The Name of the World by Denis Johnson Read Free Book Online

Eloise the caterer with her face tilted up, laughing and exhaling a cloud of smoke. Of Flower Cannon I saw only her back and shoulders as she swayed in her gray outfit, wiping down the kitchen counter.
    Now, outside the Italian restaurant, by calling back the scene into my mind’s eye, I managed to conjure one almost exactly like it: a solitary moment in the dark, a warm window…and now, right now, as I puffed experimentally on my big Churchill, the woman herself, Flower Cannon, appeared before me in a cloud of cigar smoke.
    I stood on a pedestrian walkway. The walkway passed between two buildings, a hotel and a boutique. Framed in atall ground-floor office window of the hotel was Flower Cannon. She sat in a swivel chair before a computer console, apparently daydreaming at her task, arching back with a weary air, her right arm limp and distended, dangling a pen.
    In my head I talked to her as much as I did anybody else, as much as Bill the museum man, even more. You, I told her. You act wild and it’s not fake. You have a kind of blessed ignorance. You are California. What do I mean you are California? I asked her. You’re long and your variousness sweeps down to the Pacific Ocean. There’s no reason not to say these things when nobody’s listening.
    Tapping on the glass seemed wrong: I’d only have succeeded in troubling her, probably—a figure in an alley, tapping. On the other hand, that figure was pretty much who I was.
    I went around to the building’s entrance to see if I could find her and say hello. The lobby was polished wood and brass—luxurious, silent. I was alone. Not even a concierge or a night clerk. From the front desk I could see back into the office now, where she sat beside her vague reflection in the window.
    It was somebody else entirely, a woman quite a bit blonder and with a face deeply tanned for this time of year, working late, taking a minute for her thoughts. It wasn’t Flower Cannon.
    I stared at her until a man who appeared to have no function whatsoever here approached me and said, “Sir, we’d rather you didn’t smoke inside the lobby.”
    A light sleet was falling as I came out of the hotel. I stepped backward under the awning and watched out for J.J. I thought about my wife. Whereas before I’d chased away any memories of her, now I found myself catching at what I could, and it was less and less. Anne drank a lot of black coffee. She liked cinnamon-spiced chewing gum. Anne was thin, intelligent, humorous, sweet. She fidgeted. She cleared her throat a lot. She frowned when something struck her as funny. Human stupidity tickled her, she wore the world lightly, and that was important to me. I needed her. In the heights and depths, in the most silly and trivial ways, she was my wife. And now here was Flower Cannon.
    I wouldn’t say I was infatuated. I had noticeable but manageable feelings for her, helpless lustful feelings, and fatherly feelings, and the mild resentful envy of someone no longer young for someone so full of vitality. Feelings not at all different in kind from those I entertained for every young woman in the world—different however in degree; stronger.
    Women had always appeared fair to my eyes. Yes, college girls, and even the high-school girls I once taught. But much of that evaporated when I became a father to my own little girl. Now every woman looked like somebody’s daughter. And after I lost her, they all began to look like my own daughter—to look like Elsie, inhabiting her years, filled with my daughter’s unlived life, Elsie seeking something out of their eyes.
    Curious to say, her name wasn’t Elizabeth, or anything else to do with Elsie. She was Huntley, a name arguably a lot nicer,but as a baby she had a stuffed animal—these days they call them “sleeping animals”—named Elsie by the manufacturers, and labeled Elsie across her bearish belly. In that world, in the baby’s crib, in that epoch, identities flowed back and forth. There weren’t