Chapter Twelve
The Stoical
Scheme
SO Blue was back. That was fine by J. Her return also seemed to coincide with a rapprochement between Blue Sr. and J.'s uncle. That was fine by J. too. (The town gossips, though delighted by the resumption of the status quo, nonetheless found themselves befuddled by this abrupt détente.) And the very day after the festival, Blue, Blue Sr., and Tallboy too were all once more frequenting the diner. As far as J. was concerned, with the exception of being in Carolina in the morning, nothing could have been finer, though the acid flames that flickered against his ticker told another story.
A supercilious Louisianan who was familiar with the symptoms of indigestion happened to be passing through town. He handed J. Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. "The book teaches us to accept that which we cannot change," he said benevolently between belches that rattled the flaps of his green hunting cap. J. cracked the spine and uncorked his pen.
Boethius believed that a blind goddess spins us on a wheel. That our luck comes in cycles. That in all adversity of fortune, the most wretched kind is once to have been happy. (Dante liked that last line so much he borrowed it a few hundred years later for his second circle of Hell.)
"What low joke is Fortuna playing on me?" J. asked. "Is my wheel rapidly spinning downward?"
"You are wrong if you think Fortune has changed toward you. Change is her normal behavior," Boethius said.
"At times she has a very unladylike way of running out."
"Commit your boat to the winds and you must sail whichever way they blow, not just where you want."
"I'll scuttle the ship."
"You have committed yourself to the rule of Fortune, you must acquiesce in her ways."
"And so the best that I can do is pray."
"Prayers are not made in vain."
"But there is room for doubt."
"There is only one thing I can say. Whenever something is done for some purpose, and for certain reasons something other than what was intended happens, it is called chance."
"Chances are I'm insane." J. spun the pen between his fingers. "I don't know what I intended. I thought I found something, but I lost it. Then I lost myself."
"If the things whose loss you are bemoaning were really yours, you could never have lost them," Boethius smugly replied.
Some consolation, J. scrawled at the top of the title page.
OOOOO
HAD the town gossips stationed themselves upstairs with J. on the night of the sendoff-to-summer festival after the diner had closed, they might have been less baffled by the normalization of relations between Blue Sr. and J.'s uncle. From that perch, they might have heard the chime of the door's bell downstairs and recognized the voice of Blue Sr. The tone in it, though, sounded unfamiliar: a flat, hollow mixture that wavered between battered and beat.
And if the town gossips had long since given up hope of the Yankees staging some kind of miracle comeback against the Rangers (and they would have been right; it just wasn't Mussina's night), they might have tiptoed from the TV to the top of the stairs to better eavesdrop on the conversation. Depending on how long they stood there, perhaps ashamed for snooping but more curious than they would care to admit, they might have heard Blue Sr. tell J.'s uncle, a sob caught in her throat, that Blue's father was going to have a child with his girlfriend, that in spite of all the good in her own world—starting, yes, with her daughter—the news left Blue Sr. feeling bereft of a life that, but for Fortune, could have been hers. They might have heard J.'s uncle proffer a few pithy words of sympathy and a donut on the house. (Had they been in a position to extend some advice, they might have suggested she try, as J. had, supplying her wants by lopping off her desires.) The ring of the bell and the silence that followed marked her exit. And though they would not have been able to see him from their vantage, they would have known from innumerable other occasions how his eyes lingered on the door long after she'd gone.