Chapter 10 No.10

Morgan was right, of course. Sooner or later he was going to run out of money. Things weren't going well. He wasn't satisfied with the cat burglar story, and he was lonely. He decided to write a story about Alphonse and the cannery.

Alphonse was a slim, dark, middle aged Filipino with a thin straight mustache. He had watched Joe stack empty pallets with a yellow Hyster and then he'd motioned Joe out of the seat. The forklift engine roared; his hands blurred; pallets leaped into perfect piles, ten feet high. Alphonse cut the engine and climbed down, eyes bright. He was somewhere between ten and a hundred times faster than Joe. The cannery whistle blew. Coffee break. Alphonse smiled, nodded, and turned for the cafeteria. Joe followed.

Alphonse was Joe's trainer. Wherever they went in the cannery, people called to him. He lifted a hand, smiled, and kept going. He was universally popular, but he rarely spoke to anyone; he focused on the work-how to do it better, how to do it faster. Joe was in a welfare job training program. He hated the whistle that told them when they could stop and when they must start. He hated the gray industrial paint and the numbing future-less work for someone else's profit.

Alphonse had no future. Not only that, he was twenty years older than Joe. He worked Joe into the ground every day, and when he waved with a small smile and walked away at the end of the shift, his head was high and he seemed untouched. Alphonse had his own standards, his own integrity, and somehow he was stronger than the whole gray clanking cannery. Stronger than profit, stronger than loss, Joe wrote.

But the story wasn't any good. It was true, as far as it went, but it wasn't-a story. What is a story, anyway?

Joe realized that he didn't know.

When Maxie was about fifteen, Joe used to quiz him on "Joe's Maxims."

Joe: "Women?"

Maxie: "Uh, women, women . . . All women are pear shaped!"

Joe (handing Maxie a quarter): "Very good, very good. And now, for a dollar, grand prize-an educated man?"

Maxie: "Damn. An educated man-umm-knows what he doesn't know."

Joe: "Right!"

Joe's position was that educated people know at least one subject well enough so that they realize (by comparison) when they don't know another. This was heavy for fifteen, but Max was game. "The idea is to know when you don't know what you're doing; then you can go ask someone or buy a good book and find out," Joe explained. Maxie nodded agreement, winnings crumpled firmly in one hand.

So, go find out what a story is, Joe told himself. He began reading books on fiction, but they weren't much help. For a change of pace, he looked up Arthur Soule on the Internet and discovered that a book he'd written on Roman taxation was still available. Joe ordered it, and when it arrived he found it interesting and clearly written. There was a small picture of Soule on the book jacket-patrician with a large jaw and thinning hair. Mo was a chip off the old block.

A few days before Kate's wedding, the phone rang as he was heading out the door.

"Hi, Joe."

"Mornin', Mo . . . That's a snappy opening," he said. "Maybe we should have a radio program."

"But it would have to be in the morning," she said. "When I work."

"Me, too. Good point."

"O.K., that's settled, no show. I was wondering if you might want to come over for lunch."

"Sure."

"I have an ulterior motive-two, actually. Leaky faucets."

"Say no more. I was born to plumb."

"See you around noon, then?"

"Yup. Wait a minute, where?" She gave him directions to a small street on the Ewa side of Manoa Valley. "No problem," he said putting the phone down. "Trouble in Gotham, Batman. Lady needs help." He rubbed his hands together. This was a test, no doubt about it, a dragon to slay.

He had left his slayer channel-lock pliers in his truck, however, along with the rest of his tools. They now belonged to Maxie and were somewhere in New England. He walked to the shopping center and bought a toolkit cased in aluminum with foam cut out for each individual tool. It looked like a briefcase. He went to Sears for a package of faucet washers and some thread sealer.

"Joe Burke, executive plumber," he announced at Mo's door.

"Well, come right in." She looked rested. He took off his shoes and advanced into a clean living room furnished with a long couch, an armchair, a wooden rocking chair, a gray rug, several expensively framed photographs, and two floor lamps. Orchids hung by a large window. Lush greenery rose steeply behind the house.

"Nice, mighty nice." The house was small, built above and behind a separate garage that fronted the street. Steps led up to a porch and the door through which he'd entered. The air was cool and quiet. The house seemed to breathe in a wooded space just large enough for it and for the walls of vegetation on either side that separated it from its neighbors. A sense of privacy lay in the living room like an expensive gift.

Mo led him into a neatly organized kitchen. "I know who he is." Joe pointed at a photograph of her father that hung above a table.

"Ah yes. My father. Do I look so much like him?"

"Very similar in the eyes and mouth." What else was there?

"Professor Soule," she said.

"I read his book," Joe confessed. "Pretty good writer." An expression both arrogant and helpless flashed across her face. "Clear," Joe added.

"Yes. He's a worker." Her expression neutralized. Joe put a hand behind his ear.

"I don't hear any dripping . . . "

"Let me show you. The kitchen doesn't drip all the time; the bathroom is the worst." Joe leaned over the bathroom sink, thumped it, and listened to its heartbeat.

"Operation iss required." He opened the aluminum case.

"Snazzo, so shiny," she said staring at the tools. "I'll fix the salad."

Joe shut the water off and began dismantling a faucet, eventually reaching the washer, held by a brass screw. He replaced both washers in the bathroom and both in the kitchen.

"As new," he said, washing his hands.

"Wonderful." She carried a dark salad bowl one step down into a dining room that had a tile floor and large windows. "I eat in the kitchen, usually, but when I have company it's nice to be out here. Should we have more light? It's sprinkling again." She switched on a paper globe suspended over the table.

"I don't know . . . I like the natural light." She switched it off and lit a sage colored candle. "There, that's better. We had this end of the porch extended and made into a dining room. When it's clear, you can see across the valley."

"Who we?"

"It was Thurston, really. It was Thurston's house. We lived together for eight years. He ran off with his secretary to Texas."

"Oh."

"Ran isn't the right word. Thurston didn't run anywhere; he was rather deliberate, actually. He gave me a deal on the house."

"That was good," Joe said.

"I didn't want him to go . . . Men just can't keep their thing in their pants," she said angrily.

Joe remembered that silence was golden. Mo reached for a baguette of French bread and broke it sharply. Joe took a piece and investigated the cheese.

"Chevre?"

"Yes."

"Finest kind. Yummy salad." Fresh olive oil, Manoa lettuce, avocado, scallions, a hint of lime or maybe Meyer lemon-delicious with the crusty bread. "Vino?" She nodded and he poured them each a glass of Sauvignon Blanc from a half empty bottle. "Here's to your cozy place," he toasted. Mo raised her glass and sipped.

"I had fun last week with your friends," she said. "Quite a character, that Morgan."

"I had a card from them in Kauai. They found Hamura's." Mo listened as she chewed salad. "Yeah, we go way back," Joe said. "What did you think of Edie?"

"Dynamite," Mo said.

"She got me thinking about writing a story. I tried, but I'm not satisfied." He told Mo about Alphonse. "I've been reading about fiction. I'm not really getting it."

"Schools can be useful," she suggested. "Sometimes it's good to be around others doing the same kind of work. I like to go to a seminar once in a while-the trouble is, it costs so much. Have you heard of Goddard, in Vermont?"

"I have."

"They offer MFA programs-non-resident, or close to it."

"It's an idea. I'll think about it."

Time slipped by. Mo told stories about summers on Nantucket where her grandmother had a twelve room "cottage" on the water. So that's where she developed her beach strut, Joe thought. Mo's father had slyly dominated the family even though her mother had all the money. Mo was ambivalent toward her father. She was proud of his intellect and accomplishments, but she had an inside view of what he had taken from every one around him and the price he himself had paid for academic success. She was looking for a way to be like him without being like him, Joe decided.

Mo tried her new espresso machine. She was having dinner guests the following evening. Joe visited the bathroom and noticed that she had left open the door to her bedroom. The bed was freshly made with lilac purple sheets. A huge white flower by Georgia O'Keeffe waited on the wall.

He thought it would be nice to listen to music, but he didn't say anything. He was tuning into Mo's way of inhabiting her space, her large eyes, quiet, cat-like. He talked about Kate and Max and then fell silent.

"So how's your love life?" she asked suddenly. Her eyebrows were raised. She bent forward, making herself smaller.

"Nothing to write home about-if I had a home."

"You're a good looking man, Joe Burke. Just the right amount of gray in your mustache. Aristocrat. Rebel. How did your nose get that crook in it, by the way. I've been meaning to ask."

"Oh, that," Joe said, "the rebounding wars-in high school." She had surprised him. He thought she was moving away from him, and now he sensed the outlines of an offer, the second one in two months. He and Mo could be lovers; he would ride shotgun, do things her way, and she would do her best for him in time left over from her busy life. The lilac sheets beckoned, but as suddenly as it had come, the offer, if it had been one, was gone, swept off the table with the crumbs she brushed with one hand into the other.

She stood and said, "The ladies better watch it. O.K., I still have work to do today. I've got some orders I'm trying to get out by the weekend." Again he was surprised, but he went on as though nothing had happened. She drove him home, his tool case on his lap.

"I'll call you when I get back from the wedding," he said with his hand on her car door.

"Have fun," she said and pulled away with a thoughtful frown. Joe walked up the stairs to his apartment. What did she want? What did he want? He didn't know, he had to admit. Probably that was why the offer vanished. He'd paid attention to the plumbing and flunked passion.

Joe slung the aluminum case across the room onto the mattress. The tools, in their foam cushion, didn't even rattle. "I kept my Goddamned Thing in my Goddamned Pants, Batman!" Batman maintained a dignified silence.

The next day Joe went to a bookstore and wrote down the addresses of several graduate schools that offered non-resident programs. At home, he hunted around on the Internet and found a writers group that discussed the pros and cons of different programs. Montpelier, also in Vermont, was well regarded.

He polished up his non-story, wrote a long letter explaining why an ex-computer programmer wanted to write fiction, signed a check, threw in some poems for good measure, and officially applied to Montpelier.

He walked to the Moana and watched the sunset. It had been a year since he arrived in Hawaii. Had he really left Maine? Or was this just an extended visit that was coming to an end? Joe liked Maine. Portland was a comfortable little city . . . the Standard Bakery, fresh ale at Gritty's, lattes at a dozen different coffee shops. He remembered the small Hispanic/Indian man who pushed a shopping cart down the street in all seasons, accepting Joe's returnable bottles with a grateful smile, always saluting as though Joe were a superior.

Should he go back to Maine? Or to Woodstock? He had many old friends in Woodstock. Daisy. Morgan had passed along her best wishes. Joe looked down the beach at the lights circling the base of Diamond Head. Did he want to go back east? It felt better to sit under the banyan tree and watch it get dark. It seemed a more forward direction, whatever happened. He decided to say goodbye to Maine and to Woodstock, but he couldn't. No wonder we say, "See you," he thought. Anything but goodbye. "Aloha" is a much better word-hello and goodbye, gladness and grief, love, all of it.