Fuchsia

Apprentice morning come easily now, silver with fog and the breakdowns of neighbors: shouts from up hill where the land curls under vines and under the porches of oaks, where even now wintergreen and inkberry shiver forth streamers of new growth, and the green frogs suck at the dew and sing their bent songs. It is easy to hear my own voice in the liquid contraltos of rage, the vents and accusations that feed fires up the hill. It is all human enough, the yelling, capacious and frank, the doors slamming, cries of betrayal. I too have betrayed, lost my place among the condensations of commitment, dallied. I go among friends who say with neither fear nor fury in their voices that they too don’t know what’s next, that from the studied impactment of their lives they have sallied small lines of proposition, made a few calls. Slight affairs shiver and fail; we go for a walk by the rotunda, where, on the perishable lawn, a band plays Dixieland—speaking, not earnestly, but with steady intent, of the play of choices, the simple chance of another future somewhere else, perhaps a house in the hills above L.A., part-time work for the screen, a few avocado trees. For a while it is as if the hazy play of evening light, the splashes of music, the unbundled oaks surrounding the Square, are enough in themselves to sustain, as if mood is itself sustenance, that our struggle to conceive a continuance is of no more moment than the fuchsia and soft yellow clothes of the tourists. Perhaps it is possible to be gentle no matter what, to seek not restraint but surrender entirely, to turn from the snarling reproach not into the keening dismissal of hope but to whatever bright fluttering is next, the bright fluttering of wisteria petals, a felicitous phrase, fingers touching a face. How else to avoid redemption, or its opposite, which we stopped believing in one day in high school, suddenly startled over a steaming lunch tray by the way the fizzed flowers of a stunted mimosa seemed to beg for release? We realized then we could say whatever we wanted, that the world was no more particular than anything else, it too could be out-argued, confused by refusal or lies, that it was no wonder people were stunned by the eloquent permanence of death. So there is permission, not granted but given, as a forsythia at the edge of the walk, having stolen more light than it can contain, trembles, and the echoes of argument fade into a fluttering over the price of butterscotch floats, and we are dazzled by the gouge of perception, as if there was in fact a word we were waiting to hear, not as completion but as synoptic and inevitable entitlement—the drift of some stranger’s conversation, the memory of a thin mist moored temporarily over the garden, that face we saw from the window on the way to St. Albans: beautiful, indifferent, unequivocably doomed.