Chance Meetings Read online

Dogs everywhere, on leashes, tugging their people across streets to reach other dogs.

  And so, up I went to the dealer in antiques on Rue Moncey to look into his window. Deadly, dear junk left orphan by the sudden death of the adoring owner, and now only for sale.

  But where’s the story I had gone out to find?

  I was walking along Boulevard de Clichy, which divides the sex shops of Pigalle, when a man looking like a beaver came up quickly and said, “Vannik Vannikian from Beirut, I am a sculptor, I admire Henry Moore.”

  We stood and talked for five minutes, and that’s the story, folks, let us please not make any more of it than that.

  Chapter 6

  I am puzzled by the people I once met, then forgot. And not all of them were met at parties, either.

  The fact is I didn’t go to a party until I was well along into adult life, as I believe it is put.

  After my first book was published, one of the richest men in San Francisco, at the Family Club, where I was the haphazard guest of an architect, standing beside me, passing water into a porcelain work of sculpture, said joyfully, “Now, sir, where have you been all this time?”

  For he did in fact believe that it was my fault that I had not met him, rich and famous and about sixty-six years old to my twenty-six.

  So what did I reply?

  Well, I don’t remember, but I know it was nothing clever, nothing at all proper or appropriate, and nothing to put him in his place, which he was quite neatly in, in any case.

  I probably mumbled something like, “Oh, here and there,” or, “Oh, out at 348 Carl Street, you know,” or, “Away,” which in a sense would have been true, for any man who puts in the required apprenticeship to become a professional writer must virtually take himself out of, and away from, all potential intrusions and instant distractions. One distraction would certainly have been hobnobbing with the rich, such as that old boy at the pissoire of the Family Club in San Francisco.

  I never saw him again, although he went on another ten or twelve years. And I am still running into people I met for a moment ten years ago, or twenty, or thirty, or even forty or fifty. In other words, he’s dead, but we did once stand side by side and pass water and words.

  I suppose I feel sorry for the people I met but didn’t remember because unless we remember people, they don’t exist, and if anybody I have met doesn’t exist, this is a terrible loss—to me, never mind what it may be, or not be, to him.

  At the Aviation Club on the Champs-Elysées in 1959 I met a whole slew of gamblers, hustlers, hangerson, con men, pimps, underworld characters, detectives, Corsican casino workers, Armenians, American blacks, African blacks, Asians, and a good variety of all-around international mothers.

  I loaned money to anybody who put the bite on me, but not one man came back of his own free will and paid the debt after he had gambled and won.

  Now and then when I insisted on reminding such a gambler of the loan I had just made, he sometimes affected astonishment with himself for having such a weak memory and quickly paid back the loan.

  But sometimes he asked was it one thousand francs I had loaned or was it two thousand, and when I said it was one hundred thousand, he said I must be mistaken, it was one thousand and he offered the appropriate piece of paper marked 1,000, which of course I told him to keep.

  He sometimes said he had not borrowed from me, he had borrowed from Mr. Hestatin of Holland, he never borrowed from anybody excepting Mr. Hestatin of Holland, how could he have borrowed from me? And as for me, I had never heard of Mr. Hestatin, and to this day do not know if I have got even the spelling of his name right.

  The reminded borrower sometimes paid the precise amount borrowed on demand, but he did so with such alacrity that I was thereby informed unmistakably that he had no time for a man who having made a small loan insisted on having it back, as if it were a law of some kind—if a law, then very well, here is a full compliance with that stingy, cheap, nagging law.

  He sometimes said he would pay his debt but not now, for it was bad luck to pay a debt while he was winning. And then after another hour or two, after he had gone broke again, he did not consider it bad luck to come and ask if I would be so kind as to lend him another one hundred thousand francs—and walked away annoyed when I confessed that now I was broke, too. In short, by walking away he was letting me know that only a fool would lose his own money in a Corsican gambling house. And he had no time for fools.

  I have forgotten people like these all my life, but as we see I have not forgotten them totally. I remember them as vague and dismal pieces of comic human behavior, and I feel sorry for them because they don’t have faces.

  Chapter 7

  Somebody is always telling somebody else to start at the beginning, and to tell precisely what happened without any ornamentation or elaboration, as if such things are ever not part of exactly what happened, especially in legal disputes.

  And some lawyer who has gone to school tells a kind of poet who hasn’t gone to school, “Now, Mr. Tutunjian, just tell us in your own words what happened on the morning of January 1st, 1919, when you got up in your house at 248 L Street between San Benito and Santa Clara Streets, at four minutes after four in the morning, and smelled smoke, what did you think, what did you do, just tell us that, and nothing more.”

  Whereupon the poet looks around in desperation as if to ask, “For God’s sake, where did this lawyer come from? Everybody tells me to go to Mr. Chickenhawk, so I go to Mr. Chickenhawk instead of to our own Khoren Kuyumjian, and this American lawyer tells everything, then he tells me to tell what he has just told, but he tells me to tell it in my own words, which are now not my own words at all, they are his.”

  Well, having had a lawyer in the family, Aram of Bitlis, I now and then heard about a case in court, and about the strange behavior of witnesses, of opposing lawyers, of judges, of members of juries. Thus, it was soon impossible not to notice that while everybody was obsessed with the idea of getting things straight, that was impossible. It never worked that way.

  In fact the harder everybody tried to get things straight, the more things became entangled, impelling one Armenian who had lost a case in court to remark, “Well, it is now a matter of the knife.”

  But the idea is a good one. If it is possible to get something straight, that is a desirable thing.

  Even more important than clarity in the statement of what happened, however, is clarity about the happening itself, which is not really possible, and the reason history is hilarious.

  Even when an event has simplicity, the giving of an accurate account of it is very difficult, and your house on fire isn’t anything at all like a simple event, but then nothing really is.

  Mr. Tutunjian had been accused of arson, but his lawyer, Mr. Chickenhawk, had got him acquitted and was proud of that fact, considering he himself was never quite sure his client hadn’t set fire to his house, but probably only as a consequence of having had in mind setting fire to the insurance company, in retaliation for not being honest with poetic illiterates.

  Chapter 8

  The Ragtag, bobtail, odds and ends of people known for a short time linger in the memory, and this has always seemed to me an indication of the unaccountableness of identity, and of the action of mind and memory in a given conglomerate, which is a person.

  For instance, I have never been able to understand the basis of memory’s selectivity, if in fact memory may be said to have such a basis, if it is not all of it pretty much whimsical and possibly even mischievous.

  The reality of the people very near in one’s life—the family, in short—is a large reality, so of course one understandably remembers them.

  But what about the stragglers everywhere and all the time, from the very beginning of one’s memory?

  Why is one straggler remembered and another forgotten?

  There was a boy at Emerson School in the second grade who had a name that struck me as exceptional: Fay.

  This boy now and then fell in besid
e me in the school grounds during recess, and without so much as saying a word began to be a friend.

  He belonged to one or another of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, very poor, very earnest, and very decent.

  One Saturday he came from wherever he lived to Armenian Town and found me in the empty lot next to the house at 2226 San Benito Avenue.

  “I know where there’s a catfish,” he said softly.

  Well, now, it must be understood that fish and game of any kind are goals of pursuit in the minds of all small boys: birds, rabbits, snakes, fish, anything alive, beautiful, and moving, capable of eluding capture, anything compelling pursuit but never willingly submitting to capture.

  I say willingly because at Vahan Minasian’s peach and apricot orchard called “Glorietta,” a little northwest of Roeding Park, I had frequently climbed a step-ladder very quietly to the nest in which sat a cooing dove, all soft and gray and beautiful—a magnificent achievement of form, design, and utility: a bird.

  And I wanted to experience some of that magnificence.

  I did not want to harm the bird, or to capture it as something to keep, or to cook and eat it, but I did want to reach out and touch it, and I felt that the bird ought not to resist that gesture. But invariably the bird did, and took to explosive, noisy flight, leaving four absolutely beautiful little eggs in the perfectly shaped bowl of the nest. And of course the eggs were not touched, for I had heard that once touched the mother dove would not, could not, accept them. This was puzzling, and even then not really believable, but on the chance that it might be true, I never touched the eggs or took them, as many kids did, for collections they were making.

  I only wanted the bird to know I was a friend, and the next evening when I climbed the stepladder again, I hoped that it would know I was a friend and not overdramatize the situation by taking off with a lot of crazy speed and wing-clatter.

  But my plan never worked and I learned my lesson. Birds don’t traffic with people. Birds and people see one another but they don’t share one another.

  All the same there is a rather famous photograph of Grey of Fallodon with a small bird perched on his head. Coming out of the sky, this little thing had made a friend of the old man who had become almost blind, and the old man was very proud to have been chosen by the little bird. Such things also happen.

  I said, “Where is the catfish?”

  “Back of Sun Maid.”

  This meant back of the raisin packing house, about a mile south by east.

  We walked, talking quietly as we went, but I don’t remember anything we said, although I am sure I asked a lot of questions about the details of the situation, which I soon saw for myself.

  A ditch was going dry, and there were in fact fish of several kinds in the larger ponds of the ditch.

  We saw the catfish, with its cat’s whiskers, but we didn’t catch it, wading after it and suddenly lunging for it. We were in that tree-shaded place about an hour, and I have never forgotten it.

  That’s all. But why did memory choose to preserve this event and not to preserve so many others?

  Chapter 9

  Have I ever known anybody who was an absolute delight to know? Well, no. And one questions if it is in fact in the nature of things for such a person to exist, in anything like an enduring way.

  My daughter, however, before she was sixteen, and especially before she was six, absolutely stunned me every day by the simple beauty and sweetness of her truth.

  I won’t go into detail and try to explain it, because it can’t be done, but I will say that she seemed to be outside the human race, a member of another race, and of course we know that such a thing is not possible.

  But she was somebody else, as the saying is.

  Her very breathing was something else. Breathing the same air, when she breathed it, the air became different. And it did different things for her than air does for others. Her voice, for instance, was beyond the human range. It was soft, and so extraordinarily moving that upon hearing it one didn’t know what to do about it, to show one’s total devotion to it, whatever it was that had made it so much another order of voice, so much another order of usage of human breath.

  And even when this little body, containing the unknown and unknowable person who was both already totally real and being made slightly different every day and every instant of every day, was suddenly outraged by some kind of betrayal or unkindness directed upon herself by somebody else, a brother two years her senior, for instance, and the little body breathed more deeply and more quickly in order to shout red outrage, her voice was suddenly the voice of somebody who obviously was in the human family, but only apparently by some lucky mistake—lucky, that is, for the rest of us, especially me, the father.

  Shouting threats and maledictions at the offender against her truth, the little girl was still an absolute delight, and I used to marvel at the mystery of the whole thing.

  How does such a thing happen?

  Well, if we don’t know, it really doesn’t matter too much, because in any case whatever it is that has happened, it fades away of itself, and behold, there before you suddenly stands a young lady of the world, of the real world, as they say. Of the real real real world, might be a fuller and more accurate way of putting it.

  What happens to kids?

  For I am implying that something of what I noticed in my daughter when she was very little must surely be noticed by other fathers in their daughters, and then the whole magical thing wisps away as if it were the flawless cosmology of a dandelion broken. The little pieces forming the miraculous circle of eternity lightly disengage themselves from one another, the design softly breaks, and that’s the end of that part of the life and story of another little girl.

  The thing that probably happens is the thing that has troubled so many poets who had a lot of talent but not much sense: the inevitable.

  And this inevitable thing is certainly commonplace enough to deserve every bit of respect and concern that can be bestowed upon it.

  Something like a leap of a billion years of accumulated experience takes place in the tiny body of a new arrival from outer space, so to put it.

  She is now here, in person, totally, but she does not have the slightest memory of that other place, or way, or truth. And she does not have one piece of behavior from then and there, excepting possibly a low soft late afternoon sigh.

  Yes, my little daughter was a delight to know, just as my little son was a fascination. Until each became a full member of the human race, by choice, by practice, by experience, by pose, by purpose, by fate, by law.

  Well, of course, that is how it is done, how the world is kept alive, and how the human race remains human, and stupid—but also inexhaustibly charming in its folly, muddleheadedness, and pomposity.

  Well, anybody else? A daughter and a son, that’s more or less to be expected.

  Anybody else, especially strangers?

  Well, there have been many people known to me for only a very short time who might be said to have been altogether delightful—but the trick of it is that such people were known only a very short time. They weren’t really who they seemed to be. They were fantastic and delightful for only that moment.

  Chapter 10

  I was especially concerned about noticing carefully people who did things like draw or paint, for it seemed to me that they were using a language which I was not sure wasn’t better than the language of words.

  If somebody could play a musical instrument, I was absolutely astonished and filled with admiration, even if the instrument was only a ten-cent harmonica, and the music was “Yankee Doodle.”

  It followed that I myself was favorably disposed towards trying to make pictures with lines and paints, or music with any kind of instrument I could buy for a dime, for it was out of the question that I would have a dollar to lay out for an authentic Hohner harmonica, for instance, instead of a ten-cent imitation one, made in some kind of madhouse factory in which imitations of everything were made for quic
k sale, quick usage, and quick deterioration.

  The pictures I made with lines were frequently pleasant to behold, especially the following day when I had forgotten what I had been trying for.

  The painted pictures were also acceptable if I stuck to animals, houses, roads, and smoke, and didn’t try to do ideas. I was quite good at making pictures of only colors and masses, which kids really want to do but are bullied into not doing by an unspoken admiration by adults for literalness.

  Now, anybody knows that there are all kinds of amateur artists in every community in the world. These are people who make things that ordinarily can’t be sold, for which there is no real measure by means of which to arrive at a value, and for which there is no demand.

  A great artist of this kind in Fresno was a young dark fellow by the name of Sarkis Sumboulian, who used pen and ink in the making of pictures of great heroic castles at the top of great heights and among great roaring clouds. And he put rather good titles to these pictures: Träumerei, for instance. And so somebody would say, “What does that mean?” And he would say, “ ‘Träumerei’ in German means dream.”

  Sarkis Sumboulian had drawn one more of his dreams. It had been inspired by the music of Schubert, but he himself in his little shack of a house on M Street in Armenian Town, sitting at the table after dinner while the rest of the family read papers or talked, slowly started a pen and ink drawing, and worked steadily for the next two or three hours, until it was finished. In an appropriate place at the bottom of the mighty picture he would write in fine letters: Träumerei by Sarkis Sumboulian Fresno December 1918.

  At that time he was about twenty years old and out of school. A high school diploma was on the wall of the parlor in the little house, and he contributed to the family living costs by finding work either in a fruit packinghouse, in a department store, or in an office, doing stuff that anybody can do.

  But he was an artist. He was not just anybody.