A Meaningful Life by L. J. Davis Read Free Book Online

ceased to feel. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Everything is fine.”
    â€œWhat your father and I are getting at...”
    â€œI understand,” said Lowell thickly. “Everything is okay. Nothing is wrong. I mean, nothing is wrong that won’t be okay in a while. I mean, what I mean is...”
    â€œWe’ll talk about it later,” said his father, meaning that they would never talk about it again unless Lowell brought it up first. “I think it’s time we all hit the hay.”
    â€œThere’s never been a Jew in my family,” Lowell heard his mother say as she walked off with his father toward their room. “Has there ever been one in your family?”
    â€œNever can tell,” said his father, putting his arm around her waist.
    Lowell and his wife were married by a Unitarian minister who blinked a lot and claimed to have known Woody Guthrie. Exactly how well he’d known Woody Guthrie diminished measurably each time Lowell questioned him about it, until he finally began to avoid the subject, glancing apprehensively at Lowell from time to time as though afraid another Woody Guthrie question was in danger of springing from his mouth. The minister’s name was Mr. Hogarth. It was the time of year when a lot of weddings occur at Stanford, and whenever the other ministers wanted somebody to cut a service short, they infallibly went to Mr. Hogarth. He was both weak-willed and a fast talker, and he seemed to suspect secretly that God didn’t pay much attention to anything Unitarians did.
    â€œI just hope everybody arrives in time,” he told Lowell, blinking, as they waited in the vestibule for the Baptists to finish. “There’s a Presbyterian service right behind us, and we’re kind of pressed for time.” He gave a fatuous smile and waved to somebody over Lowell’s shoulder. Lowell turned and saw a man donning vestments in a little room off to one side. The man frowned at them and closed the door. “That was the Presbyterian minister,” Mr. Hogarth said.
    â€œI wish the Pope could see this,” whispered Lowell’s best man, the roommate whose tent he’d stolen. “He’d laugh his ass off.” Lowell’s roommate was an easygoing Catholic who crossed himself at table before taking food, drank prodigious quantities of wine at club parties without ever impairing his ability to drive, never got a grade higher than a B, and planned to be elected mayor of San Francisco before he was forty. He was as short and squat as a rain barrel and as strong as a bull, and he deeply loved his father and mother, immigrant Italians who ran a tiny bakery on North Beach, who deeply loved him back with a devotion that was outrageous, embarrassing to onlookers, and quite touching, like something from a maudlin old movie come to life.
    The moment Lowell took his place at the altar, a fog of terror blew into his mind and few things sufficiently penetrated its veil to be remembered with any clarity afterward. He hadn’t been scared a minute ago—just exhausted by events and nervous that his voice would break or that he would fart loudly—but he was scared now, and scared he remained. He was changing his status in the community of man. He was in the hopper of a great machine and he could no more get them to turn it off than a confessed and proven murderer could change his mind about his trial. It was Donner Pass all over again, only permanent. The law had him and there was no way out, at least not a nice or easy one: it was a matter for judges and courts, his wife testifying about the length of his prick and the dirty things he whispered in her ear when he was drunk on Miller High Life, the judge scolding him, alimony; he could see it all. The only other way out was murder or moving secretly to another town, changing your name, losing all your friends, denying all your accomplishments, a kind of suicide (there was also