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Meaningless? Unspectacular? Nothing very enormous going on there? Well, what you make of it would depend on where you grew up and how life got opened up to youAlan Meisner could not be said to have risen out of nothing; however, remembering him as a little hick obliviously yapping away nonstop in his seat at Ebbets Field, remembering him delivering the dry cleaning through our streets late on a winter afternoon, hatless and in a snow-laden pea jacket, one could easily imagine him destined for something less than the Tournament of Roses
Only after strudel and coffee had capped off a chicken dinner that, what with barely anyone able to stay seated very long in one place to eat it, had required nearly all afternoon to get through; after the kids from Maple got up on the bandstand and sang the Maple Avenue School song; after classmate upon classmate had taken the microphone to say “It’s been a great life” or “I’m proud of all of you”; after people had just about finished tapping one another on the shoulder and falling into one another’s arms; after the ten-member reunion committee stood on the dance floor and held hands while the one-man band played Bob Hope’s theme song, “Thanks for the Memory,” and we applauded in appreciation of all their hard work; after Marvin Lieb, whose father sold my father our Pontiac and offered each of us kids a big cigar to smoke whenever we came to get Marvin from the house, told me about his alimony sac chloe miseries–”A guy takes a leak with more forethought than I gave to my two marriages”–and Julius Pincus, who’d always been the kindest kid and who now, because of tremors resulting from taking the cyclosporin essential to the long-term survival of his transplant, had had to give up his optometry practice, told me ruefully how he’d come by his new kidney–”If a little fourteen-year-old girl didn’t die of a brain hemorrhage last October, I would be dead today”–and after Schrimmer’s tall young wife had said to me, “You’re the class writer, maybe you can explain itWhy are they all called Utty, Dutty, Mutty, and Tutty?”; only after I had shocked Shelly Minskoff, another Daredevil, with a nod of the head when he asked, “Is it true what you said at the mike, you don’t have kids or anything like that?,” only after Shelly had taken my hand in his and said, “Poor Skip,” only then did I discover that Jerry Levov, having arrived late, was among us
I hadn’t even thought to look for himI knew from the Swede that Jerry lived in Florida, but even more to the point, he’d always been such an isolated kid, so little engaged by anything other than his own abstruse interests, that it didn’t seem likely he’d have any more desire now than he’d had then to endure the wisdom of his classmatesBut only minutes after Shelly Minskoff had bid me good-bye, Jerry came bounding over, a big man in a double-breasted blue blazer like my own, but with a chest like a large birdcage, and bald except for a ropelike strand of white hair omega watch orange draped across the crown of his skullHis body had really achieved a strange form: despite the majestic upper torso that had replaced the rolling-pin chest of the gawky boy, he locomoted himself on the same ladderlike legs that had made his the silliest gait in the school, legs no heavier or any shapelier than Olive Oyl’s in the Popeye comic stripThe face I recognized immediately, from those afternoons when my own face was target for its focused animosity, when I used to see it weaving wildly above the Ping-Pong table, crimson with belligerence and lethal intention–yes, the core of that face I could never forget, long-limbed Jerry’s knotted little face, the determined mask of the prowling beast that won’t let you be until you’re driven from your lair, the ferret face that declares, “Don’t talk to me about compromise! I know nothing of compromise!” Now in that face was the obstinacy of a lifetime of smashing the ball back at the other guy’s gulletI could imagine that Jerry had made himself important to people by means different from his brother’s
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Jerry said
“I didn’t expect to see you
“I wouldn’t have thought this was a big enough stage for you,” he said, laughing”I was sure you’d find the sentimentality repellent
“Exactly what I was thinking about you
“You’re somebody who has banished all superfluous sentiments from his lifeNo asinine longings to be home againNo patience for the nonessentialOnly time for what’s indispensableAfter all, what they sit devil wears prada chanel necklace around calling the ‘past’ at these things isn’t a fragment of a fragment of the pastIt’s the past undetonated–nothing is really brought back, nothing
These few sentences telling me what I was, what everything was, would have accounted not merely for four wives but for eight, ten, sixteen of themEveryone’s narcissism is strong at a reunion, but this was an outpouring of another magnitudeJerry’s body may have been divided between the skinny kid and the large man but not the character–he had the character of one big unified thing, coldly accustomed to being listened toWhat an evolution this was, the eccentric boy elaborated into a savagely sure-of-himself manThe original unwieldy impulses appeared to have been brought into a crude harmony with the enormous intelligence and willfulness; the effect was not only of somebody who called the shots and would never dream of doing what he was told but of somebody you could count on to churn things upIt seemed truer even than it had been when we were boys that if Jerry got an idea in his head, however improbable, something big would come of itI could see why I had been infatuated with him as a kid, understood for the first time that my fascination had been not solely with his being the Swede’s brother but with the Swede’s brother’s being so decisively odd, his masculinity so imperfectly socialized compared with the masculinity of the three-letterman
“Why did you come?” Jerry asked
About the cancer scare of the year before, and the impact on chanel tote urogenital function of the ensuing prostate surgery, I said nothing directlyOr rather, said everything that was necessary–and perhaps not merely for myself–when I replied, “Because I’m sixty-twoI figured that of all the forms of bullshit-nostalgia available, this was the one least likely to be without unsettling surprises”You like unsettling surprisesWhy did you come?”
“I happened to be up hereAt the end of the week I had to be up here, so I came Smiling at me, he said, “I don’t think they were expecting their writer to be so laconicI don’t think they were expecting quite so much modesty Keeping in mind what I took to be the spirit of the occasion, when I’d been called up to the microphone near the end of the meal by the MC (Erwin Levine, Children 43> 41 Grandchildren 9, 8, 3, 1, 6 weeks), I’d said only, “I’m Nathan ZuckermanI was vice president of our class in 4B and a member of the prom committeeI have neither child nor grandchild but I did, ten years ago, have a quintuple bypass operation of which I am proud That was the history I gave them, as much as was called for, medical or otherwise–enough to be a little amusing and sit down
“What were you expecting?” I asked JerryThe Weequahic EverymanWhat else? Always behave contrary to their expectationsAlways found a practical method to guarantee your freedom
“I’d say that was a better description of you, JerI found the impractical methodRashness personified, Little Sir Hothead–just went nuts and started screaming when I couldn’t have it my chanel cc logo earrings wa

He got caught in a war he didn’t start, and he fought to keep it all together, and he went downBanal, conven-65 tional–maybe, maybe notPeople could think thatI don’t want to get into judgingMy brother was the best you’re going to get in this country, by a long shot
I was wondering while he spoke if this had been Jerry’s estimate of the Swede while he was alive, if there wasn’t perhaps a touch of mourner’s rethinking here, remorse for a harsher Jerry-like view he might once have held of the handsome older brother, sound, well adjusted, quiet, normal, somebody everybody looked up to, the neighborhood hero to whom the smaller Levov had been endlessly compared while himself evolving into something slightly ersatzThis kindly unjudging judgment of the Swede could well have been a new development in Jerry, compassion just a few hours oldThat can happen when people die–the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and omega speedmaster replica what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admirationIn which estimate lies the greater reality–the uncharitable one permitted us before the funeral, forged, without any claptrap, in the skirmish of daily life, or the one that suffuses us with sadness at the family gathering afterward–even an outsider can’t judgeThe sight of a coffin going into the ground can effect a great change of heart–all at once you find you are not so disappointed in this person who is dead–but what the sight of a coffin does for the mind in its search for the truth, this I don’t profess to know
“My father,” Jerry said, “was one impossible bastardI don’t know how people worked for himWhen they moved to Central Avenue, the first thing he had the movers move was his desk, and the first place he put it was not in the glass-enclosed office but dead center in the middle of the factory floor, so he could keep his eye on everybodyYou can’t imagine the noise out there, old omega the sewing machines whining, the clicking machines pounding, hundreds of machines going all at once, and right in the middle his desk and his telephone and the great man himself
The owner of the glove factory, but he would always sweep his own floors, especially around the cutters, where they cut the leather, because he wanted to see from the size of the scraps who was losing money for himI told him early on to fuck off, but Seymour wasn’t built like meHe had a big, generous nature and with that they really raked him over the coals, all the impossible onesUn-satisfiable father, unsatisfiable wives, and the little murderer herself, the monster daughterThe solid thing he once wasAt Newark Maid he was an absolute, unequivocal successCharmed a lot of people into giving their all for Newark MaidVery adroit businessmanKnew how to cut a glove, knew how to cut a dealHad an in on Seventh Avenue with the fashion peopleThe designers there would tell the guy anythingThat’s how he stayed abreast of the packIn New York, he was always stopping into the vintage gucci bags department stores, shopping the competition, looking for something unique about the other guy’s product, always in the stores taking a look at the leather, stretching the glove, doing everything just the way my old man taught himDid most of the selling himselfHandled all the big house accountsThe lady buyers went nuts for SeymourHe’d come over to New York, take these tough Jewish broads out to dinner–buyers who could make or break you–wine and dine them, and they’d fall head over heels for the guyInstead of him buttering them up, by the end of the evening they’d be buttering him upCome Christmastime they’d be sending my brother the theater tickets and the case of Scotch rather than the other way aroundHe knew how to get the confidence of these people just by being himselfHe’d find out a buyer’s favorite charity, get a ticket to the annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, show up like a movie star in his tuxedo, on the spot make a fat donation to cancer, muscular dystrophy, whatever it was, United Jewish Appeal–next thing Newark Maid had the fendi big accountKnew all the stuff: what colors are going to be next season’s colors, whether the length is going to be up or downAttractive, responsible, hardworking guyA couple of unpleasant strikes in the sixties, a lot of tensionBut his employees are out on the picket line and they see him pull up in the car and the women who sew the gloves start falling all over themselves apologizing for not being at the machinesThey were more loyal to my brother than they were to their unionEverybody loved him, a perfectly decent person who could have escaped stupid guilt foreverNo reason for him to know anything about anything except glovesInstead he is plagued with shame and uncertainty and pain for the rest of his lifeThe incessant questioning of a conscious adulthood was never something that obstructed my brotherHe got the meaning for his life some other wayI don’t mean he was simpleSome people thought he was simple because all his life he was so kindBut Seymour was never that simpleSimple is never that simpleStill, the self-questioning did take some time to reach hermes tas h

“Newark can’t even hold on to its streets? Seymour, get the hell out!” His father’s had become the voice of reason
Merry’s street was just a couple of hundred feet long, squeezed into the triangle between McCarter–where, as always, the heavy truck traffic barreled by night and day–and the ruins of Mulberry StreetMulberry the Swede could recall as a Chinatown slum as long ago as the 1930s, back when the Newark Levovs, Jerry, Seymour, Momma, Poppa, used to file up the narrow stairwell to one of the family restaurants for a chow mein dinner on a Sunday afternoon and, later, driving home to Keer Avenue, his father would tell the boys unbelievable stories about the Mulberry Street “tong wars” of oldThere were no longer stories of oldThere was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a poleThe pole still held up a sign telling you what corner you were onAnd that’s all there was
Above and beyond the roofline of her house, he could see the skyline of commercial Newark half a mile away and those three familiar, comforting words, the most reassuring words in the English language, cascading down the elegantly ornate cliff that was once the focal point of a buzzing downtown–ten stories high the huge, white stark letters heralding fiscal confidence and institutional permanence, civic progress and opportunity and pride, indestructible letters that you could read from the seat of your jetliner chanel classic flap descending from the north toward the international airport: FIRST FIDELITY BANK
That’s what was left, that lieLast, last fidelity bankFrom down on the earth where his daughter now lived at the corner of Columbia and Green–where his daughter lived even worse than her greenhorn great-grandparents had, fresh from steerage, in their Prince Street tenement–you could see a mammoth signboard designed for concealing the truthA sign in which only a madman could believeA sign in a fairy taleThree generations in raptures over AmericaThree generations of becoming one with a peopleAnd now with the fourth it had all come to nothingThe total vandalization of their world
Her room had no window, only a narrow transom over the door that opened onto the unlit hallway, a twenty-foot-long urinal whose decaying plaster walls he wanted to smash apart with his fists the moment he entered the house and smelled itThe hallway led out to the street through a door that had neither lock nor handle, nor glass in the double frameNowhere in her room could he see a faucet or a radiatorHe could not imagine what the toilet was like or where it might be and wondered if the hallway was it for her as well as for the bums who wandered in off the highway or down from Mulberry StreetShe would have lived better than this, far better, if she were one of Dawn’s cattle, in the shed where the herd gathered in the worst weather with the proximity of one another’s carcasses to warm them, chanel cc logo earrings and the rugged coats they grew in winter, and Merry’s mother, even in the sleet, even on an icy, wintry day, up before six carrying hay bales to feed themHe thought of the cattle not at all unhappy out there in the winter and he thought of those two they called the “derelicts,” Dawn’s retired giant, Count, and the old mare Sally, each of them in human years comparable to seventy or seventy-five, who found each other when they were both over the hill and then became inseparable–one would go and the other would follow, doing all the things together that would keep them well and happyIt was fascinating to watch their routine and the wonderful life they hadRemembering how when it was sunny they would stretch out in the sun to warm their hides, he thought, If only she had become an animal
It was beyond understanding, not only how Merry could be living in this hovel like a pariah, not only how Merry could be a fugitive wanted for murder, but how he and Dawn could have been the source of it allHow could their innocent foibles add up to this human being? Had none of this happened, had she stayed at home, finished high school, gone to college, there would have been problems, of course, big problems; she was precocious in her rebellion and there would have been problems even without a war in VietnamShe might have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could beBut she would logo dolce

“Please,” said the Swede’s father, “what these two things have got to do with each other is a mystery to meI don’t know why you people pay good money to go to that trash in the first placeIt’s pure trash–am I right, Counselor?” He looked to Barry for support
“It’s a kind of trash,” Barry said
“Then why do you let it into your lives?”
“It leaks in, MrLevov,” Bill Orcutt said to him pleasantly, “whether we like it or notWhatever is out there leaks inIt’s not the same out there omega automatic seamaster anymore, in case you haven’t heardI come from the late city of NewarkI heard more than I want to hearLook, the Irish ran the city, the Italians ran the city, now let the colored run the cityI got nothing against thatIt’s the colored people’s turn to reach into the till? I wasn’t born yesterdayIn Newark corruption is the name of the gameWhat is new, number one, is race; number two, taxesAdd that to the corruption, there’s your problemSeven dollars and seventy-six centsThat is the tax rate in the miu miu clutch city of NewarkI don’t care how big you are or how small you are, I’m here to tell you that you cannot run a business with those kind of taxesGeneral Electric already moved out in 1953GE, Westinghouse, Breyer’s down on Raymond Boulevard, Celluloid, all left the cityEveryone of them big employers, and before the riots, before the racial hatred, they got outRace is just the icing on the cakeStreets aren’t cleanedBurned-out cars nobody takes awayPeople in abandoned buildingsFires in abandoned gucci indy bag buildingsSchooling nonexistentOn every street corner dropoutsDropouts doing nothingDrop-outs dealing drugsDropouts looking for troubleThe projects–don’t get me started on the projectsEvery kind of disease known to manAs far back as the summer of ’64 I told my son, ‘Seymour, get out’
‘Get out,’ I said, but he won’t listenPaterson goes up, Elizabeth goes up, Jersey City goes upYou got to be blind in both eyes not to see what is nextAnd I told this to Seymour’Newark is the next Watts,’ I sac chloe told him’You heard it here first’ I predicted it in those very wordsDidn’t I, Seymour? Called it practically to the day
“That is true,” the Swede acknowledged
“Manufacturing is finished in NewarkThe riots were just as bad if not worse in Washington, in Los Angeles, in DetroitBut, mark my words, Newark will be the city that never comes backAnd gloves? In America? Kaput
Only my son hangs onFive more years and outside of the government contracts there won’t be a pair of gloves made in balenciaga handbags motorcycle Ameri

He took her to clinics, to psychiatristsThere wasn’t enough he could do for herAnd the reward? Boom! Why does this girl hate her father? This great father, this truly great fatherGood-looking, kind, providing, thinks about nothing really but them, his family– why does she take off after him? That our own ridiculous father should have produced such a brilliant father–and that he should then produce her? Somebody tell me what caused itThe genetic need to separate? For that she has to run from Seymour Levov to Che Guevara? No, noWhat is the poison that caused it, that caused this poor guy to be placed outside his life for the rest of his life? He kept peering in from outside at his own lifeThe struggle of his life was to bury this thingBut could he? How? How could a big, sweet, agreeable putz like my brother be expected to deal with this bomb? One day life started laughing at him and it never let up
That was as far as we got, as much of an earful as I was to hear from Jerry–anything more I wanted to know, I’d have to make up–because just then a small, gray-haired woman in a brown pantsuit came up to introduce herself, and Jerry, not a man equipped by nature to stand around more than five seconds while someone else was getting a third party’s attention, shot me a mock salute and disappeared, and when I went looking for him later, I heard that he’d had to leave, to catch a Newark plane back to Miami
After I’d already written about his brother–which is what I cartier must 21 would do in the months to come: think about the Swede for six, eight, sometimes ten hours at a stretch, exchange my solitude for his, inhabit this person least like myself, disappear into him, day and night try to take the measure of a person of apparent blankness and innocence and simplicity, chart his collapse, make of him, as time wore on, the most important figure of my life–just before I set about to alter names and disguise the most glaring marks of identification, I had the amateur’s impulse to send Jerry a copy of the manuscript to ask what he thoughtIt was an impulse I quashed: I hadn’t been writing and publishing for nearly forty years not to know by now to quash it”That’s not my brother,” he’d tell me, “not in any wayYou’ve misrepresented himMy brother couldn’t think like that, didn’t talk like that,” etc
Yes, by this time Jerry might well have recovered the objectivity that had deserted him directly after the funeral, and with it the old resentment that helped make him the doctor at the hospital every-74 I body was afraid to talk to because he was never wrongAlso, unlike most people whose dear one winds up as a model for the life-drawing class, Jerry Levov would probably be amused rather than outraged by my failure to grasp the Swede’s tragedy the way he didA strong possibility: Jerry’s flipping derisively through my pages and giving me, item by item, the bad news”The wife was nothing like this, the kid was nothing like this–got even my father wrongI 2.55 chanel jumbo won’t talk about what you do with meBut missing my father, man, that’s missing the side of a barnLou Levov was a brute, manThis guy is a pushoverNo, we had something over us light-years away from thatDad on the rampage–laid down the law and that was itNo, nothing bears the slightest resemblance tohere, for instance, giving my brother a mind, awarenessThis guy responds with consciousness to his lossBut my brother is a guy who had cognitive problems–this is nowhere like the mind he hadThis is the mind he didn’t haveChrist, you even give him a mistressPerfectly misjudged, ZuckHow could a big man like you fuck up like this?”
Well, Jerry wouldn’t have gotten much of an argument from me had that turned out to be his reactionI had gone out to Newark and located the abandoned Newark Maid factory on a barren stretch of lower Central AvenueI went out to the Weequa-hic section to look at their house, now in disrepair, and to look at Keer Avenue, a street where it didn’t seem like a good idea to get out of the car and walk up the driveway to the garage where the Swede used to practice his swing in the wintertimeThree black kids were sitting on the front steps eyeing me in the carI explained to them, “A friend of mine used to live here When I got no answer, I added, “Back in the forties And then I drove awayI drove to Morristown to look at Merry’s high school and then on west to Old Rimrock, where I found the big stone house up on Arcady Hill Road where the Seymour Levovs black chanel quilted once had lived as a happy young family; later, down in the village, I drank a cup of coffee at the counter of the new general store (McPherson’s) that had replaced the old general store (Hamlin’s) whose post office the teenage Levov daughter had blown up “to bring the war home to America I went to Elizabeth, where the Swede’s beautiful Dawn was born and raised, and walked around her pleasant neighborhood, the residential Elmora section; I drove by her family’s church, StGenevieve’s, and then headed due east to her father’s neighborhood, the old port on the Elizabeth River, where the Cuban immigrants and their offspring replaced, back in the sixties, the last of the Irish immigrants and their offspringI was able to get the New Jersey Miss America Pageant office to dig up a glossy photo of Mary Dawn Dwyer, age twenty-two, being crowned Miss New Jersey in May of 1949I found another picture of her–in a 1961 number of a Morris County weekly–standing primly before her fireplace mantel in a blazer, a skirt, and a turtleneck sweater, a picture captioned, “MrsLevov, the former Miss New Jersey of 1949, loves living in a 170-year-old home, an environment which she says reflects the values of her family At the Newark Public Library I scanned microfilmed sports pages of the Newark News (expired 1972), looking for accounts and box scores of games in which the Swede had shined for Weequahic High (in extremis 1995) and Upsala College (expired 1995)For the first time in fifty omega speedmaster day-date years I reread the baseball books of John RTunis and at one point even began to think of my book about the Swede as The Kid from Keer Avenue, calling it after Tunis’s 1940 story for boys about the Tomkinsville, Connecticut, orphan whose only fault, as a major leaguer, is a tendency to keep his right shoulder down and his swing up, but a fault, alas, that is provocation enough for the gods to destroy him
Yet despite these efforts and more to uncover what I could about the Swede and his world, I would have been willing to admit that my Swede was not the primary SwedeOf course I was working with traces; of course essentials of what he was to Jerry were gone, expunged from my portrait, things I was ignorant of or I didn’t want; of course the Swede was concentrated differently in my pages from how he’d been concentrated in the fleshBut whether that meant I’d imagined an outright fantastical creature, lacking entirely the unique substantiality of the real thing; whether that meant my conception of the Swede was any more fallacious than the conception held by Jerry (which he wasn’t likely to see as in any way fallacious); whether the Swede and his family came to life in me any less truthfully than in his brother–well, who knows? Who can know? When it comes to illuminating someone with the Swede’s opacity, to understanding those regular guys everybody likes and who go about more or less incognito, it’s up for grabs, it seems to me, as to whose guess is more rigorous than big black bag whos

Welcome to my first blog

To Dawn, who’d been trying for decades to be as tolerant of the Swede’s imperfect parents as he was of her imperfect mother, this was their most inexplicable preoccupation–their most enraging as well (particularly as Dawn knew that, for her adolescent daughter, Sheila had something Dawn didn’t have, that somehow Merry had come to trust the speech therapist in a way she no longer trusted her mother)”Are there no Jewish blonds in the world other than you?” Dawn asked him”It hasn’t anything to do with her appearance,” the Swede explained, “it has to do with Merry
“What does her being Jewish have to do with Merry?”
“I don’t knowShe was the speech therapistThey’re in awe of her,” the Swede said, “because of all she did for Merry
“She wasn’t the child’s mother by any chance–or was she?”
“They know that, darling,” calmly answered the Swede, “but because of the speech therapy, they’ve made her into some kind of magician
And so had he, not so much while she was Merry’s therapist–when he had merely found her composure a curious stimulus to sexual imaginings–but after Merry disappeared and grief absconded with his wife
Thrown violently off his own narrow perch, he felt an intangible need open hugely within him, a need with no bottom to it, and he yielded to a solution so foreign to him that he did not even recognize how improbable it wasIn the quiet, thoughtful woman, who had once made Merry less strange to herself by teaching her how to overcome her word twiggy balenciaga phobias and to control the elaborate circumlo-cutionary devices that, paradoxically, only increased her child’s sense of being out of control, was someone he found himself wanting to incorporate into himselfThe man who had lived correctly within marriage for almost twenty years was determined to be senselessly, worshipfully in loveIt was three months before he could begin to understand that this was no way around anything, and it was Sheila who had to tell himHe hadn’t gotten a romantic mistress–he’d gotten a candid mistressShe sensibly told him what all his adoration of her meant, told him that he was no more himself with her than Dawn was Dawn at the psychiatric clinic, explained to him that he was out to sabotage everything–but he was in such a state that he went on anyway telling her how, when they ran away together to Ponce, she could learn Spanish and teach techniques of speech therapy at the university there, and he could operate the business from his Ponce plant and they could live in a modern hacienda up in the hills, among the palms, above the Caribbean
What she did not tell him about was Merry in her house–after the bombing, Merry hiding in her houseShe told him everything except thatThe candor stopped just where it should have begun
Was everyone’s brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to omega planet ocean watches being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him?
This sense of inadequacy he might once have described to her; he could talk to Sheila, talk about his doubts, his bewilderment–all the serenity in her allowed for that, this magician of a woman who had given Merry the great opportunity that Merry had thrown away, who had supplanted with “a wonderful floating feeling,” according to Merry, half at least of her stutterer’s frustration, the lucid woman whose profession was to give sufferers a second chance, the mistress who knew everything, including how to harbor a murderer
Sheila had been with Merry and she had told him nothing
All the trust between them, like all the happiness he’d ever known (like the killing of Fred Conlon–like everything), had been an accident
She’d been with Merry and said nothing
And said nothing nowThe eagerness with which others spoke seemed, under the peculiar intensity of her gaze, to strike her as a branch of pathologyWhy would anyone say that? She herself was to say nothing all evening, nothing about Linda Lovelace or Richard Nixon or HHaldeman and John Ehrlichman, her advantage over other people being that her head was not filled by what filled everybody else’s headThis way of hers, of lying in wait behind herself, the Swede had once taken to paolo gucci women’s watches be a mark of her superiorityNow he thought, “Icy bitchWhy?” Once she had said to him, “The influence you allow others to have on you, it’s absoluteNothing so captivates you as another person’s needs And he had said, “I think you are describing Sheila Salzman,” and, as always, he was wrong
He thought she was omniscient and all she was was cold
Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyoneThe excision of certain assurances, the last assurances, made him feel as though he had gone in one day from being five to being one hundredIt would give him comfort, he thought, it would help him right then if, of all things, he knew that resting out in the pasture beyond their dinner table was Dawn’s herd, with Count, the big bull, protecting themIf Dawn still had Count, if only CountA relief-filled, realityless moment passed before he realized that of course it would be a comfort to have Count roaming the dark pasture among the cows, because then Merry would be roaming among the guests, here, Merry, in her circus pajamas, leaning up against the back of her father’s chair, whispering into her father’s earOrcutt drinks whiskeyA mischievous intelligence that was utterly harmless–back then unanarchic and childish and well within bounds
Meanwhile he heard himself saying, “Dad, take some more steak,” in what he knew was a hopeless effort–a good son’s ef-357 fort–to get his self-abandoned father to be, if not tranquil, less insistently chagrined over the mens gucci watches inadequacies of the non-Jewish human race
“I’ll tell you who I’ll take some steak for–for this young lady Spearing a slice from the platter that one of the serving girls was holding beside him, he dumped it onto Jessie’s plate; he had taken Jessie on as a full-scale project”Now pick up your knife and fork and eat,” he told her, “you could use some red meatSit up straight,” and, as though she believed he could well resort to violence if she did otherwise, Jessie Orcutt drunkenly mumbled, “I was going to,” but began to fiddle with the meat in such a clumsy way that the Swede feared his father was going to start cutting her food for herAll that crude energy that, try as it might, could not remake the troubled world
“But this is serious business, this children business Having gotten Jessie taking nourishment, he was in a state again about Deep Throat”If that isn’t serious, what is anymore?”
“Dad,” said the Swede, “what Shelly is saying is not that it’s not seriousHe agrees it’s seriousHe’s saying that once you’ve made your case to an adolescent child, you’ve made your case and you can’t then take these kids and lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key
His daughter was an insane murderer hiding on the floor of a room in Newark, his wife had a lover who dry-humped her over the sink in their family kitchen, his ex-mistress had knowingly brought disaster upon his house, and he was trying to propitiate his father with on-the-one-hand-this and louis vuitton jewelry on-the-other-hand-tha

37.AnneR.TheVampireArmand

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