time. My problem was clocked—will the scholar-in-training triumph over the odds or fail to make the grade in given time? That question troubles you, Lou, though the solution is solely mine.
Released into the city at high noon, I could head up, or downtown. History lies in both directions. Downtown is Wall Street, where my grandfather went to the office every working day. He invested, bought and sold, made money. We are living off him now, Louise, though he’s gone these six years if I reckon correctly, which I should be able to do, since he has willed me the luxury of going back to school to pick up my love affair with mathematics. So I had the choice of walking down the blocks to look at the Stock Exchange that rang the market to my grandfather’s attention each day, though not going as far as the Trade Center wound or taking the route up to SoHo, where we lived our first years together in your loft, the materials of your trade all around us—paints, charcoal smudges in progress, canvases stacked against the wall. I was in that empty waiting room at my request, the privilege granted by the machinations of Bertie’s lawyer, who believed I must fiddle on with statistics and correlations for my class in applied mathematics. Furthermore, I did not want to spend time under the surveillance of Attorney Sylvan, famous for finding loopholes in the law. I had been coached by him, his every slick word put in my mouth, thinking when the time comes I’ll say what I have to say truly—my schoolboy adventures with Bertie, my larky jobs at Skylark, more play than employment.
My choice was not to travel downtown for recess, Lou, not to recall the dutiful life of Cyril O’Connor, not indulge in Lower Broadway, where we were so gone on each other our nights of love consumed us. I’ve loosened up, though consumed is too heady a word, or too visceral. My tongue freed by a hot dog with the works as I perused the discount junk on Canal Street, odd lots of T-shirts with Goth symbols of the Reich, dog beds, doll heads, faucets, copper wire, cruets labeled Oil and Vinygar, framed posters of Che and the Eiffel Tower. Products in their mass graves guarded by their keepers, who seemed to be doing swift business of sorts, perhaps as subject to investigation as Bertram Boyce’s deals at Skylark. Troubling.
You were well acquainted with troubles that day in the park, your fears crossing the line from daily concern to manic organic. Alar in the apple juice, bacteria flourishing in plastic bottles, E. coli, tuna with its dose of mercury—all loomed large as the national debt. A whiff of the super’s stogie in the hallway, Asian flu, Teflon and faulty seat belts—right up there with toxic waste. Nothing to fear but fear itself, attempting the noble line, I fail to amuse. Along with your catalog of horrors, there is Maisy’s persistent congestion, and the uncertain course of my career. Love, in one of its many distortions, allows you never to speak of my possible failure, though I work hard, harder than I ever have in my life. Lou, there is the one unspeakable word— talent , if in fact the gift of numbers was ever mine to squander. No longer nimble, one step behind the beat? Better to record the owl’s composure on a warm October day.
That night when Cyril and Maisy were safely stashed in their bunk bed, I discovered you were keeping an account of the current war’s fatalities, though only our boys were admitted to your file. You had copied each soldier’s name, age, rank and hometown into a baby book, a present from your mother intended for Maisy’s vital statistics—first tooth, first fever, first word. On the cover a stork carts a swaddled newborn in its beak. I suggested the death toll of Operation Iraqi Freedom is online, www.Iraqbodycount.org . Oh, that’s only information, you said, transferring Private First Class, 20, Linden, NJ, and Staff Sergeant, 34, Shreveport, LA, from the Times to your register, inscribing each name,
Released into the city at high noon, I could head up, or downtown. History lies in both directions. Downtown is Wall Street, where my grandfather went to the office every working day. He invested, bought and sold, made money. We are living off him now, Louise, though he’s gone these six years if I reckon correctly, which I should be able to do, since he has willed me the luxury of going back to school to pick up my love affair with mathematics. So I had the choice of walking down the blocks to look at the Stock Exchange that rang the market to my grandfather’s attention each day, though not going as far as the Trade Center wound or taking the route up to SoHo, where we lived our first years together in your loft, the materials of your trade all around us—paints, charcoal smudges in progress, canvases stacked against the wall. I was in that empty waiting room at my request, the privilege granted by the machinations of Bertie’s lawyer, who believed I must fiddle on with statistics and correlations for my class in applied mathematics. Furthermore, I did not want to spend time under the surveillance of Attorney Sylvan, famous for finding loopholes in the law. I had been coached by him, his every slick word put in my mouth, thinking when the time comes I’ll say what I have to say truly—my schoolboy adventures with Bertie, my larky jobs at Skylark, more play than employment.
My choice was not to travel downtown for recess, Lou, not to recall the dutiful life of Cyril O’Connor, not indulge in Lower Broadway, where we were so gone on each other our nights of love consumed us. I’ve loosened up, though consumed is too heady a word, or too visceral. My tongue freed by a hot dog with the works as I perused the discount junk on Canal Street, odd lots of T-shirts with Goth symbols of the Reich, dog beds, doll heads, faucets, copper wire, cruets labeled Oil and Vinygar, framed posters of Che and the Eiffel Tower. Products in their mass graves guarded by their keepers, who seemed to be doing swift business of sorts, perhaps as subject to investigation as Bertram Boyce’s deals at Skylark. Troubling.
You were well acquainted with troubles that day in the park, your fears crossing the line from daily concern to manic organic. Alar in the apple juice, bacteria flourishing in plastic bottles, E. coli, tuna with its dose of mercury—all loomed large as the national debt. A whiff of the super’s stogie in the hallway, Asian flu, Teflon and faulty seat belts—right up there with toxic waste. Nothing to fear but fear itself, attempting the noble line, I fail to amuse. Along with your catalog of horrors, there is Maisy’s persistent congestion, and the uncertain course of my career. Love, in one of its many distortions, allows you never to speak of my possible failure, though I work hard, harder than I ever have in my life. Lou, there is the one unspeakable word— talent , if in fact the gift of numbers was ever mine to squander. No longer nimble, one step behind the beat? Better to record the owl’s composure on a warm October day.
That night when Cyril and Maisy were safely stashed in their bunk bed, I discovered you were keeping an account of the current war’s fatalities, though only our boys were admitted to your file. You had copied each soldier’s name, age, rank and hometown into a baby book, a present from your mother intended for Maisy’s vital statistics—first tooth, first fever, first word. On the cover a stork carts a swaddled newborn in its beak. I suggested the death toll of Operation Iraqi Freedom is online, www.Iraqbodycount.org . Oh, that’s only information, you said, transferring Private First Class, 20, Linden, NJ, and Staff Sergeant, 34, Shreveport, LA, from the Times to your register, inscribing each name,
Similar Books
