and stood on the porch with his coffee. There were many songbirds out there in the concealment of the tree line; their voices seemed to testify to the belief that they could dissuade nighttime air. In a while it seemed to be the case, the old parchment gray of the hour filtering in.
When the light was full he went back to where he’d boxed so many of Liza’s pictures. It felt wrong to keep them like that, even given what the real estate agent had said. He hung many where they had been before and the rest in the back bedroom. If he were to have his way, they would soon disappear, but it was better to have them where he could see them for now. Better to deal honestly with what they were.
I-40 was flanked with occasional crosses to mark the highway dead. Semis pressed from behind, headlights in the rearview mirror like threats. Things slowed as he came into Knox County, the glut of commuter traffic rising up as suddenly as something sprung from the ground. There were stalled vehicles on the shoulder, yellow roadside assistance trucks flashing code lights. At a halt, he quick-timed the intervals of traffic, plunged his foot on the gas so hard that his heart bobbed up to his ears and then the gridlock fell away.
There was a spot on Volunteer Boulevard on the university campus; he fed the machine with all the spare change he had and tried to remember how to get around. In a quarter of an hour he found himself standing in the waiting room of the office for the art and photography program. The woman behind the front desk was on the telephone. He took a seat and waited.
“Can I help you, sir,” she said a few minutes later in a tone that suggested the very prospect grieved her.
“Yes, ma’am. I was hoping to talk to John Easterday. I wanted to see him about some photography he might be interested in.”
“Let me check his schedule.”
She made a face that was less than encouraging before turning to consult her computer monitor.
“It looks like he’s on campus early this afternoon and has an office hour. From one to two. It’s an open hour so he should be available to walk-ins. I suppose you might need to know where his office is?”
Stratton said that he would. Without a word she scrawled an abbreviated title and a number on a pink Post-it and stuck it to the desk counter. He peeled it off as carefully as he would a bandage, thanked her, and left.
He wandered down to the banks of the Tennessee and walked the greenway for a while. He had not been to the city in well over a year, and it was always a pleasure to come and spend a little time here where the river flowed under the old iron railway spans. It provided the perfect opportunity to empty himself, to walk beside something of magnitude.
An old spaniel with a gray muzzle popped up a few feet in front of him and wolfed. His owner, a sleek black man in a battered fedora, told him to hush as he flicked his fishing rod toward the water and the reel sang.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “he don’t eat white meat.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
The man spoke a few words barely audible and the dog relaxed, his tongue rolling brainlessly from his mouth. Stratton patted him on the head and the tongue went to work. When the dog was done Stratton wiped the back of his hand along his trouser seam.
“I should have brought my rod.”
“You should have. There’s plenty to catch in there.”
Stratton took a seat and watched the man fish, cast after cast, with the elegantly slow retrieval, the rubber lure fluttering in the brown water. Patience and commitment to pattern made into its most essential shape.
“If you don’t mind me saying. You look like somebody that ain’t in the right place,” the man said.
“There’s a fair chance,” he said, and despite his desire to say something more to the man, he felt awkward and prohibited. He remembered the ugliness of his father about Black men and what he would say when he would see them sitting beside some bridge or overpass fishing. Street bait niggers, he had called them. Even as a boy, it struck Stratton’s ears with its low violence, its idle hate. But he’d never been able to tell his father his thoughts and now they passed through him with a haste to be gone. He said his farewell and went on.
On farther up the landing he passed a few people out on a midmorning stroll. College boys and girls running in close file, made of little more than lovely muscle and tans. He marveled at the fact that the young women stimulated only the lightest whisper of lust. Was he that far into oblivion that he could sign the receipt on his own broken libido? He sat on a bench and watched the river for the small fishing canoes working in close along the banks, their pilots scruff of face, their paddles tilted like medieval lances. They reminded him of McCarthy’s Suttree, of the man who forsook everything promised for everything abject; he suspected real genius in a man like that, though he would be hard-pressed to say why he thought so.
He ate lunch at a riverside restaurant called Calhoun’s. The waitress seated him in a glass room overlooking the water. His table was cut hard down the middle by a stripe of sunlight from overhead, but he liked the view and the relative quiet. He ordered iced tea and a hamburger and watched a long snaking barge crawl with the current, its burden under black tarpaulins. On the opposite bank big cranes were unmanned but appeared to be staged for demolition of the old hospital. The barge came even and blocked his view with its slow dream of gradual movement, setting all surrounding things into their relative contexts of time.
He finished his lunch and paid his bill, went back up toward campus to tour the McClung Museum, derelict this time of the week. It was cool and dark inside, the exhibits maintained with a kind of clinically imposed silence. He started on the bottom floor, walked past the displays of different primate ancestors, rigidly patient in their artificial skeletons. Next door he found the Civil War display with its sabers and bullet-torn tunics, its soft maps of temporary conquest, proof that progress across the ages had been altogether dubious. He liked the display of indigenous Tennessee gems the best, preferring their resistance to becoming anything more than what they were—beautiful pieces of self-sufficient geometry. On the top floor he found the pottery of Egyptians and scale models of their sacred cities, but it was the exhibit of the Mayans that he liked best and where he lingered. He read of their classical period, saw the stone art and the elaborate calendar.
He wondered what would be made of this time he lived in. What would historians write of this life built around objects glowing with the magic of electric power? A world made up of billions of small parts that most men and women walked through without the faintest idea of how they actually worked. What kind of exhibits could be arranged for men like that?
He realized that he’d lost track of things and was late to meet with Easterday. He hurried out through the front doors and past the sculpture of dinosaur bones, bumping into a security guard and speaking a quick apology. When he arrived at the office, he found the man already gathering his things to leave.
“Excuse me, Dr. Easterday, but we’ve met once before,” Stratton began. “At an exhibit of my wife’s several years ago.”
Easterday crammed a sheaf of handwritten papers into his leather briefcase and snugged it by a pair of belted straps. He had not bothered to glance up.
“And who was your wife?” he asked, stroked the slight whiskers of his chin distractedly as he turned to shut off his computer monitor.
“Liza Bryant.”
Easterday’s eyes rose briefly, made a weak effort at smiling.
“Yes, I believe I remember. It was in Atlanta, wasn’t it?”
“Savannah, actually.”
“Yes, that’s right,” he said, caught in the awkwardness of how to go on. “I know it means very little, but my sincere condolences. I didn’t know your wife but through a few professional contacts, but I was upset to hear of her passing. Her work was important. How can I help you?”
“I wanted to talk to you about her pictures. About donating them.”
“Donating them?”