Work Text:
A Man In His Life by Yehuda Amichai
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
⁂
They don’t look back, having been in London for two days too many. Courtesy of Copley, they rent the most boring Audi they can find and drive East, burning petrol through Essex and meandering up the coast, trying to decide whether three days on a ferry to Norway would be worth enduring. They may have Copley under their thumb, his resources at their disposal, but Andy doesn’t yet trust him to get them through airport security. Flying while staying under the radar would also mean flying separately. They don’t even entertain the thought.
Nicky had fallen asleep somewhere around Colchester, so he’d missed the sign stating the name of whatever seaside town they had ended up in. It had been dark outside when Joe had woken him, and when they piled into a bed and breakfast the receptionist had been blessedly uninterested in them, despite the late hour. They had slept, the kind of sleep that felt more like a blink, then dragged themselves out of bed to catch the end of the complimentary breakfast.
Andy disappears afterward, under the guise of getting some air, taking the car with her. Restless and itching to get his bearings, Nicky makes a mission of doing laundry, throwing their duffle bag full of clothes over his shoulder and heading out to find a laundrette. Nile tags along with him, bored of watching Joe scrutinize the local news in case there’s anything breaking they need to avoid.
It’s a bright, busy morning, people about in the sunshine bleeding through the overcast clouds that followed them from London. The town itself can’t quite decide what it wants to be, caught halfway between a modest tourist destination and a working dock, tour boats moored next to well-kept trawlers.
They find the laundrette around the corner, thankfully barren of people, then take refuge on a bench across the road until the machines are finished. The sea tosses and turns in front of them as they talk, water reflecting the sunlight.
“Have you ever been here, to England?” Nicky asks Nile.
She nods. “Stayed overnight when I was on leave, once. Never left the airport though.”
“We’ve done a poor job of showing you around so far,” Nicky replies, then, “I cannot say it is my favourite place to be.”
He, Joe, and Andy had spent most of the 17th century becoming intimately acquainted with the English Channel, to no fruition. The churn of the water doesn’t make Nicky sick to his stomach anymore, but looking at it still makes grief stick in the back of his throat.
“Yeah, I can imagine,” Nile says, voice solemn. “The weather sucks," she adds.
Nicky laughs thickly. “The weather is terrible.”
Joe isn’t in their room when they return, so Nicky leaves Nile to her own devices and goes to search him out.
He wanders the promenade for a while until he finds him. There are the pedestrians and the traffic, the sky and the sea, and then there’s Joe, like a second sun on Nicky’s horizon. He’s sitting outside a cafe, eating a plate of chips and squinting into the growing heat of the day. Nicky sees his silhouette on the insides of his eyes when he blinks.
Joe notices him and grins, blinding and handsome, pushes the chair opposite him out with his foot so Nicky can sit. Nicky picks it up and drops it down right next to him instead.
“Vinegar?” He asks, nodding at Joe’s chips.
Joe hums in confirmation, and Nicky grimaces but takes one anyways. It’s a shock of salt and acid on his tongue, a taste he can’t exactly describe as good but nevertheless wants to keep eating.
Joe puts his little wooden fork down and touches his thumb to Nicky’s cheek. “You’ve got sunburn,” He says, tired but fond.
Nicky hasn’t looked at him in days, he realises. Properly looked at him, appreciated him. He swallows. “I’ll get sunscreen before we go.”
“No, no. Not for you, at least. Maybe for Andy,” Joe teases, “It’s nice, pretty. You look like a proper tourist.”
Nicky laughs and shakes his head. He knows the real reason Joe likes it, knows his own body well enough to know why. It’s a shame the redness will fade soon, what with the way Joe is looking at him. Nicky tucks their ankles together under the table.
Joe picks up his fork again, and Nicky lets his eyes wander to their surroundings. There’s a woman sitting opposite them, dressed in pharmacist scrubs and feeding a cat pieces of battered fish from her plate. It circles around her chair whenever she stops giving it attention, a master at grifting for scraps. On the pavement next to them people search for early lunch, argue over prices and preferences. Across the road, a teenager is pondering over a bus timetable, hood up despite the sunshine.
Nicky’s eyes turn, as they always do, back to Joe. His centre of gravity. He hasn’t bothered with buttoning his shirt all the way up, collar undone to reveal his sternum. The chain of his necklace disappears under the fabric, and Nicky wants to press his face there, taste the sweat on his skin.
He’s watching the TV through the cafe window, Nicky realises. Football. The third chair at their table, previously unnoticed, is suddenly very empty.
Nicky exhales. It’s worth it, he reminds himself, to be alive. He’s glad of it, for all of it. For the day, for the laundry and the cat and the lunch rush, the teenager trying not to catch the wrong bus. For Andy and Nile and for Joe, especially. It all matters so very much.
It’s intoxicating to witness, he thinks, even though it is ordinary. Joe had told him once, late at night, sat under every star above the Sahara desert, about how astrophysicists claimed that the odds of being alive were incomprehensibly small. He had told Nicky about the improbability of the death of the star that created the solar system, how unlikely it was that the planet that collided with Earth made the moon just so. Every asteroid, every underwater hot spring, every new bacteria and change to the Earth’s orbit, all so exceptional in their occurrence.
The story of it all, Joe had said, whether you thought it coincidence or part of God’s design, was remarkable. A miracle. So miraculous that, in perspective, it was a privilege to be here experiencing anything at all. Even a lackluster seaside town.
It’s a conversation they’ve had many times since. One that never gets old, one that brings Nicky great comfort.
When Nicky contacts Booker, which he knows he inevitably will, knows that despite his own distrust he won’t last a hundred days let alone years, he won’t tell him that his grief is a privilege to endure. Misery is perhaps the one exception. He can only hope Booker will reach his own conclusion, come to his own realisation that the world, for all its pain, is worth staying alive to witness. Nicky hopes that one day his grief won’t be so all-consuming, that it will still be a part of him but will no longer define his decisions. Nicky does a lot of that, hoping.
There’s a jasmine plant climbing up the wall behind them, Nicky notices, all the way to the second-floor window of the cafe. The clean shapes of the petals catch the light, lovely in their simplicity. The symmetry to be found in plants has always pleased Nicky.
He reaches over and picks one, careful to leave the stem long, then leans into Joe’s personal space and feeds the flower through a buttonhole in his shirt. “Here,” He murmurs.
Joe looks down at his shirt lapel and smiles. “Thank you,” He says, earnest.
“Beautiful,” Nicky adds. It’s true, he is.
Joe’s smile melts into something old and comfortable and sincere. He looks at Nicky with warm, familiar eyes. “Thank you,” He says again, “You make me feel it. Have another chip.”
Nicky takes two at once.
Things will be alright, he thinks, hopes, as he chews. For all of them, Booker too. He’s sure of it, has to be. As sure as the press of the pages in the book Joe will tuck his jasmine flower into later, and as sure as the fact that the book will one day be misplaced. As sure as the vow that, in comparison, they will never misplace one another.