The Slave Trader

The Root Cellar

Cari had observed him like a ghost during their relationship. She knew he still allowed himself to listen to John Coltrane and drink scotch after work and into the evening, even though he'd told himself he wouldn't and would ride his bike after work instead. At least it kept him from thinking about her too much. His fear of alcohol dependence was a small price to pay. He had gotten the apartment while he was studying for the bar. She had nodded to herself when she saw it; it was much like the one he'd had his first year of law school; white, sterile, uncomplicated by history. Within his comfort zone. He set up the calfskin chair and ottoman his grandfather had given him next to the wall of windows. He termed this his “command center,” after his father's home office. His father was a tall, facetious assistant vice president of customer relations, always a little too fat and self-satisfied to make it all the way up. Marc bragged that his father had once been considered a potential nominee for California governor, knowing deep down that it had been a shot in the dark, something an assistant chief of staff had thrown out at a cocktail party and no one had taken seriously, except in a fraternity frame of mind. “Yeah, Bud, go for it! I can see that face on yard signs ... you're better looking than the governator!”
His father had had a heart attack four months earlier. His grandfather had died of a heart attack at 61 and he knew it wouldn't be a long time for his father. His mother had she and his father on Weight Watchers and tried her best with her limited knowledge of what was healthy to keep him fit. But he snuck cheap beer onto their sailboat every other weekend, skiffing around the bay by himself. He was a man of almost no real ambition, but with enough respect for pampering to keep up the appearance of having some in order to get paid. Marc had never stood up to his father, or even refused a can of Bud from the doughy hand of the man he had lied to since he could talk. He remembered his father asking him about his dreams when he was little, because he was on ADD medication and nightmares were a side effect, and he'd told him he had dreams of sailing when he had actually dreamed of snakes piling on top of him, slithering around his room and into his orifices.
Marc came out of the shower, the start of a Saturday with no agenda except to review some documents for Monday, which could wait until Sunday. He liked waiting until the last minute sometimes, just to be rebellious. He sat in front of a chocolate croissant and coffee and thought, “I am happy, though I work for the side of the insurance companies. I am happy though I am worse than a DA and don't even theoretically represent any person ... I am happy.” He looked back down at his plain coffee sitting on the bamboo mat, then out the window across the room. From that angle all he could see was the building across the street, but from the command center chair, he could see the river. It was finally the beginning of summer, but this didn't matter to him much. He would go hiking by himself, or bicycling with Real from work, a skinny fifty-two year old with nothing to offer in the way of conversation except Wall Street Journal article summaries and recaps of the two trials he'd had that year.
He looked at his bookshelf. On the bottom was her copy of Tender is the Night. He hadn't been able to get rid of it and realized that he always thought of how it was there, trying to hide on the bottom shelf, but never acknowledged it. He thought about watching Five Easy Pieces and making out on the couch with her the summer before, so thin and beautiful her little body in his big lap, and making love with her in the warm night in the little house they'd shared in law school that was like a farm house and suddenly wanted a cigarette. He had one in a plastic bag that he'd saved from law school, his emergency cigarette for exams that he had never smoked because he had her to call instead.
He remembered the night of the Christmas party, afterward sleeping alone in the room with no curtains, curled up waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
“Oh my goodness!” she had said, smiling and starting to traipse across the back lawn of his new boss' house in Beaverton, the lawn dewing over in the late night cold. “That was the dullest thing ever ... an insult to the word party!”
She'd looked over at his face, stern as she stopped in front of her car door, her expression falling into disappointment like a child being reproached after thinking they'd done well in the Christmas play. They had gotten in the car as at dawn when everyone doesn't talk out of respect for others' sleepiness. Onto the cold suburb road they had driven, it reminding her of long drives she would take alone in college, watching the silhouettes of the hills around Corvallis fold out onto each other, knowing she wasn't alone. She had grown up outside of Sullivan, New Hampshire, on 20 acres. She had told him about the deep yellow Banny eggs that were almost all yolk and the wild turkeys running out of the forest and hanging out with the chickens in the sometimes dusty, sometimes muddy clearing between the chicken house and the pond. What she missed most, she had said, were the cool evening frog songs that would come up from the bordering forest that hid a little bog about the same time as the fireflies started blinking on and off like little lit up potato bugs while she and her brother hit the last few volleys across the badminton net. This hadn't struck a chord with him until he hung out with her the summer of their third year of law school when they lit candles in the back yard of their little farm house and he had felt the summer evenings come on strong like they had never existed before.
After the “party” he had floated through a red light without realizing it, and turned into a strip mall. The grocery store was still open. He parked as far away as possible from it, so far away that she wondered where he was going when he got out of the car. She sat watching him walk, he always looked heavy when he walked, being so tall and thick and dressed in clothes that didn't fit him.
She got out and walked after him at the pace he was going, watching him enter through the automatic doors as though through a portal. He wandered down a fruit and vegetable corridor and over to the side aisle, stopping in front of the pomegranate juice to stare at it. She came to stand beside him in line.
“Is there anything else we need?” he asked.
She thought of several things. “No, I don't think so.”
In the car his body felt heavy as though he had gone swimming in his clothes, and did not turn the key.
“What's wrong?” she had said, knowing how futile the question was.
“I'm not like those people, they weren't even talking to each other. Where were they? Did you see the flowers, silk roses! in the bathroom?”
She was relieved, until she realized she couldn't respond honestly without pissing him off, because she knew he'd take the job anyway.
“You don't have to talk to them, they don't have to be your friends,” she said, even though she couldn't imagine working every day with people who had spent three years studying to end up defending insurance companies and seeming fine with it, and for whom alcohol didn't even make them interesting.
She thought of the young man, pre-law school Marc he had told her about. He who had gone after work to have a drink at Smyth's around the corner from his tiny apartment in Manhattan, then sat on the roof reading J. M. Coatzee (which she knew was a problem, but blamed it on immaturity, his lack of experience), watching the neighbors barbecue and feeling a foreigner. This was the man she wanted to love, not the check shirt insurance pinch-hitter sitting next to her in the Volvo. But then again he had also been a paralegal in Manhattan, and before that had worked for Wendell Wilke in D.C. He had been turning his clock key in the wrong direction maybe always. And his parents, a mother who kept his room exactly the same, down to the little twin bed not made for bringing anyone home, and the model sailboat and the blue walls, and his father, the might as well be an insurance adjuster or shoe salesman who had a speaker in his pillow piping classical music to help him sleep.
“Let's go,” she'd said.
He looked at his Blackberry. Her number was still in there. He felt a wave of happiness as he thought of hearing her voice. He looked out the window at the Steel Bridge, black and harshly industrial, reminding him of nothing but black-faced coal miners he'd seen on the cover of a book at Powell's earlier that week, no relation to the Steel Bridge, only just as professionally removed from him as those who'd built it. After a while reading Coatzee in the command center, he wound his way around the Columbia to a trail he'd found in a book and hiked until he almost passed out, stopping to sit on a log eating red beans from a can and wanting to cry but not allowing himself to, fearing this would be the beginning of the end and he would end up moving to Hood River and opening a motel.
After work on Monday he felt a little satisfaction at turning in a brief he'd been working on since the week before. He walked two blocks over from the big pink reflecting pool of a building where he worked to Mary's Club and sat in the corner drinking scotch and thinking of her body in the flashing light of the credits of Venus, and her smiling in the tall grass on the top of Mt. Pisgah. They had hiked the gentle hill that was a mountain in Eugene together at least once a week after classes, taking the thin trails through the grass, sometimes sitting in it, he in his big straw hat. He had told her of his grandfather who was fond of wandering, sometimes walking into the forest on family trips in the valley, not to return for hours. He watched the young blond woman in front of him dancing topless for twenty minutes, then went home and sat by the window in his white apartment with the big black bird Picasso and the Deibenkorn he didn't even like until it was time to masturbate and fall asleep counting backward from a thousand, just to be sure.
In the morning he felt like he had melted into the bed and couldn't move. It was cold outside his white down comforter, the window was open. It was grey. He decided to take a personal day and called his assistant.
He thought of her right after he got off the phone. They'd gone to Bend to wade in the river and he'd asked her if she wanted to live there after law school. He had always said things, just to see what they felt like. He didn't really mean them, but she took them to heart. She wanted to live in Bend, have a big garden and a root cellar, can jam and sell it at the Christmas market. “Real life isn't like law school,” he'd said. “But that's the cool thing about Portland, we can have those things there, too. I can't start my career in Bend.” She'd gotten a job at the courthouse as a clerk while he studied for the bar. They'd gotten an apartment together initially, until she got tired of feeling herself become obsolete.
He put on some running shorts and his grey Princeton t-shirt and walked over to the courthouse. He sat on one of the benches next to the elk fountain, across from a man with a miner's beard who was smoking with ruddy yellowish fingers swaying. He felt he knew something. He felt this man, more than any other he had ever seen, could give him advice. He looked up to see her walking up Madison Street toward the courthouse. He watched her, a field mouse, walk across Fourth Avenue. He ran across the park and caught up to her.
“Marc,” she looked horrified, but she was not surprised.
“Hi!” he smiled big and intensely as he had not done since he father gave him a stuffed elephant for passing preschool.
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I'm okay.”
“Good. Listen, come have coffee with me.”
“We have a hearing at 8:30.”
“I want to move to Bend.”
“Good for you.”
“Bend ...” he waited for it to sink in. “Let's move to Bend.”
“What?” she smiled like someone had just fed her silicone pudding.
“I want to move to Bend with you.”
“I'm seeing someone,” she lied. She hadn't dated in a month.
“Who is he? Is he a lawyer? Do I know him?”
“He makes bikes.”
“Nice. He makes bikes.”
“It's none of your business. Law school was a mistake for me.”
He looked at her like his eyes were made of buttons.
“I thought you wanted to be a big corporate lawyer, your dream to live in the West Hills and have to work in a city.”
He looked at her. She was so pretty, she had her mother's Native American cheekbones.
“I don't care about that as much anymore.”
“You wouldn't be happy without your career. Even though I never understood how doing insurance defense would help you become a corporate lawyer. There aren't any corporate lawyers in Portland, and if there are, they're all very, very old.” She missed him for a second. She remembered sitting in the park across from him by their house in law school where they would meet during lunch, or after classes. His face had reminded her of a pencil tracing, delicate, like Rimbaud's. He had been so willing to lean back into the grass and just sit there. He had said, “I like being quiet with you.”
He felt old. He felt very, very old. He couldn't walk away, but he did. He kissed her on the cheek in his mind and walked down the sidewalk back over to the strip of mostly empty benches. He glanced at he miner, still smoking and swaying into the distance. “I don't need a root cellar,” he said under his breath as he passed the older dark-suited attorneys and their youthful colleagues in bright unmatching shirts and ties, on their way to morning call. He wandered toward Pioneer Square, feeling comforted by the ornate buildings he knew had been designed by A.E. Doyle, comforted by the Williams & Sonoma bowls he recognized from his mother's kitchen in their display window. He thought of Christmas with his family socked in at the beach near the artichoke fields, little trips, packages of bliss that pockmarked his now unchecked flat-lining trajectory.
Rimbaud had been a sailor; he had sailed to Africa to trade slaves. She had never been able to reconcile the boy who had written the most beautiful poetry she had ever read with a participant in the loss of the most beautiful thing that existed.



Cristen Hemingway Jaynes
Summer 2009