spring, when the air smelled so alive and people took off their coats and their figures showed. Spring and summer, the terrible times to be fat. “You’re not fat, Jane, you’re overweight.” Her Uncle Larry was the only one she allowed to tease her. He was even fatter but he was fun. “Bugsy Siegel wasn’t going to allow the syndicate to build another hotel in Vegas unless they bailed him out. He was going to squeal. They got him on a train,” Larry went on. He’d told her the story before but it didn’t matter. “Hemingway was a bum. We fished together around Cuba. Think I’m fat. He never stopped drinking.” They were driving around Manhattan in Larry’s convertible, a pale yellow Buick with a white top. “And what about sex? I won’t tell your father,” he said and puffed on his cigar. “There’s nothing to tell, Uncle Larry. I think I’m in love with someone who’s not in love with me and someone who likes me—that way—it never even occurs to me,” Jane said and looked at the Flatiron Building, with its funny triangular shape. “The whole family’s crazy,” Larry said. “No reason you should be an exception but listen to me, kid. Try to have a good time. I’m just learning that. There’s not too much else. Have a few laughs.” The sun was setting as he drove her back to her apartment. The air was heavy with nostalgia. “Take it easy,” he said at her door. “Look at your father—he worries night and day—and where does it get him. There’s no percentage in worrying.” Larry still played the horses even though business was worse than ever. “You’ve gotta have some fun in life, right?” Jane hated spring.
Part III
* *
*
Chapter 7
M ark read aloud from his notebook: “Once I was in a sentimental hospital. The nurse’s uniform was starched, and her hands soft, the fingers wrinkled, as if she’d been in the bathtub all day long. When I cried out, she heard me, rushing to my bedside, a line of concern etched into her noble brow. A hand quickly laid on my feverish forehead, she soothed me and restored my soul.…” Mark repeated “my soul” and faltered. “They talked about the soul.”
Mark dangled, like a pendulum, over sentimentality and cynicism, his direction changing, reflecting a kind of weather. While he was sensitive, it was a sensitivity not unlike that experienced under laughing gas. You’re numb and don’t care about anything and you don’t know if you’re able to control your facial muscles or not. When pain comes, in this indifferent state, it is bad, worse, because you have been lulled into a kind of inviolability, Mark’s favorite word, next to epicene. Most of the time you don’t feel anything, as if encased by a prophylactic. All this led him to the Pre-Raphaelites. He told Grace that pubic hair was absent from their paintings of nude women, that it was discovered later, that all the hair was on top, mounds and mounds of it. Grace slid off the barstool and walked to the jukebox, where she watched the record turn. Mark was rejected by some men because they were straight, he rejected others because they were too serious, and some rejected him because he was too much of a woman, or not enough of one. “I’m a displaced person, a country without a man. A guest in my own body.” “You have beautiful eyes,” Grace told him. “The doorway to the ignored soul,” he muttered. His Bible, his comfort, was “Notes on Camp,” which he insisted Grace read as a way to know him. He told her some people would call her a fag hag. She said, “They can go fuck themselves.” He said, “I love you when you’re brutal.”
Silence Is Golden hung over the sink in Ruth’s kitchen, its yellow walls and shelves, its linoleum floor; her domain. It was the room from which she wrote Grace those occasional letters, during which time she glanced every now and then at the sign above the sink, which restored to her something that might have been lost for a moment or two.
Part III
* *
*
Chapter 7
M ark read aloud from his notebook: “Once I was in a sentimental hospital. The nurse’s uniform was starched, and her hands soft, the fingers wrinkled, as if she’d been in the bathtub all day long. When I cried out, she heard me, rushing to my bedside, a line of concern etched into her noble brow. A hand quickly laid on my feverish forehead, she soothed me and restored my soul.…” Mark repeated “my soul” and faltered. “They talked about the soul.”
Mark dangled, like a pendulum, over sentimentality and cynicism, his direction changing, reflecting a kind of weather. While he was sensitive, it was a sensitivity not unlike that experienced under laughing gas. You’re numb and don’t care about anything and you don’t know if you’re able to control your facial muscles or not. When pain comes, in this indifferent state, it is bad, worse, because you have been lulled into a kind of inviolability, Mark’s favorite word, next to epicene. Most of the time you don’t feel anything, as if encased by a prophylactic. All this led him to the Pre-Raphaelites. He told Grace that pubic hair was absent from their paintings of nude women, that it was discovered later, that all the hair was on top, mounds and mounds of it. Grace slid off the barstool and walked to the jukebox, where she watched the record turn. Mark was rejected by some men because they were straight, he rejected others because they were too serious, and some rejected him because he was too much of a woman, or not enough of one. “I’m a displaced person, a country without a man. A guest in my own body.” “You have beautiful eyes,” Grace told him. “The doorway to the ignored soul,” he muttered. His Bible, his comfort, was “Notes on Camp,” which he insisted Grace read as a way to know him. He told her some people would call her a fag hag. She said, “They can go fuck themselves.” He said, “I love you when you’re brutal.”
Silence Is Golden hung over the sink in Ruth’s kitchen, its yellow walls and shelves, its linoleum floor; her domain. It was the room from which she wrote Grace those occasional letters, during which time she glanced every now and then at the sign above the sink, which restored to her something that might have been lost for a moment or two.
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