Into the Trees

Fruitcake or fruit nut cake?  I have always called it a fruit nut cake because that is what I like, but this morning, I looked it up.  Hey, kids. . . there are myriad varieties.  The ones I like have less flour and are more dense.  And they have nuts.  One night, many, many years ago, I came home from sitting on my sailboat alone on a Friday night.  I had been drinking and perhaps, though I can't remember, I had smoked a little boo, too.  It would have been a rare occasion, but it seems possible.  I was in my twenties and had been teaching for awhile.  An older woman, a student, had made me a fruit nut cake for Christmas the year before, and, though she was no longer my student, she surprised me with a cake the next Christmas, too.  It was the best fruit nut cake I have ever had.  That night, however, when I got home from the boat, I cut into the cake and was chewing fast and furious when I came down on an indestructible piece of pecan shell.  My molar split in two.  I picked out the pieces of my tooth and spit out blood.  

Andy yet. . . I still love fruit nut cakes.  That is how much.  

The English call them plum cakes, in case you were wondering what a plum cake was.  

Oh. . . Red didn't go to bed when I took her back to her hotel. . . of course.  She was not really up for "an early night."  Indeed, she had a story the next day of her various rompings.  I saw that Tennessee had FaceTimed me at midnight. He was out with the Billionaire Boys and wanted Red and me to meet them on the Boulevard.  Red was on the Boulevard just then, too, but not at the Billionare's Hooker Lounge.  Black Sheep, it seems, had been drinking for twenty-four hours straight.  The whole crew was unhinged.  Too bad, I think.  Red would have had some tales.  

I was invited out last night, but since I had been out three nights running, I declined.  I thought I wanted a night back in the old routine, though I knew it would sadden me, too.  Couples were out, eating, drinking, and enjoying the season.  I would have a Campari and a cheroot on the deck, fix dinner, and finish watching "Across the River and into the Trees."  

Before I started the movie again, I looked up the old reviews of Hemingway's novel.  One in particular surprised me.  

Tennessee Williams, in The New York Times, wrote: "I could not go to Venice, now, without hearing the haunted cadences of Hemingway's new novel. It is the saddest novel in the world about the saddest city, and when I say I think it is the best and most honest work that Hemingway has done, you may think me crazy. It will probably be a popular book. The critics may treat it pretty roughly. But its hauntingly tired cadences are the direct speech of a man's heart who is speaking that directly for the first time, and that makes it, for me, the finest thing Hemingway has done.

O.K.  Williams is an undeniable genius, so there was that.  

I dicked around on YouTube as I ate, then, putting the dishes in the sink, I started where I had left off.  I was not enamored of Colonel Cantwell.  Much the opposite.  I had no sympathy for him, nor admiration, in the least.  But I was in love with Renata. . . of course.  And, of course, the story of her affection for Cantrell is such a male fantasy.  It could never happen.  

The movie changes the novel's ending.  Rather than dying pathetically from a heart attack, the movie suggests that he pulled a Hemingway and blew his brains out with the shotgun Renata has brought him for duck hunting.  

And so it goes.  

In just a bit, the annual Christmas Parade will begin on the Boulevard.  The streets will be lined with tout le village and, now, the GPS crowd.  I first photographed the parade when I was in college.  I doubt that I will go again today, but it makes me sad.  Not to photograph, I mean.  

Last night I realized that I might have stayed home for a reason.  25 years ago last night, Sky first came to my house.  She insisted.  I told her I was going to Vespers if she wanted to join me, but she didn't show.  She was tied up with some boy at the Country Club College, and I didn't wait.  It was the first Vespers I'd gone to since my wife and I had split up.  I sat in the back of the chapel and dare I say tears came to my eyes.  When I got home, though, I had a call.  

"I'm coming over."

She terrified and thrilled me.  After that, I was a goner.  We've kept in touch to varying degrees over the past quarter century, but I won't see her this season, I'm afraid.  Selavy.  Life its own self, as they say.  

I was going to take my mother to Vespers tonight, but she changed her mind about going.  She does not think her back would take sitting in a pew that long.  I have not plans, so I may go alone.  Maybe.  

I think I'll buy a fruit nut cake today.  I'll get out and about.  I will buy that little live tree for Christmas, perhaps.  I may even climb the stairs to the attic.  

May and perhaps, of course.  My life is provisional.  

No matter.  I have memories, so here's to old times.  Here's to good living.  Here's to things that could never happen but do.  

Here's to the river and the trees and visions of plum cakes, too.