Almost No Memory Read Free Page B

very late coming to pick me up at the graduate-student housing compound where I was staying. Just when I had decided he wasn’t coming, after I had spent an hour pacing more and more hopelessly out onto my tiny tree-shaded balcony, which overlooked a playground and the parking lot, and back into my tiny living room, which was crowded with the things of some young couple I didn’t know, he came in wearing an old work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and brown corduroys with the cord worn off on the thighs. He stopped and looked around as though he were about to get to work on something, then spotted the piano and bent over it for a moment and played a fast, pretty tune just long enough to make me happy again, then broke it off in the middle.
    I was very curious about him, as though everything that added itself to what I knew already would be a revelation. When we got into the car he reached across me and unlocked the glove compartment and when we prepared to get out he reached across me and locked it again. I asked him why he did that, and he lifted up a bundle of papers in the glove compartment and showed me the wooden butt of a gun. He told me a couple of men were after him, and that it had something to do with his little girl.
    We parked near the restaurant, he took a gray jacket off a hanger in the car and put it over his arm, and as we walked along he tucked in his shirt and then put on the jacket. I thought to myself this was how a cowboy might do it—carry his gray suit in the car on a hanger, and when he neatened up to go into some place with a woman he would also touch his hair gently.
    He drank milk with his Chinese dinner. He talked about his job, offering me pieces of scientific information, and then told some bad jokes. We didn’t either of us eat very much, embarrassed, I think, to be alone together like this. He told me that he had married his wife right after he got back from the war. She was half Chinese and half Mexican. He told me his hearing had been damaged in the war and I noticed that he watched my lips as I talked. He told me his balance had been affected, too, and outside the restaurant I noticed how he would veer toward the curb when he walked. He drank milk in the restaurant but beer in the bar where we went to play pool. He put his arm around me outside the bar, but back in the car he said he had to get home to his babysitter. Then he changed his mind and took me to a spot on a cliff that looked out over the ocean and kissed me. Other cars were parked around us, and a pickup truck.
    He kissed me a number of times there in his old maroon Ford with the radio on, so that I could have imagined I was a teenager again except that when I was a teenager I had never done anything like that. Then we got out of the car and went to the edge of the cliff to look down at the ocean, the black water of the bay, and the strings of lights that reached out into the water from the town where we had been playing pool. We sat down on the sand not far from the edge of the cliff and he told me a little more about how hard it had been with his wife, how he had tried to get back together with her, how he had done his best to charm her and she wouldn’t be charmed. He told me he had been alone with his little girl for six months now, and his wife was coming home in a few days to try living with him again, even though nothing he did had ever worked. He said he wouldn’t be able to see me again. I told him I wasn’t expecting that anyway, because I was leaving the West soon. It wasn’t quite true that I hadn’t expected to see him again, but it was true that I was leaving soon. Finally he took me home and kissed me good night.
    As far as I could tell, I didn’t mind the way the date turned out, though I started crying the next day in my car on my way to the drive-in bank. I thought I was crying for him, his fears, his difficulties, the mysterious men he thought were after him and his