Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Sure,” said Rachel. She hadn’t extinguished her cigarette to accept the beaded glass of ice and soda. The smoke drifted into the August air unstirred.

“For all of me that’s dying my tongue is dying soonest.”

“Maybe put lemon in it,” Rachel suggested.

“I put lemon in my soup. I can’t also put it in my soda. Take the bottle with you when you go. I should drink formaldehyde.”

Rachel Ebdus ignored the remark. She was unshockable, a bad sign if Isabel was looking. The young mother leaned back in her chair perilously, cigarette between fingers on a hand propped over her shoulder. Her black unbrushed hair was madness. Isabel pictured it on fire on her patio in the deafened afternoon.

The man on the ladder gathered excess with his blade and allowed it to drip heavily to the butcher paper on the parlor floor, which crackled as it accepted the weight.

The boy’s intensity, his gaze, might be wearing the gloss off her old photographs. He hadn’t turned a page for a whole minute. He remained curled around the album as Isabel was curled involuntarily around her whole self.

Isabel saw that Rachel Ebdus watched the plasterer. “The old art lives in him,” she told the younger woman. “He drinks beer on his breaks and talks like John Garfield, but look at the ceiling.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“He says his father taught him. He’s only bringing out the beauty which was hiding. He’s an instrument of the ceiling. He doesn’t need to understand.”

Isabel felt irritation with herself or Rachel Ebdus, she wasn’t sure which. She hadn’t brought the image entirely into the light: that though mute, the house conveyed a language of itself, as the plasterer carried forward his father’s trade.

“He’s got a great ass,” said Rachel.

Outside, the squirrel shrieked.

Isabel sighed. She actually craved one of the woman’s cigarettes. Was it possible to begin smoking at seventy-three? Isabel thought she might like to try. Or perhaps she was only impatient with her own inability to fathom anything about Rachel Ebdus besides the woman’s insatiability. And the cigarettes lay on the ironwork grille of Isabel’s patio table within a hand’s reach, whereas the plasterer’s ass was in every sense less accessible.

“If it’s in any way a question of money-” Isabel began, surprising herself by getting to the point.

“No, it isn’t,” said Rachel Ebdus, smiling.

“I don’t want to embarrass you. Both Packer and the Friends School have scholarship possibilities. I don’t know about Saint Ann’s. But I would also be glad to help.”

“It isn’t about money. I believe in public school. I went to public school.”

“That’s idealistic indeed. I do think you’ll find that all his friends will be at one or another of the private schools.”

“Dylan has friends on the block. I doubt they’re going to Brooklyn Friends or Packer.”

Days were not always like this. There were days like white pages, when no squirrels screamed in the trees and no boys leafed through her albums and no plasterer sweated at her ceiling and a neighbor stinking of radicalism and a tenuous marriage did not sit grinding cigarettes into Isabel’s china teacups and enjoying the ginger ale Isabel could no longer taste while offering as conversational checkmate a neat implication of racism, days when the only dischord in the tall Dutch house was the orange cat clawing newspaper bundles in the basement apartment into frayed, piss-smelling bales, days when Isabel sat upstairs at her table, scraping the nib of her pen across the signature line of a check to some moderately worthy cause, or to her favorite and completely unworthy one, her nephew Croft who’d hidden himself at a commune in Bloomington, Indiana, after impregnating a black cook at the house in Silver Bay and who, she’d been assured, divided Isabel’s monthly donation neatly in half, sending one portion to the distant cook and her child and donating the other to the commune’s petty-cash reserves for food and marijuana. To hell with Rachel Ebdus. Isabel subsidized feral hippies and the mulatto offspring of her criminal relations and Rachel Ebdus could certainly send Dylan, God help him, to Public School 38 to show his sole white face among that ocean of brown, to air his waterfall of girlish hair among the Afros, if that was what suited her principles. Isabel could wish now for this day to be unsquirreled entirely, for it to be one spent not even at her desk but rather one in which she lay in bed still, ignoring the orange cat’s cries, rereading Maugham or De Maupassant.

She wondered if Rachel Ebdus would also have admired Croft’s ass. Likely so.

The boy put the big photo album on the cast-iron patio table and pointed. “That’s your name,” he said inquiringly. Isabel turned, surprised.

The long-ago photographer had in the darkroom burned a row of small white letters at the bottom corner of each of the black-and-white shots of the boats, the harbor, the parties on the lawn: VENDLE’S HARD, SILVER BAY, LAKE GEORGE, NY. The boy pressed his nubby fingertip to Isabel’s family name, and waited for an answer.

Vendle’s Hard. Cranberries soaked in cognac. Emptied bottles rolling in the belly of a skiff. The famous oar, fouled in aquatic vines, that shattered and speared her side, puncturing her lung nearly to the spine. The old injury around which she was so rigidly curled.

“He reads,” said Isabel, allowing herself to be mildly impressed.

“Mmmmh hmm,” said Rachel Ebdus, humming the syllables through the ignition of another cigarette. “He sure does. He reads Abraham’s New York Times .”

“He’ll be with children who’ll never learn,” said Isabel, feeling impulsive and a little cruel. The fact was undeniable. Let Rachel squirm now.

“Maybe he’ll teach them,” Dylan’s mother said easily, then laughed. “It’s a problem for him to solve, school. I did it, so can he.” Cigarette between her fingers pointed to the sky and leaking smoke, she put her hand in Dylan’s hair.

Skully did exist. It was a science more closely related to the Spirograph and the Etch A Sketch than to the spaldeen and Dylan fell on it with gratitude. In fact when it was actually played he lost the game more often than he won but skully was an art that involved the conveyance of a body of knowledge, like the methods of a guild, and by his second summer on the block Dylan had mastered all its peripheral notions and was widely recognized for this mastery. For instance drawing the skully board. The first step involved finding the ideal square of slate and so Dylan’s long communion with the Dean Street sidewalk was rewarded. The slate shouldn’t be flawed by a crack or vein, or tilted, or bowed. Dylan favored a square in front of the blue-painted brownstone, midway between the home of the woman his mother sometimes, laughingly, called Vendlemachine and Henry called the olelady, and Henry’s own house. It was Dylan’s secret that other squares of slate farther down the block were as good or better but that he preferred this one for being nearer his own house and close also to Henry’s, where the kids gathered, and for the way it was shaded by a particular tree-the dynamics of space and sound, the quality of privacy and access, for a whole series of subtle aesthetical distinctions and that he could still hear his mother if she called for him from the stoop of their house-it would have been impossible to express all that went into his selection and so Dylan instead declared it the best square for skully, on the whole. And he was believed. The kids might scratch a skully board into another square from time to time, testing the principle, but after Dylan’s declaration the principle was in place.