His and Goines’ paths shared several prominent venues in their lives: San Francisco itself (where Goines had started with IBM and their two children had been born), Los Gatos (where the friend had a house on a hilly acre), the Ivy League (the friend had graduated from Cornell), Yale (where the friend earned a doctoral degree), Chicago (where the friend grew up and near Northwestern University, where Goines had done one semester of doctoral work), Paris (where the friend had worked and the Goineses liked to visit), Montmartre (where the friend had an apartment the Goineses used), and the pages of the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times and Washington Post newspapers, from one or the other of which the friends frequently swapped articles.
Goines’ list of life’s intersection awakened Goines’ muse, who suddenly grabbed Goines and squeezed him – squeeze him hard and thrust before Goines’ mind’s eye the image of a bee frantically flying around inside a garage looking for an exit (Mrs. Goines had freed one such bee only the day before), and that image somehow brought on – or at least immediately preceded – a surge of poem, a pounding of phrases and lines, which Goines immediately set about drafting and revising through a dozen iterations, the result audibly singing in Goines’ inner ear.
Why, he wondered, as he extricated himself from that long list of thought, did his thinking sometimes resemble the prose of Marcel Proust? And he remembered that he even dreamed himself into one of Proust’s settings one night a few years earlier – in Madame Verdurin’s drawing room, wasn’t it? Somewhere, anyway, depicted in detail in À la recherche du temps perdu. He tried to remember how the dream had gone, but all of its details were apparently lost in time.
Why, he wondered, as he extricated himself from that long list of thought, did his thinking sometimes resemble the prose of Marcel Proust? And he remembered that he even dreamed himself into one of Proust’s settings one night a few years earlier – in Madame Verdurin’s drawing room, wasn’t it? Somewhere, anyway, depicted in detail in À la recherche du temps perdu. He tried to remember how the dream had gone, but all of its details were apparently lost in time.
Goines emailed his friend again, asked how he was, reported the bee in the garage, and wished him well – “better than well, fiddling!”
“My silence,” the friend’s reassuring reply announced, “was due to my preoccupation with our tax return and to the thus far inexplicable comings and goings of pain in my right ankle, which leave me in a non-communicative mood!
“There are no bees in the apartment, but last night a hum next to my ear suggested the proximity of a mosquito, towards which I showed no mercy! Pow!! Ouch!!! Damn!!!!”
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