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Pondermotive Noise
By Alan D. Flurry
OUTSIDE the window and farther east along the shore, summer was already kicking up and into full swing. Rustling screens left unsecured by beach house renters rattled in the stirring winds that left the early summer freshness behind like a gauzy Polaroid. Pictures unearthed among the hubbub would have confirmed what could only be presumed by the lack of continuity among the shoreline haunts; families came and went, each handing off to the next a baton of gently fading luster with which to enjoy the beach anew. Sand piled up in the tiny corners where brooms or light seldom reached and this small, fleeting statuary were the only monuments to mark the season and connect it one to the next.
Alderman White brought his family to the Delaware shore for two weeks before his youngest began varsity football practice and though he rationalized the time as a working vacation, months earlier he had mentally set aside the days as time for his own thinking. He reckoned that some re-evaluation was needed, and though he knew not what its focus might be White had pocketed the need, hiding it away to be confronted later. After a few months and as the vacation approached White had looked with a certain relish upon the time when he would ostensibly turn his attention toward himself.
Then with the family secure and exploring the oversized house, cheaply rented though it was peak season, White was free to forget his schedule and the up and down commitments that obliged his different attentions in as many directions and imagine the blankness that he had anticipated finding with an open view to the sea. For a reason he could not quite reconcile he had joined many others in imagining that time alone with himself could be framed with the blankness on which he would begin to construct a list of priorities according to wont. But in the mild warmth of that first afternoon, White discovered that his time was very crowded with the same things that had led him to put off this time alone from the beginning. All of the same small faces and unresolved issues came flooding back into his head and he winced as he supposed that this, too, he had expected in some small way.
“Honey? Jim… it’s the phone, for you,” his wife called from the weathered deck of the battered and beaten down house. It had to be less than ten years old but, having seen all manner of short term lessees unconcerned with its abuse or upkeep, the structure had not aged well. The concrete siding designed to withstand the weather had instead endured a more difficult time coping with the multiple paint jobs employed to maintain its façade of rental appeal. Soffits sagged and corner boards revolted like contrarian Luddites against carefully mitered edges, shaping themselves into the subtle planes not imagined by their material engineers. From the back of the house, which had taken the brunt of the natural and man-made abuse and overlooked the bald-patched strip of lawn before the dunes started, his wife waited on him to turn and answer. White lurched to his left and the wooden-framed beach chair creaked beneath his girth as it was stationed in the purring wind. He heard it though he had assumed the wind to have limited the possibility of his own sounds, that they might be immediately sucked up into the wind, and that he might ignore such particular disturbances altogether.
“Take a message,” White called back to his wife, not nearly loud enough to be understood. She shrugged with mild frustration and stepped back through the opened sliding glass door as though she was being ignored. White turned back around toward the ocean without further concern about the call.
The essential highlight of his life so far hinged on the fact that he was unfulfilled. White had kept an eye for many years on the fact that he had been involved in many things but not that one thing which would lead him to the downhill portion of his race, the coasting after some near accomplishment upon which he would be able to reflect endlessly, with regret or satisfaction, unto his own demise. The lesser-imagined trophies of distilled power whose reigns he had periodically claimed were like the sand beneath his toes just then; he knotted and quilted them not in mini-frustration but the deliberate ignorance of one who has always seen more for himself in his visions than the mirror. White wanted to see more and thought, not without some honor, that he had ignored his own vitality to further a list of smaller causes. But the price for this he had gladly accepted and was racked not with regret, but with a longing to deepen his senses where he himself was concerned. A mini-resolution to put this off no longer settled his mind, focusing his view to the horizon. White watched a ship pass between him and the line with the slowness and aplomb he imagined right then it would take to accept and explore the idea that he would one day have a chance to decipher these things and that that time, arriving with similar witting, was upon him. After several minutes he stood, with his contentment still unconsummated yet feeling closer somehow to the blankness, and turned back toward the battered house and his family.
“Alonzo!” he shouted to his wife’s youngest from an earlier marriage, who was engaged in the staking of a volleyball net on an already bald section of the lawn. Blond and gangly, he turned around only slightly to see his step father’s approach but did not answer, returning instead to the task at hand. When he had driven the stake down into the hard sand sufficiently, he dropped the mallet and stepped lively in the direction of his approaching elder. Coming into his immediate vicinity, the son took the wooden chair from the father without question and re-established a sort of kindness between them as it had been effectively bred into one from the other.
“How was it out there?” Alonzo asked, joining White’s leisurely stride back toward the house.
“I didn’t go in – not yet,” White replied to his step-son without looking at him and instead peered over the neighboring houses as he could see them at the peak of the dunes.
“You never do,” Alonzo reminded his father tenderly, which shook White out his momentary fixation with the nearby structures.
“Sometimes,” White corrected him. “But it’s good, too, just to sit and think. I love the wind and the open… water.”
“What’s the matter?” Alonzo asked noticing that his father’s attention had been momentarily stabbed and the last word offered like a prosthetic appendage. Nothing was in plain sight, nor did it have to be; it was the kind of pause anyone who had lived around White for fourteen years would have grown accustomed to, but still voiced concern out of a certain patronage for revelatory depth, whether it was present or not.
In the next moment, White smiled as though the thought had passed. “Nothing,” he offered falsely and they continued toward the house. He could be proud of the boy, in many ways because he didn’t have to see himself in him. This requirement alleviated, he could appreciate the instance of youth he witnessed passing before him and the tragedy therein allayed not into a seeping awareness but a more libertine appraisal of the man in the booth, struggling to change out of the boy.
Though nothing was actually the matter, like seeing spots upon standing too quickly, White’s own politics had occurred to him in way as he joined step with Alonzo. The boy had learned about time with him, disjointed in that way, and accepted it without qualifications that White loved him like his own blood. Not something worked out, but this they had established between them over time, had cradled by minor subscription and nothing more. To cherish something underwhelming would be one of the subtle mysteries Alonzo took with him into manhood.
But an acute consternation had re-occurred to White and as they wiped the sand off of their bare feet on the splintered deck of the house before entering, he plunged again toward the unsurprising, anaplastic rehashing of how he had spent his productive years. This Boomer-ish replay White had been through many times, to the point that his appraisal resembled more a well-thumbed rolodex with no beginning, end or alphabetical context. Just a list of activities and engagements framed beneath the rubric of an ideology much like – but not identical to – that he himself would choose to have, if he had one. In such a case, White’s overarching posture would be at once much more forgiving of human failures though more deeply stringent with regard to justice, and perhaps equality. But more so the idea of just representation and the greater good. The patina of his own complicity in allowing others, and himself, to say some things while doing others was his primary source of self-reproach and would become his chief regret if it outlasted a fix – or some even deeper regret.
Later, after dinner, White stepped back out onto the deck but the sea, eternal time keeper, had changed. In it he could see the ominous darkness so easily parlayed onto human endeavor, though often merely left there. White lit his cigar with no intention of trying to understand himself through the shifting overlord cloaked in the dark skies. Having brought himself that far, he would now move cautiously and when he could, more conscious of avoiding the churlish stymie of thickness brought on by the unwieldy doctrine of healing himself. Yet the commando posture was as inappropriate as battledress on the otherwise calm seashore; White’s real armaments would neither disguise nor reveal themselves in the quiet of repose, and he somehow knew this. His overindulgence in their arrival precluded instead the distractions he might have furnished and, unconsciously, put off again the thoughts of himself. But he had done otherwise, for whatever reason, and White’s mind was clear.
He had spotted a trawler a half-mile or so off shore and was watching it gently bobble on the windy currents when the sliding glass door scrawled across its track and his wife poked her head out of the lightly escaping shears within. “Did you get this?” she asked softly, politely yet not precisely in exchange for an answer. A small piece of paper with pen scribbling extended from her thin, vein-mapped wrist.
“No,” he replied against the spasm of a yawn. “What is it?”
“It’s a message. Someone called for you earlier this afternoon – when you were on the beach,” she reminded him.
“They did? Why didn’t you tell me? Was it…?”
“I did,” she reminded, chiding him gently in the voice that had been like a third party to their marriage. Whether by repetition or some authority she had achieved through other vindication, she felt no need to buttress her charge and so let it stand. “And now I’m telling you again.”
“Oh,” was all he could summon, taking the slip of paper and looking at the number and the name written in her flailing cursive, Hanford Dixon.
* * *
The secretaries of the named and presumptuous executives at Barnes, Stammer looked up from their laminated Birch kiosks, a couple raising their heads enough to look down at Alderman James White as his worn loafers clicked on the marble floor. Gratuitous invitations awaited local-level politicians, but White knew this wasn’t one of them. It occurred to him as he stood in the grand lobby that he wasn’t quite sure what Barnes, Stammer was, though he knew of a couple of things they did: namely, publicize a half-completed construction project as a municipal scandal to arrest the bankruptcy of the construction firm which had designed and built a sinking, four-story building. White heard himself defending the city’s loyalty to the construction outfit on the evening news weeks before; quite a feat, he surmised of the firm’s prowess as his eyes followed the arching vault of the ceiling as it rose along the cathedral trusses and their partially hidden sconces in a continuing survey of his surroundings.
They also engaged a looted art collection for the Carnegie Museum. After the Gazette broke the story that the paintings were from Germany via Argentina, the Carnegie’s reputation had taken a full frontal blow, leading them to engage the firm again to resuscitate themselves and rehab their reputation for benign philanthropy and light artworld provocation. ‘What was this place anyway,’ White asked himself. A law firm? Some sort of brokerage house… an ad agency? Companies had stumbled over themselves in the rush to provide any and every service so that, when the music stopped and they attempted to appear dignified and establishmentarian, their trappings only had the air of what they had morphed into. It seemed disputable to White that they themselves knew what they were right then, because it would not be determined until the next crisis opportunity allowed them to become what they would be.
But they had made him look bad, even from the lofty perch of local news. Not bad, but typical and small, which White assumed to have been their point all along: to publicly demonstrate the obstacles to their benevolence. After all, there was no point in truly castigating him too aggressively – they were practiced in this art and followed its principles closely. Too aggressively blaming him would expose their opportunism; they had been interested only shifting blame from the construction concern to the faceless municipality, only in this case the city’s face had been White’s.
“Do you have an appointment?” a tanned receptionist emaciated except for perfectly round and perky breasts asked above them. Her neck was roped by a hapless string of black pearls that pooled in the semi-circle formed between her clavicles, evoking an inverse inelegance against the simple joy of her breasts which, unlike the pearls, seemed open and accessible. White, momentarily distracted by them and the overall reverence by which they seemed to be backlit from her thin waist and shoulders, stumbled over a short list of improbable responses and said nothing. At this, the receptionist removed her glasses as if to commence a further incursion. “Sir… is anyone expecting you?” she asked again, on safari for clarification.
“Yes,” White responded quickly and with sureness. And it was true that, while he did not know with whom he was appointed to meet, White knew that he had been summoned. “My name is James White… I’m the…”
“Oh yes. Mr. White. Mr. Peterman’s been expecting you,” she replied with a snappy change in tone. It was not usual that he would feel as much distrust toward such a lower level functionary but this was not a usual situation and White eyed the woman with an indiscrete summary of sudden misgivings about her. He was of the mind that this Peterman could be a euphemism, or he was about to be shuffled off into some unseen corridor where he would be cast about to wander and this firm, whatever it did, would not be availed to deal with him, because he would have, as such, been dealt with, in a way. But White reminded himself that he was not afraid of these things, and being aware of what exactly was happening was the one provable item let loose upon his mind. The surreal impact of such surroundings, after all, was to be expected. In a moment of secure respite, he thought of his driver, Clarence, down on the street waiting for him.
Instead of giving him directions, the skinny, buxom receptionist came around her kiosk and led him across the marble lobby to a carpeted corridor onto which several unmarked closed doors ostensibly opened. It was much quieter in this area and White was hesitant to attribute it simply to the presence of the carpet. When they came to a cracked raised-panel door, richly stained to accentuate its cherry soul, she began to withdraw, even before they arrived or she tapped lightly on the door. Before White realized it, he was standing alone in front of the door and listening for something within.
“Come,” a voice, gently preoccupied, exclaimed. He pushed the door and it swung open silently to reveal a man standing behind a desk, much as White often did at his own as he spoke on the phone. This familiarity immediately relieved him of some anxiety as the man’s face shown an incomplete smile, somehow arranged among his own anxieties, and came around the desk. He bounded toward White in the large office. “Alderman White… I’m Lawrence Peterman. I’m so glad you could come over on such short notice,” Peterman said graciously.
“It sounded pretty serious when – when whoever it was – called,” White replied easily but as an unmistakably pointed remark.
“Yes – I’m sorry about that. That’s the way things work around here sometimes. I’m sure you have a crisis mode you get into when something happens,” Peterman explained chummily with matter-of-fact reference to something that still escaped White.
“Sure, but I’m getting more and more curious, about that very thing – that something that has happened, as you say,” White ventured. Peterman didn’t hesitate.
“Well… you know about the museum, right. It’s turned into a mess for them.”
“I thought they had already…” White began, but Peterman cut him off.
“Do you know that during the war, World War II, and really immediately after, there was great interest in the U.S. government to round up scientists who had been working for the Nazis; I’m sure you know that,” Peterman reminded them both. “Well, you probably also know that many of those who were able went to South America. Many of these, highly cultured Germans, Poles and Hungarians who took with them or sent ahead a trove of prized artwork, which had been misallocated, so to speak. They brought quite a bit to countries like Argentina. I’m sure you’ve heard Buenos Aries described as the ‘Paris of South America’? Well, it’s true; but it’s not a fluke,” Peterman assured him.
“I never thought it was, but,” White began thoughtfully, “it would be hard to trace that affection for things European.”
“Or not difficult at all. You see we’ve been aware of this for a long time, and there’s the principle of re-integration, and it could go for any number of things. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. White?”
White sensed that his meeting with Peterman seemed to hinge on this moment and he could not shake the foundation, the absence of pretext, upon which he thought he had been called. To this, the thrice removed ideas Peterman spoke to seemed flimsy as a reason, something he had to interpret or ignore in order to connect himself to them. And he was already failing at one of these.
“I would… if our intention was to leave my agreement on the hypothetical level,” White, openly squandering the opportunity. It was not often, and this was something he realized over and over, that he was permitted to speak for himself. By this same token, under the cover of officialdom White had always been able hide who he really was. Venturing back and forth with Peterman could have disoriented him right then, a stranger, but it did not. White felt his mind clear, and the ability to game Peterman flow from him as though it were a more natural disposition. The other man, sensing nothing of this beyond the words White let into the room, remained outwardly relaxed in the surroundings to which he was quite more than accustomed.
But to this custom came a quotient of circumscribed happiness that did not fit, to White’s mind. Arrayed behind Peterman were several framed photographs of a woman and three children in various postures of momentary joy - on an open lawn, sharing a shaded bench, around a kitchen table – not staged but spontaneously captured as if several particular moments selected from among millions of possible ones. White could not see Peterman the husband and father in these pictures, if indeed he was the missing party – or the photographer. His manner before White in no way supposed it to have been possible that he ever shared such spontaneous moments and though surely this was a small detail rubbing against White’s presence there in the office, it was certainly one that he could not dismiss once it joined the others swimming among his general impressions. He could believe Peterman a family man, but not a happy one. Not one immured of the erstwhile magnetism set off by the momentary or frivolous. Perhaps the pictures were of the sort that came with chrome picture frames, White thought to himself.
“And yet… we quickly move beyond the hypothetical, Mr. White,” Peterman added, setting himself further beyond the reach of the framed lightness behind him. “What I would ask of you… no. What I want to ask of you, Mr. White, is the price of your cooperation on a certain matter.”
“Is this the…?” White began but Peterman raised a finger to stop him as though it didn’t need to be named by name or any other reference more than had been by Peterman himself. His gist having been made clear, Peterman then only waited for a response to come that he would have already considered, knowing what he did about politicians and their very limited constituencies. The situation was similar to many White had encountered but at the same time very different and he shook off the tendency, once ingrained in him, to group it among the former, as though he was fulfilling some typical business in a typical way. For once, perhaps, he would assert some independence, some fickleness where he would normally just roll over. He wasn’t trying to be difficult for its own sake or present any particular actual obstacle to Peterman’s wants. But in the murky depth he witnessed between Peterman and the pictures of incongruent family bliss behind him, White found his own obscured version of the space he enjoyed though seldom used. The fix was in with White up until right then, when several moments passed before he said anything, then
“I’m going on a vacation with my family for a week or so, down to the shore. I need to think about this price – this cooperation. When I get back, we’ll talk,” White said plainly, calmly stood up and extended his hand across the Birch surface of the desk toward a suddenly befuddled Peterman. He let White take his hand and the imperceptible movements construed their agreement; he let White leave without protest, but once the door was pushed almost closed again, immediately picked up the phone and pressed the numbers as if with villainous desperation he had saved from White. The frozen smiles of the children on the ledge behind made his furious tone into the receiver that much more vituperative, as Peterman’s exactness suffered beneath his rage.
‘The price of your cooperation,’ rang in White’s mind like a song he knew well as he peered out over the dark, mildly roiling sea out before him. It could have been the same instance of a self-gravitating orb, encroaching on his over-infatuated sense of self like a selection of rings one had worn for years. But it did not; and White permitted himself some distance from the well-worn accusation and terrifying retreat as if he had already made it and so quickly beyond, it didn’t seem so bad. The fact was that Peterman was not an amalgam and his reference to buying White’s support or silence did not amount to a symbolic equivalent of his entire professional life. He hadn’t prudishly rejected the notion; and he could admit that he was well past that possibility, but he was also not above considering that he left open the possibilities for maneuvering by doing so this time, even if he never took them. That was the shore upon which the gentle tide lapped on the night White saw blur into a commingling of his life, his choices and his options. Still he smiled, invigorated somewhat by the cool breeze pounding the dunes and drying out his eyes as he surveyed the rented retreat.
“Hi Dad,” Alonzo said, poking his head out from the dancing drapes, exposed to the wind suddenly by the opened sliding door. “What’s up?”
“Hmm,” was White’s response, as though he had been startled from a daydream by the boy’s voice. He shook his head slightly and motioned for Alonzo to join him on the deck, but before Alonzo could take the open chair next to him, White spoke again. “Shall we take a walk?”
“Now?” the boy asked with unmasked surprise.
“Why not?”
Alonzo shrugged; he really had no reason other than surprise to protest the suggestion of a walk and he knew even at that age that surprise by itself was an insufficient objection.
“Do you want to go, or not?” White prodded gently.
“Let’s go. Do you want a sweatshirt or something? It’s kinda breezy.”
“Did we bring any?”
“I’m sure…” Alonzo began almost sarcastically, knowing what a reluctant nomad his mother was, but White interrupted.
“Get me a beer instead,” White said, then added somewhat thoughtfully, “and get one for you, if you want.” Fourteen was a fine number but a loathsome age, White thought. Being at the end of it, so to speak, with every year being the highest age understood, it was difficult for White to think back and understand, but not impossible. In another minute Alonzo walked out with two bottles of beer held confidently in one hand, full of the poise and candor not of a boy but the young man who had begun to wait patiently within him for such invitations. White turned and faced the beach again as though he hardly noticed but the presence was with him and they began the brief stroll over the patchy lawn to where the dunes began, where the walking would become harder even with their combined singular freshness turned into the shifting ocean breeze.
White and his stepson had never shared beers like some similarly related men, the father intermittently but over the course of years offering the son sips as though to initiate him into not just the taste and habit but a higher appreciation, like for an ordinary art. This sort of nurturing was not out of place between the two but off-limits in the way that their interactions had simply precluded it. And Alonzo being his age that night, it was too late and probably too clumsy to begin such a ritual and so the two men drank from their own bottles openly but for the first time together.
White knew about Alonzo’s reputation within the family as a budding poet, but he looked upon this predilection as he would if the boy’s nature had been one to lead him toward a religious ministry. In a way, in White’s mind, this idea fit with how he had imagined Alonzo for many years and had peppered their conversation with a somewhat confessional tone on White’s part for at least as long. Alonzo was tall, stately and athletic for a sensitive boy, and this made him all the easier to talk to because of a physical significance and its seeming relation to traditional defenses. With his older step-sister and brother off at college, he had been left much more space with White, if not actual time, and the two had let this arrangement quietly evolve without much embellishment or aggravation. In this way it had become the ultimate pregnant pause and they allowed much to pass before and between them unsaid. However, as they trudged through the thick dry sand and found better footing on the more compacted surface next to the lapping tide, White felt himself so unencumbered by Alonzo’s presence that he erased the lines separating his thoughts from his words.
“What do you think?” White asked his stepson after a few minutes of walking.
“I can’t believe nobody’s out here – it’s such a nice night,” Alonzo said, taking a look over the dunes to their left.
“Yeah… people can surprise you, but they usually don’t. Also, I guess we came up here sort of late in the season. It’s actually almost August,” White admitted matter-of-factly as if it was a calendar secret he had kept to himself.
“Yeah,” Alonzo said after a long pull from his beer. “School’s already starting some places, colleges too. Why is that?”
“Well, they keep starting earlier and earlier, I guess to…”
“No,” the boy interrupted. “Why did we come here so late?”
“Oh,” White replied, but not feeling the need to clarify instantly like he might with a child he let the question crest against the steady crash of the small waves just to their right. There was a reason, he was sure, but White didn’t know if he could explain or arrived at them so haphazardly. It remained a great search, an excavation of his willingness to unearth his larger dilemma which led them out onto the beach that night that had probably made him book the trip. But even admitting as much as that took him to a more forward location nearer the front of his private little war, and White could see that he had enlisted others in this cause, as well as himself. Maybe that’s why; a walk along the ocean was its own rationale. He wondered if he just left the reason out in such plain silence, would Alonzo come upon it himself. White figured him to be roaming around the answers to his own problems in much the same way and the tendency to wait and watch became aimed not so much at the boy as himself, but as a surrogate for White.
“I mean, I know you’ve been busy and all – I guess a lot of times, that’s how people slow themselves down. I’ve been wondering, when you get really busy like that, does it make you tired – I mean is that how you know you need to take a break?” Alonzo asked in a building crescendo of curiosity and confusion to which White, as an adult, would certainly be privy and as a stepfather, might even accept.
“It depends on what you’re doing,” he offered weakly, perhaps trying to straddle both. But knowing this might ultimately deprive the question’s heart – and at least momentarily open to caring about such loss – he went on. “People get busy with many things, some good, some not so much, but generally that doesn’t matter in this regard. It really comes down to doing something you feel you got to do – versus doing something for any other reason.”
“You mean somebody makes you do something…”
“I mean the exact opposite; not only does no one make you do that thing, whatever it is, many people and things actually try to stand in your way of doing it. In that scenario, busy and tired don’t really come into play. Or only after a long, long time,” White said, sanding his comments with what he considered fine caveat.
“You mean if you love what you do?” Alonzo asked with his own lyrical designs on going farther but he noticed White shaking his head in the darkness after he downed the last of his beer and pushed the bottle into the back pocket of his ragged chinos. He noticed still more than half of his remained though he accepted this as somehow natural.
“You don’t always have to love it for what you do keep you focused. A lot of people are very fulfilled without loving their work; it’s a popular misconception,” White declared.
“I guess you can always love other things?” Alonzo asked perceptively.
“You can,” White agreed chummily, but left something off as though that wasn’t the end of it. The surf picked up at that moment and took both their attentions out to the sea as it encroached upon the beach, the sand nothing but a temporary boardwalk to be committed back to the ephemeral scattering at the next available instance or gentle gust to lift the top layer into an invisible dimension. Yet for then, it lingered beneath their feet, providing nothing noticeable but space to move upon and the greater aura of their entire surroundings. Like this, the ocean beckons with a warning, the negative invitation to come near but not enter.
The two men stopped to turn around, as if they had, in a way, walked far enough. White peered toward the lights of a nearby beach house as if he knew exactly where he was, as though their own house had been rented because of its proximity to the one he noticed right then. A disturbed sense of attention, even vague remorse if such a thing exists, came over him and White forgot about the conversation with Alonzo as though he had seen the trail of an unseen comet. That house wasn’t rented but occupied by its owner, he considered, and it led him back to the half-truths of his conversation with Peterman. Where he as a man unlearned many of the same lessons he had embraced over the course of his life was the memory of himself in Peterman’s presence. He knew it, believed it, like the vision had been whispered to him, though he would not let the imagination gesture so wildly. His unincorporated merit stood on its end amounted to more, not less, than Peterman’s innuendo that he was some sort of mercenary. If it was an unaffiliated raw resource, that was one thing; but White was overcome, overwhelmed just before the point of allowing Alonzo to notice, even through the salty darkness, with the larger resonance to the untapped desire in himself for satisfaction. Even if it resulted in more regret, he would return to Peterman’s office, bury his prudish reaction to another bribe and open the door that waited for him like a night walk on the beach that seemed like one among many though never quite identical to the last.
“I have overemphasized one thing,” White said to Alonzo, “but more like from an accent than a prejudice. You can’t love what you don’t take in your arms… and you can be sure that you will confuse love with fulfillment. And when you do, remember: One moment of your life will illuminate all others. One way – or the other.”
Alonzo gave a brief thoughtful snort through his nose and nodded almost imperceptibly as the shifting, top layer sands gathered in unnoticeable little piles about them and the suggestion to head back prodded gently like the receding tide. However White was not finished with his reasoning and his wistful turn back toward the house was a signal of what had become a long-running explanation, one that turned on just a few moments, as he had explained. It was these moments that had accumulated and that he knew he would pass through on the walk back to the house with Alonzo. Their ramparts were like the house where they turned around, where he might at once enter a different set of circumstances and treasons, and as he ventured back into them there was a sort of acceptance that had begun to resemble White’s sentimental comfort with his own dilemmas. |
