Fiction from NER 44.3 (2023)
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ark Penrose turned into a narrow lane leading away from Union Square when he saw someone walking slightly ahead of him on the opposite sidewalk. He couldn’t be sure—so many years had passed, and the man’s hair was mostly gone. But he had glanced in Mark’s direction, and he had the same large, ardent eyes, and he walked with that slightly stooped posture. He was taller than Mark remembered. Was it really his old friend, the one more than any other whom he wished he might see again?
He picked up his pace so he was even with the man, glancing over, stealing a look. Should he approach? Just then he ducked into a small bakery, and Mark decided to follow. There was room for only three or four customers, and Mark was standing behind the man when he heard him say, “I’ll have the apple tart, please.”
“Pete?” Mark said. He’d recognized the voice immediately.
“Excuse me?” the man said, turning with a look of curiosity and surprise.
“I’m sorry. I think I know you. Peter Francis? It’s Mark. Mark Penrose.”
It had been forty years since Mark had seen him, and Mark couldn’t guess how firmly fixed he was in Pete’s memory.
Now Pete smiled. “Of course.”
Mark was ready to be disappointed, to find that Pete had forgotten all about him or dismissed him as unimportant in the sweep of his life. It wasn’t that way for Mark. Pete had been a different kind of friend, alive to ideas and books and music in a way no one else was. His father was into politics, and Mark had met interesting people because of Pete. In later years, Pete sometimes appeared in his dreams—dreams in which he hoped Pete would approve of him and his life.
“It’s just—we were such good friends,” Mark said.
Pete’s expression relaxed, and there was the wry smile that Mark remembered. “Yes, we were,” he said.
“Sorry. I was nervous about, you know, coming up to someone on the street.”
“Rose,” Pete said, drawing out the old nickname as he used to do. “So you’re still around.”
“We went off in different directions. I always wondered,” Mark said.
“So did I.”
“Did you?”
The baker’s helper gave Pete his pastry.
“Do you have time?” Mark said. “We could sit right here.” There were three small tables off to the left.
“I have a few minutes.”
Mark bought coffee and they sat facing each other. There was so much he wanted to know. “I guess it was our freshman year—the last time I saw you.”
“I was pretty far gone,” Pete said.
“I didn’t know what to make of it,” Mark said. “I read about your father, of course. That was a terrible thing.”
Bill Francis had been on the staff of the congressman from San Mateo, who had been murdered in a notorious incident in Guatemala. Bill Francis and three others were killed at the same time. It was the 1980s.
“I tell people I met the congressman at your house,” Mark said. “You and I put up campaign signs for him. Do you remember that?”
“Of course I do.”
“And your mom?”
Pete’s eyes, always so expressive, conveyed sadness but also wonder—at the way life turns out. “She finally got back to Paris,” he said. Pete’s mother, Jeanne, had come to the United States after the war. His father had met her in Paris and brought her back to live in a small house amid the tree-lined avenues of suburban San Mateo. Mark remembered showing up at Pete’s house on Ferndale Avenue, Jeanne stretched out on the couch, blond hair falling around her shoulders. “Rose!” she called. “How goes it?” She spoke in a dramatic, humorous way, her beguiling French accent distinguishing her among the other mothers who were part of Mark’s world.
“And your parents—they were from—Montana?” Pete said.
“Idaho. My mother lived till she was ninety-eight. Did you ever get to Paris yourself? I remember you wanted to live in Paris more than anything.”
“I did. I lived there in the eighties.”
Mark sipped his coffee. Pete had finished his tart, and he glanced at his watch.
“You have to be somewhere,” Mark said.
“Yes, but tell me.”
“What?”
“How did you recognize me? Do I look so much the same?”
“Remarkably so.”
Pete examined Mark’s face as if to match it with the person he remembered.
“Look, give me your phone number,” Mark said. “Let’s get together when we can talk more. Are you living in the city?”
“I am,” he said. “And you?”
“Palo Alto.”
They exchanged numbers, and then Mark watched as Pete strode down the lane, head hunched forward in the chill of the afternoon. Pete was full of surprises back then. Mark was prepared to be surprised again.
—
When Mark arrived, Pete was already seated in a booth at a Vietnamese restaurant on a dark street at the edge of downtown. It had been two weeks since their encounter at the bakery. Pete stood and extended his hand. “How goes it, Rose?” he said.
“Hey, Pete,” he said. As they took their seats, he took in the atmosphere of the brightly lit restaurant. “Have you been here before?”
“It’s a favorite place.”
“Do you live nearby?”
“Down on Jones.”
“That’s kind of dicey, isn’t it?
“It’s not too bad. I have a little apartment.”
He offered no explanation for why he was living in the Tenderloin. Nor was he embarrassed by the fact.
“What do you do, Pete? Are you working?”
“I teach English to immigrants.” Pete had the same smile he had the last time Mark saw him, lit up by something within.
“So, Pete. What’s the story? Wife? Kids?”
“My son lives in New York City. He’s this brilliant wizard of money. He said he’d pay for me to live somewhere else. I didn’t want him to. His mother lives in Pittsburgh.” He paused. “Long story.”
“I’m sorry I got spooked away from our friendship,” Mark said. “So much was going on.”
“I get it completely,” Pete said.
“You came up to my house and you were—I don’t know, you were hyped up, spaced out. You said you were living with your French teacher—eighteen years old and living with this exotic older woman. You talked about tripping while you drove across the bridge. ‘Rose, you ought to see it!’ I kind of freaked.”
“It was freaky.”
“I guess you survived.”
They ordered their food. The place was not crowded.
“Sex made us crazy,” Pete said.
“You could say that again.”
“Think back, Rose. You had a girlfriend. You were in your own world. Remember my horrible skin? I was like a monster. No girl would touch me.”
An extreme form of acne marred Pete’s face back then, and his back was lanced so painfully it hurt him to sit back in a chair. Meanwhile, Mark became absorbed in a high school romance that others might have viewed with cynicism, curiosity, or envy.
“Mademoiselle Benoit,” Pete said. “Maybe she was a predator. I don’t think so. She was beautiful, Rose. And she was lonely, of course. She said, ‘Move in.’ My parents threw a fit, especially my father, but my mother understood something. Marie and I dropped acid, we read poetry to each other—Mallarmé, Rimbaud. This was 1965, Rose!”
“You were moving faster than the rest of us.”
“You got there eventually,” Pete said.
“Not with my teacher.”
“You stayed in the groove—and that’s okay—but I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why.”
“You had something working on you, Pete,” Mark said. “One time we were out in the parking lot at the pizza place, and you were shouting. ‘Why is everything so wrong? Why is everyone so stupid? What is wrong with me?’ It was late, and people thought you were crazy or drunk. ‘Why do I feel so guilty? What am I guilty of?’ Don’t you remember? You had me read Kafka. You had me read Dostoyevsky. As if to understand.”
“It’s all a lie, isn’t it,” Pete said.
“What is?”
“That there’s something wrong with us.”
Mark was not so willing to let himself off the hook—to refrain from self-blame concerning the events of his life.
Pete was adept with chopsticks, consuming his noodles and pork with appreciation. Mark slurped his pho. Pete drew Mark out on the course of his life—law school, Laura, and their two boys, Jake and Joey. Also his divorce from Laura, and then his marriage to Karen. Mark understood he had achieved greater wealth and status than his friend had done.
“When did you live in Paris?” Mark said.
“After my father died, I met someone named Claudine. I never cut him any slack, but my father was a good guy, Rose.”
“He was always nice to me.”
“He didn’t think Ben should go down there, but they were investigating the genocide, and he couldn’t not go. When you’re a kid you look at your dad in a certain way. He was a little guy, big glasses. He ran a clothing store, for Pete’s sake. You take it all for granted and you look down on him. But then he went to work for Ben Riley. He went down there to keep Ben safe.”
“Did your mother ever regret coming to America?”
“I thought she did. But not really. ‘There would have been no you, mes enfants.’ That’s what she said. She came to visit me in Paris, but her life was here. She took me to all her old haunts in St. Germain and Montparnasse. She met Claudine, who was from this little town in the Pyrenees. We went there, Rose. You should see it.”
“You used to play recordings of Debussy,” Mark said. “Who else in our world was into that stuff?”
“It was because of my mother.”
“So, Pete, what did you end up doing? Of all the people we knew, you were the intellectual.”
“Because I read books?”
“You read books.”
“When I was at Berkeley, I did journalism. Crazy moronic stuff. I was trying it out, but I didn’t believe it even then. Everybody was talking about revolution. I said, ‘You mean, guys in hardhats are going to line up with us long-hair freaks? Get real.’ I wrote wild incomprehensible poetry.”
“So you were a writer?”
“I was a writer, Rose. I worked for newspapers. I lived in New Orleans. I lived in Tallahassee. I went to graduate school in New York. I studied French literature, and that’s where I met Claudine. But I didn’t want to be a scholar. When I came back, I started to get teaching gigs.”
Mark was thinking that the world has its ways of judging success—the big house, the fancy car. Who was to say that Peter Francis, living in the Tenderloin and teaching English to immigrants, was not a success and that he had not blazed a brilliant trail through the seemingly random venues of his life. New Orleans, Tallahassee? Why not? Mark didn’t know what he had hoped for on behalf of his friend—that he become a scholar of Proust? He didn’t even like Proust—or so Mark remembered.
“Didn’t you hate Proust?”
“I loved Proust,” Pete said.
Pete turned the conversation back to Mark’s life. “I loved constitutional law, Brandeis and Holmes, it was all so stirring, Pete. My wife and I were both lawyers, and we were fighting the fight. But I got sucked into other stuff, and she stuck to her guns, always lining up with hopeless causes. No, that’s not it. Giving hope to hopeless causes.”
“What did you get sucked into?”
“We did First Amendment stuff. Silicon Valley plutocrats defending their rights. But then for awhile I got into divorce cases. Rich dudes paying big money for a clean divorce.”
“Clean?”
“Some of them are so greedy, they want to hold on to all their millions. I tried to curb their selfishness.”
Pete took it in.
“See?” Mark said.
“What?”
“You don’t approve.”
“I don’t approve or disapprove.”
“I wanted to measure up.”
“To what?”
“To what we were hoping for when we were sitting in your bedroom listening to Debussy.”
Pete looked at him. “Do you think the person you were then would look at the person you are now and find him interesting?”
“Yes,” Mark insisted. “I did what I wanted to do. My father was a lawyer, and it seemed interesting to me. It seemed useful. And it has been, Pete.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“Who is?”
They were sipping tea from tiny porcelain cups. Pete had a knowing smile, and Mark wondered what it was he knew.
“Where do you live? Take me to your apartment.”
“Really?”
“The Tenderloin doesn’t scare me.”
Pete’s face lit up. “All right. Let’s go.”
—
Mark knew he lived a privileged life. His house in Palo Alto was small but handsome, and real estate values in California had gone berserk, which had made him rich. His law practice brought in a lot of money, too. When he started doing divorce cases, he thought he was performing a valuable service, but eventually the sleaze began to repel him. He eased up on his workload. Karen was a cellist who played in Bay Area chamber groups and orchestras, and she had a performance schedule she liked to maintain. It awed him that she held in her mind what seemed to him towering cathedrals of music—Bach sonatas and cello suites fixed forever in her memory. Jake and Joey were well on their way. Jake was the business manager for a prestigious winery in Sonoma, and Joey was a graphic artist living what passed for a bohemian life in L.A. He drew whimsical cartoons that sometimes appeared in the New Yorker. In Mark’s mind it all added up to a successful life, and he felt no need to apologize for it. So he asked himself: why the need for Pete’s approval? Mark was born into the middle class, and he had proceeded on the path that answered his interests. His advantages did not require that he become a revolutionary or a saint—that’s what he told himself—and the Tenderloin did not threaten him or challenge his values. As they walked toward Pete’s apartment, the streets became more squalid and crowded with clusters of homeless people, huddled in doorways or pitched out on the sidewalk under makeshift tarps and blankets. On one street corner, a pair of young men eyed Pete and Mark as they approached. Pete said something and they nodded. Pete was a known presence. “How you doing?” Mark muttered as he passed them. Further on two women in high heels lingered in a doorway. Pete nodded and so did Mark and they walked on. Briefly, Pete was on his phone with someone, but then a bearded man walking past whispered something, offering drugs maybe, though it didn’t seem to Mark that he and Pete were likely customers. Pete put his phone away, and they walked on. People went by, going to or from work, passing in and out of the brightly lit pharmacy on the corner. They walked past a bar, and Mark glanced in through the open door. It was mostly empty. There was a porn shop, and a pair of scared-looking girls in torn jeans outside the door. Were they runaways, Mark wondered? Laura had devoted her legal career to groups that combated domestic abuse and the other pathologies that drove people to the streets. They passed a man huddled under a filthy blanket next to a street light, and Pete put a dollar bill in the guy’s lap. They turned to their right and crossed the street, passing another cluster, half a dozen men and women, with cardboard signs and hats turned over for receiving money. “Hey, Olin, how’s it going?” Pete said to one of them. Pete put a dollar in each upturned hat. That’s one way of dealing with it, Mark thought. Give a little to everyone who asks. As open-minded and worldly as Mark might consider himself to be, the desperation of these city blocks had a corrosive effect on his spirit. He admired Pete for his equanimity. Pete didn’t need to live here, and Mark didn’t understand why he did. They stopped at the entrance to an apartment building, and Pete turned to him.
“I didn’t tell you about Mariam,” Pete said.
“Mariam?”
“My companion. Whatever you want to call her.”
“Oh.”
“She’s from Syria.”
“Okay.”
“She also teaches English.”
“Okay then.”
Pete pushed a button and a voice sounded on the tiny speaker. “Hello.”
“Bonne nuit, mon amie,” Pete said.
“Bonne nuit. Entrez.”
The door buzzed, and they passed through a clean and polished entryway. They climbed the staircase to the third floor, where the door of 3-C was ajar. Mariam was inside.
“This is Mark,” Pete said. “Mark, this is Mariam.”
Mark thought she might be forty-five years old, dark hair cascading down her shoulders, dark eyes shining. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Pleased to meet you as well,” Mark said. At first he didn’t notice how small she was because her radiance made her seem large.
“We speak English. We speak French,” Pete said. “I think her English is better than mine.”
The apartment had a spartan cleanliness and absence of clutter, with a combined living room and kitchen and a passage leading to a bathroom and bedroom. Windows on one side looked out on the windows of the next building. Bookshelves lined two walls of the living room. There was a couch, a chair, and a desk. On the coffee table was a laptop and a book in Arabic.
“A glass of wine?” Pete said.
“Of course,” Mark said.
Pete went to the kitchen for the wine, and Mariam motioned toward the couch and said, “Please.”
She was happy to meet someone from Pete’s past, she said. “The past is so far away.”
“We were good friends,” Mark said.
“He showed me the house where he was a boy. Do you remember?”
“Of course.”
Pete gave Mark a brief summary of Mariam’s history, gaining her approval for each revelation. Her husband, a professor of Arabic literature, had been assassinated by the government. She fled to Turkey, made her way to France and, eventually, to America. Her son and daughter remained in Turkey, waiting to learn if it would be possible someday to go back or if they should follow to America.
“Show him your photos,” Pete said.
She retrieved a small album from one of the book shelves. “San Francisco is beautiful,” she said. “Damascus is also beautiful.”
The photos showed a gracious home with purple-flowered vines climbing the walls of a spacious villa, a sunny terrace, an airy sitting room with elegant carpets. This life of ease—it can be taken away in an instant, Mark thought.
“You have suffered a terrible loss,” he said.
“I am lucky to be here,” she said.
Pete was staring at her with admiration. Mark had known Pete only back when he was sad and lonely, full of a teenager’s yearning. Now he was beaming with appreciation.
“How long have you been at it,” Mark said to Pete, “teaching English?”
“Oh,” he said, “five years or so. I was back East, but then my sister got sick, and I came out to be with her.”
“I remember her,” Mark said. “Danielle.”
“She had a crush on you, you bastard.”
“I thought maybe she did.”
“Did you? Did you just assume that women liked you?”
Was that why Pete went his own way and let their friendship languish? Was he resentful of Mark’s good fortune? Did Mark let it languish because he feared Pete’s resentment? Mark had not felt blessed by fortune back then—anguished as he was by the search for love and overwhelmed by the workload at school.
Mark sensed no resentment now, even though from the outside Pete and Mariam’s lives seemed constrained by want. It helped that Pete’s son in New York could come to the rescue if necessary. But as the light shone in the ruby-red wine and glimmered in their eyes, it seemed that Pete and Mariam wanted for nothing.
—
Karen Penrose was born Karina Masur. Her parents, survivors of Nazi labor camps, had emigrated to the United States after the war. They ended up in California, and that’s where Karina was born—she changed her name to Karen when she reached fifth grade because she wanted to fit in with the world around her. Karen’s parents had arrived with nothing, and to conjure something out of nothing became their mission. Karen’s father was a medical student in Poland, and in America he became a doctor. They understood that their daughter’s musical gift was something to be nurtured, and they provided her with a cello as soon as she could hold one. She had the muscular arms and shoulders of a cello player, and Mark always thought the way she planted her feet on the ground when she played—sturdily, confidently—carried over into the rest of her life. She was sympathetic to the plight of refugees everywhere, and she liked that Peter Francis had taken up with a refugee from Syria.
“Maybe we should have them down for dinner,” she said to Mark. Mark thought about it. “That would be like showing off,” he said.
“What? Our glittering lifestyle?” She sipped her coffee. They were on their patio, surrounded by geraniums and fuchsias. Their wealth was real but not of the glittering kind.
“He lives in the Tenderloin, and they come here—it’s like, ‘Hey, look at us, this is how successful people live.’”
“He doesn’t sound like he’d take it that way.”
Pete had always been a challenge for Mark. When they were young, it was a challenge to keep up with the books he had read or to understand the music he liked. Mark first met the future congressman, Ben Riley, when he and Pete attended an angry hearing about whether the nearby college should permit a communist to speak on campus. Ben Riley put it to the crowd, “What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of ideas?” Mark didn’t want to be afraid. Ben Riley was challenging Mark and others to grow up, and Mark described the event to his parents, who were not closed-minded, but who worried their son might stray toward radical ideas. Mark was not inclined toward the radical, but he wanted to challenge himself.
“We should go up there,” he said to Karen. “We could meet them at a restaurant. Their turf.”
“Are you embarrassed by your wealth?” Karen said.
“No!” Mark insisted. “Maybe. But why should I be?”
“We are so lucky.” Karen was not prone to unearned guilt. From her parents she had learned never to apologize for good luck. There were people who had helped her parents make it to America and helped them establish themselves once they were here. They had worked hard; Karen had worked hard. “It sounds like Peter Francis has had an interesting life,” she said.
“I’ll give him a call. I’ll sound him out.”
Pete didn’t respond to phone messages or emails, and Mark might have concluded that to Pete their friendship remained an artifact of the past, like a shard of pottery, interesting to examine, but no longer useful. But Mark didn’t give up. He was in the city to meet with a client, and afterward he walked up Market Street to Jones. It was a cold summer afternoon, fog racing past the tops of buildings and wind scouring the streets. For the homeless, it was time to find shelter in nooks and alcoves beneath tattered blankets. Mark knew Pete might be at work, teaching newly arrived Hondurans or Arabs or Chinese.
When he reached the apartment building, he buzzed 3-C. A scratchy voice emerged from the speaker: “Who is it?”
“Pete, it’s me. It’s Mark.”
“Rose!” He almost shouted the name. “Come up.”
The door buzzed open, and Mark entered the building, hurrying up the stairs to the third floor. Pete was standing in the doorway, and he came out into the hallway with a wide expectant smile. He gave Mark a hug that had a quality of desperation. “Good to see you,” he said.
“I hope I’m not barging in. I tried to call. I started to wonder.”
“No. Come in.”
Inside the apartment, everything was different. Unwashed dishes were stacked on the counter. A jacket and sweater were strewn on the couch. The bookshelves were in partial disarray, books removed, other books stacked on the table.
“What’s happening?” Mark said.
“Mariam’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“She went to Turkey. Her daughter is sick. She got word a few days after you were here.”
“Oh, Pete, I’m sorry. She seemed like a terrific person.”
He nodded, eyes wide and full of uncertainty.
“So is she coming back or what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, Pete.”
“I might go over there.”
“Really?”
“I’m waiting to hear. Hey, I’m starving. Isn’t it dinner time? Why don’t we go someplace.”
“Karen thought we ought to invite you down to our place. She wanted to meet Mariam.”
“Too late,” he said, in a joking tone. But it wasn’t a joke.
“I know a place downtown. Old-fashioned San Francisco place. We can walk.”
So that’s where they headed, down the garish commercial strip of Market Street and toward the Financial District. Their destination was an old-time grill where Mark’s father took him when he was young and his father was working in the city. They walked side by side up the wide sidewalk like old friends. Pete asked Mark about his older brother, who lived back East.
“He’s a poet. Did you know that?” Mark said.
“Wait—Charles Penrose, that’s your brother?”
“He surprised us all.”
“He always used to give me a hard time.”
“He did that with everybody.”
At the restaurant the maitre d’ seated them in the wood-paneled room, and they stared at one another across the starched white linen. “I always liked your mother,” Mark said. “She was this foreign element.”
“Everyone was a foreign element,” Pete said.
“No, I mean she was from Paris,” Mark said.
“And Keith’s father was from China. And Carl was from North Carolina.”
“North Carolina?”
“Didn’t you wonder about his accent?”
Mark thought back to the people they knew when they were teenagers. All their young friends behaved as if there was a given way they were supposed to behave, assuming an imagined uniformity. Their friend Ron, fleet of foot on the football field, was Italian. Their friend Carol, brilliant at math, was Jewish. They all tried to obscure their individuality.
“I liked that you were different,” Mark said.
“Hey, brother, everyone was different!” Pete took delight in making this assertion.
“There was this notion of conformity.”
“We’ll conform when we’re dead,” Pete said. “Look at you. Your family was from Idaho. Who’s from Idaho?”
“It seemed normal.”
“You used to go on about the mountains. You were as different as anyone.”
Mark cherished his family trips to the Sawtooth Mountains but instead built a life in a ritzy town only a few miles south of where he had grown up.
“You influenced me, Pete.”
“For better or worse?”
“You were my intellectual friend. I followed your lead. I got into different things—theater, art. Karen is a cellist, did I tell you? It awes me. You helped me learn about stuff.”
“You were into jazz. That was different.”
“That was because of my brother.”
“I was going to be the worldly Parisien, wasn’t I? Do you know where I ended up?”
“Tell me.”
“A god-forsaken little town in upstate New York, a place where the rivers freeze and moose tromp around in the woods. Teaching French at a little college, like Mademoiselle Benoit. Without the predatory behavior. I had a little house on a dirt road, a woodstove, reading books in a rocking chair, poking at the fire. That’s a long way from Montmartre.”
It’s where Pete had ended up after his divorce, a low-level faculty position that he occupied for a number of years. Then his sister Danielle got sick.
“Rose, I can’t complain. I used to take walks along this road behind my house, and there in the woods up on the right was a rocky ledge, exposed rock, twenty or thirty feet high. Winter, summer, there it was, this beautiful formation of cold gray rock running forty or fifty yards along the road. I thought: That rock was there when the Europeans came along, when the Indians came along, there while the Roman Empire came and went, there through all our murderous history, there while crazy humans formed their ideas of knowledge and beauty. Just resting there, witness to it all. Of course, a rock doesn’t witness anything. But it was present. I used to think of that rock as my brother.”
The waiter assured them that the striped bass, illegal to catch in nearby waters, had been flown in from the East Coast. He was lying, but that was all right.
“Pete, you’ve had this interesting life.”
“Haven’t you?”
“Did I lack imagination or what? I live twelve miles away from where I grew up. I’m in the profession of my father.”
“I envy that.”
“Stop it.”
“Doesn’t everyone long for home?” Pete said.
“I remember your neighbors—who were they? The Harlows?”
“Oh, yeah, Vern and Eileen.”
“They were wild alcoholics. You used to house-sit, remember? We went over there and poked around and you showed me all these empty whiskey bottles. You said they had crazy screaming matches. They were reporters for the paper, and it seemed exotic and sick and kind of noirish to me.”
“I’m amazed you remember that.”
“Home was more complicated than we knew, wasn’t it,” Mark said. “You were grappling with stuff. It was kind of an inspiration. I didn’t want to settle in and get all comfortable. I guess I kind of did.”
Their food came, but before he picked up his fork, Pete just sat, elbows on the table, resting his chin on his hands, staring at Mark. They had reached a stage in their lives where every story was a wonder.
“You were always so restless,” Pete said to his old friend.
“I was?”
“I talked to you because you lapped it up. You were all hot to campaign for Ben Riley.”
The waiter, in a starched white smock, filled their water glasses. After he went away, Pete said, “Don’t you think this waiter has a story? Jesus, he probably worked his way up from Guatemala. Or he’s a refugee from Iraq. What a world, Rose. Don’t you love it?”
Pete’s face bore the marks of the skin disease that had plagued him as a teenager, but he had plunged into a life that took him from Paris to upstate New York. “What in the world did you do in Tallahassee?” Mark said.
“I worked for the paper there. I exposed a corrupt senator, and it was a good story, but it got me fired.”
He still had that expansive smile, as if the absurdities of life were a joke to be appreciated until the final absurdity, and maybe he’d be smiling even then.
“What do you mean the rock is your brother?” Mark said.
“We have all these elements in common. Atoms of carbon. We got whirled here by time.”
“But we have life, we have brains, we have thoughts.”
“For now.”
“Ha,” Mark said. “How will you get over to Turkey? Do you have the money?”
“I have enough,” he said, as if enough was all anyone ever needed. “After a while, all you can do is be with the people you love,” Pete said. “What else is there?”
“When we were young, we were crazy.”
“Sometimes in a good way.”
“Mademoiselle Benoit?” Mark said.
Pete nodded, and his winsome smile suggested there was more to the story than he could possibly describe.
—
Mark said he’d walk with Pete back to his apartment, and they returned on Market Street, angling off when they got to Golden Gate. Mark took out his phone; he wanted to let Karen know when he’d be home. He wouldn’t stay long at Pete’s place; then he’d walk back to his car and drive south. As he spoke with her, he slowed his pace, and Pete moved on ahead, rounding the corner onto Jones Street.
“Mariam had to go back to Turkey,” he told her. “Pete might follow after.”
When Mark turned the corner, Pete was twenty yards ahead of him, and when Mark looked up, he saw two men leap out of a doorway. One grabbed Pete by the shoulders, and the other slugged him across the face. Then they began to search through Pete’s pockets to find a wallet, a phone, anything they could take. Pete tried to wriggle free, but the one guy hit him again, and Pete let out a cry. Mark ran forward, but at the same time, a man came from the other direction, shouting, “Hey, let him be.” He was wearing an old overcoat, which streamed along behind him. A grimy knit cap reached down almost to his eyes, and his chin was covered by a scruffy gray beard.
“Fuck off!” shouted one of the assailants as he turned on the bearded one. Mark reached the group and threw aside the one who was holding Pete. His heart was racing, and he wasn’t thinking. Pete fell to his knees. Everyone was looking at everyone else. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said one of the attackers, and they swiftly disappeared.
“Hey, man, you okay?” said the guy in the overcoat.
Pete looked up, blood flowing down his face. “Olin?” he said. “Dude!”
“Yeah, man, they shouldn’t oughta done that. That was Wendell and his asshole pal.”
Pete rose to his feet, dabbing at the blood dripping from his nose. He turned toward Mark. “Thanks, man.”
“Jesus, Pete, are you all right?” Mark said.
“Me? Yeah. Mark, this is my man, Olin.”
“I know those guys. They’re trash,” Olin said.
“That was Wendell? He has his own problems, you know,” Pete said.
“Yeah, whatever, man,” Olin said.
“Olin, let me buy you breakfast. I’ll look for you tomorrow.”
Olin looked at him for a moment. “Be well, brother,” he said, and he walked away.
“You know these guys?”
“I know some of them.”
“Let’s get you cleaned up,”
They went to Pete’s apartment and saw his injuries weren’t so severe. He maintained a kind of buoyancy throughout the cleanup. It was no more than a cut lip and a bloody nose.
“You okay?” Mark said.
“That was something,” Pete said. “Caught me by surprise.” For a moment Pete was lost in thought, his eyes searching beyond the walls of his apartment. “People get so messed up,” he said.
“I guess they do,” Mark said.
Pete shook his head back and forth, as if he might puzzle out the mystery of human cruelty, as if he had put the incident behind him already and had moved on to the question of why. Then he came back to the present. “Well, I’ve got to look at some air fares. Flights to Istanbul aren’t cheap.”
“Pete, you’re acting as if nothing happened. You just got mugged.”
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
“Who are those guys? How do you know them?”
“I see them around. I see them on the street corner. People think they’re so menacing.”
“They just attacked you.”
“Those guys will talk to you if you take the time.”
Mark was examining Pete’s face, trying to see if he was joking, or putting on an act of selflessness. “So you just stop on the street corner and chat with them?” he said.
“Sometimes. ‘Hey, how you doing?’ That sort of thing. ‘You gotta a dollar?’ one of them says. ‘Sure,’ I say. It surprises them. ‘My name’s Pete,’ I tell them. Shake their hand. Whatever.”
“Your pal Wendell just hit you in the nose. Aren’t you pissed?”
“Sure.”
“Well?”
“Then what?”
“I’m flummoxed,” Mark said.
“Good word,” Pete said, smiling from behind the tissue at his nose. They were remembering how as teenagers they used to delight in interesting words.
“The oppression goes forever,” Pete said. “Don’t you think?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Nazis killed my uncle in France. Assad’s goons went after Mariam’s family. Your wife’s family—they had Nazis of their own. Who knows Wendell’s story or Olin’s? Or the other guy—”
Pete dabbed a wash cloth to his lip.
“We’re so lucky,” he said. “We have enough money. Our parents didn’t wale on us.” He could see Mark wasn’t convinced. “You’re thinking, ‘Why does he even live on friggin’ Jones Street?’ I understand that. Well, Rose, the world is Jones Street, don’t you think? And Jones Street is the world. Everybody has something,” he said. “Some kind of death squad killed my father on an airstrip in Guatemala. What do you do with that? Some of my students have seen worse.” Mark sat, listening, as he had done in that little bedroom at the house on Ferndale Avenue. “Sit tight,” Pete said. He went to the book shelf and picked out a particular CD. He popped it into the CD player—Debussy.
“La Mer,” Mark said. “How about that?”
The music spanned decades, a swelling sea reaching back to those moments when Debussy conceived it and forward to the LP on the turntable in that teenager’s bedroom. It persisted, like the sea, persisting as surely as that cold rock ledge, but seething with the life of humanity, which brought it into existence as something new in the universe.
“I’ve never been to Turkey,” Pete said.
“Will we see you before you go?”
“I’d like that.”
“Come down to dinner. Or we could come up. Karen would love to meet you.”
“Does she like Vietnamese?”
“Of course.”
He flew off to Istanbul before they had a chance to get together again. But Mark had his email address and his phone number, and he vowed he would keep in touch. On this evening in the city, they sat through the twenty-plus minutes of La Mer, then Mark took out his phone and called to tell Karen he’d been delayed.
“Tell Pete hello,” she said.
“She says hello,” Mark said to Pete.
Pete touched the cloth to his lip. “Tell her hello,” he said.
Driving home by way of the Bayshore, Mark thought about Pete’s words: Doesn’t everyone long for home? Whenever he returned to the Bay Area after being away, he recognized that the ring of hills surrounding the bay formed the circumference of his childhood. He hadn’t intended to stick close to home, but that’s the way it had worked out. Now as he plunged southward on the busy freeway, navigating the multiple lanes that skirted the airport, he realized he was approaching the exits that would take him to the old neighborhood. In past years he sometimes cruised by the house. He liked to show his kids—“this is where I grew up”—and Laura had been interested in seeing the place. Lately, there was no reason to go out of his way. The past is so far away, Mariam said, and that’s the way it seemed. But tonight he had a different idea. He swerved to his right, took the exit, and found himself on the avenues of his childhood. Here was where his mother had taken him to the dentist. Here was the downtown library. Here was the movie theater where he went on Saturdays. The avenues always seemed narrower than he remembered. He took the road leading up the hill, and then where it leveled out he found the house where the sage-green front had been painted a dull blue-gray. Everyone may long for home, he thought, but this isn’t it. The lights were on in the kitchen, which looked out onto the street. Someone passed in front of the kitchen window. He remembered the whole layout of the house, even though his parents had moved away decades before. We long for home because the past has expelled us into an uncertain present, he thought. Karen would be waiting up when he got back. He would describe their evening, but how could he describe all those layers beneath the surface, the past painted over again and again by the perennial present? Pete had been mugged. And he had displayed the buoyant spirit that had always been his—even back when he was a lonely teenager longing for something more. Now he would be off to Turkey. Mark drove back down from the old house, past Ferndale Avenue, to the freeway, merging into the traffic heading south to Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park. That rock ledge beside the road where Pete had lived—Mark pictured it now: a vein of truth that persisted even as the centuries passed and time slowly wore it down. He would tell Karen all about it. He found the exit and drove with longing through familiar streets. Longing, oriented toward the future, was really a condition of the present, like suffering, like love. All the ingredients were there, years ago, for the lives that lay ahead of them and that lay ahead of them still. ■