His Commute

He listened to audio books on his bus ride to work. He couldn’t read, the motion made him queasy if he tried to read. He usually chose nonfiction. He preferred to read fiction, to give the words his own inflection, not some actor’s or even the author’s.

A man a few rows up from him, on the other side, where he could see him from his own seat, was making nervous, jerky motions. He wondered if it was Tourette’s. Gilles de la Tourette was the neurologist who first described the condition, not some random guy who went around saying “merde” all day.

It was a book about the Indo-European language family. Linguistics interested him, ever since he took a college course in it. It was read by a man with a very mannered way of speaking. The voice reminded him of the Romanian-American historian Eugen Weber, who had hosted a program on public television called “The Western Tradition” when he was younger. But it wasn’t Weber.

He found bus rides relaxing, which he couldn’t say for the subway, which he had used regularly during the year he spent studying in New York. He enjoyed looking out the window, watching his progress from his own pleasant, almost suburban neighborhood, through the poorer areas, home to many Central American families, and then the central business district with its modest skyscrapers, nothing like New York. He and his wife loved pupusas, and would often visit a modest Salvadoran restaurant in one of those poorer neighborhoods. She was fond of loroco, a flower grown in El Salvador, but he usually stuck with plain cheese. He was fascinated by the correspondence of number names from farflung members of the Indo-European language family, do, dva, due, two, for instance. Not to mention dos.

I should have peed before I left, he thought. Now he’d have to deal with a little discomfort until he got to the office. It always happens when the caffeine really kicks in. Then, a couple of stops before his, the audio book just stopped. His bluetooth earbuds had run out of juice. The man who may or may not have had Tourette’s got off the bus. He’d charge them at work, after he visited the men’s room.

His Brother

He got together with his brother, who was in town, just for a couple of days, for business, and whom he hadn’t seen since their mother’s funeral, for dinner. His wife decided to stay home. “You see him so infrequently,” she told him. His brother lived by the ocean, yet they had never been out to visit him. “Send my regards.”

His brother had come for his firm’s national sales conference, which was being held at the Sheraton. He, on the other hand, didn’t have the temperament for sales. The brothers, who were five years apart, made mostly small talk.

They had agreed to meet in his city’s small Chinatown. The restaurant, Wo Hing, had been there forever, already an institution when he and his wife moved there, originally for her work. The place even served some of the old-school dishes the brothers remembered from childhood.

The previous year the conference had been in New Orleans. He’d never been to New Orleans. His brother told him about the beignets and chicory-accented coffee at Cafe du Monde and the oyster po boys at Acme and then asked him about his new consulting position, to which he supplied scant details.

The dishes all came out at the same time. They ate their spare ribs, wor shew opp, moo goo gai pan, and roast pork fried rice in silence until his brother told him about the tumor and insisted on picking up the bill, saying, “Expense account,” even though it was a pretty cheap dinner.

His Destination

It was the kind of drizzle that puts one in a quandary, to open the umbrella or not. Were he wearing a hat, he probably wouldn’t have even considered opening one, but he didn’t enjoy the feel of even small amounts of rain on his rapidly thinning hair.

His destination was a quarter of a mile away, more or less. He decided to hold the umbrella in abeyance until the rain picked up, if the rain picked up. He remembered a song. Or was it a nursery rhyme? “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day.”

Few people on the street were using umbrellas, mostly older women. When it rains in movies, it pours. It makes sense, he reasoned. A torrential downpour is dramatic. You wouldn’t even notice a light drizzle in a film.

He still carried the Marks & Spencer compact umbrella he had bought during his first trip to London 30 years earlier, when he and his wife had separated briefly, early in the marriage. Amazingly it had held up all these years, but he did only take it out when there was a slight chance of light rain. He had bigger umbrellas for the cinematic torrential downpours. He’d had a one-night stand, at his hotel, with a woman named Vix, short for Victoria, he had met at a pub. A Fuller’s pub, if he remembered correctly, but otherwise it was pretty much a drunken blur. All he could remember of Vix was her short, curly hair and her calling him “Luv” all night. But he did remember her name after all these years. She probably forgot his right after he told her.

When he was greeted at his destination he removed his shoes and was ushered to a room. A nice, soothing massage was just what he needed, one without a happy ending.