Activity

JACK FIELDS’S FIRST novel took him five years to write, and it left him feeling reasonably proud but exhausted almost to the point of illness. He was thirty-four then, and still living in a dark, wretchedly cheap Greenwich Village cellar that had seemed good enough for holing-up to get his work don…

This tense gathering was what I’d heard Eileen describe on the phone a few times as “our little shipboard soignée”—I didn’t think that word was right but didn’t know enough French to correct her. There was plenty of liquor flowing, but most of it seemed to be going down my mother’s throat. She wore…

Even so, when I brought Dan Rosenthal into the house and upstairs that afternoon, I found I was doing my best to slouch and mumble and squint for him. And Eileen couldn’t have been more helpful if she’d tried: we discovered her reclining on the big studio couch, wearing her black turtleneck sweater…

And it was whatever he wished for the rest of that rapidly darkening afternoon, even after her husband had come home—a drained-looking man in middle age whose hat left a neat ridge around the crown of his flat, well-combed hair, and who ventured almost no conversational openings—and their little bo…

Late in the day he discovered white wine. It salved and dispelled his hangover; it softened the rasp of his anger into an almost pleasant melancholy. It was very nice and dry and mild and he drank a great deal of it, slowly, in one quietly obliging café after another. He found various ways to compo…