Take bus?
Save money.
It was a smiley morning. The waitress and the desk clerk were in good moods. The trolley driver was singing. The sun was shining; that must have had something to do with it. He got off the trolley at the end of the line and caught a city bus to SeaTac. He was hours early and had saved thirty bucks by not taking a taxi. He snoozed and spaced out all the way to Hawaii and home.
"Hi, Batman. Where's the party?" Batman maintained a tolerant silence.
Joe took two aspirin and slept for fourteen hours.
14
Friday morning Joe walked to the farmer's market and bought onions, bok choy, lettuce, and carrots. The prices were good; the locals were cheerful; it was a good deal for everyone. It was late September, and there were fewer tourists around. A lone conga beat tumbled and surged across Kapiolani Park. The smell of grilling teriyaki drifted across the grass. Small cumulus clouds blew out to sea.
Joe sat on the last beach before Diamond Head, a place where he and Sally and Kate had often come on weekends. An older man—the age Joe was now—used to park his car and carry a rubber raft to the water. His dog would jump into the raft, and the man would push it out, swimming slowly, until they were a hundred yards offshore. He would climb into the raft and write in a notebook while his dog rested and kept watch. The deeply tanned man and the black raft floated up and down, a dark silhouette on the glinty ocean. Occasionally the man paddled to keep from drifting too far down the beach. Probably 80 now, if he's still alive, Joe thought.
"Time to get serious." The words appeared like a banner in Joe's mind. To his surprise, he had told the woman at the San Juan Yacht Club that he was a poet. The words were true as he spoke them. He had defined himself, for better or worse. Whether he wrote stories or poems didn't matter—he could do both. What mattered was to get to work.
Isabelle was on to something with the patchwork quilt. The faces and feelings that he described were important, but—as patches. He needed to carry his writing further and work on the quilt. Isabelle? He shook his head feeling a slight flush. She was a sharpie, no doubt about it. She got right to him. But she was well down the alcoholic road. She didn't have to work. She didn't have children. Joe couldn't see what would bring her back. It wasn't the drinking, so much, that put him off. It was the lack of pride or purpose or will power that the drinking implied. Just as well, he thought, that there was an ocean between them.
"You could define adult life as the struggle not to drink too much," he said to Mo at Hee Hing's the following week. He was telling her about Isabelle, leaving out the sex.