Free The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise Page B

childlike. I am forty-five, but slow and heavy in spirit.
    She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I can’t help noticing that urn you’re carrying. Is it what I ...”
    I had placed it unobtrusively, I’d thought, on the table between the wine glasses. It was stoppered and guaranteed airtight, a kind of Thermos bottle of ashes. I was afraid that if I put him on the floor an errant foot might touch him.
    â€œVery perceptive,” I said. “It’s my uncle.”
    â€œLovely to meet you, sir,” she said to the urn. Then to me, “You can call me Rose.” Call me Rose? I must have squinted, but she said, “You were talking to him back in Siena. You were sitting on a bench and holding it in your lap and I heard you. Of course, I couldn’t understand what you were saying, but I’d never seen anything like it.”
    â€œWhy the mystery about your name?” I asked.
    â€œYou’ll find out,” she said. Perhaps she changed her name every day, or on every trip, or for every man she met. I told her my name, Abhi, short for Abhishek.
    The farm landscape reminded me of paintings on the walls of Italian restaurants: mounded vineyards framed by cypress trees, against a wall of purple hills sprinkled with distant, whitewashed villas. She moved like a dancer to the fence, then turned, and called to me.
    â€œWhy not right here?”
    I walked over to the fence, but a goat wandered up to us, looking for food, and tried to butt me through the slats. Then he launched a flurry of shiny black pellets.
    â€œMaybe not,” she said.
    When we remounted the tour bus, the aisle seat next to me turned up vacant. “May I?” she asked. She told me that my morning seatmate had also made a connection with the urn and a possible bomb, or shortwave radio. He too had seen me talking in a strange language in Siena, probably Arabic.
    During the next leg of the trip, she opened up to me: “You came here on a mission. So did I, in a way. I read that an old friend of mine was going to be in Florence for a Renaissance music festival. He plays the mandolin. And suddenly I wanted to see him again. Not to be with him — goodness, he has a wife and family — but I thought how funny it would be if we just happened to run into each other.”
    I could not have imagined so much disclosure in a single outburst. I couldn’t even understand her motivation. Funny? The impulsiveness of my fellow Americans is often mysterious to me, but I listened with admiration. We’d never met and we were on a bus in Tuscany, but she was spilling her secrets. Or did she consider me a harmless sounding post? Or did she have no secrets? And then I wondered had she — like me — been pried open by some recent experience? Perhaps our normal defenses had been weakened.
    â€œMaybe you had a wake-up call,” I said. The things we do that elude all reason, because suddenly, we have to do them.
    She seemed to ponder the possibility, then consigned it to a secret space for future negotiation. After a few moments she asked, “Where are you from?”
    Always an ambiguous question: where are you really from? India? Am I from Kolkata? California? Bay Area? She said, “I work in a library in a small town in Massachusetts, two blocks from Emily Dickinson’s house.”
    She’d been married, but not to her mandolinist. She’d gone to New York to dance, she married, but she’d injured herself and turned to painting, and then she’d divorced and started writing. By her estimation she was a minor, but not a failed, writer. Like most Bangla-speakers of my generation, I’ve known a number of poets and writers, although most were employed in more mundane endeavors, by day. I had never considered them minor, or failed.
    And then her narrative, or her confessions, stopped and I felt strangely bereft. I sensed she was waiting for me to reciprocate. What did I have to