Free Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett Page B

woebegone truth, that not even in the blue stillness of death can we be decisive, resolute, unwavering. It was once that life found nourishment, pabulum (and I mean them in whatever ways you can make them mean), in death. If we could have, we would have personified Time, nonspatial as it is, as if in a children’s book, we might have asked it, politely or not, I don’t think it would matter to Time (untroubled as it is), not to run off to ruin.
    In this my modest but comfortable Connecticut saltbox house in which I have lived for some thirty-four years, I am reclining in the midcentury Eames lounge chair my Rose bought at a yard sale in Mystic. I cannot see the ocean from my farmhouse, but I know that it is there and yet it gives little if any solace. The bluegrass lawn is long and it is being mown by Gerald, a pleasant Negro man from Hartford, who tells me my bluegrass is rare now. I attend to the care he pays the edges of the yard, swinging his old John Deere riding mower wide to pick up the strip he missed on his last pass. I imagine the tide is going out now and that the constant sound of the ocean is softer, sadder perhaps, the way I feel, but I cannot hear it even when it crashes. I imagine that I am one of those sandy beaches, viewed from a high place, more of me exposed than ever, my sea fleeing for some distant, opposite land, shore, continent, until all is a great silence, a torture of silence. I reflect on my last trip to Paris, lament is more like it. I arrived at the Gare du Nord from I can’t remember where. It was a Friday night it had rained all day, leaving the streets shimmering. I knew the taxi ride to the sixth would be long and slow. I was there because I had won some award or other. I asked the driver to stop before we crossed the river, and I got out. Êtes-vous certain? the driver said again and again. I had some sense of where I was. I could see an archway ahead of me, cars bottlenecked and trying to get through, and I believed that through there I would find the Louvre and from there it would be a long walk to the Odéon and my hotel. It was on that long journey along the wet Boulevard Saint-Germain that I finally figured out that I had tumbled into depression, my shoulders aching from my bags, my feet hurting with every step, and yet it was a feeling of freedom, that realization. À quelque chose malheur est bon. I would contemplate this over dinner at Les Éditeurs, the restaurant across the street from my hotel, the walls of which were covered with photographs of writers, I among them, posed seated in a hotel lobby some blocks away. There I would have the gratinée de coquilles St. Jacques, my favorite, and a bottle of wine from the Loire, a sauvignon blanc no doubt. I did arrive at the restaurant. I still had not checked in to my hotel and so I sat with my bags in the chair opposite me at a table meant for two. As it turned out, I instead had a cabernet franc, the color of the wine befitting my mood.
    Nat, Nat, Nat, you can’t write this.
    Why the hell not? It’s deep, it’s intellectual, it’s cosmopolitan, and it’s timely. What do you mean I can’t write it? I’ve written it.
    It’s so unreal. How can this guy be depressed? Look at his life.
    Depression is a disease. Besides, you have not gotten to the part where he’s hiding in the lobby of the Four Seasons and has sex with a bellboy.
    Really.
    I could make the scene about you, I suppose, and I’d have to call it Go Down, Moses.
    Are you going to fill it with all sorts of literary allusions?
    No, I’m trying to remain authentic here.
    Dad?
    Son?
    I can’t keep up.
    Und so weiter.

    What?
    Ashita wa ashita, kyo wa kyo. It’s Japanese.
    That much I gathered. And it means?
    A shrug.
    I’ll be Murphy again. And I’m sitting with my Leica still, having just looked through the viewfinder and seen the cast and crew of the March on Washington. Nat was smoking a joint rather unabashedly. Charlton Heston was pretending not to know him.