faithful. An immaculate drug the boredom seemed to be, with its hazy drift of dreams, its passivity pure and rich as cream.
After a dreamy day, Louisa went into her nights. Always she insisted they were full of agitation, restlessness, torment. She was forever like one watched over by wakefulness in her deepest sleep. She awoke with a tremor in her hands, declaring the pains, the indescribable, absorbing drama of sleeplessness. The tossing, the racing, the battles; the captures and escapes hidden behind her shaking eyelids. No one was more skillful than she in the confessions of an insomniac. These were redundant but stirring epics, profoundly felt and there to be pressed upon each morning, in the way one presses a bruise to experience over and over the pain of it.
Her hypnotic narration is like that of some folk poet, steeped, as they say, “in the oral tradition.” Finally, it goes, sleep came over me... At last... It was drawing near to four o’clock. The first color was in the sky... Only to wake up suddenly, completely.
Unsavory egotism? No, mere hope of definition, description, documentation. The chart of life must be brought up to date every morning: Patient slept fitfully, complained of the stitches in the incision. Alarming persistence of the very symptoms for which the operation was performed. Perhaps it is only the classical aching of the stump.
She will be leaving soon, the intruder, the dramatic star of ennui with catlike eyes. She has come with no more force than a hand offering a delivery at the door. All the time she has been in the house I was planning to think of my mother. To think , that is to wonder what I would be forgiven for remembering or imagining. What do those of my flesh and blood deem suitable, not a betrayal? Why didn’t you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when all of it is not. I do not know the answer.
My father, for instance. He is out , because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded. I will say, can say, he was very handsome, and indeed, when embalmed, with his hair parted on the wrong side, his profile reminded everyone of that of John Barrymore. He was not well educated, but very intelligent and read a great many true detective magazines and newspapers. He sang beautifully and knew all the verses of many, many songs. He worked as a laborer and as little as possible. As a plumber, as a seller of furnaces, as something in the health department at the courthouse, as something in the Democratic party machine. He was not defined by work but by the avoidance of it to leave time for other things; for gossip, for card-playing at the firehouse, for football games, for going to bed and creating children, for smoking cigarettes, for frying bacon, for going fishing. He was political, and he and I got up early in the morning to listen on the radio to the fall of Madrid, the signing of the Munich Pact. We held hands and wept.
Sometimes when I am up in Maine and the men come to fix things—handsome, attractive people that they are, coming to fix a pipe, to measure, to take apart a motor, to drag a car to the garage—often then I find myself falling into a flirtatiousness, a sort of love for their look , their sunburned faces, their fine oiled workshoes, their way at the wheel of a truck, their jokes about the bill, their ways with other men, down-town drinking coffee, or inside a house under construction, or at the ravaged shed of the boatbuilder, their strong fingers yellowed from nicotine.
Then I think of my father, of Papa, and wonder what it would be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.
I wonder about this and of course I know. I know what the men are like, but I do not know
After a dreamy day, Louisa went into her nights. Always she insisted they were full of agitation, restlessness, torment. She was forever like one watched over by wakefulness in her deepest sleep. She awoke with a tremor in her hands, declaring the pains, the indescribable, absorbing drama of sleeplessness. The tossing, the racing, the battles; the captures and escapes hidden behind her shaking eyelids. No one was more skillful than she in the confessions of an insomniac. These were redundant but stirring epics, profoundly felt and there to be pressed upon each morning, in the way one presses a bruise to experience over and over the pain of it.
Her hypnotic narration is like that of some folk poet, steeped, as they say, “in the oral tradition.” Finally, it goes, sleep came over me... At last... It was drawing near to four o’clock. The first color was in the sky... Only to wake up suddenly, completely.
Unsavory egotism? No, mere hope of definition, description, documentation. The chart of life must be brought up to date every morning: Patient slept fitfully, complained of the stitches in the incision. Alarming persistence of the very symptoms for which the operation was performed. Perhaps it is only the classical aching of the stump.
She will be leaving soon, the intruder, the dramatic star of ennui with catlike eyes. She has come with no more force than a hand offering a delivery at the door. All the time she has been in the house I was planning to think of my mother. To think , that is to wonder what I would be forgiven for remembering or imagining. What do those of my flesh and blood deem suitable, not a betrayal? Why didn’t you change your name? Then you could make up anything you like, without it seeming to be true when all of it is not. I do not know the answer.
My father, for instance. He is out , because I can see him only as a character in literature, already recorded. I will say, can say, he was very handsome, and indeed, when embalmed, with his hair parted on the wrong side, his profile reminded everyone of that of John Barrymore. He was not well educated, but very intelligent and read a great many true detective magazines and newspapers. He sang beautifully and knew all the verses of many, many songs. He worked as a laborer and as little as possible. As a plumber, as a seller of furnaces, as something in the health department at the courthouse, as something in the Democratic party machine. He was not defined by work but by the avoidance of it to leave time for other things; for gossip, for card-playing at the firehouse, for football games, for going to bed and creating children, for smoking cigarettes, for frying bacon, for going fishing. He was political, and he and I got up early in the morning to listen on the radio to the fall of Madrid, the signing of the Munich Pact. We held hands and wept.
Sometimes when I am up in Maine and the men come to fix things—handsome, attractive people that they are, coming to fix a pipe, to measure, to take apart a motor, to drag a car to the garage—often then I find myself falling into a flirtatiousness, a sort of love for their look , their sunburned faces, their fine oiled workshoes, their way at the wheel of a truck, their jokes about the bill, their ways with other men, down-town drinking coffee, or inside a house under construction, or at the ravaged shed of the boatbuilder, their strong fingers yellowed from nicotine.
Then I think of my father, of Papa, and wonder what it would be like to be married to such a man, to see him coming out of the shower, to sit at dinner at six o’clock, turn off the lights at nine, embrace, make love frequently in honor of a long day of working, get up at five, visit with the relations on Sunday, never leave town.
I wonder about this and of course I know. I know what the men are like, but I do not know
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