inspo/dialogue

“You wanted the kids. You wanted this life.”

“You didn’t?”

“If it had been up to me, we’d be devoted to service. You wouldn’t be a housewife, and I damn sure wouldn’t be giving sermons to bankers and the bridge club.”

“You’re saying that I’m the one who dragged you down? That you’re the one who sacrificed? That you’re doing me a favor with this marriage?”

“At this point? Yes. That is what I think. If you want to know why, take a look at yourself in the goddamned mirror.”

It was the cruelest thing he’d ever said.

“That hurts me,” she said quietly, “but not as much as you wish it did.”

“I—apologize.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea who you married.”

The Belsons are coming to our house for a barbecue, and I’m making a pie with Peggy, our stepmother since last year. Outside the kitchen window Bradley pushes my stepsisters, Sheila and Meg, on the tire swing. Peggy keeps looking out there like she’s nervous. Dad’s beside her, chopping onions for burgers.

“He’s pushing them awfully hard,” Peggy says.

Dad looks out and so do I. Sheila and Meg are six and seven years old, Peggy’s daughters from her first marriage. Dad smiles. “Brad’s good with kids,” he says, kneading the chopped meat.

“That’s not what I said.”

Dad is quiet. I stare at my blob of crust. “What do you want me to do?” he says.

Peggy laughs. “Nothing, I guess.” She dumps her flour and sugar mix over a pile of apple slices. “If I have to tell you, then nothing.”

“He is. Great American Artistitis,” Phoebe Delmar said. “Ever bigger. Ever louder. Jostling for the highest perch in the hegemony. You don’t think that’s some sort of sickness that befalls men when they try to do art in this country? Tell me, why did Lotto write a war play? Because works about war always trump works about emotions, even if the smaller, more domestic plays are better written, smarter, more interesting. The war stories are the ones that get the prizes. But your husband’s voice is strongest when he speaks most quietly and clearly.”

She looked at Mathilde’s face and took a step back, and said, “Whoa.”

I couldn’t make a decision and she felt it; I was afraid, in fact, that she was betting on that and her calm was due to a calculation. I asked her affectionately, “Do you say that because you think you can’t act otherwise? That you don’t have a choice? There’s always a remedy, at least greater harm can be avoided. You’ve been his lover, right?” I saw her blush violently. “That concerns me alone.” So I lost control again. “Shameless!” I said. “Aren’t you ashamed of speaking like that?” “No,” she answered firmly. “And whatever my response, it wouldn’t change anything. You can impose your will on me, even for a few months; you can shut me in a convent or throw me out of the house. You have full rights, and I will obey you. Those are the relations between you and me. The rest concerns me alone.” Annihilated by that coldness, I replied, “So morality has no importance for you?” She was silent for a moment, then said softly, “Oh, I reflect a lot, believe me. I ask myself constantly what’s good and what’s evil. You always accuse me of being cynical, cold, but it’s not so. It’s not true. I’m different from you, that’s all. I’ve said to you many times: you are able to rely on conventional models of good and evil. You’re luckier. Whereas I need to review them according to my judgment before accepting them.” “But what can your judgment be, at twenty?” I exclaimed angrily. “You have to rely on those who have experience, submit.” She smiled. “If things were like that, nothing would ever change, everything would be transmitted intact from generation to generation, without improving, slaves would still be sold in the square, don’t you think? It’s precisely now that I can rebel. At forty, when I’m old, I won’t be able to do much, I’ll want to stay comfortable.” I was about to say that, on the contrary, it’s precisely at forty that one rebels, but I don’t know if it’s true, and then Mirella is so much more educated than I am, she always cites names and books that say I’m wrong. “You’re not religious, Mirella?” I asked her instead.

"Only guy I know who still owns a beeper."

McRae looked up over his half-moons with a wide-open, undimmed enthusiasm that made even his gentlest son fear for him.

"Really? A lot of the guys at work have 'em."

I asked after Arthur Mitchell.

‘He and his wife live in Perth,’ I was told. ‘With their daughters.’

‘How are they?’ I asked.

A long silence.

‘Nobody here has been in touch with them for years.’

The silence continued another moment or two, the distance between these people and Arthur Mitchell filling the room.

‘Who farms there now?’ I asked.

In retrospect, the trip to the city had been a ridiculous idea. After all, the beginning of the beginning of the end had started on a trip to New York. On the train, he tried to engage Miranda with complaints about the departmental budget cuts, but all she wanted to talk about was this wonderful Wittgenstein she was learning about in her college course. ‘“Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? In use it lives. Is it there that it has living breath within it? Or is the use its breath?”’ she said, an eager sheen in her eye. ‘Well?’

‘I didn’t think I needed to respond,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have to do with real life at all.’

‘Maybe when you say you didn’t think you needed to respond, you didn’t need to. Maybe I needed you to respond.’

‘Is this still philosophy or do you just talk like that now?’

‘Jesus, Bill.’

‘What?’ He looked at her looking out the window. From the side, her lips were two red jelly beans. He could absolutely bite them. This was real life: lips like jelly beans! Historical facts! He was a man of events, not ideas, a historian, a knower, not a philosopher. ‘We’ll be there soon,’ he said.

‘When is soon?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she said. ‘When you imagine soon, the word soon, what do you see in your mind? When is it?’

‘I feel like I can’t say anything without it becoming a fucking discussion anymore,’ he said.

‘Lucky we’re going to a play then,’ she said. They didn’t talk for the rest of the ride.

'Yeah, yeah, I know. But say I hadn't seen it and I said to you, "I haven't seen Reservoir Dogs yet" , what would you think?'

'I'd think, you're a sick man. And I'd feel sorry for you.'

'No, but would you think, from that one sentence, that I was going to see it?'

'I'd hope you were, yeah, otherwise I would have to say the you're not a friend of mine.'

'No, but—'

'I'm sorry, Rob, but I'm struggling here. I don't understand any part of this conversation. You're asking me what I'd think if you told me that you hadn't seen a film that you've seen. What am I supposed to say?'

'Just listen to me. If I said to you—'

—'"I haven't seen Reservoir Dogs yet," yeah, yeah, I hear you—'

'Would you ... would you get the impression that I wanted to see it?'

Well ... you couldn't have been desperate, otherwise you'd have already gone.'

'Exactly. We went first night, didn't we?'

'But the word "yet" ... yeah, I'd get the impression that you wanted to see it. Otherwise you'd say you didn't fancy it much.'

'But in your opinion, would I definitely go?'

[...] Not long ago, one of my former undergraduate workshop students came to visit, and I took him on a walk in my neighborhood. Jeff is a skilled, ambitious young person, gaga over Pynchon's critique of technology and capitalism, and teetering between pursuing a Ph.D in English and trying his hand at fiction. On our walk I ranted at him. I said that I too had once been seduced by critical theory's promise of a life unco-opted by the System, but that after my initial seduction I came to see that university tenure itself--the half-million-dollar TIAA-CREF account in your name, the state-of-the-art computer supplied to you at a university discount by the Apple Corporation for the composition of your "subversive" monographs--is the means by which the System co-opts the critical theorist. I said that fiction is refuge, not agency.

Then we passed a delicious trash pile, and I pulled from it a paint- and plaster-spattered wooden chair with a broken seat and found a scrap of two-by-four to knock the bigger clumps of plaster off. It was grubby work. Jeff said: "This is what my life will be like if I write fiction?"