Ghost of a Flea Read Free Page A

watched very closely. My dear son never lets me out of his sight; he’s an unbearable creature, who would quarter a thread and skin a flint; he is afraid I should get lost, for I am his only father.
    In the margin Deborah had written son dresses father in fashionable new tunic—Persian, and I remembered Emerson, Beware of enterprises that require new clothes.
    “The beginning should work great. One of the slaves watching over the old man tells us what the play will be like, but he’s lying the whole time. I just have to find a way to bring this out.”
    “Well,” I said, “definitely time for a revival, at any rate.”
    R evival was what she’d taken to calling her staging of the ancient play, grinning like some Hollywood shark given three minutes to pitch his spiel.
    “Resuscitation is more like it,” I’d responded the first time she came up with that. Then: “The thing could do with a zippier title, too, while you’re at it. Return of the Wasps , maybe.”
    “Son of Wasps.”
    “Or jack it up a whole other notch, go for the grabber: Sting! ”
    “That’s it! With the exclamation point a stinger!”
    “And a drop of blood at the tip.”
    We laughed and poured more of the wine she brought home to celebrate. Lifting my glass in a toast, I said, “Happy you’re getting the chance to do this.” The grant came jointly through Tulane’s drama department and a loose association of several local arts foundations. She’d learned of it from one of her regular customers at the flower shop, a cardiologist on the board of a couple of those foundations, and had applied more or less on whim.
    “Me too. I thought … well, I guess I thought the theatre thing was all over, that I’d had whatever chance I was likely to get.”
    “No second acts in American lives?”
    “Something like that.”
    I sat down beside her now as I had then.
    “Thanks, Lew.” She stared for a moment at the script. Commentary and notes had begun not to change the play in any elemental manner but subtly to reshape it, urging plot, surround, self and minions toward—what? She didn’t know. That’s what she was searching for. “Hellacious amount of work hiding in the woodpile.”
    “And one hell of a woodpile. But it just so happens we’re running a special on homilies this week, Ms. O’Neil. Two for one.” Made as though to rummage in a bag, see what we had left. “Got Anything worth doing, If it was easy, Hang tough. Few more in there, looks like.” I leaned close. “Just between the two of us, marking them down’s the only way we’ve found to move this stuff off the shelves.”
    “Like what Bierce said about good advice.”
    “Right. Only thing you can do with it’s give it to someone else—fast.”
    She was, as usual, wearing a long, full skirt, and when she leaned back, drawing legs under, the skirt took away not only her legs but the chair’s as well, along with a good few inches of floor.
    A group of young people went by laughing and from the sound of it doing their version of dirty dozens on the street outside.
    “That’s something else I never thought I’d have, Lew. Couldn’t imagine ever being close enough to someone long enough to have private jokes, places, thoughts that didn’t need to be completed, stories all our own. I love having that, Lew.”
    “I do too.”
    We sat there quietly a moment.
    “I could fix more coffee,” I said.
    “Two pots are enough—even for New Orleanians.”
    She leaned forward to turn on the radio, found some small-combo jazz, Dolphyesque baritone sax weaving a floor for guitar and piano to walk on. Then a soprano sax sounding scarily like Sidney Bechet started up. Another New Orleans boy like Louis Armstrong and with him one of the truly great jazz soloists. They’d always said Bechet was so good you could put him in front of an army band and he’d even swing that . Bechet, who’d play great music anytime, anywhere, but would never consent to play nigger, and went off to