Tim Horvath - Understories

“So,” my father murmured. “He get away with it?”

The tip of my tongue rooted around between my lip and the top of my gums as I pondered, as though the answer were wedged there like food caught in teeth. It was a good question, and it felt like any answer was irrevocable; somehow, too, it needed to be dictated by the book. “He gets caught. . when his teacher asks him about the part about ‘uterine walls.’ The class snickers. . so she knows it is her professional duty to do something, and when she confronts him, Heath is stymied, tongue-tied.” I paused for a moment here. My dad was not Pollyannaish, but why I had been lured into such a cynical cavern of possibility, a seeming dead end? Somehow, glancing over at his sallow cheeks, I felt I needed to push around this.

It came to me all at once, and I said it as quickly as though I was on a fading phone connection. “But he will read the book later for a literature class and understand it much more and look back in disgust and pathos on his younger ways. And he will write his college essay on the book and the whole experience, and it will get him into his second choice.”

I looked over at my father; he appeared to be in something akin to a trance. As for me, I’d gotten so caught up in the story that I hadn’t even seen Désirée come into the room.

“This is what happens next to the book,” I explained, as if this explanation would make sense to her. But if it didn’t — I shrugged — so be it; I’d realized something that my father, perhaps, had already known: that delirium is a form of understanding.

As Désirée crouched over him to give him his medication, he said, “We are cave people,” perhaps by way of his own explanation. Somehow, the words were comedic and weighty at once. Neither of us responded, except by smiling, which seemed about right.

Afterward, as I drove home, I retraced my story as though I had just surfaced from a particularly vivid dream, trying to figure out from whence its ingredients had grown, by what recipe it had been put together. I had dated a woman once who was a high school teacher, and she had told me a couple of stories about plagiarists she had caught; I hadn’t thought about her recently. The other details — avalanches, buff football players — seemed like miracles.

The next evening, I told him about the couple who had checked the book out next. Somehow, a fragment set me off — something I heard about once on NPR? “They’re a couple who are getting married in a cave. She’s an archaeologist; he’s a dean at the school where she works. She has a vision of a splendid wedding that actually will be set in a cave — hundreds of candles illuminating the lush walls, dripping sounds in the background, chains of flowers lining the mantel that happens to run along the cave’s contours, a photographer who must crane his neck around stalactites.

“The groom, the dean, he’s a little stiff, but he decides to go along with it. She’s brought out so many wonderful aspects of him — spontaneity, adventure — that he can’t complain. They get out books about caves, look for ‘Cave Readings.’ Spelos looks promising, looks like it was written for that target audience of brides and grooms looking for pithy cave quotes. Doing his part, dutifully, he reads the passage on bats, somehow panics. It’s not about the bats; it’s about something deeper that she represents, someplace she’s leading him. Too much. Soon, for consecutive nights, he’s having dreams, nightmares, bats swarming.

“They split up. She marries a local chef, who is delighted to get married in a cave. They have a cave-aged cheese spread at the wedding that rivals anything anyone’s ever seen.

“He neglects to return the book. Pining for her, he clings to it, a remnant of that relationship, what once was, even though it is too painful to actually read it.

“Then one day, he meets a new girl. Everything’s great — she loves the symphony and the opera. It’s what he’s always imagined. A couple of years go by. They are moving. . to New Mexico, of all places. He’s a little bit wary but hears the Santa Fe Symphony is fantastic. As they are packing up, she turns up the book, which is absurdly overdue at this point. She can’t believe he hasn’t returned it. Not only that, but she knows that he was previously all but married in a cave, and she’s savvy — she actually puts two and two together; she interprets the reasons for the book’s continued presence there and continued absence from the library all too accurately. They fight — about other last-minute scrambles, the need to return the cable box, et cetera — she never lets on that she sees the significance of it, besides its being long overdue. He doesn’t quite understand why she wants him to return it immediately —they are in the middle of rolling lamps in bubble wrap — but he does. Dutiful. At first, they want to charge him at the library, but the librarian is in a lighthearted mood and clears the fine when he explains the situation. The librarian sleeps well that night, thinking of him as she is drifting off.

“The book is back but it’s not there for long. There is a woman who has been taking a class in the evening.” I looked up; I had been so immersed in the story that I had forgotten the presence of my audience. I glanced over at him. He was fast asleep, his snoring steady and serene.

The next night, I told the story of the woman. The stories continued to unfold over the next several nights. Sometimes Désirée was present, and sometimes not. I had never told stories before — it felt exhilarating. I would leave and pick up my car and pay the ticket at the gate, imagining SCHEHERAZADE on a vanity plate — how could you pare it down to six characters and still make it recognizable? Immediately, I reprimanded myself for being so flippant — my father was on his deathbed, and I was hardly saving my own life. Or was I?

I thought about Aidan reading his children stories, and I wondered if I would be any good at it. My father had seen and experienced enough of the world that that there was very little I would bite my tongue about with him; almost anything that popped into my head would be fair game. But if you were telling stories to children, you would have to limit what you could say. Did you just make exotic dishes with minimal ingredients, or were the expectations lower for items ordered off the children’s menu? When I’d visited Aidan in New York, I’d always been anxious about bedtime — it seemed like a nightly trial, a forum in which all of your shortcomings and neuroses as a parent and as a person would be showcased. Were you a pushover, or were you “just not the creative type,” or, perhaps worse, too preoccupied with budgets and deadlines to suspend disbelief even fleetingly — your own and another’s — in outspoken mice and yawning moons?

I would wait downstairs, nervously thumbing the remote through cable channels, gnawed at by the sense that I should be doing something to help, something to make the night special because I was there. Meanwhile, I’d let Aidan and Jen tend to those duties, like any other night. Eventually, they would rejoin me, shaking their heads, swapping a detail or two about their ordeals, and every so often glancing at the head of the stairs, looking for the pajama-clad figure they hoped would not appear. Next time I was out at Aidan’s, I vowed, I would volunteer for bedtime services.

For now, though, I was in the thicker woods of the adult story world. “It’s a continuing ed class. She’s getting her life back on track after a series of abusive or nondescript relationships. Doing something good for the soul.

“Needless to say, she develops a crush on her handsome thirtysomething teacher, who has been ushering her into the realm of philosophy — the class is called ‘The Moderns on the Ancients,’ or maybe it’s ‘The Ancients on the Moderns,’ whatever. She shoots him glances; he might or might not be responding, but she confirms her initial impression that he isn’t wearing a ring.