The visit with Edwina to Bartlett house became an undercurrent that troubled Will’s sleep. He woke in the night and prowled around his apartment, looking out the windows into the streets below. After hours, no one in the club on the corner, only an occasional car. Sergeant Lou DeChris leaning against a lamppost smoking, his collar turned up. Will squinted. Not DeChris. Someone else driven from bed by insomnia. Someone waiting for a ride that wasn’t coming, for a bed that wasn’t available, for someone to sleep with. Maybe I should invite him up. Maybe I should invite Doug to have coffee tomorrow. It’s been a couple of days since he treated me to an afternoon at his club. I should thank the man, if only with a cup of Howard’s best espresso or better yet house coffee, considering my finances. A car approached the man standing under the streetlight and he began to run. The car sped up and disappeared around the corner. The man stopped running. Apparently, Will thought, not every threat is real.
     In the morning Will called Doug at his office and was surprised at how quickly Doug said yes, a cup of coffee sounded like just the right thing. He’d take a mid-afternoon break, maybe just take off for the day.
     Will waited in front of his building, watching Doug approach, reminded of the first time he met the man. Emmy was excited to have them meet. “I know you’ll like each other. Doug’s really very nice. A gentleman. And what’s not to like about you?” She had patted his arm like a mother. Suddenly, she was a stranger making gestures out of character, or out of time. Don’t do that. Things like that, going around patting people on the arm when you’re old, after I’m gone. He almost said it aloud before he stopped, struck by her expectant, anxious eyes. She was just nervous and here he was superimposing an image of his own mother and aunties and childish powerlessness. Doug was walking toward them up this same street. It was all rain and umbrellas then. Will and Emmy were squeezed together beneath the overhang of the doorway. Doug was casual in his stroll, protected by a substantial umbrella. Made to last. The kind that are never left behind in the bathtub, after a party.
     Today, there was no hint of rain. A steady sun and high white clouds. If Howard had outside tables, this would have been a good day for them.
     “Hey, Howard. We’ll take ours outside,” Will joked as they entered the cafe.
     Howard grunted. “You’ll sit on the curb, if you do. You must be the tenth wiseguy to come in here today and subtly suggest that I should have tables out there.” He gestured with his head toward the sidewalk and smiled. “What’ll you and your friend have, Will?”
     “House.”
     “Room for cream?”
     “A little. I’ve got to start treating my stomach better.”
     “You?”
     “No. No cream, thanks.”
     Will steered Doug away from the couch toward a booth along the wall. “That couch may look inviting, but the springs are unpredictable,” he said.
     Seated, sipping their coffee, the two men did not look at each other. Doug initiated conversation. “Know much about Buddhism, Will? Some of those monks can do superhuman things. They can withstand great pain, fire. They can sit, naked in the snow and still cause steam to rise from a wet robe when it is placed on their bodies. They do it by raising the temperature of their bodies. That’s self-control. I’ve been interested in the process of controlling extremes since I was a teenager. I learned how to meditate and control my own impulses. That and psychotherapy can do wonders for a boy like I was.” Doug took a drink of his coffee and met Will’s eyes over the cup. As he set the cup down, he turned the subject away from himself. “What was it like, growing up in Providence?” Doug asked.
     “I remember the ocean, of course. As a boy, I thought the ocean was a long way away. Almost the whole city was between our house on the West Side and the Atlantic. We had a house, not an apartment. Our neighborhood wasn’t exactly middle class, but it was getting there. Dad was a union man dockworker and Mom sometimes worked in a real estate office. Not selling, she was a secretary. She would have gone to school, if there had been the money in her family. She read constantly. Everything, but especially history.” As Will talked he realized that he was only talking about geography and generalities, not about his childhood, not about his grandfather, the odd immigrant who embarrassed his grandson by losing his English in front of Will’s young friends.
     “How about a stroll along the waterfront?” Doug suggested. “I think I’d like to stretch my legs and the coffee is gone.”

     They walked through clouds of pigeons and past men in frayed suits, faces covered with a section of the news, blotting out the sun. They dodged bicyclists and joggers who smiled grimly at their pedestrian pace.
     They stopped and gazed down into the waters of the Willamette, leaning their forearms on the concrete seawall. Will remembered Emmy’s comment one afternoon when they were strolling the banks of the river, “It should be a riverwall, not a seawall. Do you see a sea? It’s a river.” He had teased her about being too literal minded.
     “You know about my camp for boys don’t you, Will?” Doug asked.
     Will nodded.
     “You should think about becoming involved in it. You’d be good with them. Teach them how to think.”
     “I don’t know,” Will said. He thought about the prospect of trying to engage a bunch of disaffected, privileged white boys in the process of thinking, of teaching them a history that involved classes of people that they assumed didn’t even exist in the “olden” times. What would make them think there were other people, some oblique reference to the masses, to the poor being told to eat cake? What would make these boys want to learn about people who exist only as masses, without names, without faces?
     “Or as a mentor, if you don’t want to teach. You know, a mentor can save a kid’s life. If Frank hadn’t seen where I was headed and turned me around, I cannot say what might have happened to me.”
     “Who is Frank?” Will’s attention suddenly focused. He was pretty sure it was the man Edwina had mentioned who had been an influence on young Doug Bartlett.
     “My ROTC instructor, but I met him before that. When he was a policeman. He caught me starting a fire. He gave me a good lecture after he put out the fire. He asked me my name and I wouldn’t tell him. He scared the living hell out of me. I thought I was going to jail.” Doug shook his head. “I don’t know why he didn’t arrest me. He was going to take me home, but I was terrified that he would tell my father. Frank knew there was something wrong. He didn’t pry. He let me go. Of course, he followed me. He took an interest in me. He would show up now and then when I was out walking or on my bike and talk to me.”
     “Sounds like an unusual cop,” Will said.
     “What makes you say that? Most of the boys at Camp Horizons are there through police referrals. Those officers really want to help the kids.”
     “Maybe things are different here than they are in other places.” Will knew better. He had seen the way the street kids were treated. It wasn’t here that was different–not in a physical sense.
     On impulse, Will invited Doug to share dinner with him. “I’ve got a couple of pork chops and enough greens to make a salad.”
     “I’d like that, but you must let me buy some wine. There is a wine merchant on the corner over there.” Doug pointed across the park to the other side of the street.

     Back at Will’s, the wine uncorked and breathing, Doug helped Will with the salad. “I actually cook for myself quite a lot. You’re surprised aren’t you?”
     “I have to admit I am.”
     “Even rich people learn how to take care of themselves sometimes. You should cut us a little more slack, Will Adelhardt, professor of politics.”
     “Political history,” Will corrected him. “Present company, excepted, I don’t see much slack to cut with the economic elite.”
     Doug raised his eyebrows, “Really?”
     “Never mind. I apologize. Let’s not go down that road tonight.”
     “Radishes would set this off well. Do you have any?” Doug said.
     Will was relieved. He retrieved a bunch of radishes from the crisper and handed them to Doug. “They’ll need washing.”

     “I’m the one who should apologize,” Doug said when they were seated at the table. He poured the wine and wiped the rim of the bottle with his napkin.
     “You mentioned earlier,” Will ventured, “that Frank caught you starting a fire. Did you do that often?”
     “No.”
     “I’m sorry. It isn’t my business. I was thinking about what I used to do as a kid. Stealing hubcaps, mostly.”
     “Hubcaps? What did you do with them?” Doug asked.
     “Tried to sell them. Fortunately, I wasn’t much of a salesman. Besides, it was the thrill, not the sale. I gave it up about the time Anna Jordan started paying attention to me,” Will said.
     Doug pushed his plate away. “That’s it for me.” He topped their glasses.
     Will cleared the table. Before he sat down again, he asked Doug if he would like to listen to some music. “How about some old country? I have the Carter Family?”
     “I don’t know that I’ve ever listened to them. I didn’t really listen to Country Music until the eighties.”
     You and everybody else, Will thought. “I prefer the old stuff,” he said and set the needle down.
     They allowed the music to take over for a while, sipped their wine and Will opened a window to let the evening breeze lift the stale air in the apartment.
     The last chords of “Will the Circle be Unbroken” faded, the album ended.
     “After the Storm, I had a pretty bad time of it. With Wesley off in the military and then not coming back from Vietnam. There was all this, this huge,” Doug gestured with his hands describing a circle, “elephant. Isn’t that what they say now. The elephant in the room that no one talks about. My father and I had a herd of elephants one for each room. Things would just build up inside me. I was always about to explode.” Doug took a drink of wine.
     Will waited. After a moment or two, his guest resumed.
      “You do have to understand that for me fire was a living thing. I know you hear people say that, but most of them don’t know. Maybe none of them really know. I do admit that I sometimes, sometimes am caught by a memory of flames running along a floor and flowing upward distorting and reshaping themselves and everything in their path and I lose, just for a moment, my hold on desire. That’s what it is, you know, desire. Anyway, that’s over. All that belongs to another time. Connie and Frank are my family now. More wine? There, that’s it for the Opus,” he said shaking out the last drops.