Dupont Circle Trade cloth - 2001

Details

• Title Dupont Circle
• Author Kafka-Gibbons, Paul
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 256
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston
• Date 2001-05-11
• ISBN 9780395869321

The Still Point of the Turning World

Jonathan Allard walks toward the fountain at the center of Dupont Circle and, Jon has always thought, of the capital itself. Jon’s theory that Dupont Circle is a paradise in the heart of the city and the nation goes this way: In Dupont Circle poor meets rich, old meets young, gay meets straight, native meets new arrival, and the peoples, styles, and languages all squish together to form America. Love begins here during morning rush hour with a glance. At midday, political and religious evangelists stop passersby with a few words, a petition, a holy book. In the afternoon, solo figures pursue venture capital and real estate deals using tiny phones. In the evening, dogs approach or snub one another. People find good food nearby, designer and regular ice cream, coffee simple or embellished, newsstands, movie theaters with smallish screens. All of this, in Jon’s eyes, is persuasive.
But what conclusively distinguishes Dupont Circle from its Parisian ancestors and Washington cousins are the dozen bookstores within a few minutes’ walk. Bookstores enough to gladden any newly published author’s heart. Bookstores chain and independent, specialty and general; large stores inventoried via satellite and corporate projection, small stores inventoried according to individual whim. Bookstores filled with thrillers and self-help books that sell like hotcakes, and bookstores obstinately maintaining law, philosophy, literature, and social history collections. Stores where books are as surprised to find themselves rubbing up against each other as the people who crisscross great Dupont Circle itself, queer theory thrust into a briefcase alongside military biography, genetics text squeezed into the same well-worn backpack with epistolary love story.
Dupont Circle, Jon maintains to friends when they complain that the place has become commercialized, gentrified, Metro-station dominated, is still perfect.
Y He settles on one of Dupont Circle’s inner row of benches. The fountain in front of him resembles a flying saucer, held aloft by two Greek women in flowing robes and one scantily clad Greek man blowing on a conch shell. Water pours from the saucer in a silky curtain into the basin below.
Jon scans the crosswalks to the north and east for his husband, Peter, and their little girl, Nita. Jon knows he has five minutes, Peter punctual with a self-righteousness Jon finds, after nine years, overly emphatic. Peter will, as always, wear that expression that says, Yes, I’m exactly on time once again. Jon himself is often late for dinner parties he and Peter are hosting, or bike rides with his training buddies, or even, once or twice a semester, seminars he is teaching. Jon is always sorry and promises to try harder.
Peter and Nita will arrive from either of two directions. Northwest lie Lambda Rising, Kramerbooks, Kulturas Books, and Jon’s sister Valerie’s beautiful, sunless house on Decatur Street, where Valerie lives with her eight-week-old, Sam. Nita, a big seven-year- old, is Valerie’s first child. Jon and Peter have raised Nita since she was a baby, when Valerie once again became an inpatient at Chestnut Lodge in Rockville. Peter may have taken Nita to see Valerie and Sam. Nita needs to get to know her baby brother. It is possibly only a matter of weeks before baby Sam comes to live in Peter and Jon’s Church Street row house. If they come from Valerie’s, Peter and Nita will appear on Connecticut, among the crowd emerging from the Q Street Metro exit, crossing from coffee corner toward the necklacepod trees.
On the other hand, Peter may have skipped Valerie’s — who can blame Peter for shying away from Jon’s sister without Jon along to help? Peter may have gone to Bailey’s, Jon’s father’s house, just about the last of the lovely patrician townhouses on O Street not yet converted to condos, offices, or stores. On Friday afternoons, Bailey and Nita often bake cookies and play gin rummy, while Peter slips around the corner to Second Story Books, or upstairs to Bailey’s own library to daydream, nap, read, or perhaps even write a word or two in his current notebook. If they come from Bailey’s, Peter and Nita will appear from the west, by the drugstore or the elliptically curved office building. Jon scans both lines of approach. He waits for the tulips to open.
Y Whereas a moment before Jon was content, sunning, his legs stretched in front of him, suddenly he is aware of how lonely he has been. Nita spots him and comes running, Peter almost keeping pace, his chin up as if to counterbalance the downward tilt of his long torso. Jon lifts Nita, and kisses her. “How,” Jon asks them, as if it’s been weeks, not hours, “goes?” “We made cookies,” Nita reports. “I beat Grandpa five games to two.” “We had a nice afternoon,” Peter says.
“Cookies?” “Oatmealllll chocolate chip,” Nita says, pillowing her head on Jon’s shoulder.
“I’ll just try one now,” Jon says, reaching into the bag Peter carries. He munches and lugs Nita off toward home. “What did you do in school?” “We practiced minuses with checkers. Ms. Schwartz read us Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Bad Table-Manners Cure. We had mac-and-cheese for lunch. We played Bombardment outside. We did Quiet Drawing. We got New Words.” And on and on, through the day, omitting no part of her program. Ms. Schwartz is the sort of elementary school teacher adored by all. She never raises her voice. She is not large of stature, and she has bangs. The worst troublemakers, those who reduced the first-grade teacher to tears, reform instantly when they reach the second grade, so potent is Ms. Schwartz’s magic. “We made pipe-cleaner art. I made Voltaire. I want to put him in The Gallery, for five dollars.” Nita takes after Peter. She loves nothing more than telling her whole story and selling her art. She has her own gallery space in Peter’s home office and, of course, a Web site. Peter helps Nita price her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and books. Voltaire, the tawny tomcat, is often Nita’s subject. Relatives and friends regularly buy her work. Peter, a novelist himself, insists this whole process is vocational training.
“Bailey got a call from a second-year,” Peter says.
“Does he sound all right?” “It’s a woman.” “Oh,” Jon says, setting Nita down and taking her hand to cross to P Street. He and Peter decided that Bailey could use a student in the house, currently occupied by only Bailey himself. Bailey, now sixty-six, has long suggested that there should be other occupants, or that he should sell the place. His children and grandchildren all want the house to stay just as it is, with him inside it. Jon assumed Bailey would find a man. A young woman living in the house with his father disturbs him.
“I don’t think Caroline would object,” Peter says.
“She’d be all for it,” Jon says. His mother has been dead for eight years. “What did Bailey tell you about her?” “Louisa. He says she sounds very businesslike and responsible. She’s an early riser. They’re meeting tomorrow.”

Copyright © 2001 by Paul Kafka-Gibbons