Too Much Happiness

“A Hare Krishna?” said Sally.

“Oh, Mom, if you’re a monk it doesn’t mean you’re a Hare Krishna. Anyway he’s not that now.”

“So what is he?”

“He says he lives in the present. So I said well don’t we all, nowadays, and he said no, he meant in the real present.”

Where they were now, he had said, and Sava

“I see it differently,” he said, but then he said he had no objection to her way of seeing it, or anybody’s.

“Well, that’s big of you,” said Sava

He said that he had seen Alex’s obituary in the paper and thought it was well done. He thought Alex would have liked the geological references. He had wondered if his own name would appear, included in the family, and he was rather surprised that it was there. He wondered, had his father told them what names he wanted listed, before he died?

Sava

“Not Dad,” Kent said. “Well no.”

Then he asked about Sally.

Sally felt a kind of inflated balloon in her chest.

“What did you say?”

“I said you were okay, maybe at loose ends a little, you and Dad being so close and not much time yet to get used to being alone. Then he said tell her she can come to see me if she wants to and I said I would ask you.”

Sally didn’t reply.

“You there, Mom?”

“Did he say when or where?”

“No. I’m supposed to meet him in a week in the same place and tell him. I think he sort of enjoys calling the shots. I thought you’d agree right away.”

“Of course I agree.”

“You aren’t alarmed at coming in by yourself?”

“Don’t be silly. Was he really the man you saw in the fire?”

“He wouldn’t say yes or no. But my information is yes. He’s quite well known as it turns out in certain parts of town and by certain people.”

Sally receives a note. This in itself was special, since most people she knew used e-mail or the phone. She was glad it wasn’t the phone. She did not trust herself to hear his voice yet. The note instructed her to leave her car in the subway parking lot at the end of the line and take the subway to a specified station where she should get off and he would meet her.

She expected to see him on the other side of the turnstile, but he was not there. Probably he meant that he would meet her outside. She climbed the steps and emerged into the sunlight and paused, with all sorts of people hurrying and pushing past her. She had a feeling of dismay and embarrassment. Dismay because of Kent ’s apparent absence, and embarrassment because she was feeling just what people from her part of the country often seemed to feel, though she would never say what they said. You’d think you were in the Congo or India or Vietnam, they would say. Anyplace but Ontario. Turbans and saris and dashikis were much in evidence, and Sally was all in favor of their swish and bright colors. But they weren’t being worn as foreign costumes. The wearers hadn’t just arrived here; they had got past the moving-in phase. She was in their way.

On the steps of an old bank building just beyond the subway entrance, several men were sitting or lounging or sleeping. This was no longer a bank, of course, though its name was cut in stone. She looked at the name rather than the men, whose slouching or reclining or passed-out postures were such a contrast to the old purpose of the building, and the hurry of the crowd coming out of the subway.

“Mom.”

One of the men on the steps came towards her in no hurry, with a slight drag of one foot, and she realized that it was Kent and waited for him.

She would almost as soon have run away. But then she saw that not all the men were filthy or hopeless looking, and that some looked at her without menace or contempt and even with a friendly amusement now that she was identified as Kent ’s mother.

Kent didn’t wear a robe. He wore gray pants that were too big for him, belted in, and a T-shirt with no message on it and a very worn jacket. His hair was cut so short you could hardly see the curl. He was quite gray, with a seamed face, some missing teeth, and a very thin body that made him look older than he was.

He did not embrace her-indeed she did not expect him to-but put his hand just lightly on her back to steer her in the direction they were supposed to go.

“Do you still smoke your pipe?” she said, sniffing the air and remembering how he had taken up pipe smoking in high school.

“Pipe? Oh. No. It’s the smoke from the fire you smell. We don’t notice it anymore. I’m afraid it’ll get stronger, in the direction we’re walking.”

“Are we going to go through where it was?”

“No, no. We couldn’t, even if we wanted to. They’ve got it all blocked off. Too dangerous. Some buildings will have to be taken down. Don’t worry, it’s okay where we are. A good block and a half away from the mess.”

“Your apartment building?” she said, alert to the “we.”

“Sort of. Yes. You’ll see.”

He spoke gently, readily, yet with an effort, like someone speaking, as a courtesy, in a foreign language. And he stooped a little, to make sure she heard him. The special effort, the slight labor involved in speaking to her, as if making a scrupulous translation, seemed something she was meant to notice.

The cost.

As they stepped off a curb he brushed her arm-perhaps he had stumbled a little-and he said, “Excuse me.” And she thought he gave the least shiver.

AIDS. Why had that never occurred to her before?

“No,” he said, though she had certainly not spoken aloud. “I’m quite well at present. I’m not HIV positive or anything like that. I contracted malaria years ago, but it’s under control. I may be a bit run-down at present but nothing to worry about. We turn here, we’re right in this block.”

“We” again.

“I’m not psychic,” he said. “I just figured out something that Sava

It was one of those houses whose front doors open only a few steps from the sidewalk.

“I’m celibate, actually,” he said, holding open the door.

A piece of cardboard was tacked up where one of its panes should be.

The floorboards were bare and creaked underfoot. The smell was complicated, all-pervasive. The street smell of smoke had got in here, of course, but it was mixed with smells of ancient cooking, burnt coffee, toilets, sickness, decay.

“Though ‘celibate’ might be the wrong word. That sounds as if there’s something to do with willpower. I guess I should have said ‘neuter.’ I don’t think of it as an achievement. It isn’t.”

He was leading her around the stairs and into the kitchen. And there a gigantic woman stood with her back to them, stirring something on the stove.

Kent said, “Hi, Marnie. This is my mom. Can you say hello to my mom?”

Sally noticed a change in his voice. A relaxation, honesty, perhaps a respect, different from the forced lightness he managed with her.

She said, “Hello, Marnie,” and the woman half turned, showing a squeezed doll’s face in a loaf of flesh but not focusing her eyes.

“Marnie is our cook this week,” said Kent. “Smells okay, Marnie.”

To his mother he said, “We’ll go and sit in my sanctum, shall we?” and led the way down a couple of steps and along a back hall. It was hard to move there because of the stacks of newspapers, flyers, magazines neatly tied.

“Got to get these out of here,” Kent said. “I told Steve this morning. Fire hazard. Jeez, I used to just say that. Now I know what it means.”

Jeez. She had been wondering if he belonged to some plain-clothes religious order, but if he did, he surely wouldn’t say that, would he? Of course it could be an order of some faith other than Christian.