There is Only One Misfortune  

13

 

After the initial meeting, Newman and Dan met without me, and I just got occasional reports from Dan on the book. It was passed from admiring editor to admiring editor, never quite officially dying and never published. One of the editors told Dan, “We would have to make you the new Pascal or Kierkegaard.” In other words, it was a marketing problem.

The failure of the book was the beginning of the end of my association with Dan.

Of course, he should have been grateful to me, but I think he, at least unconsciously, blamed me. I was the only available target anyway. He was also resentful of my refusal to acknowledge the pristine truth of his vision and become his disciple. Tensions came to a quiet finale one sweltering summer afternoon.

He no longer visited me. Whenever I saw him now, I visited him at home. I didn’t mind this because it meant I could see him when I felt like it, and also because I liked his family.

He needed a lavish car for his job, but his house was a modest white-stucco place on a sycamore-lined street. I entered its delicious coolness, invited in by his wife who, typically, came to the door to meet me.

This was the first time I had stopped by in the day and I was a little unsure of myself until I saw that she was genuinely glad to see me, and then I relaxed. She led me through the livingroom and diningroom to the familyroom where Dan sat in a recliner with a book nearly four inches thick. Their children, a girl of thirteen and a boy of eleven, were simply the most physically beautiful human beings I had ever seen. They were also intolerable brats. I saw them in the kitchen and they saw me and offered no sign of recognition. The greeting from Dan was hardly more animated.

“What’s the book?” I asked, nodding toward it as I sat on the couch.

His latent testiness had become open, if subdued, hostility. He held the book closer and stared at me a moment, considering.

“A collection of symbols,” he said, “visual symbols, like heraldry insignia.”

He was obviously holding something back.

“Oh,” I said.

There followed some idle chatter, weather talk, though with his wife that could be thoroughly delightful. She was delicacy incarnate. But as I listened to her, I realized she had a predisposition to like me because of what I represented to Dan. I wondered if she sensed the strain between him and me. She offered iced lemonade then went to get it.

“What are you looking for in there?” I asked him, nodding at the book.

“Symbols.”

“Oh. Find any good ones?”

He nodded, still staring at me with a vague, distant hostility.

“I finally found the one I’ve been looking for,” he said.

“Really!?”

He nodded, now pressing the book to his stomach. His wife approached with three glasses on a tray. I was waiting for him to hand me the book.

When he didn’t, I asked, “Can I see it?”

He turned his head slightly to one side, then the other, saying, “No.”

I knew he was capable of petulance, but I was stunned.

Helen handed out the glasses. She asked me about a book of haiku she had lent me and conversation and my attention then drifted to other things.

But eventually my shock faded and I hardened and realized that I didn’t really care about the symbol. Nothing new had been discussed in months. We had been coasting on habit. I had all I was going to get from him. And when you get the message, you hang up the phone.

So, while sipping the icy lemonade, I looked at him realizing I would never see him again after that day.