ruminative forms as to have less effect on his mood and ambition than a lite beer. He saw in Fiona another culture with deeper roots. He let it come to him. If it did, he was unintimidated. If not, the point was moot. He liked , in the summer and fall, though his sense of home now was movement. Saddle up. A season or two suffices. In whither thou goest he was most touched by goest. Gettin a mite tired of Dave, anyway. A nice kid, smart, able, and willing to hold down his Yankee nerves. Stoic within his means. Rafe had been pleased as always to find he could really talk to Dave--unusual with this generation--but it was something he found with a number of people. Creepy kid. Rafe was moved, but.... One thing movies lack is intermissions--supplied by breaks not so much commercial as natural, bespoke. Fiona had a nice place back east and he had some business with TV scripts at a NY studio. He might look like a hick to her there, but he knew when and how to tone down the accent. Owned some Savile Row suits. Knew the restaurants and galleries. Besides, movement. Not frenetic but stately, well organized. Travel. Get her away from the kids. He sensed she'd enjoy it, especially on his responsibility. At his age he wasn't looking for a good mother for his children--never had been, which might've been a mistake--and who was to say she hadn't been? He hadn't done well in that department himself, point of fact, and this did not set him apart from folkways. Only the insecure boonies, undeterred by evidence, believe in a uniform standard, a platonic scale of virtue applicable from situation to situation, culture to culture, person to person, movie to movie. There may be only one reality, but there are many visions. And if there be a soul, it's no essence, but as mutable as any other well written character. Give the Old Boy credit.
The men were armed, infected, mad, so David, no coward, never considered intervening, even once fully awoke from short sleep. Call a cop? He could imagine himself pleading, disheveled; returning, harshly condescending Officer in tow, to show The Man this group of invisibles again peacably drinking, panhandling, napping, the fetid woman, curled under burlap, unwilling to show her schizo face, much less file incident reports or again expose of her own free will her greenbruised clotted thighs for a sad Polaroid. (Backlit acid cyanine, the hue of her varicose....) Clearly law and custom did not apply. Goths encamped in the eternal city, the seat of empire. David walked back to Grand Central, stripped to the waist in the men's room and bathed. The water brooked along his pebbled back, infested his trouser seams with damp. The universal solvent marking the insoluble stranger. The waiting room was too exposed. He struck his tents again. All the same he would days later pass one of his father's colleagues on at 42nd but by then David would've become invisible too. Torn, dirty, homeless. As callous about room temperature as a bike racer. Wandering Jew. The days passed. He developed an obsession with cleanliness, arcane knowledge of bathrooms and fountains. The obsession metamorphosed. His topsiders would hold up well, though provide inadequate cushioning. Intended for sailing, a nongravity sport. He shifted for himself. He studied where the rain does not fall, the sun shineth not, where wind is lost. He found a refrigerator box on the Lower East Side, pulled it into a drain gully behind a Canal Street culvert and insulated it with carpet remnants and chunks of fiberglass found in a construction dumpster. Omar Khayyam, his tent. Put up and hidden away at daybreak, repitched at nightfall. The box was safer than a Shelter or Con Ed
He kept his mouth shut for the sake of his rep in stoic but he was having trouble putting up with himself. Riding used to shut down that voice, or knead it, but the only present means was chemical, and less successful, not merely in side- and after-effects. A tank top, mesh-lined shorts, huaraches. It was getting hot, even in his sylvan oasis. Rayban Wayfarers and a Panama hat as sequester from the merciless Aztec Sun. Keen edge of the bronze. He lived fine with people one at a time but as soon as we became three or more he became sullen at an odd one out for the most venial transgressions--a constant peroxide drip--or convinced he was the odd one and the others pitied and contemned him, Caliban. Why? Had one parent laid plot with him against the other? Had his childhood oeconomy been so bilious? He put his truck key and superthin wallet in his pockets. Always hated carrying things. Burdened enough. Tent and duffle, bikes and watercraft already loaded for South Padre. Even Rose was willing to ride the flats a couple days. Mountainbike the beach, stretch in the sun, sailboard the foamy waves. Steamed shrimp, eaten cold, with horseradish sauce. Erika would already be outside, striding the ledges impatiently, those calves flaring like cobra hoods. She'd learned six didn't mean six sharp in this country but she didn't have to like it, at least when she was alone. Well, long as he beat Rose, the superior wheedler. Relaxed as a conditioned athlete. In top form, weeks before the Olympics. While he was tired. Catch-up nap in the truck. If the girls didn't babble. Getting in any vehicle for a trip, even brief, always sentenced him to a certain moment of panic, of sinking fear and isolation. Particularly creepy if it was not his. Had family trips been such a cage? Little Davey already L'Etranger, age three? A toddling Meursault. And why did small boys always touch his heart? as innocent and at risk, as earnest but doomed. He
That left the neglect question. There was just too much evidence. The medical history, David's specific memories, and most tellingly Fiona's present way of being. She was once again totally engrossed in a mate. To this day she didn't even recognize that David had a speech impediment. The emotional problems skimmed right over her head. They were up to Erika. Her grandchild interested her but rarely. It's difficult for a mother--particularly a young mother--to respect a mom like that, but Erika was not so much tolerant as dismissive of the past. She had the practical new world approach; the Moores were the ones engrossed in the world of yesterday. In this sense, she realized that motherhood's a tough job, so tough that no parents do it perfectly, even working together. An Olympic weightlifter she consulted about squats and thrusts--form, technique--once said, 'No two guys lift the same': like marriages, childrearing's hard to judge from outside. Americans, some explicitly believing in absolute morality, and all under that influence, naturally tend to judge everyone by one standard. But people have facets. Some good mothers are perfectly intolerable human beings, while some fine people just don't have a parenting instinct, never develop sympathy for children. They discipline well and encourage badly, or vice versa. Erika was satisfied with this amount of progress. Forward looking, she had no driven need to delve farther into this past, but getting some background established about her husband’s history was important. What she worked out was subject to revision, not set in stone, but the outlines were pretty determinate compared to her in laws’ uncertain, fearful and waffling vision. Erika kept her own counsel.