probably have married her,” a voice across the room said, “with the exception that he died.”
“Well, I am a personality that prefers not to be annoyed.”
“We should all prepare ourselves for this eventuality.”
A six-year-old was passing the hors d’oeuvres. The baby, not quite steady on his feet, was hurtling about the room.
“He’s following me,” the six-year-old said, in despair.
“Then lock yourself in the bathroom, dear,” Inez replied.
“He always waits outside the door.”
“He loves you, dear.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“How I envy you,” the minister’s wife was saying to a courteous, bearded boy, “reading Magic Mountain for the first time.”
The homosexual across the hall from me always takes Valium and walks his beagle. I borrow Valium from him from time to time, and when he takes a holiday the dog is left with me. On our floor of this brownstone, we are friends. Our landlord, Roger Somerset, was murdered last July. He was a kind and absent-minded man, and on the night when he was stabbed there was a sort of requiem for him in the heating system. There is a lot of music in this building anyway. The newlyweds on the third floor play Bartok on their stereo. The couple on the second floor play clarinet quintets; their kids play rock. The girl on the fourth floor, who has been pining for two months, plays Judy Collins’ “Maid of Constant Sorrow” all day long. We have a kind of orchestra in here. The ground floor is a shop. The owner of the shop speaks of our landlord’s murder still. Shaking his head, he says that he suspects “foul play.” We all agree with him. We changed our locks. But “foul play” seems a weird expression for the case.
It is all weird. I am not always well. One block away (I often think of this), there was ten months ago an immense crash. Water mains broke. There were small rivers in the streets. In a great skyscraper that was being built, something had failed. The newspapers reported the next day that by some miracle only two people had been “slightly injured” by ten tons of falling steel. The steel fell from the eighteenth floor. The question that preoccupies me now is how, under the circumstances, slight injuries could occur. Perhaps the two people were grazed in passing by. Perhaps some fragments of the sidewalk ricocheted. I knew a deliverer of flowers who, at Sixty-ninth and Lexington, was hit by a flying suicide. Situations simply do not yield to the most likely structures of the mind. A “self-addressed envelope,” if you are inclined to brood, raises deep questions of identity. Such an envelope, immutably itself, is always precisely where it belongs. “Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative. But “joking with nurses” fascinates me in the press. Whenever someone has been quite struck down, lost faculties, members of his family, he is said to have “joked with his nurses” quite a lot. What a mine of humor every nurse’s life must be.
I have a job, of course. I have had several jobs. I’ve had our paper’s gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press. I often write about families in Queens. Last week, I went to a dinner party on Park Avenue. After 1 a.m., something called the Alive or Dead Game was being played. Someone would mention an old character from Tammany or Hollywood. “Dead,” “Dead,” “Dead,” everyone would guess. “No, no. Alive. I saw him walking down the street just yesterday,” or “Yes. Dead. I read a little obituary notice about him last year.” One of the little truths people can subtly enrage or reassure each other with is who—when you have looked away a month, a
“Well, I am a personality that prefers not to be annoyed.”
“We should all prepare ourselves for this eventuality.”
A six-year-old was passing the hors d’oeuvres. The baby, not quite steady on his feet, was hurtling about the room.
“He’s following me,” the six-year-old said, in despair.
“Then lock yourself in the bathroom, dear,” Inez replied.
“He always waits outside the door.”
“He loves you, dear.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“How I envy you,” the minister’s wife was saying to a courteous, bearded boy, “reading Magic Mountain for the first time.”
The homosexual across the hall from me always takes Valium and walks his beagle. I borrow Valium from him from time to time, and when he takes a holiday the dog is left with me. On our floor of this brownstone, we are friends. Our landlord, Roger Somerset, was murdered last July. He was a kind and absent-minded man, and on the night when he was stabbed there was a sort of requiem for him in the heating system. There is a lot of music in this building anyway. The newlyweds on the third floor play Bartok on their stereo. The couple on the second floor play clarinet quintets; their kids play rock. The girl on the fourth floor, who has been pining for two months, plays Judy Collins’ “Maid of Constant Sorrow” all day long. We have a kind of orchestra in here. The ground floor is a shop. The owner of the shop speaks of our landlord’s murder still. Shaking his head, he says that he suspects “foul play.” We all agree with him. We changed our locks. But “foul play” seems a weird expression for the case.
It is all weird. I am not always well. One block away (I often think of this), there was ten months ago an immense crash. Water mains broke. There were small rivers in the streets. In a great skyscraper that was being built, something had failed. The newspapers reported the next day that by some miracle only two people had been “slightly injured” by ten tons of falling steel. The steel fell from the eighteenth floor. The question that preoccupies me now is how, under the circumstances, slight injuries could occur. Perhaps the two people were grazed in passing by. Perhaps some fragments of the sidewalk ricocheted. I knew a deliverer of flowers who, at Sixty-ninth and Lexington, was hit by a flying suicide. Situations simply do not yield to the most likely structures of the mind. A “self-addressed envelope,” if you are inclined to brood, raises deep questions of identity. Such an envelope, immutably itself, is always precisely where it belongs. “Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative. But “joking with nurses” fascinates me in the press. Whenever someone has been quite struck down, lost faculties, members of his family, he is said to have “joked with his nurses” quite a lot. What a mine of humor every nurse’s life must be.
I have a job, of course. I have had several jobs. I’ve had our paper’s gossip column since last month. It is egalitarian. I look for people who are quite obscure, and report who is breaking up with whom and where they go and what they wear. The person who invented this new form for us is on antidepressants now. He lives in Illinois. He says there are people in southern Illinois who have not yet been covered by the press. I often write about families in Queens. Last week, I went to a dinner party on Park Avenue. After 1 a.m., something called the Alive or Dead Game was being played. Someone would mention an old character from Tammany or Hollywood. “Dead,” “Dead,” “Dead,” everyone would guess. “No, no. Alive. I saw him walking down the street just yesterday,” or “Yes. Dead. I read a little obituary notice about him last year.” One of the little truths people can subtly enrage or reassure each other with is who—when you have looked away a month, a
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