The Vagabonds Read Online Free Page A

glad to see you. Except you should have called.”
    He left. It was a form of avoidance. He left towns and jobs and people often, and like any other habit it was easier to make than break; it had been his MO and his SOP for years. “Standard operating procedure,” he said. “I’m your dance-away lover, remember? That’s me.”
    “Oh Christ,” she said. “That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m saying that I
missed
you, babe.”
    Adrienne lives near the Rose Garden, on Euclid Street, and on clear days the view is spectacular; on clear days they lie together on the cantilevered deck and watch the clouds and islands and the bridges and the bay. David has been working freelance for an agency that is abandoning print and focusing on web sites, and though he understands why web site design is the art of the future and though he is good at it and makes good money at the job, he misses the hands-on technique. He has been in Berkeley since May. This is par for the course, and time to get gone, and so he drove up to Bolinas and spent the night with Richard and Lucy, eating soft-shelled crab and smoking what his friends assured him was their sweetest home grown smoke and listening to the Pacific down beyond the Mesa; he has been working on a series of pastels about water and the offshore rocks and wondering how best to sketch a visual equivalent of sound. Not sound waves, David told them, not a diagram but evocation, an equivalence, so what you see is what you hear and doubly what you get.
    The past, he said to Richard and Lucy, that’s
exactly
how it feels to me: a handheld brush above an empty page. It’s like calligraphy, he said, you practice to make it seem casual, you work to make it effortless and the stroke no work at all. Or like all those years he spent at karate and jujitsu, where the price of a black belt, they say, is ten thousand falls. The thing about pastels, he was saying—Lucy’s head in his lap, her red hair spiked and staticky—is that they take
forever,
so the trick is to make it seem easy though it’s hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.
    Richard has a trust fund and is into hydroponics and he and Lucy have no children but are planning to adopt. There’s a network, they told David, a pipeline straight to China and you get to go—five couples max—with a pediatrician along on the trip, so he can check out the babies and help with traveling back. You wouldn’t believe the paperwork, the time it takes to check us out and have the documents translated and site visits and the rest, you wouldn’t believe what it costs . . .
    “Except it’s worth it,” Lucy declared. “It’ll be worth it, I’m certain.”
    “Another mouth to feed,” said Richard, theatrical, grinning. “Another candidate for excess to join the favored few.”
    Then David told them how, that afternoon, he’d stopped, on impulse, at Muir Woods and walked the trail an hour (past the sightseers and the instructional signs, the benches with their carved initials and a pair of men in wheelchairs and a group of high school students on a field trip with their teacher) to what he thought of as his sacred grove—well, no more than any other grove except in the way that it mattered to
him,
this particular cluster of redwoods where a year before he’d promised himself that next year would be different, a ring that
counted
on the trunk, a year to mark a growth spurt since he was turning thirty-five and that was Dante’s fateful year, the middle of the journey in the middle of this life.
Che la diritta via era smaritta,
that much he could remember: where the direct way is a muddle and the direction unclear . . .
    “Or remember Yogi Berra,” Richard said. “And his immortal saying. ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’”
    Lucy laughed. “Well, has it?”
    “Has it what?” he asked.
    “Been a year that mattered?”
    “Not in any good way, no.”
    And that was when he understood his mother was going to die. That was when he