Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

  “Can you make arrangements at work, Ari?”

  I could imagine him in the military. Taking charge. His voice calm and undisturbed.

  “Yeah. It’s only a job flipping burgers. What can they do, fire me?” Legs barked at me. She was used to her morning run. I looked at my dad. “What are we going to do about Legs?”

  “Dante,” he said.

  His mother answered the phone. “Hi,” I said. “It’s Ari.”

  “I know,” she said. “You’re up early.”

  “Yeah.” I said. “Is Dante up?”

  “Are you kidding, Ari? He gets up a half hour before he has to be in to work. He won’t get up a minute earlier.”

  We both laughed.

  “Well,” I said, “I sort of need a favor.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Well, my aunt had a stroke. My mom was visiting her. My dad and I are leaving as soon as we can. But, then, there’s Legs, and I thought maybe—” She didn’t let me finish my sentence.

  “Of course we’ll take her. She’s great company. She fell asleep on my lap last night.”

  “But you work and Dante works.”

  “It will be fine, Ari. Sam’s home all day. He’s finishing his book.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me, Ari.” She sounded so much happier and lighter than the woman I’d first met. Maybe it was because she was going to have a baby. Maybe that was it. Not that she still didn’t get after Dante.

  I hung the phone up, packed a few things. The phone rang. It was Dante. “Sorry about your aunt. But, hey, I get Legs!” He could be such a boy. Maybe he would always be a boy. Like his dad. “Yeah, you get Legs. She likes to run in the morning. Early.”

  “How early?”

  “We get up at five forty-five.”

  “Five forty-five! Are you crazy? What about sleep?”

  That guy could always make me laugh. “Thanks for doing this,” I said.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did your dad give you hell for coming in so late?”

  “No. He was asleep.”

  “My mom wanted to know what we were up to.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her we didn’t get to watch any stars because of the storm. I said it was raining like hell and we just got stuck in the storm. And we just sat in the truck and talked. And when the rain stopped, we got hungry so we went out for menudo.

  “She looked at me funny. She said: ‘Why don’t I believe you?’ And I said: ‘Because you have a very suspicious nature.’ And then she dropped the whole thing.”

  “Your mom has hyper instincts,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, she can’t prove a thing.”

  “I bet she knows.”

  “How would she know?”

  “I don’t know. But I bet she knows.”

  “You’re making me paranoid.”

  “Good.”

  We both cracked up laughing.

  We dropped off Legs at Dante’s house later that morning. My dad gave Mr. Quintana a key to our house. Dante got stuck with watering my mom’s plants. “And don’t steal my truck,” I said.

  “I’m Mexican,” he said. “I know all about hotwiring.” That really made me laugh. “Look,” I said. “Eating menudo and hotwiring a truck are two totally different forms of art.”

  We smirked at each other.

  Mrs. Quintana shot us a look.

  We drank a cup of coffee with Dante’s mom and dad. Dante gave Legs a tour around the house. “I’m betting Dante’s going to encourage Legs to chew up all his shoes.” We all laughed except my dad. He didn’t know about Dante’s war against shoes. We laughed even harder when Legs and Dante walked back into the kitchen. Legs was carrying one of Dante’s shoes in her mouth. “Look what she found, Mom.”

  Twelve

  MY FATHER AND I DIDN’T TALK ALL THAT MUCH ON THE drive to Tucson. “Your mother’s sad,” he said. I knew he was thinking back.

  “You want me to drive?”

  “No,” he said. But then he changed his mind. “Yes.” He got off at the next exit and we got some gas and coffee. He handed me the keys. His car handled a lot easier than my truck. I smiled. “I’ve never driven anything besides my truck.”

  “If you can handle that truck, you can handle anything.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” I said. “It’s just that sometimes I have things running around inside me, these feelings. I don’t always know what to do with them. That probably doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It sounds normal, Ari.”

  “I don’t think I’m so normal.”

  “Feeling things is normal.”

  “Except I’m angry. And I don’t really know where all that anger comes from.”

  “Maybe if we talked more.”

  “Well, which one of us is good with words, Dad?”

  “You’re good with words, Ari. You’re just not good with words when you’re around me.”

  I didn’t say anything. But then I said, “Dad, I’m not good with words.”

  “You talk to your mother all the time.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because it’s a requirement.”

  He laughed. “I’m glad she makes us talk.”

  “We’d die in our own silence if she wasn’t around.”

  “Well, we’re talking now, aren’t we?”

  I glanced over and saw him smiling. “Yeah, we’re talking.”

  He rolled down the window. “Your mother doesn’t let me smoke in the car. Do you mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  That smell—cigarette—it always made me think of him. He smoked his cigarette. I drove. I didn’t mind the silence and the desert and the cloudless sky.

  What did words matter to a desert?

  My mind drifted. I thought of Legs and Dante. I wondered what Dante saw when he looked at me. I wondered why I didn’t look at the sketches he gave me. Not ever. I thought of Gina and Susie and wondered why I never called them. They bugged me, but that was their way of being nice to me. I knew they liked me. And I liked them back. Why couldn’t a guy be friends with girls? What was so wrong with that? I thought about my brother and wondered if he’d been close to my aunt. I wondered why such a nice lady had divorced her family. I wondered why I’d spent a summer with her when I was only four.

  “What are you thinking?” I heard my father’s voice. He hardly ever asked that question.

  “I was thinking about Aunt Ophelia.”

  “What were you thinking?”

  “Why did you send me to spend the summer with her?”

  He didn’t answer. He rolled down the window and the heat of the desert came pouring into the air-conditioned car. I knew he was going to smoke another cigarette.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “It was just around the time of your brother’s trial,” he said.

  That was the first time he’d ever said anything to me about my brother. I didn’t say anything. I wanted him to keep talking.

  “Your mother and I were having a very difficult time. We all were. Your sisters too. We didn’t want you to—” He stopped. “I think you know what I’m trying to say.” He had a very serious look on his face. More serious than usual. “Your brother loved you, Ari. He did. And he didn’t want you to be around. He didn’t want you to think of him that way.”

  “So you sent me away.”

  “Yeah. We did.”

  “It didn’t solve a damn thing, Dad. I think of him all the time.”

  “I’m sorry, Ari. I just—I’m really sorry.”

  “Why can’t we just—”

  “Ari, it’s more complicated than you think.”

  “In what way?”

  “Your mother had a breakdown.” I could hear him smoking his cigarette.

  “What?”

  “You were at your Aunt Ophelia’s for more than a summer. You were there for nine months.”

 
“Mom? I can’t—it’s just—Mom? Mom really had—” I wanted to ask my dad for a cigarette.

  “She’s so strong, your mother. But, I don’t know, life isn’t logical, Ari. It was like your brother had died. And your mother became a different person. I hardly recognized her. When they sentenced him, she just fell apart. She was inconsolable. You have no idea how much she loved your brother. And I didn’t know what to do. And sometimes, even now, I look at her and I want to ask, ‘Is it over? Is it?’ When she came back to me, Ari, she seemed so fragile. And as the weeks and months went by, she became her old self again. She got strong again and—”

  I listened to my dad cry. I pulled the car over to the side of the road. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know, Dad.”

  He nodded. He got out of the car. He stood out in the heat. I knew he was trying to organize himself. Like a messy room that needed to be cleaned up. I left him alone for a while. But then, I decided I wanted to be with him. I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.

  “Dad, sometimes I hated you and mom for pretending he was dead.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Ari. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Thirteen

  BY THE TIME WE REACHED TUCSON, MY AUNT OPHELIA was dead.

  There was standing-room-only at her funeral mass. It was obvious that she had been deeply loved. By everyone except her family. We were the only ones there. My mom, my sisters, me, and my dad.

  People I didn’t know walked up to me. “Ari?” they would ask.

  “Yes, I’m Ari.”

  “Your aunt adored you.”

  I was so ashamed. For having kept her on the margins of my memory. I was so ashamed.

  Fourteen

  MY SISTERS WENT BACK HOME AFTER THE FUNERAL.

  My mom and dad and I stayed on. My mom and dad closed up my aunt’s house. My mom knew exactly what to do, and it was almost impossible for me to imagine her residing on the borders of sanity.

  “You keep watching me,” she said one night as we watched a summer storm coming in from the west.

  “Do I?”

  “You’ve been quiet.”

  “Quiet’s pretty normal for me.”

  “Why didn’t they come?” I asked. “My uncles and aunts? Why didn’t they come?”

  “They didn’t approve of your aunt.”

  “Why not?”

  “She lived with another woman. For many years.”

  “Franny,” I said. “She lived with Franny.”

  “You remember?”

  “Yes. A little. Not much. She was nice. She had green eyes. She liked to sing.”

  “They were lovers, Ari.”

  I nodded. “Okay,” I said.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No.”

  I kept playing with the food on my plate. I looked up at my father. He didn’t wait for me to ask my question.

  “I loved Ophelia,” he said. “She was kind and she was decent.”

  “It didn’t matter to you that she lived with Franny?”

  “To some people it mattered,” he said. “Your uncles and aunts, Ari, they just couldn’t.”

  “But it didn’t matter to you?”

  My father had a strange look on his face, as if he was trying to hold back his anger. I think I knew that his anger was aimed at my mother’s family, and I also think he knew that his anger was useless. “If it had mattered to us, do you think we’d have let you come and stay with her?” He looked at my mother.

  My mother nodded at him. “When we get back home,” she said. “I’d like to show you some pictures of your brother. Would that be okay?”

  She reached over and wiped my tears. I couldn’t speak.

  “We don’t always make the right decisions, Ari. We do the best we can.”

  I nodded, but there weren’t any words and the silent tears just kept running down my face like there was a river inside me.

  “I think we hurt you.”

  I closed my eyes and made the tears stop. And then I said, “I think I’m crying because I’m happy.”

  Fifteen

  I CALLED DANTE AND TOLD HIM THAT WE’D BE BACK in a couple of days. I didn’t tell him anything about my aunt. Except that she’d left me her house.

  “What?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow.”

  “‘Wow’ is right.”

  “Is it a big house?”

  “Yeah. It’s a great house.”

  “What are you going to do with the house?”

  “Well, apparently there’s a friend of my aunt’s who wants to buy it.”

  “What are you going to do with all that money?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Why do you suppose she left you the house?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, you can quit your job at the Charcoaler.”

  Dante. He could always make me laugh.

  “So what have you been up to?”

  “Working at the drugstore. And I’m sort of hanging out with this guy,” he said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I wanted to ask his name but I didn’t.

  He changed the subject. I knew when Dante was changing the subject. “My mom and dad are in love with Legs.”

  Sixteen

  ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, WE WERE STILL IN TUCSON.

  We went to watch the fireworks.

  My dad let me a have a beer with him. My mother tried to pretend she didn’t approve. But if she hadn’t approved, she would have put a stop to it.

  “It’s not your first beer, is it, Ari?”

  I wasn’t going to lie to her.

  “Mom, I told you when I broke the rules, I was going to do it behind your back.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what you said. You weren’t driving, were you?”

  “No.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  I drank the beer slowly and watched the fireworks. I felt like a small boy. I loved fireworks, the explosions in the sky, the way the crowd sometimes uuhhhed and aahhed and oohhhed.

  “Ophelia always said Franny was the Fourth of July.”

  “That’s really a great thing to say,” I said. “So what happened to her?”

  “She died of cancer.”

  “When?”

  “About six years ago, I guess.”

  “Did you come to the funeral?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t bring me.”

  “No.”

  “She used to send me Christmas gifts.”

  “We should have told you.”

  Seventeen

  I THINK MY MOTHER AND FATHER HAD DECIDED THAT there were too many secrets in the world. Before we left my aunt’s house, she put two boxes in the trunk of the car. “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The letters I wrote to her.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “I’m going to give them to you.”

  “Really?”

  I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.

  Eighteen

  ON THE DRIVE BACK TO EL PASO FROM TUCSON, I SAT in the backseat. I could see that my mom and dad were holding hands. Sometimes they would glance at each other. I looked out at the desert. I thought of the night Dante and I had smoked pot and run around naked in the rain.

  “What are you going to do the rest of the summer?”

  “I don’t know. Work at the Charcoaler. Hang out with Dante. Work out. Read. Stuff like that.”

  “You don’t have to work,” my father said. “You have the rest of your life to do that.”

  “I don’t mind working. And anyway, what would I do? I don’t like to watch TV. I’m out of touch with my own generation. And I have you and mom to thank for that.”

  “Well, you can watch all the te
levision you like from here on in.”

  “Too late.”

  They both laughed.

  “It’s not funny. I’m the uncoolest almost-seventeen-year-old in the universe. And it’s all your fault.”

  “Everything is our fault.”

  “Yes, everything is your fault.”

  My mom turned around just to make sure I was smiling.

  “Maybe you and Dante should take a trip together. Maybe go camping or something.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You should think about it,” my mom said. “It’s summer.”

  It’s summer, I thought. I kept thinking of what Mrs. Quintana had said: Remember the rain.

  “There’s a storm up ahead,” my father said. “And we’re about to run into it.”

  I looked out the window at the black clouds ahead of us. I opened the back window and smelled the rain. You could smell the rain in the desert even before a drop fell. I closed my eyes. I held my hand out and felt the first drop. It was like a kiss. The sky was kissing me. It was a nice thought. It was something Dante would have thought. I felt another drop and then another. A kiss. A kiss. And then another kiss. I thought about the dreams I’d been having—all of them about kissing. But I never knew who I was kissing. I couldn’t see. And then, just like that, we were in the middle of a downpour. I rolled up the window and I was suddenly cold. My arm was wet, the shoulder of my T-shirt soaked.

  My father pulled the car over. “Can’t drive in this,” he said.

  There was nothing but darkness and sheets of rain and the awe of our silence.

  My mom held my father’s hand.

  Storms always made me feel so small.

  Even though summers were mostly made of sun and heat, summers for me were about the storms that came and went. And left me feeling alone.

  Did all boys feel alone?

  The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.

  All the Secrets of the Universe

  Through all of youth I was looking for you

  without knowing what I was looking for

  —W. S. Merwin

  One

  IT RAINED OFF AND ON THE WHOLE TRIP BACK TO El Paso. I dozed off to sleep. I’d wake every time we hit a heavy downpour.