Death and Fire

Paul Klee, Death and Fire

       Jean first met Willard on the elevator on a rainy afternoon in March. They were alone on the elevator. He was tall, slender and bright-eyed. She was not good at estimating someone’s age, and It was especially hard for her to say how old he was. If there was anyone he reminded her of, it was the fictional Dorian Gray. He was wearing a neon yellow slicker on which droplets of water glistened like yellow diamonds. He had an iPhone in his hands. She recognized it by the Apple logo, the white apple with the bite taken out of it. Willard was using his thumbs with the incredible dexterity that everyone under thirty—Jean was forty-six—seemed to have mastered. For someone like Jean for whom the expression “all thumbs” was a synonym for digital clumsiness, the speed with which his texting thumbs could maneuver around a minuscule screen astonished her. 

       When Willard  glanced at  the peculiar look on Jean’s face, he immediately stopped texting. She could see he was embarrassed. He could probably indulge himself with his iPhone in a taxi or in first class on an airplane, but he apparently understood it might be impolite to do it on the elevator of a luxury Park Avenue apartment building in which the tenants were for the most part, contrary to the reputation New Yorkers had for being crass and unsociable, refined and polite. 

       “I’m sorry,” he apologized,  blushing. He slipped the iPhone into the capacious pocket of his slicker.

       “Oh, don’t be sorry,” she was quick to reassure him. “It’s perfectly all right. It’s just that  I’m having trouble with my new iPhone,” she said, taking hers out of her pocketbook.  “I envy your skill with yours. What model is it?”

       “An iPhone 6,” he said. At that moment the elevator in its swift ascent had stopped at her floor.

       “I get out here,” she said, somewhat flustered, still holding her iPhone as she stepped out of the elevator.

       “Let me help you,” he said, following her off the elevator with the graceful, quick step of a ballet dancer.  He was tall,  as tall in fact as her husband, who at that moment was off somewhere in Africa hunting. She had forgotten which country.

       “Would you like me to look at it?” he asked as the elevator door closed behind him with a swoosh sound that she couldn’t recall being fully conscious of before.

       “You want to look at my iPhone?” she asked. He nodded and after a moment’s uncertainty on her part,  she handed it to him.

       “Your floor is different from ours,” he said, turning her iPhone over in his hand, examining it, front and back.

       “The color scheme was my idea,” she told him, referring to the unusual color scheme and design on the walls. “I was inspired by Klee’s playfulness.”

       “Of whose playfulness?” he asked.

       “Paul Klee, the painter,” she said, and with her next breath asked, “Do you live on the top floor?” 

       “Uh-huh,” he said, turning on her iPhone. “This is one of the new ones,” he said. “I haven’t seen this model before.”

       “I’ve been on the elevator more than once with a woman going up to your floor,” she explained. “She had blond hair. Like mine. But I’m not sure how old she was.” 

       “Uh-huh,” he said absently as his thumbs moved so fast on the screen of her phone that she felt she was watching an aboriginal trying to light a  fire by rapidly rubbing sticks together.

       “Was she a relative of yours?” she asked.

       “The woman on the elevator,” he asked. No,” he said without taking his eyes or thumbs off her iPhone. She couldn’t believe  he could carry on a conversation while the screen,  in response to his thumbs,  was kaleidoscopically flashing colors, as if the native had succeeded in starting a fire  But then his thumbs began to  move more slowly, as if he was closing in on the quarry, as a hunter might stealthily move toward  a deer in a thicket. He appeared to be holding his breath as he proceeded. 

       “Ah,” he said as his thumbs stopped moving, suspended like the wings of a hawk alighting.  “I think this is the problem.”

       “What is? she asked.

       “It’s complicated,” he replied.

       "I’m sure it is,” she said, feeling somewhat patronized.

       “There’s so much involved,” he said. She noticed beads of perspiration in the down on his upper lip. 

       “There!” he exclaimed. His search had apparently ended. He let out his breath as she had once seen a loin clothed  Hawaiian diver do after surfacing with pearls in his mouth.

       “You fixed it?” she asked.

       “Uh-huh,” he replied. “You probably messed it up by futzing around with it.

       “Futzing?” she asked. He didn’t explain futzing  because his mind was already elsewhere.

       “What is your name?” she asked as he handed her back the phone.

       “‘Willard, ma’am. Willard Shaler.”

       “My name is Jean. Jean Harlow.”

       “Glad to meet you, ma’am.”

       “Does my name mean anything to you?

       “No, ma’am. Should it?”

       “No, no,” she said. “There was an actress, but that was a  long time ago. She was known as the Blond Bombshell.”

       “Like Madonna?” he asked. 

       “Well, yes,” she said. “Sort of.” Jean’s father had been a big fan of Jean Harlow, who died in 1937 at the age of 26. Though they were both Harlows, they weren’t related. The actresses last name was Caprenter, but Jean’s rather shy, tightlipped  father felt there had been some kind of bond between himself and the glamorous actress he, though  had seen her only a few times in late night movies. 

       Willard was looking again at the walls and the playful design.  “Does your place have walls like this?” he asked.

       “No,” she said. “But it’s interesting.”

       “Interesting?” he asked. But before she could answer the iPhone in her hand rang.

       “Who can this be?” she wondered aloud. “Oh,” she said, looking at the number that was calling. “It’s my husband. Hello? Howard? Where are you? Yes, I lost track. So that’s where you are. You’re what? Going where? So you won’t be back next week. No, no. That’s all right. Where am I? I just got off the elevator at our place. No, I’m not alone. Who? A young man who lives above us. No, not that family. They moved out some time ago. This gentleman just fixed my iPhone. What? Oh, he’s technologically  literate, I’m sure.”

       When she hung up, she asked Willard, “Where were we?”

       “We were talking about your place,” he said.

       “Of course, Of course,” she said, as if she was resuming walking barefoot across a shallow stream, one stepping stone at a time. “Would you like to see it?”

       “Sure,” he said.

       She opened the door, which was a complicated process because her place had more alarms than a bank. Holding the door open for him, she smiled like the doorman downstairs. Willard hesitated. He seemed discombobulated by her deference. “Please come in,” she urged him. 

       When he entered, he stopped after taking a few steps.  Looking around, he was awed. “I feel like I’m entering  the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

       “You frequent the museum?” she asked.

       “No, but my class went there on a field trip when I was in the sixth grade,” he explained. 

       “That must have been interesting,” she said.

       “What’s that painting over there?” he asked, walking over to one of the many paintings on the walls. It was a painting of a naked woman. 

       “That’s the Blonde Bombshell herself, or that’s what I call her anyway.”

       “You mean the actress you mentioned?”

         “That’s right. Jean Harlow. Or at least that’s what my hunch is.”

       “She looks kind of funny,” he observed.” He was staring at her vagina was like a black bush and her blazing long blonde hair looked like the trail of a comet. 

       “What style is it?” he asked.

       "What style of painting?"

       "Yes,"

       “Expressionism,” she said, following behind him as he made his way among other paintings.

       “What’s this one?” he asked, stopping in front of a painting of Adam and Eve. It looks different.”

       “That’s a copy of a fresco, a wall painting by Masaccio. It’s called The Expulsion from Paradise.’Somebody had painted over the genitals, but when it was restored the fig leaves were removed.”

       “it isn’t expressionism?” he asked.

         “No,” she said. “Masaccio was long before that. He was one of the first to use perspective. He died when he was twenty-six.” After a short pause, her curiosity got the better of her. “How old are you, Willard?”

       “Me?” he said, nonplussed.  “Take a guess.”

       “I’m terrible guessing someone’s age.” she admitted.

       “I’m eighteen.”

       “Eighteen?” she repeated trying not to show how surprised she was. She was thirty-nine, but she told people she was twenty-eight so she didn’t have to people make cracks about Jack Benny, who was perenielly thirty-nine.

       “Sweet eighteen,” he said. “But people tell me I could  pass for twenty.”

       "Oh?" she said, wondering if he was pulling her leg. “I’ll bet you could easily pass for twenty-one,” she added, just in case he was pulling her leg.

       An awkward silence was broken when his iPhone rang. The iPhone 6 ring, called the Marimba, coming from the pocket of his slicker, sounded to her like the faint tintinnabulation of a grasshopper playing on a tiny xylophone.

       “Excuse me,” he said taking the call. “Linda? Is that you? I’m so sorry. I lost track of the time. Where am I? I’ll explain later. I promise.”  Then he hung up, the phrase revealing how idioms linger on long after the circumstances that had occasioned them had disappeared.  In the old days one ended a call on a wall telephone by reaching up to place the ear piece back on the phone cradle. So one hung up on a cell phone by snapping it shut or pressing a button.  Was the Linda on the phone  the woman on the elevator? When Willard left, Jean still did not know what  futz meant? Lighting a joint, she looked it up in her old Merriam-Webster, the binding of which was coming apart. Futzing  was derived from the Yiddish phrase arumfartsn zikh, literally, “to fart around.”

       With the Merriam-Webster still in her hands, in something of  a daze, she went over and stood in front of “Blond Bombshell” for a minute. Then she sat down on one of the half dozen modern wooden Danish chairs in the  Wishbone style that were scattered throughout the large room. Through the window she could see Manhattan stretching down below to the East River, and to the boroughs beyond.

       “Farting around,” she said with a laugh. Then she became reflective. Was Willard really eighteen?Finally, she grew sad, thinking of Masaccio and Jean Harlow, both of whom  had died young,  at twenty-six, sparing them the disillusionment of growing older, unlike Paul Klee who lived to be sixty and died of a painful, wasting illness that was reflected in a late, smaller, expressionist  painting called Death and Fire, a framed copy of which she hung up on the wall opposite the toilet.

A Murder of Crows

Van Gogh, A Flock of Crows

One of the definitions of murder is “a flock of crows.” It’s in Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries. but a literal-minded fool at the Audubon Society says it should be stricken not just from scientific but also from sensible discourse generally, to which I respond with the following story:

         It was early March, with freshly fallen snow on the ground, and John and his four-and-a-half- year-old toddler Molly, whom he tended to coddle,  were taking advantage of the blue sky and windless day to get a little relief from their cramped living quarters. They were walking hand in hand, with their earmuffs and boots on, when  an  Audubon  member on horseback passed by, making a condescending tip of his cap to both father and daughter.  

       Molly  pointed to the horse, telling her father, “Hossy,” and he had replied,  “Yes, Molly, hossy.” 

Not far from the father and daughter, the  Audubon horse deposited a small pile of steaming manure on the snow, triggering a strange series of events John  would not soon forget. Molly who had watched the horse’s  rump all the way, pointed to the steaming pile and asked her father, “Poop?”

       “Yes, Molly,” her father answered. “Poop.”

       As if continuing a game they were playing, her father, to turn her attention away from the poop,  pointed to a scraggly, prickly evergreen bush to their left,  under which crouched a cat. “Look, Molly,” her father said. “Under the bush. There’s Kitty.”

       “Kitty?” Molly asked excitedly. That’s what they called the pink-eyed feral albino cat they had seen a number of  times before. John had never seen an albino cat before, nor had anyone else in the neighborhood because they were rare as hen’s teeth and horse’s toes. Molly squinted to see the cat whose whiteness had lost its luster and was now a sickly gray as a result of its homelessness. 

       Kitty would not allow anyone to get close enough to pet her, not that any adults would be  tempted to, and even most children looked upon Kitty with fear and a few with loathing. “Ugh!” John had heard one disgusted teenage boy say. “Somebody should shoot that ugly bitch.”

       John looked around, trying to figure out what Kitty might be stalking. She appeared to be just hiding when he had first noticed her, a short while before, but now she seemed in a predatory posture, with her gaze fixed on the poop. Skittish and unsociable, never knowing where her next meal was coming from, Kitty looked starkly undernourished. But John never heard of cats eating animal or human excrement and doubted Kitty ever would stoop to poop, even if she were starving.

       “Daddy, wook,” Molly said, pointing again, this time at the huge ancient sycamore tree, to the right. With her slight speech impediment she pronounced her l’s as w’s. Her father assumed, or at least hoped, she would outgrow the impediment. But who could say for sure that a slight speech impediment was not the precursor of far more serious genetic problems.

       “Look at what, Molly?”  he asked. “The sycamore tree?” Because of a genetic glitch in their make-up, the bark of sycamore trees lacks the gene that makes the bark of most trees elastic, like human skin. Consequently, as the width of sycamore trees expands with growth, the bark splits annually in response to growth and then subsequently heals, giving a sycamore tree the appearance  of a scarred veteran of sylvan wars. Since sycamores are long lived, sometimes as long as one or  two hundred years, they look scarred to death, pale but in some respects like beautiful corpses. That Poe never wrote a story about sycamores seems shortsighted on his part.

       “No, Daddy,” Molly said, shaking her head rapidly to emphasize she was not pointing to the sycamore tree. “Wook at the bwack birds.” 

       “God!” John exclaimed, looking at the tree, astonished at the number of crows perched quietly in the leafless sycamore. Had  hundreds of crows been perched there for some time without his having noticed them or had they just suddenly swooped in noiselessly?  “Where did they all come from? How long have they been there?” John asked. Of course, he was asking himself these questions, not his toddler daughter. The silent, motionless crows occupied every limb and branch of the tree, making the sycamore look black instead of its customary mottled white and gray. John always found crows fascinating when dense flocks of them swirled in the sky like a black tornado. He wondered whether it was only one crow who led the rest of them to suddenly change direction,  or did they all collectively instinctively know which direction the flock was going,  as an oil spill flows in the direction dictated by the composition of the soil and tilt of the landscape.

       John’s wife Daisy had been murdered late at night, coming alone home from the tavern, carrying that white pocketbook whose glass mesh exterior glittered under the streetlight  like tiny diamonds. Because the neighborhood they had moved to was crime-ridden, he had tried to dissuade his wife from carrying the bag, especially at night, because it was an invitation to the predatory gang that lived in the nearby housing project who roamed about the neighborhood after dark. Turning state’s evidence, one of the gang members had subsequently confessed to the police that she, John’s wife, had refused to give up her bag, even with the knife at her throat held by a hopped-up member of the gang. When she started screaming, the hopped-up member had slit her throat. 

       There had been nothing of value in her bag, nothing but lipstick, a compact, and other makeup. Daisy couldn’t pass a mirror without refreshing her makeup. She had been eighteen with a clear, glowing complexion when he married her, but after the birth of Molly, the bloom  in her cheeks had disappeared completely, like a rose in an autumn drought. His drug addiction hadn’t helped, he guiltily admitted. If he hadn’t lost his well paying job as a county weights and measurement inspector after a random drug test, they would not have had to give up their ground floor apartment in a well kept up building in a better neighborhood on the other side of the city. He had never smoked or drank, not even coffee or tea. Growing up, he had avoided all stimulants, except for crack cocaine. Haunted by guilt he had vowed after his wife’s death to kick his addiction, for Molly’s sake, but he hadn’t managed to yet. He had a two-year degree from a community college, where he had studied animal husbandry. Weights and measures was not the first job he had lost because of drugs.

       “Here, Kitty,” Molly called when she finally saw the crouching cat. But the cat hadn’t heard her. It hadn’t heard her not  because her voice was faint but because almost all albino cats are deaf, as white cats in general are inclined to be.

       As if on cue, one of the crows flew down from the sycamore and alighted not far from the pile of poop, but instead of approaching the pile, the crow strutted back and forth, glancing all around  as if wary of predators. Did the crow consider John and Dolly potential predators? He doubted it because crows  were supposed to be among smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, with the exception of course of homo sapiens, the thinking hominid. Crows had been around homo sapiens long enough to know which humans to avoid.  But if it wasn’t John and his daughter  the crow was wary of, was it the albino cat under the prickly bush? Was the crow even aware of the cat under the bush? John was pretty sure it was aware, because not only are crows smart, they also have acute binocular vision. They can see much farther and clearer than people. Why then did the crow suddenly turn its back on the bush where the cat was hiding and stand stupidly in the snow on one foot, staring at the pile of poop from which it was only a foot or two away?

       The albino cat took advantage of the crow’s apparent lapse of alertness by stealthily and with increasing speed racing  toward the winged creature, hoping to pounce on it by surprise. But as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and saw that the cat was in lunging distance, the crow acrobatically lifted itself by its wings into the air six feet above the ground.  Instead of sinking its teeth and claws into the bird, the cat sank its pink nose deep into the pile of poop. Before the cat had regained its balance and composure, and extricated itself from the poop, the birds in the sycamore took flight en masse, and swooped down upon the cat, clawing and pecking at it unmercifully. In a half a minute the bird was bleeding and blinded, one of its eyeballs hanging by some kind of thin ligature or integument out of its bleeding eye socket. Afraid that the crows would turn on him and his daughter next, John  picked up his frightened daughter and hugged her protectively. Turning his back on the carnage, he put more distance between him and the crows  by walking rapidly away. When John dared to stop and look back, the cat was a writhing blob of blood-soaked skin, bones,  and intestines. Most of the crows had already taken to the blue sky. John felt relieved that he and Molly  would not be attacked by the crows. 

       “Daddy,” Molly murmured, “Kitty dead.”

       “Yes, she is,” he answered somberly, taking out a tissue and drying her dripping red nose, “or she will be soon.” He wondered as he continued to carry his distraught daughter in the direction of their dingy living quarters whether the crows had lured Kitty out of the prickly bush with that solitary crow feigning carelessness. Were crows that smart? Had they attacked Kitty simply because she was an abomination,  a freak whom mother nature had assigned crows the responsibility of culling from the herd of normal living creatures? He was not sure  what to make of it all. He wondered if Molly would always remember the shocking incident when she became an adult. When he looked up, not far from where they lived,  and saw a black murder of crows so large that it blocked  out the sun,  he was sure he would never forget. 

                                                                                                               Robert Forrey

The Butterfly Effect

Edward Lorenz, The Butterfly Effect

       When Foster, a bachelor, late in his career moved to that section of the country that had the reputation of being notoriously backward, a national joke, depicted in the movies and on the radio as the source of unending amusement if not hilarity, he did not know what to expect. How much of it was true, how much urban prejudice? He moved to Hedgewater Creek only because the position he had accepted at the Snidely Foundation,  however much it might be a step down socially and culturally, was a step up professionally and financially. It was a step he compulsively felt he had to take to complete his professional career cycle. That was how he viewed it. A career cycle. Why come so far professionally in life and not take the last step? Once his three year contract was up, he could clear out, and retire to some idyllic spot where he could pursue his study of the Butterfly Effect. He had been bitten by the butterfly bug as a ten-year-old  and had never gotten over it. He  got hooked on lepidoptera the way some kids did on cigarettes or drugs.  He couldn’t for the life of him remember people’s names, but he unfailingly remembered the tongue-twisting latinate names of the lepidoptera groups, the clades and nesting clades, of butterflies.

       The Snidely family  had offered him the directorship of the Snidely Foundation sight unseen. So he had returned the vote of confidence by not visiting the town or meeting the Snidelys before accepting the position, adopting the “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” philosophy.

       “Welcome to Hedgewater Creek, Mr. Foster,” the mayor of the town greeted him at the railroad station the overcast day he stepped off the train, the only passenger to do so. Foster had noticed as the train pulled into the Hedgewater Creek station that there was a sign under the one with the name of the town which read, “Where Southern Hospitality Begins.” Perhaps that slogan, which he later learned was the town’s official motto, explained the mayor greeting him at the station, though it wouldn’t explain the eeriness of the station.

       “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Foster responded to the mayor’s greeting.  Foster’s terrible memory for the names of people had only gotten worse with age, so he took to adopting  or creating generic names or titles for people.  Foster had expected to be met at the station by at least one of the Snidely sisters, a wing of whose “mansion,” as they called it, he would be renting,  but there was no woman, no other person, anywhere on the platform. The mayor looked and sounded like Paul Ford, the comic actor who had had a long career on television  playing incompetent blowhards. The mayor’s striking resemblance to Ford and the eerie emptiness of the platform had made Foster suddenly feel the  late career move he was making was not really happening, that he was dreaming or even worse that he was awake but trapped in one of Paul Ford’s long running television shows. It was odd trains of thought  like this that made Foster wonder at times if he was slipping into Alzheimer’s as his younger brother had.

       As if if reading his  mind, the mayor said, “Gertrude was going to join me, but something came up  that she had to deal with. She sends her apologies.” Foster tried to remember which of the sisters he had talked to on the phone was Gertrude. Was she the oldest, the youngest  or the middle sister? He was glad to be reminded by the mayor what her name was, whichever one she was, because he had already forgotten the first names of the other two. “She asked me to drive you to the Snidely mansion,” the mayor said, relieving Foster of the luggage he was carrying. “Did you bring anything else?”  

       “I have a trunk that will be shipped later,” Foster explained. In what other the region of the country, Foster wondered, would the mayor carry your luggage and chauffeur you from the railroad station to your destination? 

       At the mansion the Mayor introduced him to the three sisters, Gertrude, the oldest; Floppy,  as Florence the youngest was nicknamed; and Gwendolyn, the middle sister. All three were spinsters. None of them were unattractive, but they were very pale, rather ethereal, to put if politely, bloodless to put it bluntly. They had had a younger brother, but he had been kidnapped, or so the sisters had believed. The Snidely Foundation had so much money that they thought it inevitable that a Snidely would eventually be kidnapped for ransom. The five-year-old Phillip had been playing in the sandbox in the backyard of the mansion when Gertrude, who was watching over him, had run into the house when she remembered she hadn’t turned the oven on to roast the duck they were going to have for dinner that evening. As she was turning  on the stove, the telephone rang. It was Gwen who was downtown who wanted to know how many yards of muslin Gertrude wanted them to buy because Floppy couldn’t remember. Then Floppy got on the phone to tell Gertrude she had just seen Elaine Dewey, the girl who had fled town five  years earlier when she was pregnant, and her oldest brother was rumored to be the father. Gertrude later claimed she hadn’t left little Phillip  at the  most for five minutes, but when  she went out, he wasn’t in the sandbox. In a panic, she ran in wider and wider circles, calling him, at first anxiously and then hysterically.

       The stagnant creek near the mansion was dragged twice and the twenty acres of scraggly woods surrounding the creek had been thoroughly gone over by the troop of local Boy Scouts, led by their scoutmaster, a young Baptist minister. No trace of the boy had ever been found. The ransom note the Snidelys had expected to receive had never arrived.

        But the first time he was in the Snidely parlor, on the day that was the missing Phillip’s birthday,  Foster saw what resembled a shrine in one corner of the room where a candle on a table burned reverentially.  On the wall were framed photographs of Snidely kin, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, most of the clan, dating far back, and at the center was a  framed chiaroscouro photo, perhaps taken with an old family camera, of the missing Phillip. Foster got as close as he could, because there was something about the photo, in the dim light,  that made his scalp tingle and his heart beat.

       

       Foster couldn’t get to sleep that night. Phillip in the photo looked exactly like him at that age. He still had the photo of himself in a trunk, but he was reluctant to take it out because then he was afraid he would never get back to sleep. He had had a rare, childhood disease and had been in and out of hospitals from the age of three to five. Those years were a blur to him and in his mixed-up state of mind he suspected he and Phillip had got mixed up in the hospital at birth, notwithstanding their wide difference in ages.

       His train of thought got so outlandish, so bizarre that he returned not to his previous idea that it was a dream but instead he was a character in a stupid unbelievable short story written by a talentless, rank amateur who didn’t know what the hell he or she was doing, and that there ought to be  a law requiring aspiring fiction story writers to get a license, after following some kind of instruction or schooling, before they could begin  trying to create credible people and places and plots with beginnings and endings, fiction that creates not so much the illusion as the essence of reality. Barbers and heart surgeons, plumbers and airplane pilots have to get licenses. Why not writers of fiction? Writers of fiction are like God. In the beginning there is nothing, a void, and the writer creates a world that he should people with credible characters who live and breathe, who love and suffer, who capture the imagination of readers, interesting  and inspiring, uplifting and enlightening them.

       In today’s fast, frantic world, where  time is of the essence, when global warming is breathing down our necks, the frying of  the planet being  only decades away,  it is not the long-winded who are invaluable, however profound and gifted they may be. Who has the time and patience for War and Peace? Only the rare and the privileged. It is the time not for Tolstoy, but for Chekhov. 

       Yes, Paris is a beautiful city to be creative in, but most people, especially most Americans, live in Podunk. Most Americans  are as exiled from culture as Ovid was from Rome. This is not the time for long love letters. For the lonely living  lives of quiet desperation, an “I love you” note will do. If you can’t find the road back to the Athens of America, make do with Appalachia.

       A little can mean a lot. The Butterfly Effect means that a small change can lead to great changes. A butterfly flapping its wings two weeks earlier can help create, can contribute to, a hurricane. This is the case in any dynamical situation, not just in the weather.

       Get out of the cycle of career advancement. Stop spinning in circles. You will be dead for a very long time, you will be dead infinitely, though religious hucksters sell heaven as a nostrum. So make the most of time, not by making money, but by making haste to get out of the rut of routine. Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

The Apple Must Be Eaten

Masaccio, "Expulsion from Paradise"

          Jean first met Willard on the elevator on a rainy afternoon in March. They were alone on the elevator. Tall for his age, he was slender and bright-eyed. He was wearing a neon yellow slicker on which droplets of water glistened like yellow diamonds. He had an iPhone in his hands. She recognized it by  the Apple logo, the white apple with the bite taken out of it. Willard was using his thumbs with the incredible dexterity that everyone under thirty—Jean was forty-six—seemed to have mastered. For someone for whom the expression “all thumbs” was a synonym for clumsiness, the speed with which his texting thumbs could maneuver around a minuscule screen astonished her. 

When Willard  glanced at  the peculiar look on Jean’s face, he immediately stopped texting. She could see he was embarrassed. He could probably engross himself on his iPhone in a taxi or even in first class on an airplane, but he apparently understood it might be impolite to do it on the elevator of a luxury Park Avenue apartment building in which the tenants were for the most part polite and sociable.  

“I’m sorry,” he apologized,  blushing. He slipped the iPhone into the capacious pocket of his slicker.

“Oh, don’t be sorry,” she was quick to reassure him. “It’s perfectly all right. It’s just that  I’m having trouble with my new iPhone,” she said, taking hers out of her pocketbook.  “I envy your skill with yours. What model is it?”

“iPhone 6,” he said. "I've grown very attached to it."

At that moment the elevator in its swift ascent had stopped at her floor. 

“I get out here,” she said, somewhat flustered, still holding her iPhone as she stepped out of the elevator.  

“Let me help you,” he said, following her off the elevator with the graceful, fast step of a ballet student.  He was as tall as the average male adult, as tall in fact as her husband, who at that moment was off somewhere in Africa hunting, with his gun and cell phone. She had forgotten which country,

She had come to realize that in  the digital age a home without a boy was at a disadvantage. For someone her age and sex, every boy was a whiz when it came to technology.  For him, a problem with an Apple computer, iPad, or iPhone was probably child’s play.  

“Would you like me to look at it?” he asked her as the elevator door closed behind him with a mechanical swoosh that she couldn’t recall being fully conscious of before.

“Look at my iPhone?” she asked. He nodded and after a moment’s uncertainty, in which he looked around at the decor of her floor, she held it out to him.

“Your floor is different from mine,” he said, turning her iPhone over in his hand, examining it, front and back.

“The color scheme was my idea,” she told him, referring to the unusual color scheme and design on  the walls. “I was inspired by Mondrian's Cubes and Squares.”

“Of whose?” he asked.

“Piet Mondrian,” she said, and with her next breath asked, “Do you live with your mother?” 

“Uh-huh,” he said, turning on her iPhone. “This is one of the new ones,” he said. “I haven’t seen this model before. My father believes technology is a pact with the devil," Willard said. 

         "What does he do?" Jean asked.

         "He's a big wheel at Apple."

“I’ve been on the elevator with your mother,” she said, suddenly recalling. “At least I think I have. She has blond hair? Like mine?”

“Uh-huh,” he said absently as his thumbs moved so fast on the screen of her phone that she felt she was watching a silent mini-Charlie Chaplin  movie. 

“Does your father live with you?” she asked.

“No,” he said without taking his eyes or thumbs off her iPhone. "I don't see him much." She couldn’t believe  he could carry on a conversation while the screen,  in response to his thumbs,  constantly shifted.  But then his thumbs began to  move more slowly, as if he was closing in on the glitch, as a hunter might stealthily move toward  a deer in a thicket. He appeared to be holding his breath as he proceeded.

“Ah,” he said as his thumbs stopped moving, suspended like the wings of a bird about to alight on a branch. “I think this is the problem.”

“What is? she asked.

“It’s complicated,” he replied. 

‘I’m sure it is,” she said, feeling somewhat patronized.

“There’s so much involved,” he said. She noticed beads of perspiration in the down on his upper lip. She could see he had not begun to shave yet.

“There!” he exclaimed. His search had apparently ended. He let out his breath as she had once seen a Hawaiian pearl diver do after surfacing.

“You fixed it?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” he replied. “You probably messed it up by futzing around with it.

“Futzing?” she asked, but he didn’t answer. His mind was already elsewhere.

“What is your name?” she asked as he handed her back the phone.

“‘Willard, ma’am. Willard Shaler.”

“My name is Jean. Jean Harlow.”

“Glad to meet you, ma’am.”

“Does my name mean anything to you?

“No, ma’am. Should it?”

“No, no,” she said. “There was an actress, but that was a  long time ago. She was known as the Blond Bombshell.” 

“Like Madonna?” he asked. 

“Well, yes,” she said. “Sort of.” Jean's father, whose last name was the same as Jean Harlow's, had been a big fan of hers, and had carried a pin-up photo of her when he was an eighteen-year-old soldier in Vietnam, as soldiers the Second World War had pin-ups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth.

Willard was looking again at the walls and the playful design.  “Does your place have walls like this?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But it’s unusual.”

“Unusual?” he asked. But before she could answer, the iPhone in her hand rang.

“Who can this be?” she wondered aloud. “Oh,” she said, looking at the number that was calling. “It’s my husband. Hello? Howard? Where are you? Yes, I thought that’s where you were. You’re what? Going to where? So you won’t be back next week. No, no. That’s all right. Where am I? I just got off the elevator at our place. No, I’m not alone. Who? The young man who lives above us. No, not that family. They moved out some time ago. He just fixed my iPhone. What? Oh, he’s pretty smart, I’m sure.”

When she hung up, she said to Willard, “Where were we?”

“We were talking about your place,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, as if she was resuming walking barefoot across a shallow stream, one stepping stone at a time. “Would you like to see it?”

“Sure,” he said eagerly. 

She opened the door, which was a complicated process because her place had more alarms than Fort Knox. Holding the door open for him to enter first, she smiled like the doorman downstairs. Willard hesitated. He seemed somewhat discombobulated by her deference. “Please come in,” she urged him. 

When he entered, he stopped after taking a few steps.  Looking around, he was stunned. “I feel like I’m entering  the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” 

“You frequent the museum?” she asked.

“My class went there on one of our culture field trips,” he explained. 

“That must have been interesting,” she said.

“What’s that painting over there?” he asked, walking over to one of the many paintings on the walls. It was a painting of a naked woman.

“That’s the 'Blonde Bombshell,' or that’s what I call her anyway. It’s a painting of a once famous Hollywood actress. Or at least that’s what my art consultant thinks.”

“Which actress?” he asked, examining it more closely. 

        "Jean Harlow. The Bombshell herself."

       “She looks kind of funny,” he observed.” Her vagina was like a black bush and her blazing long blonde hair looked like the trail of a comet. “What style is it?” he asked.

“Expressionism,” she said, following behind him as he made his way among the many paintings. She concluded he must be precociously responsive to art. Her husband had not looked twice at any of the paintings.

“What’s this one?” he asked, stopping in front of a painting of Adam and Eve. It looks different.”

“That’s a copy of a fresco, a wall painting by Masaccio. It’s called ‘The Expulsion from Paradise.’ I call it 'The Apple Must be Eaten.' Somebody had painted over the genitals, but when it was restored the fig leaves were removed.”

“This isn’t expressionism,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Masaccio was long before that. He was one of the first to use perspective. He died when he was twenty-six.” After a short pause, her curiosity got the better of her. “How old are you, Willard?” 

“Me?” he said, nonplussed.  “I’m twelve.”

“Twelve?” she repeated trying not to reveal her surprise.

“But I  can pass for fifteen or sixteen,” he added.

“Yes, I’m sure you can,” she added, trying to sound casual, trying to adjust to the realization that he was still, strictly speaking, a preteen. 

The silence was broken when his iPhone rang. The iPhone 6 ring, called the Marimba, coming from the pocket of his slicker, sounded to her like the faint tintinnabulation of a grasshopper playing on a tiny xylophone.

“Excuse me,” he said to Jean as he took the call. “Linda? Is that you? I’m so sorry. I lost track of the time. Where am I? I’ll explain later. I’m on my way. Right now. I promise.” He was gone in seconds, leaving the door open as he left. Who was Linda? Apparently not his mother. Possibly an older futzy female  of thirteen or fourteen? What did futz mean? She looked it up immediately in her Merriam-Webster. It was derived apparently from the Yiddish phrase arumfartsn zikh, literally, “to fart around.”

With the Merriam-Webster still in her hands, she went over and stood in front of Blond Bombshell  for a minute. Then she sat down on one of the half dozen modern wooden Danish chairs in the  Wishbone style that were scattered throughout the large room. Through the window she could see Manhattan below, stretching to the East River, and to the boroughs beyond.

“Farting around,” she said with a laugh. Then she became reflective. Finally, she had a good cry for herself.