Activity

“She’s the opposite of incorrigible. She’s making amends.”

“I don’t want her amends. I want her to disappear.”

“What makes you say things like that, Miles?”

I remember exactly where I was standing when we had that conversation: on the deck of the lakeside Winnetka home Trudy and I had over…

“I prefer ‘screaming,’ ” Alfred said. “Sometimes twice in a week. Sometimes not for a couple of months. Overall… maybe twenty times a year?”

“Do you do it with friends?”

“Most people can’t tolerate it.”

“Family?”

“Zero tolerance. That’s a direct quote.”

“As in, someone used the phras…

The story that I later called A Friendship originated in that mildly depressive state, in Naples, during a week of rain. Of course I knew that I was violating an unwritten agreement between Lila and me, I also knew that she wouldn’t tolerate it. But I thought that if the result was good, in the end…

They were complicated years. The order of the world in which we had grown up was dissolving. The old skills resulting from long study and knowledge of the correct political line suddenly seemed senseless. Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, Communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly be…

“I didn’t want to hurt Dede, Mamma, I love Rino, it happened.”

“It will happen countless more times.”

“It’s not true.”

“Worse for you. It means you’ll love Rino your whole life.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

I said no, I felt only all the absurdity of that verb in the mouth of a child.