Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

Thoughts of Mary Snyder took me to the big old wild cherry tree in our backyard and the books I used to read there as a child, sitting in its branches and eating sun-warmed cherries: three of my favourites were illustrated editions of Robin Hood, The Arabian Nights and Treasure Island. I still had them through high school but in 1959 my heart was broken when Jessica Williams dumped me for an older fellow who was in the Navy. As a broken-hearted lover I felt that I had entered man’s estate. Life was hard, women were cruel; it was time to put childish things behind me, so I took those three books and burnt them in the backyard. I watched bits of charred pages flying and the smoke rising past the bare winter branches of the cherry tree with a lump in my throat and tears running down my face.

Jessica had been my first serious girlfriend as an adult, which is what I considered myself at seventeen when we began to go steady. In 1958 I cycled over a hundred miles to visit her in Wildwood, New Jersey where her parents had a seaside bungalow. They lived in Philadelphia and earlier that year I’d taken Jessica to a concert in Robin Hood Dell. The night was full of stars and the Philadelphia Orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. The music swelled and my whole being swelled with it. I took her hand and squeezed it and she returned the pressure. First love!

Years later I wanted my three burnt books back, those editions and no others. They were, after all, a first love that never stopped being true to me even when their ashes were blowing in the wind. I haunted second-hand bookshops until I learned to use book searches and the Internet. I had no luck with The Arabian Nights because it was a cheap edition in which the illustrator had never been credited and I’d forgotten the publisher. I found the Robin Hood I wanted, illustrated by Edwin John Prittee, and only the other day I obtained from Abebooks my old Treasure Island with Louis Rhead’s wonderful illustrations. I held it in my hands and the pictures and text sprang to life as juicy and soul-satisfying as when I had them in the cherry tree. The book fell open to the page with the Hispaniola nearing the island at night. THE MAN AT THE HELM WAS WATCHING THE LUFF OF THE SAIL, said the caption under Rhead’s full-page pen-and-ink drawing in which Jim is about to get into the apple barrel, where he will hear:

Silver’s voice, and before I heard a dozen words I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity; for from those dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.

No matter that Rhead drew a square-rigged ship when the Hispaniola was a schooner. Seeing that white moon in the pen-and-ink sky and the moonlit sea below, I could feel the warm wind filling the luff of that wrong sail. I turned from the picture to the text again and I had tears running down my face.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a teenage favourite that I never did think I outgrew; I still have the edition I wanted to read to Mary Snyder, the Fitzgerald translation, with an unforgettable drawing by Edmund J. Sullivan for each of the seventy-five quatrains of the first version. And I still know most of it by heart.

Recaptured childhood pleasures, however, were no help at present. Living alone was no longer good enough. Having opened myself to the possibility of not being alone, I now felt less than complete in Christabel’s absence and anxious in the uncertainty of where we were with each other. I sensed that the things I didn’t know about her were important. I also sensed that she was at some kind of hard place in herself. She was just as alone as I was and I didn’t think she should be alone right now. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to talk to her. She’d said she was going to Honolulu and Maui but she hadn’t given me any telephone numbers or the names of places where she could be reached.

25 January 2003. And now a dead bat. Not just any bat but a rare one, an endangered species. I can imagine this bat — I’ll call him Jim, he’s from Maui. Hasn’t been feeling all that great so he goes to his doctor for a check-up. Doc Bat says, ‘What seems to be the problem?’

Jim says, ‘Shortness of breath, chest pains, I pass out when I hang upside down, my echolocation is wonky, I have trouble taking off and I can’t get any altitude.’

‘Hmmm,’ says the doc. Listens to Jim’s heart, looks into his ears, opens and shuts his wings, says, ‘Hmmm’ again and shakes his head.

‘What?’ says Jim.

‘I think,’ says the doc, ‘if there’s anything you’ve always wanted to do but never got round to, now is the time to do it. If you can.’

‘You mean …?’ says Jim.

‘You got it,’ says Doc Bat.

So Jim thinks he might as well try for Honolulu. It’s only a short hop but he’s never found the time to go there and he’d like to see the bright lights and the action before he checks out. He takes off and he’s flapping, flapping his way to Oahu. He’s running out of petrol when he sees the lights and there’s the airport with ALOHA in big letters on it. How he’s over the Japanese garden and he echolocates me. ‘My kind of human!’ he squeaks. ‘She’s into this kind of thing.’ And with that he drops dead in front of me.

OK, so Jim Bat got my number. Why not? I was probably broadcasting on all frequencies, ALDERTON’S MY NAME AND DEATH’S MY GAME. I felt sorry for Jim but I had other things to think about, like why I came here.

In 1993 when the grief in me was like something with hooks on it stuck in my throat, I spent a night at the Mini Hotel Sleep/Shower and the quietness and tranquillity of it calmed me down and helped me pull myself together. Now the Mini Hotel was gone but I thought I might find that old quietness in the gardens or the lounge in the middle of the night. It didn’t happen. In my chair in the lounge I was tired but not sleepy; I was awake for a long time with my eyes feeling dry and sandy and I dozed off now and then with strange pictures in my head but no useful thoughts.

What I was feeling for Elias wasn’t the kind of rush I had with Adam. How could it be with Elias and me both so much older? But when he held me that night while I cried I felt as if I’d come home after being gone for a long, long time. I’d been trying to keep my death life separate from the live life that Elias was part of. Why hadn’t I told him about Django? If I told him about that I’d be inviting him into every part of my life and I wasn’t sure he’d be safe there.

Henry turned up with a coffee for me. ‘I thought you might be wakeful,’ he said.

‘Thank you. I was.’ I said. ‘Too much on my mind.’

‘Remember,’ said Henry. ‘The bat chose you. You’re special.’

29 January 2003. Jimmy Wicks’s phone number was ex-directory but I remembered other band names. Howard Dent was not ex-directory and he gave me Jimmy’s number. When I phoned I got Jimmy’s ex-wife Tracy. She sounded as if the breakup had not been amicable and demanded to know why I wanted Jimmy’s number. On the spur of the moment I said that he owed me money. ‘That makes two of us,’ she said. ‘If you see that bastard, you tell him I’ve got friends who know where he lives.’ She gave me a number, and when I dialled it the phone was answered by a man who sounded suspicious. He said Jimmy was out but he offered to take a message. I said who I was, told him I was calling about Christabel, said it was urgent, and left my number.