Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [42]
His laughter had already modulated into sympathy. “Tough.” He shook his head, and in the middle of a shake I saw him realize that I couldn’t shake mine, that I was looking up at him under my eyebrows because I couldn’t tilt my head back. He sat down quickly on the Bendix crate to bring himself closer to my level. Few people are that understanding or that considerate.
“Howth the wife? Thee with you?”
“We’re divorced.”
Left for a moment uncertain whether to pursue that delicate subject or let it drop, he let it drop. Through his dizzy glasses he inspected my chair. His nostrils looked as if they had been made with an auger, I could see clear into his head. “Quite a rig you got,” he said. “You get around all over in that?”
“Pretty much. I have to stay in the slow lane on the freeway.”
Haw haw haw again. What a companion. A prince of good fellows.
“You thtill a profethor?”
“I’ve retired. Why don’t you come out some Saturday and have a beer and watch the ballgame on TV?”
“Thay,” Al said, “don’t think I wouldn’t like to. Thaturdayth are tough, though. All the working girlth do their wath.”
“You own the shop?”
“Thit,” Al said. “It ownth me.”
He sat on the crate with his mouth open a little, his tongue protruding slightly. His nostrils were black and hairy. Behind his shifting, glittering glasses he had as many eyes as Argus. We had a real bond: one of us is about as hard to look at as the other.
“What have you got on?” I said. “What kind of glasses are those?”
“Thethe?” He took them off and dangled them by an earpiece, looking down at them as if he had just become aware of their oddity. The wart crept out between his parted lips. For fifty-odd years the poor bastard has had that thing on his tongue, filling his mouth and distorting his speech and building his character. You’d think he’d have had it off years ago. You’d think his parents would have had it off before he was three. “Thethe are my working glatheth,” he said. “Quadruple focalth.”
I looked at them. Four half-moons of magnification were ground into each lens. When I raised them and looked through them, the front of the building swam like hot taffy, and Al became a small crowd. “I thought I had a problem, having to look straight ahead,” I said. “What do you use them for?”
Tentatively, delicately, the wart emerged, touched the upper bow of Al’s smile, withdrew again. Al stood chuckling, scratching his elbow. “I don’t th’pothe a profethor would ever need anything like thethe. But I’m alwayth having to fixth the mathineth. Ever try to thee with your head inthide a Bendixth?”
I get the message. Space being curved, tunnel vision and the rigid neck could leave a man focused on the back of his own head. I don’t know what the effect of quadruple focals on a historian might be—nausea, maybe—but there might be virtue in trying them on.
Whose head isn’t inside a Bendix?
II
NEW ALMADEN
1
Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary experience and make it yield whatever instruction it contained. She anticipated her life in New Almaden as she had looked forward to the train journey across the continent–as a rather strenuous outdoor excursion. The day she spent resting with Oliver’s sister Mary Prager in San Francisco she understood to be the last day of the East, not the first of the West. That sort of house, full of Oriental art, and that hidden garden with its pampas grass and palms and exotic flowers, were not for her, not yet. Mary Prager was such a beauty, and Conrad Prager so formidably elegant, that she wished she could introduce them to Augusta as proof of the acceptability of Oliver’s connections. Because her trunks had not yet arrived, she had to wear Mary Prager’s clothes, which made her feel, in the strange garden in the strange chilly air, like someone else–Mrs. Oliver Ward, perhaps, wife of the young mining engineer who as soon as he had established himself in his profession would be able to provide such a house and life as this, preferably near Guilford, Connecticut, or Milton, New York.