Chapter 17. Stormy Weather.
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The sixth day of Lee's fast she was at Dalton's getting a massage while Arthur was at the Market Spot getting a cheddar, onion, and sprouts on rye. He felt good. The sky was cloudless and blue, which many of Tucson's weather-spoiled inhabitants called boring but Arthur loved, and the temperature was in the 60s. He left the Market Spot and headed toward the Bittercreek for a cup or two of coffee; before he'd gone fifty feet he heard Lucia call his name, looked around, and saw her.
"Lucia," he answered.
"What trouble are you stirring up?"
"God, what a day. I couldn't resist coming out for a spin." He mentioned neither sandwich nor coffee, lying by omission.
"I've dreamed about you three nights in a row, Tony," she said. "No, not that kind of dream. All three were about me taking care of you in the White Mountains this summer. Would you be interested?"
"Is that a firm offer?"
"Not yet, but me and Dalton were talking about it; he suggested us working on you together, too. Wild things happen sometimes when we work together."
"I bet they do. I'll think about it. Lee's at Dalton's now getting a massage."
"Do think about it, and I will too. I'm on my way to Dalton's office."
Lucia's truck was parked at the corner of Tyndall and Speedway and as she got into it Arthur turned right on Tyndall as though he were headed home. As soon as she had pulled away from the curb he stopped, and when her truck was out of sight he spun around and headed for the Bittercreek.
"What a goof," he thought.
While he was in the Café clouds rolled in and by the time he was home the boring blue sky had changed to gray and the temperature had dropped into the 50s; his sunny mood had dimmed. He had been less moody the past few days and was surprised at his afternoon funk; he was still an emotional mess when night fell and Lee suggested and he accepted his first massage in four days. His internal monologue shamed him as she worked on him: "Lucia believes I'm soon to walk provided Dr. Lang's instructions are followed; why doesn't she massage me more? And why hasn't she done anything to make sure I see Charles Hawk, like Nine Wells said I should?"
"You are a jerk," he said to himself, and found something imperfect to criticize in Lee.
After the massage Lucia dropped by and she and Lee helped Arthur out of bed; his mood did not improve.
"Look what I have," Lucia said, bringing out a joint.
She lit it and looked inquiringly at Arthur, who was smoking some again; a single toke would probably end his funk, but he refused; when it occurred to him to wonder, he hoped he hadn't refused just to prolong his misery. Lucia inhaled and passed the joint to Lee, who accepted, took her hit, and offered the cigarette to Stoner; he didn't take it in his hand but leaned over it, waved smoke at his nose, and exaggeratedly sniffed. It was the first pot of 1978 for Lucia and Lee. Lee, unlike Arthur and Lucia, found abstinence easy.
Lee put a record by Boz Skaggs on to play and began to dance with Lucia; Stoner danced alone in figure eights, sometimes moving between and around the women. Arthur felt their sensuality as mockery, though he knew it wasn't. He buzzed out of the living room, through the kitchen, and into the bedroom. In the bedroom he wiped tears off his face; as Lee flipped the record he tried to move his toe.
"Aw Cricket," he said.
He thought of returning to the living room and going to his typewriter but didn't want to be near the dancers; he knew that writing about his mood would probably transmute it. Leaving the house was not an option; his chair had seemed run down while he was out earlier, and he didn't think its battery was adequately charged. He sat in his room as Boz crooned. The women and Stoner danced, Stoner now shaking his banged-up tambourine.
"Get it together," Arthur said, disgusted with himself, and buzzed back through the kitchen into the living room and to his typewriter. He said nothing, had nothing to say, but managed an unconvincing grin in Lee's direction when she looked at him; he was glad that no one questioned him. He rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter and tried to describe how offensive his friends' inoffensive enjoyment of their bodies was to him tonight.
They danced, he wrote. He had been writing daily since his trip to the Bittercreek two weeks ago. He finished one page and put another into the machine. He paused. Was what he'd written Kerouacanly inspired, spontaneous and finished? He thought again of Failure and his unnumbered futile beginnings, couldn’t tell whether what he was writing was just another fragment. He began to type the second page. Tonight, as he converted depression to story, finishing was not an issue; Stoner and the women still danced, their dance no longer painful to the writing man.
(November 1963, night. Arthur, 22-years-old, lay in his hospital bed intensely aware that what he was doing, which he knew was high adventure, rare adventure, was deadly dull. He had been hurt August 25th; he couldn't move his legs at all, could barely move his arms, though later in the month, after a second laminectomy relieved pressure on the cord above where it had been torn, his arm movement would return; he would not begin to try to sit up in bed until February 25th. He was thinking that art--making it, reading it, seeing it, hearing it--transmuted suffering, and he was wondering to what extent it was necessary to suffer to create. Everyone suffers, he thought. He hoped before his life was done to have written one or more true book; trusted at least that a time would come when he would try.)
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