four pairs, though theyâre too short. And I still have my favorite hammer and shovel.â
âI know what heâs going to do,â I said, nodding at Donald and chewing on my corned beef sandwich as if mortality were a fiction.
âI do, too. I sat beside him in the middle of the night and he told me. I didnât say much. Itâs up to him. Itâs not like you can hold out any hope. People are always talking about the war against cancer but with this one the military metaphor doesnât work. Youâre dead with the diagnosis. The night Mom called last year I contacted a friend at UCLA medical school and got the information. Herald and I stayed up until dawn talking. As you know, when Herald is nervous he cooks something if heâs near a kitchen. Heâs a thoroughly mediocre cook. Anyway, in the middle of the night heâs cooking chili and he weighs the cubed chuck because the recipe calls for two pounds. He pushes the extra two ounces of meat off to the side and for once I didnât tease him, and then he said, âThere arenât very many people like my father anymore,â and then we both fell apart. Thatâs what I was thinking this morning when I read about the three Clarences. These kind of people are gone forever.â
âWell, I thought that too, but then I supposed that if you went far enough off the interstate youâd find some people with similarities. Also I thought of people in other parts of the world, what educated people blithely call theThird World and then turn up the Bach or Springsteen and drink a two-dollar bottle of water, which is the daily food budget for families in ninety percent of the world population just as an American car costs fifty times the annual income of eighty percentââ
âOh stop it, you fucking ninny.â Clare rolled her eyes so far upward they were nearly all white, which she also did during orgasm when we were lovers. This stopped about five years ago, when I was nineteen and she eighteen, at which point she had perceived that my desire was greater for her mother, Cynthia. I thought that she broke it off because we were cousins and I said, âYou love my mother more than you do me,â and that was that. Clare never drifts. When youâre with her youâre always walking along the cornice of a tall building. When she says something withering you actually wither.
âThe water is so beautiful itâs hard to believe my great-grandpa died out there. Yours was taken underground and mine at sea.â Donald gestured and Clare handed him his warm milk shake. He was talking about my grandpa, Pollyâs father, who was injured in an iron mine in his early thirties. He didnât die but forever after scuttled like a crab when he tried to walk freely. I was a difficult boy and my grandma would come down to Chicago in early June when school was out and retrieve me to spend a month in Iron Mountain. We would travel on a Greyhound bus because a plane was beyond her comprehension. I didnât want to go but once I reached Iron Mountain it was fine and I think of those summers as the best part of my childhood. I mean, my father would occasionally take me to a Chicago Cubsgame but his lack of real interest in baseball was infectious. He would stare off at the field but you knew he wasnât seeing anything. I liked it best when we would visit a friend of his from the Marines, an Italian auto mechanic with a big family. The whole family was always eating, shouting, and laughing. They had a daughter named Gaspara who was my age but was much stronger. She would throw me on a couch and kiss me and sometimes just get me in a stranglehold and hold me tight while she read a comic. Once she demanded to see my penis and when I showed it to her she literally laughed until she cried. Still I loved her. When she helped her mother serve dinner she would give me an extra meatball and if her brother teased her she
âI know what heâs going to do,â I said, nodding at Donald and chewing on my corned beef sandwich as if mortality were a fiction.
âI do, too. I sat beside him in the middle of the night and he told me. I didnât say much. Itâs up to him. Itâs not like you can hold out any hope. People are always talking about the war against cancer but with this one the military metaphor doesnât work. Youâre dead with the diagnosis. The night Mom called last year I contacted a friend at UCLA medical school and got the information. Herald and I stayed up until dawn talking. As you know, when Herald is nervous he cooks something if heâs near a kitchen. Heâs a thoroughly mediocre cook. Anyway, in the middle of the night heâs cooking chili and he weighs the cubed chuck because the recipe calls for two pounds. He pushes the extra two ounces of meat off to the side and for once I didnât tease him, and then he said, âThere arenât very many people like my father anymore,â and then we both fell apart. Thatâs what I was thinking this morning when I read about the three Clarences. These kind of people are gone forever.â
âWell, I thought that too, but then I supposed that if you went far enough off the interstate youâd find some people with similarities. Also I thought of people in other parts of the world, what educated people blithely call theThird World and then turn up the Bach or Springsteen and drink a two-dollar bottle of water, which is the daily food budget for families in ninety percent of the world population just as an American car costs fifty times the annual income of eighty percentââ
âOh stop it, you fucking ninny.â Clare rolled her eyes so far upward they were nearly all white, which she also did during orgasm when we were lovers. This stopped about five years ago, when I was nineteen and she eighteen, at which point she had perceived that my desire was greater for her mother, Cynthia. I thought that she broke it off because we were cousins and I said, âYou love my mother more than you do me,â and that was that. Clare never drifts. When youâre with her youâre always walking along the cornice of a tall building. When she says something withering you actually wither.
âThe water is so beautiful itâs hard to believe my great-grandpa died out there. Yours was taken underground and mine at sea.â Donald gestured and Clare handed him his warm milk shake. He was talking about my grandpa, Pollyâs father, who was injured in an iron mine in his early thirties. He didnât die but forever after scuttled like a crab when he tried to walk freely. I was a difficult boy and my grandma would come down to Chicago in early June when school was out and retrieve me to spend a month in Iron Mountain. We would travel on a Greyhound bus because a plane was beyond her comprehension. I didnât want to go but once I reached Iron Mountain it was fine and I think of those summers as the best part of my childhood. I mean, my father would occasionally take me to a Chicago Cubsgame but his lack of real interest in baseball was infectious. He would stare off at the field but you knew he wasnât seeing anything. I liked it best when we would visit a friend of his from the Marines, an Italian auto mechanic with a big family. The whole family was always eating, shouting, and laughing. They had a daughter named Gaspara who was my age but was much stronger. She would throw me on a couch and kiss me and sometimes just get me in a stranglehold and hold me tight while she read a comic. Once she demanded to see my penis and when I showed it to her she literally laughed until she cried. Still I loved her. When she helped her mother serve dinner she would give me an extra meatball and if her brother teased her she
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