|
|
|
To what do you attribute your vast wealth? To your banks, your mines, your vast plantations in tropical countries warming fecundly in the sun? To girls, armies of girls of all ages, fresh fourteen-year-olds at the end of the long table in the Imperial Garden Chinese Restaurant at Cynthia's wedding rehearsal dinner, their dresses and shirts and skirts cotton and lycra, their fingernails colored, laughing, their mothers teary-eyed, is that the source of your wealth, after all? What color car do you drive? What do the seats feel like? What do you find, what would I find, thrusting a finger down behind the seat cushions and rooting around? Do you find these questions offensive? Provocative? Evocative? Would you feel differently if I were asking these questions in person? If I were not asking these questions in person? If I and my son were here wearing our hats against the sun and wearing sunglasses and hardly squinting at all would you feel differently? I never trust anything I only hear on the radio, my cabdriver told me this morning. On the way to work. I'm not sure what he meant by that, exactly. Why would he not trust the poor radio? Poor faithful cloth radio, cloth and plastic, cloth and wood and plastic, heterodynes, variable capacitors, an old piece of paper glued inside the case that no one has looked at in twenty-three years, listing the components, the part numbers, the manufacturer. But this isn't the radio in the cab, can't be, the cab's not that old, so this old wood and cloth radio is I guess somewhere else. The cabdriver sits there at night, or his night whenever that happens, by the old radio in the sitting room, listening to what the radio is saying but not trusting anything that he only hears there. Hears only there. Is trust the source of your vast wealth, then? Would you rather I wouldn't talk anymore about your vast wealth? My son and I? In our hats? Is this bright sun also the source of your wealth? Is it wealth we can share? May I lie there in the sun, next to the boy in his hat, I also in my hat, our hats keeping the eyes shaded, when I have finished asking you my questions and we are drinking our Margaritas? Are Margaritas the source of your vast wealth? Are your girls hungry for love? |
|
|