As Simple as a Wish

There was no problem at all, he said.

Because he had studied at the institute with a person of the highest and most exacting reputation in his field, someone who had suffered great deprivations and traveled great distances to extend his knowledge to others. He had been lucky to study with him. In comparison he himself had had a life of great ease, thanks to the gift of the instructor and other instructors like him. He had been so well-trained. He had been so lucky. Had she studied with anyone like that?

Do you want the sweet vermouth or the red wine, asked the waiter. Or neither?

Oh, yes, the sweet vermouth, she said, returning to the politeness of the beginning of their dinner, when she was smoothing her dress as she sat down, and no one had asked her whether she wanted red or white, and the specials had not been read, and she hadn’t noted yet how young or how old everyone who worked in the restaurant was, and she hadn’t begun thinking what she would do the next three days—she divided all her intellectual life into three day periods—which art museum, which gallery, where artists said what you weren’t allowed to say aloud, in code, in paint. How you loved or hated someone; how unfair something was, how overly fair something else had proved to be. And how long the earth would last, and what bad spells it was under, and about how the worst spell to be under was the spell of never being satisfied, and the illusion of a great revenge.

I’ll have white wine, her companion said, who’d traveled a long distance to lecture.

We are out of white wine, said the waiter, who was very young, who looked to be a college student.

No wine, then, said her companion, who had given a lecture about ecology, the environment, intuitive solutions, at the large, dark, rainy university. She had invited herself. She was proud of him: he was almost famous, among ecologists. And just in time, as white was sweeping his hair, just like hers, and death would be their dustpan.

What did you think of my oxygen number in ratio to free tree terrain? he said.

I am sorry, she said, I wasn’t listening, I was remembering forty years ago. Almost fifty years ago. When all of those environmental solutions should have been forced through?

By who—Superman? he said. There were no electric cars. No powerful batteries. No scrubbers for coal plants. The whole world, cars, houses, factories everything, was still an outdoor barbecue fired with coal. Now at last we have solutions. Batteries. Solar panels. Computers to help us solve things. Then you had to think of it yourself.

Yes, she said. She remembered his wonderful professor’s driveway (he was now dead, had been dead ten years at least), how it was short and rutted with dried mud, how the yard in the back was rank with fat-bladed grass rarely mowed, how there was a fence and some sort of alley you avoided. How the cupboards in the kitchen were as tall almost as coffins, how inside them you could find objects that were as if stashed at the last minute in a moving van. How the bedroom was as dark blue as sleep and how he had admitted to her he was an insomniac. How curious she had found that. What a luxury it sounded like, to be a college professor, and to be an insomniac, too, when everything about you was what college students wished they had for themselves: knowledge, and the ability to grind it into people, or withhold it from them, or profess in any way you wished that you were superior in knowledge. And you had a fine job, too—all of that overlooking your inferiors like a stone shelf hanging over their heads.

Yes, now she remembered. There had been an abandoned WWII era Jeep in the backyard, the color of canned green beans but turning to the embarrassed complexion of rust. Its seats rags and tatters, its gearshift missing its knob, its wheels dirty and deflated.

It is a Superman science, he said, brightly. I agree.

Yes, she said.

The waiter brought her sweet vermouth. There was a flash of its dark green and red glossy bottle. A soldier of Christmas, it seemed; but after the waiter poured it, the waiter whisked it away like a problem, just as he should have, she thought, something which should be hidden, not placed out for all to see, urging one to finish the bottle. Something to be conserved, only served again if you paid for it with apologies. She had chosen it because it was exactly what his favorite professor, who had according to him launched his career, had offered her: she had never even heard of vermouth before, and she had drunk it. He had put a squeeze of lemon in it, dropping in the wedge atop the ice, which made it look as if the sun was on his side, and her side, and sun rays had even fallen in her cup.

She now sat across from the person whose name was very like the name of that very brand of vermouth, the young man who soon after her first dinner at the professor’s house did not understood why she would not go out with him anymore. The professor knew about the young man, whom she had been dating for a year, had revealed this to her by suddenly mentioning him, in a mocking voice. A lightweight, he’d called him. He said he’d heard people say he was—not stupid, no, but doomed to be another lightweight. The professor had said this just after placing the vermouth in front of her. She could not admit she had never had vermouth before. She was twenty. She was pleased to find—it was sweet.

I am sorry but I will have to leave soon, her companion now said, looking at the ruby-red drink, symbol of her chess move of wrongness, which she could not erase, and he could not know, unless someone had told him. He now said: it’s snowing so heavily and I will have to get to the airport as early as I can. And don’t worry. I will be fine taking the taxi.

Oh, yes, she said. You will be fine.

There was a high-charge aroma of rosemary, a motherly, take-charge smell, coming from the restaurant’s kitchen, and a quick tangy smell of busy, toasting bread. These smells, smelling good now, but long ago—beginning that year her father had died and the professor had secretly come into her life—would not have smelled as good then. All land/human experiences she had begun to hate. Her increasing depression manifested itself as wanting, whenever she thought of water, to become a fish, so she could fall deep, graceful, into cold water, and never come back up again.

I’m actually a very good cook, he said suddenly.

I imagine you are, she said.

Was she blinking because she was becoming sleepy? She was grateful there was no request to drive him to the airport, grateful that all they would be doing was having a quick supper together before he returned to Montreal. He had already thanked her for coming to the lecture, had smiled at her quickly when he saw her in the audience.

What is Montreal like, she said.

Everything I have ever wanted in a town, he said. It’s so nice I avoid doing the writing I should have been doing. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said to write you must be happy, but sometimes happiness, geographically, keeps taking you out the door. Have you ever had a wonderful bowl of onion soup?

Perhaps we’ll have it today, she said. It’s what we’ve ordered.

He looked surprised, sounded surprised. Yes, I guess we did, he said. He was holding his spoon as if he was ready to eat, but no food was there. He seemed to be balancing the spoon, a very ordinary spoon, as if he had never seen one before, was studying it as if it was a sculpture. Maybe, she thought, he only ate things with his hands at home. That, often, was what she did, in miserable Chicago.

He looked up. Sometimes I think it’s that year again, he said.

That horrible year, she said. My father died and everybody but me had a father.

I guess that’s how it would have felt, he said. My father died last year. When I was almost sixty-six. Here’s a picture of him when he came to visit me. He reached in his pocket, found a photograph in his phone, held it up. It was mostly bluish. There’s a man, he said, who’s wearing a heavy coat and a scarf with his wife beside him, with his eyes sparkling and happy but his body pose says he’s ready to go away, he’s late for somewhere he has to go to. That’s what he looks like to me, now. He died at the end of that year. My best friend.

You were mine, she said. And you still are. Isn’t that insane?

They were both silent after she said this. The soup was arriving, in dark brown bowls with stubby handles on the sides. Cheese had melted to the sides and crusted. There was a confetti of red pepper flakes: you could smell their chaotic red, see their tattered red raggy begging corners.

The desert is where I want to live, she said.

You should, he said. You should go there.

They ate their soup, with large spoons, very carefully, because it was very hot. In her mind it gave them both glowing golden onion crowns, made them magic older people with limbs which moved as smoothly and slyly as layers of onion against each other. Their shoes were light as onion paper and anything they wrote became as soulful and caramel sweet as onions cooked slowly for five hours in herbed broth. The soup was the kind that made people stay home instead of go out, the kind that made people not fear war or problems. There was no recipe for it, you knew: if you asked a kitchen or a person for it, they would look vague, and pretend anyone could make it: as simple as a wish.

Rebecca Pyle is American but has been living most of the past year in France. Her fiction and poetry appear in Anacapa Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Pangyrus, Post Road (forthcoming), The Lindenwood Review, The Hong Kong Review, and Kithe. Her artwork also appears frequently in art/literary journals (see rebeccapyleartist.com).