The Pacific and Other Stories

The Pacific and Other Stories by Mark Helprin Page B

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Authors: Mark Helprin
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less than thirty years old, and she is stunningly beautiful and looks eighteen.
    “He knows,” her husband said, “he sent me.”
    Her answer to this cruelty was, “Oh.” But that was not the end of it. Thinking that something was sure to follow, I sat there like the Sphinx. Unlike the Sphinx, however, I acknowledged with my eyes that she was alive.
    “Do you know Venice?” she asked. I saw that I was now a strategical point in her troubled marriage. “What with the dollar so high, it’s like Disneyland. There are more Americans than in New Jersey.”
    “Americans don’t live in New Jersey anymore,” her husband added, “and they actually wear mouse ears. I saw them.”
    “Sometimes,” she qualified. “Sometimes they wear mouse ears, some of them. Have you been there?” she pressed, turning toward me as slowly as the aft turret of the
Missouri
.
    “Yes, I have.”
    “When?” she inquired, as insistently as the Bronx district attorney.
    Thinking of the bayonet that had once been at the end of my rifle, I picked up my butter knife, and then returned it to the damasked tablecloth. “Right after the war.”
    “The Gulf War?” she asked.
    I must have looked incredulous that she would not understand which war “the war” was.
    “Vietnam?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “What war?”
    “Alicia,” her husband said severely, because she had had three glasses of champagne, and because, of the long list of names by which the world knows our firm, mine is the only one that belongs to someone living.
    “I want to know, Jared.” When she pronounced his name she did so as if she didn’t care for it, and then she looked up at me like a woman with whom you have been arguing and whom you are about to kiss, and she said, “Which one, babycakes?”
    “The Second World War,” I answered. “World War
Two
.” I did want to kiss her.
    “Well, you can’t possibly remember the Second World War,” she said. “How old are you?”
    “I was born in nineteen forty-two,” I told her. Here I was, talking, I who am famous for sitting through social engagements like a ghost. “I was in Venice in ’forty-six, when I was four, and I remember everything. I remember the weave of the towels in the bathroom of the hotel. I remember the color of the paint on the iron chair on which I sat one day in the Piazza San Marco—it was green—and the shape of the dish in which I had yogurt and sugar. I remember the pigeon that lit upon the balcony, the slate gray and iridescent purple of his neck feathers. His eyes jumped when an ocean liner just outside the Grand Canal blew its whistle and scattered every bird in Venice but him. He stayed put, strutting like a pigeon. I wore a compass on a lanyard, and carried a rubber hunting knife in a cardboard sheath, in case there were any wild animals.”
    Just as I realized that I was really building up to something—and I really was—my wife broke in with her accustomed diplomatic skill and turned the conversation to the reconstruction of Venice, to the floods in Florence, and to the restoration of wetted works of art in general. To make the break invisible she informed them of my ability to pull from the past the most extraordinary details of memory, saying with no apparent bitterness, “That’s the part of his life that is most vivid. If you lose him in your conferences, look for him there.” Now these people had become strategical points in our marriage, and though I cared, I drifted. I lost them, they lost me, voices faded, and the room became pale.
    I N ITS STEAD , reconstituted before my eyes as if it actually existed, was a glass of amber-colored scotch, what I now know to be a double, on a white tablecloth next to my father’s dinner plate. We were in Venice, in a restaurant where everyone had to shout. In October 1946, my chin just cleared the table. I looked up like a cat at the glasses and plates, at the dishes and bowls and bottles that arrived or were taken away with

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