computer whiz to my own blessed home? I’ll cope with him in my office, along with the other dirty work.”
“It doesn’t seem to me you did cope, though. You’re acting very annoyed and upset.”
“I am not.”
“His ideas sound more amusing than you seem willing to admit, for some reason.”
“I resent your poking at me about him. I also resent the way he poked me about Verna. He seemed to think I should be doing more for her than I am.”
“Maybe you should. Don’t you think it’s unnatural, hereshe’s been over a year in town and you haven’t once called her up?”
“Edna told me not to. Over the phone. She said the girl had disgraced herself and her family, including me. Including you and Richie, for that matter. Including the Kriegmans and Mrs. Ellicott, you could almost say.”
“Don’t rave, Rog. You don’t care what Edna told you. You’ve never been crazy about Edna.”
“I can’t stand her, to be precise. She was messy and shallow and bossy. And I’m sure her daughter would be the same.”
“What a mean spirit I’m married to,” Esther said. Her green, hyperthyroid eyes had been tipped into glassiness by her last sip of wine. One whole side of her hairdo had collapsed and was falling loopily to her shoulders. “What a cold, play-it-safe bastard.”
I told her quickly, as one cuts short a student who is garrulously bluffing, “My dear, you’ve been looking ever since I came home for an excuse to attack me and I don’t think you’ve quite found it yet. I am not my niece’s keeper. When on earth is dinner?”
Richie, indignant at our quarrel—children take our friendly adult give-and-take all too seriously—punched off the television and said upward, “Yeah, Mom. When’s dinner? I’m starv ing.”
Simultaneously, Pavarotti, in the far-off living room, had exhausted his string of sob stories and automatically clicked off.
For fourteen years we’ve had the same cheap white timer, a wedding present given to us by an old lady in my former parish who didn’t seem to realize that I had disgraced myself into an outer darkness beyond all such homey things. The device had a docile little long-nosed clockface you twisted to the requiredminutes; when the minutes were up, it gave out its flat, furious peal. Looking like one of Shakespeare’s slim transvestites, a bosomless boy in an unravelling gingery-red wig, Esther bowed toward the timer as toward a fellow actor. Dramatically extending one hand, palm up, she announced to her audience of two, “ Voilà. Le meatloof .”
“ O mia cara ,” I said, thinking, Más, más . I love meatloaf; it’s easy to chew.
Her wrist, thrust from her loose sweater, looked thin as a dog’s foreleg. The faintly desperate impudence of this her burlesque of the housewife’s role triggered in me that old enchantment, that fourteen-year-old sense of the space in her vicinity being sacred, charged with electrons agitating to one’s own. Cathexis is, as Freud repeatedly says (where?), never lost, just mislaid, like a one-armed doll lodged among worn, rolled-up carpets and empty picture frames in the attic.
iii
Then a few days later I found myself walking in the steps of Dale Kohler as I imagined them, the afternoon he left my office. The trees held a few leaves less but the weather was otherwise similar, in-and-out, the blue-bottomed clouds twisting and fragmenting as they sailed their sea of air, the American flags shining in the sunny intervals. My route passed fire stations, schools, and other buildings where the public services of the commonwealth and the nation were distributed. I had looked up Verna Ekelof in the phone book, and was somehow astonished to find her there, to see that a girl with so few resources and little reason to be in our city had been allowed to procure a telephone.
Our city, it should be explained, is two cities, or more—an urban mass or congeries divided by the river whose dirty waters disembogue into the harbor that
“It doesn’t seem to me you did cope, though. You’re acting very annoyed and upset.”
“I am not.”
“His ideas sound more amusing than you seem willing to admit, for some reason.”
“I resent your poking at me about him. I also resent the way he poked me about Verna. He seemed to think I should be doing more for her than I am.”
“Maybe you should. Don’t you think it’s unnatural, hereshe’s been over a year in town and you haven’t once called her up?”
“Edna told me not to. Over the phone. She said the girl had disgraced herself and her family, including me. Including you and Richie, for that matter. Including the Kriegmans and Mrs. Ellicott, you could almost say.”
“Don’t rave, Rog. You don’t care what Edna told you. You’ve never been crazy about Edna.”
“I can’t stand her, to be precise. She was messy and shallow and bossy. And I’m sure her daughter would be the same.”
“What a mean spirit I’m married to,” Esther said. Her green, hyperthyroid eyes had been tipped into glassiness by her last sip of wine. One whole side of her hairdo had collapsed and was falling loopily to her shoulders. “What a cold, play-it-safe bastard.”
I told her quickly, as one cuts short a student who is garrulously bluffing, “My dear, you’ve been looking ever since I came home for an excuse to attack me and I don’t think you’ve quite found it yet. I am not my niece’s keeper. When on earth is dinner?”
Richie, indignant at our quarrel—children take our friendly adult give-and-take all too seriously—punched off the television and said upward, “Yeah, Mom. When’s dinner? I’m starv ing.”
Simultaneously, Pavarotti, in the far-off living room, had exhausted his string of sob stories and automatically clicked off.
For fourteen years we’ve had the same cheap white timer, a wedding present given to us by an old lady in my former parish who didn’t seem to realize that I had disgraced myself into an outer darkness beyond all such homey things. The device had a docile little long-nosed clockface you twisted to the requiredminutes; when the minutes were up, it gave out its flat, furious peal. Looking like one of Shakespeare’s slim transvestites, a bosomless boy in an unravelling gingery-red wig, Esther bowed toward the timer as toward a fellow actor. Dramatically extending one hand, palm up, she announced to her audience of two, “ Voilà. Le meatloof .”
“ O mia cara ,” I said, thinking, Más, más . I love meatloaf; it’s easy to chew.
Her wrist, thrust from her loose sweater, looked thin as a dog’s foreleg. The faintly desperate impudence of this her burlesque of the housewife’s role triggered in me that old enchantment, that fourteen-year-old sense of the space in her vicinity being sacred, charged with electrons agitating to one’s own. Cathexis is, as Freud repeatedly says (where?), never lost, just mislaid, like a one-armed doll lodged among worn, rolled-up carpets and empty picture frames in the attic.
iii
Then a few days later I found myself walking in the steps of Dale Kohler as I imagined them, the afternoon he left my office. The trees held a few leaves less but the weather was otherwise similar, in-and-out, the blue-bottomed clouds twisting and fragmenting as they sailed their sea of air, the American flags shining in the sunny intervals. My route passed fire stations, schools, and other buildings where the public services of the commonwealth and the nation were distributed. I had looked up Verna Ekelof in the phone book, and was somehow astonished to find her there, to see that a girl with so few resources and little reason to be in our city had been allowed to procure a telephone.
Our city, it should be explained, is two cities, or more—an urban mass or congeries divided by the river whose dirty waters disembogue into the harbor that
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