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In Another Way

Vincent Barry

    Another way is on my mind when I ask Char for the SKYY.
    Strictly against house rules, cobalt blue is, but we’ve worked out an arrangement, the charwoman and I. SKYY for TV. . . .
    Betcha haven’t heard that term in a while. Or “charlady,” or “chargirl,” or just plain ole “char,” as I affectionately call the facility’s charwoman. It’s British. I’ve always liked it. Don’t know why, doesn’t matter. . . . Of “why,” more and more I can say less and less....
    Picked it up in Jinja, “char”—that I still remember.
    ’S in Uganda, Jinja is. On Lake Victoria— the headwaters of the White Nile, that stretches two thousand or so miles to embrace the the Blue Nile, like a lover the beloved. Beautiful image, isn’t it? Oh, right, right, Idi Amin Dada,“Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa and General and Uganda in Particular” who fed four thousand disabled citizens to the crocodiles infested headwaters of the Nile . .  Well, no image is perfect. .  only, of course, one that’s heart-opening, but of that—
    What was I doing there? Hmm, probably some contract work or other. . . . That evasive enough? Like “import/export?”. .  Frankly, I—can’t remember. . . . and it doesn’t matter. . . .
    Oh, well, it does, bothers actually, failing memory, even if most things, as I used to think, I think, aren’t worth remembering. I mean, when you come right down to it, “There is nothing more beautiful than to forget.” Still, more ’n more, to whoever said it I say: If it’s so beautiful, then how come it worries like sin—the closing over the past like a skin? Why does it turn 3 a.m. into the sweaty panic fear of a man facing the noose at dawn. .  were it not for the quieting presence of—?
    “A man in trouble must be possessed somehow of a woman. If she doesn’t come in one way she comes in another.”
    I read that once and never forgot it. Funny the things that stick even when you’re coming unglued. . . . The thing is, though, a man doesn’t always know in which way a woman is coming until it’s too late. . . . About a woman, I don’t know. . . .
    It’s her birthday—I am speaking now of 3 a.m., to Char, as if she can understand English—
    then, going on, I am taking the girl up to a lodge, seduction on my mind. Not a ski lodge, but up in the mountains, the Tehachapis, where Sam Spade sent Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Not so far from where the supermax used to be. . . . Stallion Springs . .  the lodge, I mean, not the women’s prison. . . .
    That’s how I always begin, and that’s where Char always plugs in the Hoover Convertible, whose whirring and birring and purring naturally makes me pause before continuing, She says later, the girl does, This was the most romantic experience of my life.
    But then, instead of what I’m supposed to say, always say because I always recount exactly what I had in the back of my mind back at the time, “Really?”, “You know what I mean?” comes out—but not even that, ’cause it’s lost, for being said to myself, to the slightly hunched over figure plainly used to using her body weight to allow the vacuum to float out and away before drawing it back. Not even that, in fact. No longer of either girl or Char, said or lost, or of me for that matter—of what’s on my mind, the color, y’know, of the object that it reflects, not even that, for something new stands in front of it, my mind, y’know what I mean?
    Now at 3 a.m she comes in another way, the girl does, I say, a way I never counted on — so artlessly, so naively, so sweetly that it sets loose all the joys and sorrows in the world—and Char, suddenly unplugging the upright’s susurrations says in the ensuing prayerful silence, “La noche oscura del alma,” as if she’s taken it all in and is closing the lattice opening on the rest of my confession and abandoning me to that drizzly morning, cold and barren, with scents and smells carried on a high-grey flannel valley fog.
    We were poised, y’see, the girl and I, to start back to “the dead city,” as we called Bakersfield. Right, Buck Owens country. But it wasn’t Buck singing. It was the First Lady of Song— not scat singing or improvising, just—let me explain.
    We were at the time outside the lodge, on the stone patio, which had an outdoor speaker and a rediscovered well, just sitting there, the girl and I, listening to purity of tone and phrase —
    Everytime we say goodbye I die a little,
    Everytime we say goodbye I wonder why a little,
    —when of a sudden, after saying what she said, propelled, y’cud say, by the courage of youthful innocence, the girl turned a cartwheel, then another, then— imagine!—just like that, turning cartwheel after cartwheel in the mist, ’midst Lady Ella’s
    And when you’re near
    There’s such an air of spring about it
    I can hear a lark somewhere begin to sing about it.
    Never did I think, “This is one of those moments that are nostalgic before they’re over,” because, I guess, I thought she was coming in one way. . . .
    I sink down, to the drizzle and fog overhanging the dead city, to cartwheels in the mist, and murmur, a bit sadly, as if “bending down beside the glowing bars,” “Char, how to say ‘in another way’?”, never thinking of course that she can understand, but she does—doesn’t she, mustn’t she?— ’cause she says, “¿Por qué?” in a dead level tone, and her “Why?” pierces me as light. . . .
    Then suddenly I am full of sleep, and Char says softly, “Aquí,” of my Vitamin V, and turns on a telenovela. . . .

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