Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe Read online

  Four

  WHEN I GOT TO THE POOL, I HAD TO TAKE A SHOWER. That was one of the rules. Yeah, rules. I hated taking a shower with a bunch of other guys. I don’t know, I just didn’t like that. You know, some guys liked to talk a lot, like it was a normal thing to be in the shower with a bunch of guys and talking about the teacher you hated or the last movie you saw or the girl you wanted to do something with. Not me, I didn’t have anything to say. Guys in the shower. Not my thing.

  I walked to the pool and sat on the shallow side and put my feet in the water.

  What do you do in a pool when you don’t know how to swim? Learn. I guess that was the answer. I had managed to teach my body to stay afloat on water. Somehow, I’d stumbled on some principal of physics. And the best part of the whole thing was that I’d made the discovery all on my own.

  All on my own. I was in love with that phrase. I wasn’t very good at asking for help, a bad habit I inherited from my father. And anyway, the swimming instructors who called themselves lifeguards sucked. They weren’t all that interested in teaching a skinny fifteen-year-old punk how to swim. They were pretty much interested in girls that had suddenly sprouted breasts. They were obsessed with breasts. That’s the truth. I heard one of the lifeguards talking to one of the other lifeguards as he was supposed to be watching a group of little kids. “A girl is like a tree covered with leaves. You just want to climb up and tear all those leaves off.”

  The other guy laughed. “You’re an asshole,” he said.

  “Nah, I’m a poet,” he said. “A poet of the body.”

  And then they both busted out laughing.

  Yeah, sure, they were budding Walt Whitmans, the two of them. See, the thing about guys is that I didn’t really care to be around them. I mean, guys really made me uncomfortable. I don’t know why, not exactly. I just, I don’t know, I just didn’t belong. I think it embarrassed the hell out of me that I was a guy. And it really depressed me that there was the distinct possibility that I was going to grow up and be like one of those assholes. A girl is like a tree? Yeah, and a guy is about as smart as a piece of dead wood infested with termites. My mom would have said that they were just going through a phase. Pretty soon they would get their brains back. Sure they would.

  Maybe life was just a series of phases—one phase after another after another. Maybe, in a couple of years, I’d be going through the same phase as the eighteen-year-old lifeguards. Not that I really believed in my mom’s phase theory. It didn’t sound like an explanation—it sounded like an excuse. I don’t think my mom got the whole guy thing. I didn’t get the guy thing either. And I was a guy.

  I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself. That sucked. I had serious problems.

  One thing was for sure: there was no way I was going to ask one of those idiots to help me out with my swimming. It was better to be alone and miserable. It was better to drown.

  So I just kept to myself and sort of floated along. Not that I was having fun.

  That’s when I heard his voice, kind of squeaky. “I can teach you how to swim.”

  I moved over to the side of the pool and stood up in the water, squinting into the sunlight. He sat down on the edge of the pool. I looked at him suspiciously. If a guy was offering to teach me how to swim, then for sure he didn’t have a life. Two guys without a life? How much fun could that be?

  I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have any friends.

  He looked at me. Waiting. And then he asked again. “I can teach you how to swim, if you want.”

  I kind of liked his voice. He sounded like he had a cold, you know, like he was about to lose his voice. “You talk funny,” I said.

  “Allergies,” he said.

  “What are you allergic to?”

  “The air,” he said.

  That made me laugh.

  “My name’s Dante,” he said.

  That made me laugh harder. “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay. People laugh at my name.”

  “No, no,” I said. “See, it’s just that my name’s Aristotle.”

  His eyes lit up. I mean, the guy was ready to listen to every word I said.

  “Aristotle,” I repeated.

  Then we both kind of went a little crazy. Laughing.

  “My father’s an English professor,” he said.

  “At least you have an excuse. My father’s a mailman. Aristotle is the English version of my grandfather’s name.” And then I pronounced my grandfather’s name with this really formal Mexican accent, “Aristotiles. And my real first name is Angel.” And then I said it in Spanish, “Angel.”

  “Your name is Angel Aristotle?”

  “Yeah. That’s my real name.”

  We laughed again. We couldn’t stop. I wondered what it was we were laughing about. Was it just our names? Were we laughing because we were relieved? Were we happy? Laughter was another one of life’s mysteries.

  “I used to tell people my name was Dan. I mean, you know, I just dropped two letters. But I stopped doing that. It wasn’t honest. And anyway, I always got found out. And I felt like a liar and an idiot. I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn’t like feeling like that.” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Everyone calls me Ari,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you, Ari.”

  I liked the way he said Nice to meet you, Ari. Like he meant it.

  “Okay,” I said, “teach me how to swim.” I guess I said it like I was doing him a favor. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  Dante was a very precise teacher. He was a real swimmer, understood everything about the movements of arms and legs and breathing, understood how a body functioned while it was in the water. Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life. He was fifteen years old. Who was this guy? He looked a little fragile—but he wasn’t. He was disciplined and tough and knowledgeable and he didn’t pretend to be stupid and ordinary. He was neither of those things.

  He was funny and focused and fierce. I mean the guy could be fierce. And there wasn’t anything mean about him. I didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?

  Dante became one more mystery in a universe full of mysteries.

  All that summer, we swam and read comics and read books and argued about them. Dante had all his father’s old Superman comics. He loved them. He also liked Archie and Veronica. I hated that shit. “It’s not shit,” he said.

  Me, I liked Batman, Spider-Man, and the Incredible Hulk.

  “Way too dark,” Dante said.

  “This from a guy who loves Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

  “That’s different,” he said. “Conrad wrote literature.”

  I was always arguing that comic books were literature too. But literature was very serious business for a guy like Dante. I don’t remember ever winning an argument with him. He was a better debater. He was also a better reader. I read Conrad’s book because of him. When I finished reading it, I told him I hated it. “Except,” I said, “it’s true. The world is a dark place. Conrad’s right about that.”

  “Maybe your world, Ari, but not mine.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

  The truth is, I’d lied to him. I loved the book. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever read. When my father noticed what I was reading, he told me it was one of his favorite books. I wanted to ask him if he’d read it before or after he’d fought in Vietnam. It was no good to ask my father questions. He never answered them.

  I had this idea that Dante read because he liked to read. Me, I read because I didn’t have anything else to do. He analyzed things. I just read them. I have a f
eeling I had to look up more words in the dictionary than he did.

  I was darker than he was. And I’m not just talking about our skin coloring. He told me I had a tragic vision of life. “That’s why you like Spider-Man.”

  “I’m just more Mexican,” I said. “Mexicans are a tragic people.”

  “Maybe so,” he said.

  “You’re the optimistic American.”

  “Is that an insult?”

  “It might be,” I said.

  We laughed. We always laughed.

  We weren’t alike, Dante and I. But we did have a few things in common. For one thing, neither one of us was allowed to watch television during the day. Our parents didn’t like what television did to a boy’s mind. We’d both grown up with lectures that sounded more or less like this: You’re a boy! Get out there and do something! There’s a whole world out there just waiting for you . . .

  Dante and I were the last two boys in America who grew up without television. He asked me one day. “Do you think our parents are right—that there’s a whole world out there waiting just for us?”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  He laughed.

  Then I got this idea. “Let’s ride the bus and see what’s out there.”

  Dante smiled. We both fell in love with riding the bus. Sometimes we rode around on the bus all afternoon. I told Dante, “Rich people don’t ride the bus.”

  “That’s why we like it.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “Are we poor?”

  “No.” Then he smiled. “If we ran away from home, we’d both be poor.”

  I thought that was a very interesting thing to say.

  “Would you ever?” I said. “Run away?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You want me to tell you a secret?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m crazy about my mom and dad.”

  That really made me smile. I’d never heard anyone say that about their parents. I mean, no one was crazy about their parents. Except Dante.

  And then he whispered in my ear. “That lady two seats in front of us. I think she’s having an affair.”

  “How do you know?” I whispered.

  “She took off her wedding band as she got on the bus.”

  I nodded and smiled.

  We made up stories about the other bus riders.

  For all we knew, they were writing stories about us.

  I’d never really been very close to other people. I was pretty much a loner. I’d played basketball and baseball and done the Cub Scout thing, tried the Boy Scout thing—but I always kept my distance from the other boys. I never ever felt like I was a part of their world.

  Boys. I watched them. Studied them.

  In the end, I didn’t find most of the guys that surrounded me very interesting. In fact, I was pretty disgusted.

  Maybe I was a little superior. But I don’t think I was superior. I just didn’t understand how to talk to them, how to be myself around them. Being around other guys didn’t make me feel smarter. Being around guys made me feel stupid and inadequate. It was like they were all a part of this club and I wasn’t a member.

  When I was old enough for Boy Scouts, I told my dad I wasn’t going to do it. I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Give it a year,” my dad said. My dad knew that I sometimes liked to fight. He was always giving me lectures about physical violence. He was trying to keep me away from the gangs at my school. He was trying to keep me from becoming like my brother who wound up in prison. So, because of my brother, whose existence was not even acknowledged, I had to be a good boy scout. That sucked. Why did I have to be a good boy just because I had a bad-boy brother? I hated the way my mom and dad did family math.

  I humored my dad. I gave it a year. I hated it—except that I learned how to do CPR. I mean, I didn’t like the bit about having to breathe into someone else’s mouth. That sort of freaked me out. But for some reason the whole thing fascinated me, how you could get a heart to start again. I didn’t quite understand the science of it. But after I got a patch for learning how to bring someone back to life, I quit. I came home and gave the patch to my dad.

  “I think you’re making a mistake.” That’s all my dad said.

  I’m not going to wind up in the slammer. That’s what I wanted to say. Instead, I just mouthed off. “If you make me go back, I swear I’ll start smoking pot.”

  My father gave me a strange look. “It’s your life,” he said. Like that was really true. And another thing about my father: He didn’t give lectures. Not real ones. Which pissed me off. He wasn’t a mean guy. And he didn’t have a bad temper. He spoke in short sentences: “It’s your life.” “Give it a try.” “You sure you want to do that?” Why couldn’t he just talk? How was I supposed to know him when he didn’t let me? I hated that.

  I got along okay. I had school friends. Sort of. I wasn’t wildly popular. How could I be? In order to be wildly popular you had to make people believe that you were fun and interesting. I just wasn’t that much of a con artist.

  There were a couple of guys I used to hang around with, the Gomez brothers. But they moved away. And there were a couple of girls, Gina Navarro and Susie Byrd, who liked to torment me as a hobby. Girls. They were mysteries too. Everything was a mystery.

  I guess I didn’t have it so bad. Maybe everybody didn’t love me, but I wasn’t one of those kids that everyone hated, either.

  I was good in a fight. So people left me alone.

  I was mostly invisible. I think I liked it that way.

  And then Dante came along.

  Five

  AFTER MY FOURTH SWIMMING LESSON, DANTE INVITED me to go over to his house. He lived less than a block from the swimming pool in a big old house across the street from the park.

  He introduced me to his father, the English professor. I’d never met a Mexican-American man who was an English professor. I didn’t know they existed. And really, he didn’t look like a professor. He was young and handsome and easygoing and it seemed like a part of him was still a boy. He seemed like a man who was in love with being alive. So different from my father, who had always kept his distance from the world. There was a darkness in my father that I didn’t understand. Dante’s father didn’t have any darkness in him. Even his black eyes seemed to be full of light.

  That afternoon, when I met Dante’s father, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and he was sitting on a leather chair in his office, reading a book. I’d never known anyone who actually had an office in his own house.

  Dante walked up to his father and kissed him on the cheek. I would have never done that. Not ever.

  “You didn’t shave this morning, Dad.”

  “It’s summer,” his dad said.

  “That means you don’t have to work.”

  “That means I have to finish writing my book.”

  “Writing a book isn’t work.”

  Dante’s father laughed really hard when he said that. “You have a lot to learn about work.”

  “It’s summer, Dad. I don’t want to hear about work.”

  “You never want to hear about work.”

  Dante didn’t like where the conversation was going so he tried to change the subject. “Are you going to grow a beard?”

  “No.” He laughed. “It’s too hot. And besides, your mother won’t kiss me if I go more than a day without shaving.”

  “Wow, she’s strict.”

  “Yup.”

  “And what would you do without her kisses?”

  He grinned, then looked up at me. “How do you put up with this guy? You must be Ari.”

  “Yes, sir.” I was nervous. I wasn’t used to meeting anybody’s parents. Most of the parents I’d met in my life weren’t all that interested in talking to me.

  He got up from his chair and put his book down. He walked up to me and shook my hand. “I’m Sam,” he said. “Sam Quintana.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Quintana.”

 
; I’d heard that phrase, nice to meet you, a thousand times. When Dante had said it to me, he’d sounded real. But when I said it, I felt stupid and unoriginal. I wanted to hide somewhere.

  “You can call me Sam,” he said.

  “I can’t,” I said. God, I wanted to hide.

  He nodded. “That’s sweet,” he said. “And respectful.”

  The word “sweet” had never passed my father’s lips.

  He gave Dante a look. “The young man has some respect. Maybe you can learn something from him, Dante.”

  “You mean you want me to call you Mr. Quintana?”

  They both kept themselves from laughing. He turned his attention back to me. “How’s the swimming?”

  “Dante’s a good teacher,” I said.

  “Dante’s good at a lot of things. But he’s not very good at cleaning his room. Cleaning a room is too closely related to the word work.”

  Dante shot him a look. “Is that a hint?”

  “You’re quick, Dante. You must get that from your mother.”

  “Don’t be a wiseass, Dad.”

  “What was that word you just used?”

  “Does that word offend you?’

  “It’s not the word. Maybe it’s the attitude.”

  Dante rolled his eyes and sat on his father’s chair. He took off his tennis shoes.

  “Don’t get too comfortable.” He pointed up. “There’s a pig sty up there that has your name on it.”

  It made me smile, the way they got along, the easy and affectionate way they talked to each other as if love between a father and a son was simple and uncomplicated. My mom and I, sometimes the thing we had between us was easy and uncomplicated. Sometimes. But me and my dad, we didn’t have that. I wondered what that would be like, to walk into a room and kiss my father.

  We went upstairs and Dante showed me his room. It was a big room with a high ceiling and wood floors and lots of old windows to let in the light. There was stuff everywhere. Clothes spread all over the floor, a pile of old albums, books scattered around, legal pads with stuff written on them, Polaroid photographs, a couple of cameras, a guitar without any strings, sheet music, and a bulletin board cluttered with notes and pictures.