Dalva by Jim Harrison Page A

invited Sitting Bull, American Horse, and Geronimo to his inauguration. All of Washington was miffed when these chiefs weren’t the least bit impressed. Politicians can’t bear the knowledge that people care more for food, sex, love, their families and jobs, than they care for political machinations. . . .”
    Michael waved Ted’s comment away with a flap of his hand. He finished an eight-ounce hit of wine he had poured in his empty brandy glass. He was clearly pissed off to some nether edge but was so resolutely an academician, even while drunk, that he was summoning up an additional vicious clunker.
    â€œI’ve often found it amusing that people with a negotiable amount of inherited wealth”—they always get you for this!”—hold a charmed, remote outlook toward minorities. As a simple, wandering scholar I’m far closer to their nature than you are.”
    â€œYou should drive out to Black Mesa in your BMW and tell that one to the Hopis.”
    â€œYou fucking bitch!” he screamed. “You miserable bitch!”
    Andrew ran out of the kitchen to prevent any possible violence, but Michael had calmly taken another drink between “bitch"es. Ted had meanwhile collapsed off his chair with laughter. “Ruth was trying to be nice. I bet she said, ‘I’ll consent to give you the papers if Dalva and Naomi will.’”
    Michael shook his head and in the process decided to becharming again. After all, he probably thought, there’s no point in needlessly cutting off contact. With a sequence of not very probing questions he got Ted started on the sexual habits of rock stars, which turned out to be somewhat limited by drug ingestion.
    I said good night and Ted showed me to the door with regret. I hugged him, feeling how his tall, gaunt body retained its boyishness.
    â€œI’m sorry I talked about Ruth. He presented himself as a close friend. You slept with him, didn’t you? But then in my circles that doesn’t mean a great deal. It was a wonderful night, you know, like in a Russian novel where Pyotr Stepanovich steps into the parlor and announces that he’s been brooding on the recent problem of infant suicide. En passant the tykes see news photos of the president or attorney general and hurl themselves out windows onto cobblestones and windswept snow.”

    Ruth called to say she wasn’t pregnant. Oh my God, I’m sorry, I said, but then she said she wasn’t particularly sorry. The letters from the priest in Costa Rica had been full of the vilest sort of recriminations, the intent being to somehow prove that she had managed the whole thing herself. There was the suggestion that she had bewitched him and that thankfully God had sent him to Costa Rica well out of her sphere of influence. She wondered what he was doing with the suggestive photos he had begged for, taken with a discount-store Polaroid. She had viewed the photos session, she admitted it with some embarrassment, as the single silliest event of her life, but was reassured by my laughter. Then she told me she had gone out twice with a Mexican grocer, a widower and the father of one of her piano students. All of Ruth’s students are physically handicapped, the largest proportion being blind. She thinks of her teaching as “music for solace” and works very hard at it. The grocer’s blind daughter was seven years old, a lovely little girl who showed a great deal of promise. The grocer himself was haunted by the fact that he hadn’t insisted that his wife go to the doctor earlier even though she had died of fallopiancancer which is nearly always undetectable in its early stages and consequently fatal. The first date had been so courtly and somber, dinner and a movie, that she had doubted she’d see him again. He had called her the next morning to ask her to a fiesta dance in honor of a saint. She had accepted because no one had asked her to a dance since