Spatial Relations

Magnify

My widowed friend Olivia often talked about her son, a talented Portland musician ten years older than me. He made the trip back to see his mother more frequently than most married sons, with his flutes, violin, and sax stowed in the trunk of his red Prelude. Over the course of a week or so back home in Oakland he’d play Bach duets with her, fix the basement plumbing, help her lug potting soil or fruit trees home from the nearby nursery to add to what was already a lush backyard garden. I was intrigued hearing the details of his continually solid performance career, but Adam’s turbulent marriage was a saga almost impossible to follow, so I didn’t try hard to track what his mother told me over the months or years.

“What a challenge for them!” Olivia proclaimed cheerfully, as Adam and his wife underwent yet another round of counseling with a new therapist. Her clipped British accent, fully intact despite her living in the Bay Area most of her adult life, made almost any incident she described sound a little like a scene from a Mary Poppins movie.

“What a challenge for him!” she said on another occasion, after Adam called to report that his wife had thrown their expensive wedding plates one by one at the wall behind him before fleeing to a hotel. What a challenge, I thought privately, to be raised by a mother who describes everything you’re going through as a challenge. If my entire family and the cat perished in a tsunami I feared Olivia might respond in a similar way. After a few more “challenges,” the perpetually beleaguered Adam landed at her house for an entire month one summer, a divorce underway, his music gigs on temporary hold.

“Do come join us for dinner!” Olivia said brightly on the phone one evening just after he arrived. “Adam’s down in the dumps, and he doesn’t believe I have any friends his age. You’ll like him, I think.”

Though Olivia’s motives are often known only to her, this particular invitation didn’t really sound like a fix-up, just a mercy mission of sorts. And my friend is a quietly spectacular cook. So off I went on a humid August night, irises and a bottle of white wine beside me on the car seat, looking forward to what I knew would be a delicious supper on Olivia’s patio.