collect.
“I’m crazy about his music. Those fingers!” He did have beautiful hands, I had noticed them. The fingernails were carefully shaped and shone with clear polish, to strengthen them for the g utar. She frowned.
“I
don’t know why I always have to do this—fall in love with people who do something beautifully. And it hardly matters what, really. It’s the competence. It’s the devotion to something. It just makes me hot.”
Then why are you drawn to me? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to presume to name Dana’s feelings about me.
Larry was the one I felt most comfortable with from the start.
He taught history at Harvard and was a political activist. He was out a good deal of the time, “rousing the rabble,” as he called it, mocking himself more than the rabble. His room was small, the smallest in the house. He had an enormous poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall, and all the floor space not taken up by the bed was occupied with bench press and scattered weights. He was short and powerfully muscled. He wore his hair in a DA, with a tumble of slicked curls trained to fall forward in the middle of his forehead, like Gene Mmcent, like Jerry Lee Lewis. He liked the incongruity, he told me once, of being a commie body-building greaser hood. He had the only car in the house and didn’t mind being thought of as a chauffeur.
“We could get Larry to take us,” we’d say, and he always would if he could. We’d cram in, rearranging the stacks of flyers, shoving the posters up on the ledge under the rear window, and he would drive us—to the North End for Italian food, to the Cape, to the movies, to the Square.
Sara and John were much as described by Dana. She’d forgotten to mention, though, that Sara was a lawyer. She’d graduated high in her class from Harvard Law School and now worked in a poverty-law office for a piddling wage. She supported them both. It was understood that John was writing a novel, but I knew, since I was home through much of the day, that he was doing no such thing.
“His work habits aren’t really the kind that lend themselves to the long haul,” I told Dana.
“In that he has no work habits.”
Eli was the handsomest man in the house, and yet he left the least impression on me at the time. And I would guess that this was true for all of us. He was quiet, of course. Shy. He seemed content, most of the time, simply to observe, to watch the action, whatever the action was.
And he was gone a good deal of the time, running experiments that required his presence for long hours at a stretch or at odd times of the day or night. And probably my assumptions about him—our assumptions, for I think we all shared them, that he was unimaginative, little dull, certainly less free, less wild, less fascinating than we were-these made it even harder to see what he might truly have been like. I remember one night after dinner we were playing a game in the living room. It was Dana’s invention. We’d all written down one adjective for each person in the house, and John collected our scraps of paper.
His job was to read all the adjectives about one person aloud. The appointed guesser had to say who was being described and why she thought so. Sara was the appointed guesser, because, as Larry put it, she was the only one with “no agenda.”
“What does that mean, no agenda?” Sara had cried with alarm.
“It means saintly, Sar,” said Dana.
“It means sweet.”
“It means perpetually stoned,” said Duncan.
Sara laughed.
“Mean, Dunkey. For you, my adjective would be mean, mean, mean.”
“You only get one, baby.”
For Eli, the adjectives were gentle, quiet, mysterious, gray, aloof and pellucid.
“Objection,” Sara said. She lifted a legal finger.
“How can someone be both mysterious and pellucid?”
“And who’s doing these color things?” Duncan asked. One of Larry’s adjectives had been red.
“Shh. No questions from us. It’ll give
“I’m crazy about his music. Those fingers!” He did have beautiful hands, I had noticed them. The fingernails were carefully shaped and shone with clear polish, to strengthen them for the g utar. She frowned.
“I
don’t know why I always have to do this—fall in love with people who do something beautifully. And it hardly matters what, really. It’s the competence. It’s the devotion to something. It just makes me hot.”
Then why are you drawn to me? I wanted to ask. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to presume to name Dana’s feelings about me.
Larry was the one I felt most comfortable with from the start.
He taught history at Harvard and was a political activist. He was out a good deal of the time, “rousing the rabble,” as he called it, mocking himself more than the rabble. His room was small, the smallest in the house. He had an enormous poster of Ho Chi Minh on the wall, and all the floor space not taken up by the bed was occupied with bench press and scattered weights. He was short and powerfully muscled. He wore his hair in a DA, with a tumble of slicked curls trained to fall forward in the middle of his forehead, like Gene Mmcent, like Jerry Lee Lewis. He liked the incongruity, he told me once, of being a commie body-building greaser hood. He had the only car in the house and didn’t mind being thought of as a chauffeur.
“We could get Larry to take us,” we’d say, and he always would if he could. We’d cram in, rearranging the stacks of flyers, shoving the posters up on the ledge under the rear window, and he would drive us—to the North End for Italian food, to the Cape, to the movies, to the Square.
Sara and John were much as described by Dana. She’d forgotten to mention, though, that Sara was a lawyer. She’d graduated high in her class from Harvard Law School and now worked in a poverty-law office for a piddling wage. She supported them both. It was understood that John was writing a novel, but I knew, since I was home through much of the day, that he was doing no such thing.
“His work habits aren’t really the kind that lend themselves to the long haul,” I told Dana.
“In that he has no work habits.”
Eli was the handsomest man in the house, and yet he left the least impression on me at the time. And I would guess that this was true for all of us. He was quiet, of course. Shy. He seemed content, most of the time, simply to observe, to watch the action, whatever the action was.
And he was gone a good deal of the time, running experiments that required his presence for long hours at a stretch or at odd times of the day or night. And probably my assumptions about him—our assumptions, for I think we all shared them, that he was unimaginative, little dull, certainly less free, less wild, less fascinating than we were-these made it even harder to see what he might truly have been like. I remember one night after dinner we were playing a game in the living room. It was Dana’s invention. We’d all written down one adjective for each person in the house, and John collected our scraps of paper.
His job was to read all the adjectives about one person aloud. The appointed guesser had to say who was being described and why she thought so. Sara was the appointed guesser, because, as Larry put it, she was the only one with “no agenda.”
“What does that mean, no agenda?” Sara had cried with alarm.
“It means saintly, Sar,” said Dana.
“It means sweet.”
“It means perpetually stoned,” said Duncan.
Sara laughed.
“Mean, Dunkey. For you, my adjective would be mean, mean, mean.”
“You only get one, baby.”
For Eli, the adjectives were gentle, quiet, mysterious, gray, aloof and pellucid.
“Objection,” Sara said. She lifted a legal finger.
“How can someone be both mysterious and pellucid?”
“And who’s doing these color things?” Duncan asked. One of Larry’s adjectives had been red.
“Shh. No questions from us. It’ll give
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