moving—his low-slung face, his thick hunched shoulders, the choppy gestures of the hand not holding the fork—and the haloed coiffures of his women rhythmically nodding as if in a subdued rapture of agreement and adoration. Myron and I often meet at parties; he is an avid small-talker, “up” on everything and bored by nothing, except possibly his own specialty. Though we have exchanged thousands of words and spent hours pressed together with watery whiskies in one hand and slippery hors d’oeuvres in the other, he has never told me anything about the one subject, bacteria, where he might be truly informative; nor has he ever elicited from me any information on Christian heresies.
In contrast with the sour, quarrelsome atmosphere and deteriorating ceiling of our own kitchen, how happy the Kriegmans appeared in their dining alcove, their multicolored lamp just barely illumining the shadowy walls, which they,like most academic families, have strewn with clumps of eclectic objects—African masks and drums, Carpathian shepherds’ horns, Ethiopian crosses, Soviet balalaikas—displayed as evidence of foreign travel, like the mounted heads of kudus or leopards for another social class, in another time and empire. I envied the Kriegmans their visible bliss, their absolutely snug occupancy of their ecological niche, which came equipped with a tenant couple on the third floor, as a tax break and hedge against burglary, with a summer home on a suitably underdeveloped small Maine island, and with uproariously unsuitable suitors for the daughters—such wastrel, drop-out boy friends (some of whom became husbands) being, I suppose, at our level of conspicuous consumption what yachts and summer “cottages” were to Veblen’s rich. Esther and I, with our second marriage and single child and my relatively shabby job in the backwater of the Divinity School, didn’t fill our niche as snugly as the Kriegmans did theirs, and we didn’t even, unfashionably, put ourselves to the trouble of creating a third-floor apartment, preferring to use these old servant rooms as a storage attic and as Esther’s studio, when one of her ever less frequent painting fits was upon her. In our decade here she had done rather lurid, abstractified views of the rooftops from all of the third-floor windows, in all of the directions of the compass, and thus used up her world. Her painting style had become over the years increasingly violent—great gumboish sweeps of the brush and palette knife, with dribbles of turpentine and unlucky houseflies accepted into the texture. Sue Kriegman’s children’s books, oddly, portrayed families in disarray: sundered by divorce, beset by financial emergency, or comically swept up in a frenetic untidiness, of too many cats and furniture spilling its stuffing, quite unfamiliar to those ofus who visited her impeccably kept home—one street over, though its windows looked into ours.
“So why don’t you?” Esther was asking, still looking to release her tension, to cap the outrage of her boring day, with a fight. For the past few years, beginning as a volunteer and graduating to underpaid assistant, she has been working at a day-care center in another part of the city, four days a week; but this activity only seems to exacerbate her sense of useless vitality, of her life’s being wasted.
“Why don’t I what? I was spying on the Kriegmans, envying them their happiness.”
“That’s the way we look to them, too. Don’t worry about it. All families look great through windows.”
“Cora Kriegman’s a slut,” Richie volunteered.
“What’s a slut?” I asked him.
“Come on, Dad. You know.” He took refuge back in “Gilligan’s Island,” where some kind of reconciliation seemed to be in progress, a mass embracing beneath the stage-set palms. The Pacific sunshine, made of studio lights, cast no shadows.
“Have him to tea,” Esther clarified, “with your niece.”
“Why should I have this creepy
In contrast with the sour, quarrelsome atmosphere and deteriorating ceiling of our own kitchen, how happy the Kriegmans appeared in their dining alcove, their multicolored lamp just barely illumining the shadowy walls, which they,like most academic families, have strewn with clumps of eclectic objects—African masks and drums, Carpathian shepherds’ horns, Ethiopian crosses, Soviet balalaikas—displayed as evidence of foreign travel, like the mounted heads of kudus or leopards for another social class, in another time and empire. I envied the Kriegmans their visible bliss, their absolutely snug occupancy of their ecological niche, which came equipped with a tenant couple on the third floor, as a tax break and hedge against burglary, with a summer home on a suitably underdeveloped small Maine island, and with uproariously unsuitable suitors for the daughters—such wastrel, drop-out boy friends (some of whom became husbands) being, I suppose, at our level of conspicuous consumption what yachts and summer “cottages” were to Veblen’s rich. Esther and I, with our second marriage and single child and my relatively shabby job in the backwater of the Divinity School, didn’t fill our niche as snugly as the Kriegmans did theirs, and we didn’t even, unfashionably, put ourselves to the trouble of creating a third-floor apartment, preferring to use these old servant rooms as a storage attic and as Esther’s studio, when one of her ever less frequent painting fits was upon her. In our decade here she had done rather lurid, abstractified views of the rooftops from all of the third-floor windows, in all of the directions of the compass, and thus used up her world. Her painting style had become over the years increasingly violent—great gumboish sweeps of the brush and palette knife, with dribbles of turpentine and unlucky houseflies accepted into the texture. Sue Kriegman’s children’s books, oddly, portrayed families in disarray: sundered by divorce, beset by financial emergency, or comically swept up in a frenetic untidiness, of too many cats and furniture spilling its stuffing, quite unfamiliar to those ofus who visited her impeccably kept home—one street over, though its windows looked into ours.
“So why don’t you?” Esther was asking, still looking to release her tension, to cap the outrage of her boring day, with a fight. For the past few years, beginning as a volunteer and graduating to underpaid assistant, she has been working at a day-care center in another part of the city, four days a week; but this activity only seems to exacerbate her sense of useless vitality, of her life’s being wasted.
“Why don’t I what? I was spying on the Kriegmans, envying them their happiness.”
“That’s the way we look to them, too. Don’t worry about it. All families look great through windows.”
“Cora Kriegman’s a slut,” Richie volunteered.
“What’s a slut?” I asked him.
“Come on, Dad. You know.” He took refuge back in “Gilligan’s Island,” where some kind of reconciliation seemed to be in progress, a mass embracing beneath the stage-set palms. The Pacific sunshine, made of studio lights, cast no shadows.
“Have him to tea,” Esther clarified, “with your niece.”
“Why should I have this creepy
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