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If it came through there might be ten days of excessive politeness and artificial laughter and awkward silences, while they all tried to pretend he wasn’t a stranger. There might be slow sight-seeing tours of London in order to kill whole afternoons; they might want to show him “typically English” things to do, like nibbling fish and chips out of twisted newspaper, or whatever the hell else it was that typically English people did, and there would be repeated expressions of how nice everything was while they all counted the days until it was over.
If it didn’t come through he might never see them again; but then he had resigned himself to that many years ago, when it had mattered a great deal more—when it had, in fact, amounted to an almost unendurable loss.
i just like this phrase
And the next thing, they decided, was to get rid of the cigarettes. It was easy. A few blocks away they met a small, tight-faced boy of about fourteen who led them upstairs to a triple-locked room that was packed to the ceiling with American cigarettes. He was so intimidating in his silence and so impatient to conclude the deal, paying them off from a huge roll of lovely French banknotes, as to suggest that in three or four more years he might be an important figure in the European underworld.
heh
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 compose himself at the different tables, and soon he began to wonder how he must look to casual observers; that, for as long as he could remember, had been one of his most secret, most besetting, least admirable habits of mind. He imagined, as the white wine wore on and on, that he probably looked like a sensitive young man in wry contemplation of youth and love and death—an “interesting” young man—and on that high wave of self-regard he floated home and hit the sack again.
The final day was one of stunted thought and shriveled hope, of depression so thick that all of Paris lay awash and sinking in it while his time ran out.
Back in the Place Pigalle at midnight and drunk again—or more likely feigning drunkenness to himself—he found he was almost broke. He couldn’t afford even the most raucous of middle-aged whores now, and he knew he had probably arranged in his secret heart for this to be so. There was nothing left to do but make his way to the dark part of the city where the Army trucks were parked.
You weren’t really expected to make the first truck; you could even miss the last truck, and nobody would care very much. But those unspoken rules of conduct no longer applied to Paul Colby: he was very likely the only soldier in Europe ever to have spent three days in Paris without getting laid. And he had learned beyond question now that he could no longer attribute his trouble to shyness or awkwardness: it was fear. It was worse than fear: it was cowardice.
oh my god
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 boy, who seemed far from dying to meet him as he peered from hiding and stuck out his tongue.
Would Paul like another bread-and-butter sandwich with his tea? Good. Would he like a drink? Oh, good. And was he sure he wouldn’t stay a while longer and have some sort of scrappy little supper with them—baked beans on toast sort of thing—and spend the night? Because really, there was plenty of room. It was whatever he wished.
He could hardly wait to get out of the house, though he kept assuring himself, on the train back into town, that he hadn’t been rude.
oh god
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 black slacks. I had always loved that outfit because it was vastly becoming, with her long red hair, and also because it seemed to loosen all her joints. She had worn it to the acting class sometimes, and she nearly always wore it on evenings when we’d sit quietly for hours in the San Remo or some other locally famous bar, trying to conquer our uneasiness among young men who slouched and mumbled and squinted with their pale, long-haired girls, whole crowds of them erupting now and then into roars of laughter over matters we were fairly sure we would never understand.
If you’re young enough, there can be exhilaration in pretending to be something you’re not. And if I’d been nimble in vaulting the fence, if I’d been a little hip on the stairs, it was time to be rugged now. Crouching, and with a good deal more force than necessary, I smashed and split those boards over the ringing iron knob of an andiron hauled from the fireplace; then, when they’d been reduced to manageable sticks, I broke each stick in half, or into thirds, one after another, against one straining knee. Some of the lumber had held rows of rusty nails, and Dan said, “Watch those nails,” but I told him without words that I could look out for myself. Hadn’t I done stuff like this all my life? Hadn’t I been a rifleman in the Army? Did he think I’d always been some indoor kind of business-office guy in a white shirt? Hell, there wasn’t much you couldn’t learn in knocking around the world; how else did he think I had won this stunning girl, from whom he seemed almost wholly unable to take his eyes?
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 a nice spring suit, with a rich little feathered hat that had probably been bought for the occasion.
“… Well, but you see we’re the only national organization in the country; our membership is up in the thousands how, and of course each member has to submit proof of professional standing as an artist before we’ll even consider their application, so we’re really a very…” And the deeper she settled into her monologue the farther she allowed her knees to move apart, with a forearm on each one, until the shadowy pouch of her underpants was visible to all guests seated across from her. That was an old failing: she never seemed to realize that if people could see her underpants they might not care what kind of hat she was wearing.
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 done after his marriage fell apart. He assumed he’d be able to find a better place and perhaps even a better life when his book came out, but he was mistaken: though it won general praise, the novel sold so poorly that only a scant, brief trickle of money came in during the whole of its first year in print. By that time Jack had taken to drinking heavily and not writing much—not even doing much of the anonymous, badly paid hackwork that had provided his income for years, though he still managed to do enough of that to meet his alimony payments—and he had begun to see himself, not without a certain literary satisfaction, as a tragic figure.
oh my god lol
Above the fireplace, in a space plainly meant for some heavy old portrait or landscape, there hung instead a small painting on black velvet, in harshly bright colors, showing the face of a circus clown with a melancholy expression; the artist’s signature, so prominently written in white that it might have been the title, read “Starr of Hollywood.” It was the kind of picture you can find on the walls of third-rate bars and lunch counters all over the United States, and in the airless waiting rooms of failing doctors and dentists; it looked so foolishly out of place in this room as to suggest that someone had stuck it there as a joke—but then, so did The Giant Crossword Puzzle Solving Book, which now lay displayed alone on a coffee table that must have cost two thousand dollars.
god
On Monday morning, sore-eyed and jittery from lack of sleep as he drove her back to Edgar Todd’s office, he began to be afraid they would never have such a good time again. All future days and nights might wither under the strain of trying to recapture this first weekend. They would discover unpleasant, unattractive things in each other; they would seek and find small grievances; they would quarrel; they would get bored.
omg stop
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jill said in a light, teasing voice. “Maybe; maybe not. But don’t you think it’s a delightfully wicked idea?”
“I think you’re out of your mind,” Sally told her.
“Oh, I think so too,” she said with an attractive little wrinkling of her nose. “I think Cliff is too. Isn’t that what it means to be in love?”
Later that night, when Jack and Sally were alone, she said, “I don’t even want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it or think about it or anything, okay?”
lol. the superglue idea