Read Online Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth by Edeet Ravel - Free Book Online

which they associated with dire news—though only if they picked up the receiver; I was exempt from the Curse of the Phone. I was therefore the only one who could take calls, and when I wasn’t at home, the rings went unanswered. If I was the one calling from somewhere, I had to use the secret code: ring once, hang up, call back.
    “Hello?” I said bleakly.
    “Yes, hello and hello again. Am I speaking to Miss Malone?”
    “Anthony!” I cried out. Maybe he’d fix everything, find a way to revive the camp. Maybe he was calling with the good news.
    “How are you, Joan?”
    “I just heard about Bakunin. Jean-Marc says we can’t go back. Isn’t there some way?”
    “Alas, I fear not. A good time was had by all, but—life moves on.”
    “I can’t believe it.”
    “Neither can I. I was hoping to see you again, Joan. Are you all right, otherwise?”
    “I guess…” I said reluctantly. “Jean-Marc said you were in New York.”
    “I’m tripping the light fantastic as we speak. Ready to snap my fingers at poetry readings. Seems I’m too late, flower power has taken over.”
    “I know that song! ‘Me and Mamie O’Rourke, Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.’ That’s where the title of that book comes from. You know, Boys and Girls Together .”
    “Ah, yes. The illustrious William Goldman. I came across him only the other week, at a party. At least that’s who he said he was. He may have been an impostor.”
    “Really? You met him?”
    “New York is small, if you exclude the down and out.”
    “How come you’re there?”
    “Ah, who knows, Joan Malone. Who knows why we do the things we do?”
    “I was really counting on going back to Bakunin this summer,” I whined—with Anthony, as with my mother, I could whine as much as I liked. “Now I’ll be moping around in the city, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.”
    “Actually, I need you,” he said. “I need an assistant and you might be just the person, avid reader that you are.”
    “You mean, like a job?” For some reason the first thing that came to my mind was Miss Pride, in Boston Adventure , hiring Sonia Marburg to be her amanuensis—a word I’d had to look up.
    “Yes. Are you interested?”
    “I’m not sure I can do anything.”
    “You can do this. I’ve written a novel, I need you to read it and comment.”
    “Okay, though I don’t really know anything.”
    “I detect a theme here.”
    “I just mean…”
    “I know exactly what you mean—don’t I?” The question began as banter but wavered midway into uncertainty.
    “This call is costing you a fortune,” I said.
    “Is it? Well, money is no object when it comes to friendship. But you’re right, it’s time to say au revoir. I’ll be in touch. Take good care of your mother.”
    “Thanks for calling,” I said awkwardly, or at least that’s how I felt—awkward, inadequate. There was something Anthony wanted from me—cleverness, for example—and I wasn’t up to it.
    Two weeks later, a package from New York arrived in the mail, but it didn’t contain Anthony’s manuscript. Instead, he’d sent me a copy of Middlemarch , bookmarked with a postcard of a sweetly solemn group of Jewish black congregants, circa 1929, photographed in their Saturday best in front of the Moorish Zionist Temple. On the back Anthony had written, in minute print: Alas, the novel has gone up in flames. Following the example of that sad creature Mme Mozart one cold night I tossed whatever paper was at hand into the fire, for a few moments of warmth. I send you instead this cautionary tale, though not as a caution to you, Joan. You would never fail to recognize pretension. Take it easy. Who knows what the summer holds for us all, and especially for you?
    Who knew indeed? Anthony’s hopeful speculation proved to be prescient, for that was the summer I met Rosie.
    My mother was convinced that my continued existence depended on her being in the house when I came home from