We’re one story shy of the terminus in Self-Evident. For you who have been reading these stories for the past 38 weeks, you’ll find that this one ties up some loose ends.
“Je regarde la mer Égée, une brise légère sur mon visage et mon bras autour de la personne que je ...”
Oh, sorry. Just popped awake at 3 a.m. Have begun to dream in French, hence the above—which I deem to be extremely strange since I am not actually able to construct a meaningful sentence longer than about three words in the language. Two can be a stretch. Mon dieux!
That said, the Ægean Sea was everything it's cracked up to be. Made me kind of sorry to wake up. Now I'll never know how that story ended and isn't that always the case with interrupted dreams? It's extremely hard to go back to the moment in question and roll the film, and even the handful of times I've managed that trick in the past it seemed like everything went south in a hurry.
[The person I was about to kiss turned out to be a department store mannequin or a slobbering basset or a pumpkin, or the beach and my feet were globbed up with bunker oil from the tanker going down just offshore, or something needed fixing that I was either unable to repair or knew how but couldn't find, or one of my relatives or friends was doing something crazy or dangerous and I couldn't intervene and then woke to realize he'd/she'd been dead for eight years or more. Thus I don't bother trying any longer. Better to remember the calm and lovely Ægean as it was. No sense giving Godzilla or the Spanish Inquisition an opening.]
[Thence to lie awake and recall Matthew Arnold.]
“Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery”
Except, given my rather different temperament, the tremulous cadence of the ocean suggests nothing regarding misery. Rather, it speaks to me of endurance, of the fact that “we are but a moment's sunlight fading in the grass1” but that the music of the spheres will live on. And hey, I've checked out the flung pebbles on Dover Beach, up close and personal, and still came away with that view. Arnold, I think, might have been kind of a depressive sort. [Sophocles too, for that matter.]
I mean, he beseeches his lover to be true, then says the world looks to be a land of dreams—various, beautiful, new—but then spoils it all. It ...
“Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;”
Bet that cheered her up no end. Not what I would have said. No indeedy. Not going to get from here to diddling like that.
Then again, that's the great virtue of composing fiction. One can nearly always control the outcome. [Though surprises may occur.]
Monty Fortner was telling me exactly that the other day. He also claims to have never actually finished a dream in his life, which we know is approximately impossible. Sleep researchers have yet to discover a subject who doesn't dream, and we don't always wake from them before the finale: ipso facto,2 some of Monty's have definitely wrapped up.
There are, of course, those who don't remember them, just as there are those who don't remember our birthdays, or to say “please” and “thank you.” You know the type.
But what he was telling me is that now that I've invented him he will do as he pleases and the hell with what I had planned. (!),
It seems clear that a battle of wits and wills lies ahead.
Monty is a gemologist and he's good at what he does. [I generally get fewer complaints from a character if I say something nice at the outset.]
This isn't a profession that one wanders into, in my view. Lots of us (moi)3 took our first serious jobs by dint of necessity, took what was available, then rolled along. Hopefully up.
Perez, for example. Jesus Perez. He was in love (moral hazard at play here) and needed some cash for the requisite ring. So he took a gig painting apartments, which seem always to need freshening between tenants. That quickly led to patching of walls—you'd be surprised how many times renters put a fist through the Sheetrock®. [Been there, fixed that.] Which led to some understanding of mud and tape and trowel, and now Jesus owns his own construction company, subcontracting wall board installation all over town.
Others diverge, but only a little. (Moi).4 Janet Tinsley worked for Jesus for a spell but was lured away by a boyfriend, Wendell Taylor, who offered her higher wages on a carpentry job. She quickly discovered that wood butchery is much more pleasant and generally a lot less debilitating than throwing around a bunch of 5/8” x 4' x 12' sheets of gypsum board, and a whole lot less dusty. The skills stuck even though the guy didn't, and fifteen years later she's a general contractor and hires Jesus' crew for that part of the work.
Wendell went on to specialize in roofing and fell to his death some years later. [Insert pathos.] I told him church roofs were way too steep,5 but did he listen? And it had just rained.
Idiot.
Janet hires Greg Samsa6 for electrical work.
By the by, Macallan, the talking steer (on whose dark side Greg's ideas were seized) is doing just fine with his own talk show and a blog (dictated, as one would expect from a cloven-hoofed beast, word processing being beyond cloven reach). Greg still calls in Mary for the whole-house jobs, though as we've previously noted, she tends to specialize in solar installations these days.
Oh, and Greg and Chelsea are still itemized. Happy as only cheese-making, goat-herding, yoga instructing, electrical worker combos can be while cohabiting with a smart-ass talking steer. [Full of himself, he is.]
Mary bought a ring from Monty when she and Jeanne decided to wed, but Jeanne bought Mary's ring at Jewels That Dance®.7 [Monty's good but Paula Dawkins is better.]
“Hey wait a damn minute!”
See? A little criticism and the griping starts. Monty, Monty, Paula has been in the trade more than thrice as long as you, and like most crafters has continually improved. You'll get there. Patience my, boy. Patience.
We hear muttered grumbling but he subsides.
Speaking of Jeanne, she's another good example of job transition that wasn't exactly planned but came out well. After a couple of decades touring with her band she quit, bought a house and took a job as a clerk at a Stop-n-Shop® where she's now manager. It might seem like a come-down from jamming with Neil Young8 and sharing a stage with a long roster of big-name acts to running a local convenience store—but it was a soft landing and she loves her regular patrons. She still plays guitar and even busks downtown once in a while to keep her hand in. Or did, before the plague.
Monty was crossing Haywood Street, headed to where Jeanne was strumming, paying no attention to traffic when a delivery truck whose driver was looking for an unfamiliar address flattened …
“No it didn't.”
You again? Look, I terminate whom I will in these pages, particularly gripers. Recall Bennie (page 96—in the print edition, on Substack look for the story “Gap toothed.”). Not a griper and I arranged for the bus to miss him, while the two people who were hit—don't believe I mentioned this—were good folks and I let them off with a bit of bruising. The driver was pretty shaken.
“Hey, I'm sorry. I was bruised too, on the previous page. I'm sorry. Please, please don't kill me.”
Okay. But mind your manners.
… flattened an empty beer can and the metallic crunch got Monty's attention in the nick of time.
That was a close call! In the residual wash of relief, the sense of luck and the resulting adrenalin rush, Monty tipped Jeanne $5!
“Hey, I'm not that ...”
Watch it.
“Okay. But really, five dollars?”
Listen, I'm trying to make you look good. Grateful. Generous. Instead you're going to make yourself look stingy, sort of a type-cast gemstone lover, a Scrooge McDuck sifting your fingers through piles of shiny objects and whispering, “Mine, all mine.” Look, it was only half a sawbuck, and I just saved your ass. So chill.
Where was I?
Later that afternoon Monty was telling his girlfriend, Alice, about the incident.
“Who?”
Alice, with whom I have just now itemized you.
“Is she attractive?”
You were attracted, isn't that enough? [Also she doesn't golf and she turns off the radio whenever Dylan shows up. Too good for you would be my view, but there you go.]
Alice said, “Oh, honey! I'm so glad you're safe!” Then she threw her arms around Monty and kissed him for a good long while. [An undeserved reward, but it did prevent his speaking for the nonce.]
When they decoupled she held his hand and said she had something important to tell him, and maybe he'd better sit down.
Monty sat in one of the Irish pub chairs he'd been given by his friend Scooter, a pair of smoothly curved hardwood seats polished by years of rears, still sturdy as the dickens.
[Scooter had moved in with his significant item and they'd had to downsize, not an unusual thing when households combine. The pub chairs had been faves, so rather than let them go at the yard sale, a friendly gifting had ensured that the former owner would be able to visit now and again. “If you ever decide they're in the way, I want them back,” he'd said. Monty agreed.]
“Okay Alice, what's up?”
“The VeryQuick® test?”
“The what?”
“The pregnancy test ...”
“The WHAT?”
“It was positive.”
“Wait a fricking minute, Bothwell! Come on! I only met this woman 239 words ago! I've kissed her once!”
It was a very long kiss.
“But we've never … y'know … what's your word for it? Diddled? Right, we've never diddled.”
How can you know that? I've known you for three pages at this point, and that's plenty of time to come up with a convincing backstory. If memory serves, you and Alice have been cohabiting for most of this “time of cholera” in a one-bedroom apartment. Don't pretend you've been sleeping on the sofa.
“You're making things up.”
Nuh-uh. Alice told Jillian that you're good in bed. [This should mollify him.]
“Who's Jillian?” [But suddenly looking a little pleased with himself.]
Alice's best friend.
“And how did you find out?”
Jillian is Jeanne's sister, and Jeanne and I have been pretty close since last winter when I made her up, and she thought it was hilarious that Jillian told her. Most people are a bit more circumspect about les histoires de coeur.
“Oh, so now you're going all hotsy-totsy on me. But, listen, I'm not ready to be a Dad.”
Maybe you should have thought about that sooner.
“You mean before we diddled?”
That, or when you had me prevent the truck from …
“This is not fair. You hold all the pixels.”
Yep. And tell you what. Alice is going to want to name him Montford too. So at this point you have a choice. The youngster can be Montford DeLuca or Montford Fortner, Jr.
“Marry her? We've only just met.”
Yeah. Right. Tell that to the judge.
“Judge?”
She isn't 18 yet. Birthday next April.
“What? What are you trying to do to me?”
Statutory gets what, 15 years?
“But she said … “
I thought you just met her.
“Anyway, the age of consent in North Carolina is 16!”
You're forgetting the trip to Merritt Island.
“The what?”
In October. Camping on the beach. The Jetty Park camp-ground. You registered as man and wife. Big trouble, Monty. Big, big trouble.
“What are you talking about?”
Making love in that tent to the “tremulous cadence” and the “turbid ebb and flow” of the Atlantic … You know that's where Charles and Danielle diddled. They made Grace.
“You mean they said grace?”
No. they got pregnant. Didn't you read the previous story?
“No. I've got better things to do with my time. But I read the box. The VeryQuick® is only 99 percent accurate. So let's not get ahead of ourselves. Besides, on page 183 you were going to explain how I ended up in my line of work. Can't we get back to that and deal with this baby business later?”
Okay. But you certainly haven't exhibited a whole barrel of gratitude for my saving your sorry self. Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy.
Monty went to a gem and mineral show in Spruce Pine when he was in his teens, in what we uncomfortably call the Oughts. [Somehow it seems we could have come up with something better. Doesn't this make ensuing decades the Ought-Nots?] He was quite taken with the difference between raw stones and those that were cut and heated and polished. The treatment turned opaque, even muddy-looking bits of rock into refractory delights.
He went to the Gem Mountain Gemstone Mine® and paid something like $50 for a premium bucket of salted sand—salted with a variety of junk and semi-precious material—then washed it in the sluice, to reveal all sorts of pretty rocks. Obviously this is a tourist trap par excellence, but reasonably on the up and up. He did gather some arguably valuable gems, from which he chose three to have cut and treated. By the time they arrived in the mail weeks later he was hooked.
The garnet and tourmaline and ruby were all gorgeous!
He bought a rock tumbler to polish stones and then took courses that taught him the finer points of the trade. He learned to work silver and later gold. He sold jewelry at art and craft shows and was eventually accepted into the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild®. Monty's work has won awards in craft competition and is admired by many.
His was not a career entered into haphazardly, or in the heat of necessity, but rather an intentional path from hobby to modest fame.
Are you satisfied now?
“Yes. Thanks. Sounds pretty good.”
Good indeed. And Monty?
“Yes?”
You can afford a child and Alice is going to be a terrific Mom.
“Great. But this feels like kind of a shotgun thing.”
By the way.
“Yes?”
I was kidding about her age. She's 24.
“Whew!” [Pause.]
“But what does all this have to do with les dents?”
Never bite off more than you can chew, Monty. Remember that.
1 “Get Together,” The Youngbloods, 1966
2 Latin!
3 Exactement.
4 Exactement? Non. In my case it was masonry. Carpentry came later.
5 I rebuilt one chimney on a 12:12 church roof. Never again.
6 Whom we well remember from Fifty Wheys to Love Your Liver and Seize You on the Dark Side of the Moo, where he appeared in four, count 'em four, stories! Including the title tale in each! As well as in the exciting crime scenario in “Vast (or Little?) Waste” in Waist Not, Want Knot. Greg gets around.
7 Lately transitioned to Paula Dawkins Fine Jewelry.®
8 Page 76 of Waist Not.
As always I want to thank paid subscribers, as well as those who enjoy my work enough to hunt up my other books. Self-Evident was my 15th and one of four short story collections I’ve completed during the pandemic. (Isolation with a laptop.)
What’s all this talk about “arresting officers”?:)
I’m headed over to Ray Mine Rd in Burnsville to the basically—quarry. Yr welcome to ride along. It makes for a very nice afternoon. Best, marsha
One of the more relaxing days in the past 10 yrs I spent with a Brevard rock hound guy who ran his El Camino with the corvette engine so hard on Airport Rd that the troopers drug him home to momma where they knew he’d be safe as mom worked for the state patrol. That event occurred some decades ago. And the motor reportedly blew up.
BTW: there’s the most astonishing hike outside of Burnsville—- you make a right at that Ingles then the next left—- you can’t miss it—— wherein you come upon a stream and a cascade of silver, black & purple mica which dazzles the eyes like the Milky Way (how do u get that trademark symbol in there) does on a very dark night far from the city lights.
Sorry—- it amused me to try & simulate yr stream of consciousness.
I know very well how to get to that mica mine. Join me sometime. I need to haul in more glittery things…
Oh, and did I tell you about Crystal River in Bloomington IN where you hike in yr River shoes (trademark) and pop potato sized rocks to reveal quartz geodes?
Been meaning to get back there. And at IU there’s multiple recitals every day—- playing real good for free.