Read Online Where There's Smoke by Black Inc. - Free Book Online Page A

another incarnation, if they want the score to be evened.
    Her daughter runs an art gallery in Nice. Her daughter is, by now, for all practical purposes French. Her son, with his American wife and American children, will soon, for all practical purposes, be American. So, having flown the nest, they have flown far. One might even think, did one not know better, that they have flown far to get away from her.
    Whatever proposal it is they have to put to her, it is sure to be full of ambivalence: love and solicitude on the one hand, brisk heartlessness on the other, and a wish to see the end of her. Well, ambivalence should not disconcert her. She has made a living out of ambivalence. Where would the art of fiction be if there were no double meanings? What would life itself be if there were only heads or tails and nothing in between?
    *
    â€˜What I find eerie, as I grow older,’ she tells her son, ‘is that I hear issuing from my lips words I once upon a time used to hear old people say and swore I would never say myself. What-is-the-world-coming-to things. For example: no one seems any longer to be aware that the verb “may” has a past tense – what is the world coming to? People walk down the street eating pizza and talking into a telephone – what is the world coming to?’
    It is his first day in Nice, her third: a clear, warm June day, the kind of day that brought idle, well-to-do people from England to this stretch of coast in the first place. And behold, here they are, the two of them, strolling down the Promenade des Anglais just as the English did a hundred years ago with their parasols and their boaters, deploring Mr Hardy’s latest effort, deploring the Boers.
    â€˜ Deplore ,’ she says: ‘a word one does not hear much nowadays. No one with any sense deplores , not unless they want to be a figure of fun. An interdicted word, an interdicted activity. So what is one to do? Does one keep them all pent up, one’s deplorations, until one is alone with other old folk and free to spill them?’
    â€˜You can deplore to me as much as you like, Mother,’ says John, her good and dutiful son. ‘I will nod sympathetically and not make fun of you. What else would you like to deplore today besides pizza?’
    â€˜It is not pizza that I deplore, pizza is well and good in its place, it is walking and eating and talking all at the same time that I find so rude.’
    â€˜I agree, it is rude or at least unrefined. What else?’
    â€˜That’s enough. What I deplore is in itself of no interest. What is of interest is that I vowed years ago I would never do it, and here I am doing it. Why have I succumbed? I deplore what the world is coming to. I deplore the course of history. From my heart I deplore it. Yet when I listen to myself, what do I hear? I hear my mother deploring the miniskirt, deploring the electric guitar. And I remember my exasperation. “Yes, Mother,” I would say, and grind my teeth and pray for her to shut up. And so …’
    â€˜And so you think I am grinding my teeth and praying for you to shut up.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I am not. It is perfectly acceptable to deplore what the world is coming to. I deplore it myself, in private.’
    â€˜But the detail, John, the detail! It is not just the grand sweep of history that I deplore, it is the detail – bad manners, bad grammar, loudness! It is details like that that exasperate me, and it is the kind of detail that exasperates me that drives me to despair. So unimportant! Do you understand? But of course you do not. You think I am making fun of myself when I am not making fun of myself. It is all serious! Do you understand that it could all be serious?’
    â€˜Of course I understand. You express yourself with great clarity.’
    â€˜But I do not! I do not! These are just words, and we are all sick of words by now. The only way left to prove you are serious is to