James Sallis - Cypress Grove

“Back when you were on the streets, you thought you were doing good, right?”

“Sure I did.”

“And as a therapist?’’

I nodded.

“Still believe that?”

“Yes.”

“But you stopped.”

“I did. But not because of some existential crisis.”

Sitting in the pecan tree, an owl lifted head off shoulders to rotate it a hundred and eighty degrees. Country musician Gid Tanner, with whom Riley Puckett played, was supposed to have been able to do that.

“When I was sixteen, my dad took me to buy my first car. We found a ’48 Buick we both liked. Some awful purplish color, as I remember, and they’d put in plastic seats like something from a diner. Car itself was in pretty good shape. But the fenders were banged all to hell, you could see where they’d been hammered back out from underneath, more than once. I was looking for something bright and shiny, naturally, and those fenders bothered me. My father’d been a bit more thoroughgoing, actually checked out the engine and frame. ’It’s a good car, J. C.,’ he said. ’Just old-like me. Fenders are the first to go.’

“Later that’s how I came to see people. The parts that are out there, between you and the world as you move into it, those parts sustain the most damage. Fenders wear out. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong, intrinsically, with the car. The engine may still be perfectly good-even the body.”

“Tell me we’re not out of wine.”

I handed my glass across. Good half-inch left in there.

“We are, aren’t we?” She finished it off, set the glass beside her own. “All day long I sat there looking at Aaron. Fans thwacking overhead. Was I helping him-or only further complicating a life that was complicated enough already?”

“You still want to fix things.”

“Yes,’’ she said. “I guess I do.”

“You can’t.”

“I guess I know that, too.”

“Ever tell you I was once half a step away from being an English professor?”

“One of your earlier nine lives, I take it.”

“Exactly. I loved Chaucer, Old English, Elizabethan drama. Read them the way other people watch soap operas and sitcoms, or eat popcorn. Christopher Fry was a favorite.

“I expect they would tell us the soul can be as lost, For loving-kindness as anything else. Well, well, we must scramble for grace as best we can.”

“That’s what we’re doing? Scrambling for grace?”

“For footholds, anyway. Definitely scrambling.”

“And what does grace look like?”

“Hell if I know.”

But I suspected it looked much like my face the morning I decided on exemption.

A sleepless night had filled with the gas of random, skittering thoughts and old memories. Around two A.M. I’d watched The Incredible Shrinking Man on TV. Went back to bed afterwards, tossed and turned to the accompaniment of Sibelius’s First Symphony on the radio and the giant spider that chased me across roof- and tabletops and through a maze of high-school lockers, was up again at five with a cup of cooling, neglected coffee cradled like a Jacob’s ladder in my hands, watching long-haul trucks take on cargo across the street. Soon they’d strike out for the new world.

Brian’s last message (Wonderful evening, thank you) shimmered in my mind. Jimmie the Machine had been found lying on a bench in the park, eyes staring upward into bright sun, pigeons pecking at bare toes. No discernible cause of death revealed by autopsy. That very day a new patient told me how he’d killed a teacher he disliked. What I saw before me was a defeated fifty-year-old man with tonsure, strands of hair clinging limpetlike to his skull, tattoos like a carpet pattern long since faded. What I heard was a teenager who’d never got over being shut out.

Complex creatures fueled by knowledge, understanding and passion-that’s how we like to see ourselves. Meanwhile, psychiatry insists we’re little more than machines of a sort, broken toys to be mended. Some simple spring or swivel in the mind fails to work right, we jam, give up, misfire. Ask any child advocate. Nine times out of ten, the kid’s been abused. Nothing recondite about it. Most of the rest is just smoke and mirrors.

Speaking of mirrors, that morning, looking into one, I saw something I’d not seen before. It didn’t last, but for the moment it was there, I recognized it for what it was. Grace, of a sort. Wherever it was I had been heading all these years, I’d arrived. I had simply to off-load cargo now.

The divestment took most of a month. Clients, I passed along selectively to students from my seminars at Memphis State. These were working therapists, many with far more professional experience, if not more personal, than myself. Licensure requires continuing education credits. Bulwarked by such courses as Statistics for Health Care Providers and Personifications of the Other in Interpersonal Relationships, my own had long proved a popular choice.

Practical affairs-the apartment lease, notification of clients and service providers, packing-presented little difficulty. I possessed, still, the inmate’s habit of simplicity; had few ties and little of a material sort that couldn’t be tucked under wing and taken along or freely abandoned.

That left Susan.

I had had my mind set against any relationship. Bad for me, worse for whoever sat at the other end of the teeter-totter, probably wouldn’t do much good for the world at large. Likely to bring on biblical floods, eras of ice, swarms of locusts, for all I knew. Yet there I was, in a relationship, albeit a halting, tentative one. Coming off a horrendous fifteen-year marriage she’d barely survived psychologically, not to mention physically, Susan trod the eggshell court as lightly as did I.

“This prosciutto’s amazing,” Susan said.

Our favorite restaurant, just around the corner from her studio apartment, restaurant and apartment much of a size. Waitress a six-footer in miniskirt, tube top and platform sandals stumbling from table to table, dark lines drawn about eyes and mouth as though to hold them in place. Hard to imagine her anywhere else. Where in the larger world could this vision possibly fit?

Susan tucked into the restaurant’s signature appetizer of melon and prosciutto as I nursed a second espresso. Entrees of pasta with sausage and sauteed spinach, pasta with salmon and asparagus, were forthcoming. We’d brought our own wine.

“You’re making another of your sudden turns, aren’t you?”

I hadn’t even to tell her. She knew.

“I suppose I am.”

“That’s okay.”

Outside, rain broke, sweeping across the parking lot, left to right, like the edge of a hand brushing debris from a tabletop.

“I half expected it, you know,” she said. “More than half, at first. But I still had hopes.”

Remember the limbo? One dances beneath a pole set lower and lower. That’s hope. Only every year the pole goes further up, not down.

“You’ll still have them. I’m not taking those with me.”

Brought to our table by the owner of the restaurant himself, our entrees arrived. Susan sat quietly as these were put before us, waited as another swing to kitchen and back cast a basket of bread on the shore.

“Yes,” she said then. “You are.”

“We’re heading home,” Sarah Hazelwood said. “I need to get back to my job while I still have one. Dad’s okay here, but he does best with people he knows, familiar surroundings. Doc Oldham says there’s no problem having Carl’s body shipped home. I wanted to stop by and thank you for all you’ve done.”

Through the window I could see her father propped up in the van’s back seat. The sliding door was open, and Adrienne, willowy, protecting, ranged alongside. Something of both shade tree and sentinel in the way she stood there.