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“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
[...] Things like this had been happening nearly every day since he came home from the hospital. First there had been the discovery that he’d left his silver fountain pen behind, in the locker beside his hospital bed, and Jean had to make a special trip back to get it from the nurses. Then on the second or third day, when he’d insisted on helping with the housework, he had shaken the dust mop out the window so hard that the head of the thing fell off, five stories down into the courtyard, and left him absurdly shaking the naked stick over the windowsill. And there was the time he’d let the bathroom sink overflow, and the time he’d split the side of Mike’s wagon wide open trying to nail the wheel back in place, and the terrible morning when he’d not only cut his thumb on the unwinding strip of a coffee can but spilled the coffee all over the floor. At first Jean had laughed about it (“Poor darling, you’re just out of touch with things, aren’t you?”) but lately her reactions had alternated between elaborate kindliness and tight-lipped silence, and he didn’t know which was worse. How, exactly, could he tell her about this? A pleasant little apology was out of the question; he absolutely could not say “Sorry, darling, I broke one of the cups,” and expect to retain a shred of dignity. But what else was there to say?
lmao
Dan took up cigars that summer, always carrying a cluster of them in his shirt pocket, chewing and smoking them all day as he bent over his work. It seemed to me that he didn’t really enjoy them much—they sometimes drove him into coughing fits—but it was as if they were a necessary part of his preparation for the thick, premature middle age he had assigned himself at twenty-five.
“You know this guy in the office I’ve told you about?” I said to Eileen one night. “The artist? Dan Rosenthal? I think he’s getting into practice for being an old man.”
“Oh? How do you mean?”
“Well, he’s getting so—ah, I can’t explain it. I’m not even sure if I’ve got it right.”
She could seldom explain anything to me about people in her office, either. Our conversations often dissolved into admissions that we weren’t even sure if we had it right, and then there would be silence until a quarrel broke out over something else.
lol
David Clark was neither strong nor handsome, but the bewildered look that had blighted his boyhood was long submerged now in a face that suggested intelligence and humor. For years he had made it a point of honor not to mess around with the girls in the classes he taught. “There isn’t any sport in it,” he would explain to other teachers. “It’s taking unfair advantage. It’s shooting fish in a barrel.” It was shyness too, and a terrible fear of rejection, though he didn’t usually mention those aspects of the matter.
But the whole of that argument had vanished some months ago when he found he could get through a lecture only by letting his gaze go back time and again, like that of a man seeking nourishment, to Miss Andrews in the front row.
just a little bit of inspo
I met Bon on the other side of passport control. We had at last stepped foot on la Gaule, as my father had taught me to call France in his parish school. It was fitting, then, that the airport was named after Charles de Gaulle, the greatest of great Frenchmen in recent memory. The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese. Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily. No matter our nationality, we all become accustomed to the aroma of our own contradictions.
What’s wrong? he said. Are you crying again?
I’m not crying, I sobbed. I’m just so overcome to be home at last.
[...] Oh, Saigon, Pearl of the Orient! Or so it was called, presumably by the French, using a term of endearment that we ourselves had adapted, for there was nothing the people of a small country liked better than to be flattered, so rarely did it happen. But sometimes we were not just the Pearl of the Orient, and sometimes the Pearl of the Orient did not even refer to us. I had heard the Chinese of Hong Kong claim that their port was the Pearl of the Orient, and when I was in the Philippines, the Filipinos insisted that Manila was the Pearl of the Orient. Colonies were a pearl choker adorning the alabaster-white neck of the colonizer. And sometimes a Pearl of the Orient could be a Paris of the Orient as well. The Parisians and the French and just about everyone meant that as a compliment, but it was a backhanded compliment, the only kind a colonizer could give to the colonized. After all, as the Paris of the Orient, Saigon was just a cheap imitation of haute couture.
But it seemed bad manners to bring up these issues when all the Chairman and his committee wanted was to enshrine the beauty of our culture and share it with others, even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgment of one’s cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely needed to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere. Americans knew their culture was ubiquitous, whether burgers or bombs. As for the French, they exported the Parisian Dream, a street show for tourists who went gaga over wine and cheese and accordion music. Mentioning none of this, I volunteered at the meeting’s end for the song-and-dance routines, betting that any hashish-smoking bohemians would be found there. I volunteered Bon for the dancing and singing as well, even though he clearly did not look like a dancer, and he certainly could not be a singer, not after I spoke on his behalf and explained that he was mute. This, too, was Bon’s idea.
I was in no condition to talk about plans or think about them, and yet an hour later there I was thinking as I sat in an RER train car rumbling toward a northern suburb. While I stared out at the grim prison blocks of apartment buildings and tried to hold myself together, I wondered if it was true, if the Eiffel Tower was just a Gallic erection thrusting forth from the supine French body, shooting off bursts of clouds, seen and invisible at the same time.
Was it so obvious that it was not obvious?
Was the French empire simply exposing itself for all to see?
Was the Eiffel Tower any different from the Washington Monument, the white missile erupting from the American capital, foreshadowing all the nuclear missiles buried in silos across the American landscape?
[...]
My neighbor got up and moved to another seat.