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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
“… And then today,” he said, “today everything on the set had to stop dead—cameras, sound, everything—while he took me off in a corner and sat me down to discuss what he called Dramatic Theory, and he asked me if I was familiar with the work of a playwright named George Bernard Shaw. You think anybody’d believe that? You think anybody in America’d believe how dumb the son of a bitch is? Christ’s sake, this year he’s discovered Shaw; three years from now he’ll discover the Communist Party.”
amazing
“My brother and me used to pull the bells every Sunday at home,” Murphy said. “When we was kids, I mean. Used to get half a dollar apiece for it. Son of a bitch, if that don’t sound just the same.”
Listening, they sat smiling shyly at each other. Church bells on misty mornings were things you forgot sometimes, like fragile china cups and women’s hands. When you remembered them you smiled shyly, mostly because you didn’t know what else to do.
The second year in Bronxville she began buying books of poetry all the time and wearing clothes that were thought a little strange for Westchester, and the third year they went through what he later thought of as their quarreling phase—a series of fights so frequent and bitter that when it ended, in the inevitability of mutual exhaustion, they decided they had reached a new maturity, had learned at last to live together as adults. And for the rest of the decade that changed them from nearly forty to nearly fifty they rarely quarreled at all. Perhaps they had not spent as much time together, perhaps they had fewer common interests, but at least they had not quarreled. And at least he had tried; he had always been gentle with her and tried to understand her. Once he had even bought and read, in private, one of those sensible books on menopause, feeling a little foolish about it afterwards, but reassured, because all the cases it described were real neurotic types and none of its clinical dogma could possibly have applied to Alice. And all along, right up until last night, he would have said they had a settled, well-adjusted marriage, imperfect as all marriages, but basically sound. And then quite suddenly it had all fallen away. She was standing in the middle of the living room when he came in, her face strangely white, and her suitcases were standing beside her. “George, I’m all packed. I wanted to be out before you came home because I wanted to avoid a scene. I was going to leave a note.” He sat down on the couch and looked at her, still wearing his hat and holding his briefcase. “Oh, George, you’re not shocked. Please don’t pretend you’re shocked. You know exactly what kind of a marriage we’ve had for the past five—my God, the past ten years.”
lol
“Just a minute, Miss Hennessy, I—” She was almost to the door and he hurried to head her off, nearly colliding with a group of people coming in. “Look—” he began, and then he remembered about the hat and the little flourish he had planned, but it came off badly. “I’d like to buy you a drink, Miss Hennessy—Mary—but I suppose that’s against the rules.”
“Yes it is, Mr. Pollock. That’s very nice of you but I’m late and I’ve got to hurry.”
“Precisely,” he said, stepping around her to block the door and touching her sleeve. “I know you’re late and that’s why I thought perhaps you’d allow me to see you home.” She smiled and drew her sleeve away. “No, I’m sorry, Mr. Pollock, that’s against the rules too. Now, why don’t you go back and finish your—”
His hand slid around her arm and squeezed, tight, and his voice was nearly a shout: “What rules?”
Her eyebrows jumped and the smile was gone. He dropped his hand quickly and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. It’s just that I don’t see why you should object when I’m only trying to be pleasant.”
brutal