The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
to stay, which I still appreciate. Instead, after we drained our beers, he asked
me how soon I was leaving.
“As soon as I can load my car, I think.”
“Come by for dinner on Friday?” he asked, looking at me out of the corners
of his eyes, as though afraid I would say no. “Donna would love to say
good-bye.”
“Sure. Sounds great.”
and it was—great, that is. They treated me like a son, and the send-off
dinner felt like I was leaving home. Donna cried, Art and I drank too much,
and Austell re-created Lincoln Common’s only Revolutionary War battle
using olive pits and corn kernels. The Rolens’ daughter, Dana, was up from
New York for the weekend, and I saw that she had inherited her father’s long
face, his gentle charm, and his uncanny and unlearned ability to see and bring
out the best in other people. It’s a rare and enviable quality.
Dana and I have been out a couple of times since I’ve been back in Brooklyn,
holed up in my childhood room. From the window I can see the same
vista of scrubby park grass, street, and the corner of Grand Army Plaza that I
saw growing up. Prone on my bed with my head at just the right angle, I can
see the top corner of the arch, just like my uncle Sean could when he had this
room. My mother and I both regressed pretty much instantly to the roles we
had when I was sixteen—she asks me where I’m going, and I grunt; I ask her
when dinner’s going to be ready, and she growls—both because it’s easiest
and because it somehow comforts us, because, like every time I go home, I
always think it might be the last time I really “go home.”
My sister-in-law, Anna, seems worried that I’ll somehow contaminate my
nephew into a do-nothing ex-journalist slacker just by playing with him in
the wrong way. If that kid makes it to eighteen without breakdowns or serious
chemical dependencies, he’ll be absolutely insufferable.
And Art and I have been talking about where I should go next, though I
feel no particular urgency about it. Maybe this is my last extended winter
vacation. The break between semesters at Wickenden lasted more than six
weeks—an unrectified holdover from the energy crisis in the late seventies,
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