

“The music?” Henry said as he sat down.

“Not me.” The girl laughed, shaking her head. “That's my grandfather. He's crazy for this stuff.”

“You don't like it?” Henry said.

The girl glanced behind her and shook her head again. “No words to it.”

“It's Miles Davis,” Henry said, and the girl looked at him as though trying to figure out something, whether he was dangerous, maybe, or what kind of accent he had. “I like it,” Henry said.

“Most people don't. They just want it turned down,” the girl said. “Papa can't hear so well, so all day he turns it up bit by bit until it's blaring.”

“It's meant to be loud,” Henry said.

“Well, I'll tell Papa someone finally likes it.”

“Wait,” Henry said as the girl started to go. “Listen,” he said, and he was surprised by the pleading tone in his voice. The girl stopped and turned her head to the side as though she was indeed listening. She had a small scar on the bottom of her chin, a thin pale line against the brown skin, and she raised a hand to cover it. Maybe she had noticed Henry looking. And that moment, as if Henry had orchestrated it, the trumpet fell away just as the tenor sax took over, a spiraling line of exquisite power and grace. “That's Wayne Shorter,” Henry said, surprised that he knew this. “In 1965,” he said. “Live at the Plugged Nickel.” He shook his head. “It's a crazy thing to know,” he said. “It's just—”

The girl looked at him, her hand still at her chin.

What was he trying to say? He couldn't explain that it was this kind of thing—insignificant, useless—that always popped into his head.

“Well, you sound just like Papa,” the girl said, stepping away now, hurrying toward a table where a man was holding his check in the air.

What he truly sounded like, Henry knew, was his own father, leaning near their old Philips stereo, the receiver's tubes casting a faint green light onto the wall behind the stereo's wooden cabinet. Henry sat and listened now, in this crowded restaurant, as he had sat next to his father, both of them absolutely still, Henry standing up only when one record ended and the next one dropped into place. He'd liked to watch the records spinning around, liked to try to decipher the label as the disk spun and spun. “Listen,” his father would tell him, a hand on Henry's shoulder. “Listen to this.” And now, though for the life of him he couldn't say why, Henry felt as though he were hearing this music, truly hearing it, for the very first time, as though he could finally detect what he had never been able to before—the distinct pattern that all the instruments, weaving this way and that, had stitched together.

Though Henry had listened, through the years, to nearly all of the music his father had left behind, he'd never understood it the way his father had. Henry had made his way through his father's reel-to-reel and cassette tapes and dusty 78s, through the recordings of Algerian rai and Ethiopian jazz, Cuban
son
and Congolese rumba and Andalusian flamenco, Caribbean gospel and Texas and Delta and Memphis blues. He tried to listen to the scratchy Folkways' recordings of slaves' sorrow songs and Baptist hymns and prison chants and sea chanteys and Appalachian ballads. Henry could usually distinguish one style from another, could sometimes name the particular artist who was playing, but he lacked whatever talent his father possessed that allowed him to perceive the way all of the world's music was, as his father had explained it, a single song.

Henry could even remember how once, on a world map laid out across the kitchen table, his father had shown him the routes that music took as it spread through the centuries from one continent to another, from one region to the next, from city to city and town to town, transforming each time into something new that nevertheless contained vestiges of what it had once been. Henry had been too young—he had always been too young—to really follow what he was saying, to even care enough to try to understand. But he did understand, when his father spoke, that this subject mattered to him more than anything else in the world. It mattered in a way that was unsettling, even frightening, to Henry, as if his father were a swimmer kept afloat in the ocean not by his body's natural buoyancy or by the careful movement of his arms and legs but by something much more mysterious and terrifying—something just like the painting he'd once seen that depicted beautiful Sirens perched on jagged rocks, sharks and stingrays and other deadly fish swirling around them, the Sirens calling out in strange, piercing cries that Henry imagined he could hear just from the way the Sirens were drawn, their heads thrown back, their mouths wide open.

“Music speaks what otherwise cannot be spoken,” his father liked to declare when someone asked him why he studied what he did. “Each melody, each song, is like a dream,” he'd say, and though Henry knew his father was just speaking the way professors spoke, he somehow also sensed that there was desperation as well as comfort in this pronouncement.

Yes, Henry understood that songs were like dreams—even though throughout his childhood, throughout his whole life, in fact, up until his father's ghost appeared at the foot of his bed, Henry didn't dream.

Everyone, of course, insisted that Henry
did
dream, that he simply didn't remember these dreams. Amy had told him that he was lucky. She'd often felt besieged by her dreams, which were so astonishingly vivid, so rich with detail, that Henry once joked that she spent more time recounting them than she'd spent sleeping.

What Amy could not do, though—and what Henry, oddly enough, did quite well—was interpret these dreams. Henry seemed to unravel their mysteries with such effortless confidence that Amy would not, even when Henry begged her to, stop telling him every detail. She did not understand that his skill was simply the result of his having loved her, of having watched her so closely for so many years, of sensing that her life was somehow decidedly more real than his own, as if her every footstep left a permanent mark while his were far too ephemeral to leave even the slightest trace. He remembered everything Amy had ever told him about her life—the boys and books and college classes and pets she had adored, the places she and her brother had visited with their globe-trotting parents, all of them floating down the Nile on a wooden raft, riding leathery, mud-caked elephants in India, climbing the trash-strewn path to Machu Picchu, sailing to England on the
QE2,
kneeling in a bamboo cage above the scorpion-infested floor of a Buddhist temple on an island in the East China Sea. He remembered every meal she had cooked, every outfit she had worn, every present she had given him. He was certain he could remember, if he tried, every time they'd had sex—or not remember, exactly, because he did not need to remember, his body imprinted with her touch. Amy was so calm and rational in her commerce with the world that he had been shocked and embarrassed by how imaginative and daring and vocal she became in bed, her hair unleashed from the complicated knot into which she wound it each morning, like the demure librarian who, in the final pages of a romance novel, abandons her painfully prim demeanor and whispers
Take me now
into her hero's ear. Henry, though, was the one who always felt
taken.

He hated his silence, his inability to announce his own desire, to tell her what he wanted to do to her, what he wanted done. With his high-school students, in conversations about the stories and poems and plays they read, he was forthright, casually explicit, when discussing sex. Paul Kehoe had warned him, of course, that he had to watch what he said, that there were parents who didn't approve, who perceived his candor as a dangerous enticement.

All art,
Henry had wanted to tell Kehoe,
is a dangerous enticement,
thinking of his father's passion for music, his mother's paintings, but he'd said it to Amy instead.

“And food,” Amy had answered. “Food is the first enticement.” It was food, Amy claimed, that had lured the fish from the sea, that had drawn man from his cave, that had led him to spark fire from the dull inertia of tree and stone.

It was indeed food that had enticed Henry to ask Amy out on a date. He'd approached her at a local bookstore where she had set up a table of dishes she had prepared, the scent of each dish so wonderful that at first Henry didn't notice how beautiful Amy was—or how ridiculous she looked in the tall white chef's toque and matching white canvas apron she was wearing, a silk-screened portrait with her signature beneath it on both, something her publisher had insisted she wear. She was the author of a series of witty cookbooks that led the reader on fanciful, intrepid excursions across various continents in search of exotic meals; she was at the bookstore to sign copies of the latest installment.

A Pilgrim's Provisions, the series was officially titled, though Amy told Henry over drinks that night that she preferred her original alliterative proposal, A Forager's Feasts, which seemed more in keeping, she said, with her modest, decidedly secular aims—and the books' equally modest sales, she added, which were just enough to send her to her next volume's exotic destination.

“Which is where?” Henry had asked her.

“Japan,” she said. “In two months.”

And Henry had ended up going with her, even though he hated traveling, hated the dislocation of it, the sense that he had been set adrift. Right after they returned, he suggested they get married. “That way,” he said, as if the issue were one of logic and convenience, “you could, for instance, get a dog and not have to worry about how long you were gone. You'd have someone to watch him for free.”

“What if I don't want a dog?” Amy had answered, laughing.

“Even better,” he'd said. “The truth is I'm not very good with dogs.”

“So what are you good at?” she'd asked him, and he'd just looked at her, then he'd lowered his head as if he were thinking, and he'd waited until his silence had become comic, had set Amy to laughing again.

“Nothing,” he said finally. “I'm good at nothing.”

He understood, of course, the charm of such apparent modesty. But in this case, what he'd said was actually true. He didn't have a clue, really, about history or philosophy or biology or chemistry or economics. He was at a loss on the subjects of medicine and law and meteorology and comparative religion. He could not play chess or garden or sew and did not understand the stock market or car engines or actuarial tables. He could not locate or name any constellations; he could not tell a finch from a nuthatch, a birch from a cypress. He had never held a gun or a blowtorch or a power saw; he'd never been a bartender, a roofer, a ranch hand, a roughneck, or a smoke jumper.

“Sex,” she'd said. “You're good at sex.”

“No,” Henry said, more seriously, more honestly, than he had intended. “
You're
good at sex. I'm just the student. An
eager
student, mind you—”

“Books,” Amy said, triumphant. “You know books. That trumps them all.”

No, he'd said. There too he didn't know most of what he was supposed to know. He hadn't read
The Iliad
or
The Odyssey
and certainly nothing obscure like
The Tale of Genji
or
Tristram Shandy
or
The Faerie Queene
or
The Decameron.

“Yeah, well, who has?” Amy had said, but he held up his hand.

“Listen,” he said—like his father, or like some reverse image of his father, who had of course known everything he was supposed to know and a million other things as well: how to open a wine bottle without a corkscrew, how to count cards in blackjack, how to make a Sazerac and an Old Fashioned.

He hadn't read Henry Miller, he told Amy, much less Henry Fielding or Henry James. “You'd think, you know, given my name, that I'd have read at least some Henrys.”

“O. Henry?” Amy asked.

Henry shook his head. And he hadn't, he said, read Jane Austen or Tolstoy or much of Hemingway besides
The Old Man and the Sea.
In a seminar in college he'd been forced to make his way through Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano,
about which he now remembered exactly nothing, and
Moby-Dick,
much of which he couldn't remember even as he'd read it. Mainly, he told Amy, he had tried to figure out which of the two books was a more useful prop to spark conversation with the beautiful, sullen young graduate students who, with their spiked bangs skimming their lashes, studied at the café tables in the student union.

“Which one
was
better?” Amy had asked.

“Neither one. Nothing,” Henry had said. “I tried everything. Kerouac and Ginsberg and Bukowski and Borges. I even sank as low as Kahlil Gibran. Nothing worked.”

“Well, now it has,” Amy had said, taking his hand.

“You're a sucker for Kahlil Gibran?” Henry had said. “Do you know how pathetic that is?”

“Not Kahlil Gibran,” Amy had said, smiling, crying now. “You. I'm a sucker for you.”

“Worse,” Henry had said. “Much, much, much worse.”