red-speckled notebooks. He got his first one over twenty years ago. In Camden, he bought a batch of black-speckled notebooks. In the black ones he kept random notes. He glued red ribbon to the binding of one of these. He wrote on the binding the letter L. Damned if he would write love . He was studying not love but consciousness. Insofar as he still saved time to read.
On a hot day he and his friend drank on the back steps. The friend was a hangdog giant with a crew cut. He had introduced Maytree to Henry Green and Borges. Now he asked if he liked Stevenson. Maytree brought out some old notebooks. “Marriage,” he read, “marriage is a step so grave anddecisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.”
Now in the same notebook Maytree found a passage from Under the Greenwood Tree . Someone wonders of a couple, How could they be in love? They are distant in manner. —“Ay,” says a rustic, popping up. “That’s part of the zickness. Distance belongs to it, slyness belongs to it, the queerest things on earth belongs to it!” He read aloud. His friend liked Baudelaire’s calling lovemaking “the lyric of the masses.”
After his friend left that day he found Deary inside manning the telephone like a howitzer. For clients she drew up similar plans and elevations. She fooled with rooflines. Deary and he convinced each new client that his or her personal needs—for bedrooms, kitchen, bath, living room, porch—showed unique taste.
Tonight they expected ten for dinner. On the extended cherry table he placed crystal and sterling in phalanxes on linen and lace. Maytree foresaw tonight’s distinguished crowd repeating information from the newspaper. Some of their guests wrote excellent articles and books. Consequently Maytree knew them to be—somewhere in there—vastly more learned than social life permitted.
Seeing friends used to be easier. Was it their age? Did anyone actually like adult social life? Ping-Pong brought laughter as respectable entertainment did not. He and Deary wasted their many-paned dining room on dinner parties instead of ongoing games and music. Portuguese and Azorean old-timers in Provincetown—calling themselves respectivelyLisbons and picos—enjoyed whist, singing fados, and taking grandchildren out in boats. Maytree envied them their noisy parties. He could not change Maine alone.
After they cleaned up the party, Maytree helped breathless Deary upstairs and into bed. Then down on the back steps he paged through another old red-speckled notebook by the backdoor light. It intrigued him still, what an art historian wrote of Michelangelo’s poetry: “The tensions deepen in the twenty or so poems of the middle period as the poet who is working deeply to complete the Sistine frescoes of the Last Judgment suffers the torture of loving two women and one man.” Maytree thought, Torture?
Decades’ reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only—but it was something—that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample.
—K EEP YOUR WOMAN FRIENDS, Reevadare told Lou long ago. But Lou ignored friends when she met Maytree. After Maytree ran off, people imposed on her the unwelcome dignity they accorded new widows or Nobel Prize winners. They blamed her for their own distance, fancying she caused their feeling by a vaunted opinion of herself. It drove Lou bats. At parties she danced silly dances, made far-fetched puns, sang camp songs, and all but wore lamp-shades. She could not imagine a friend more lively, and loyal, than Jane Cairo turned out to be. Jane seemed not to resent or begrudge anything Lou was by birth or hap, such as tall, or made-into-myth.
Jane often visited Lou or Cornelius or both in the dunes. Once she invited Lou to Cornelius’s
On a hot day he and his friend drank on the back steps. The friend was a hangdog giant with a crew cut. He had introduced Maytree to Henry Green and Borges. Now he asked if he liked Stevenson. Maytree brought out some old notebooks. “Marriage,” he read, “marriage is a step so grave anddecisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.”
Now in the same notebook Maytree found a passage from Under the Greenwood Tree . Someone wonders of a couple, How could they be in love? They are distant in manner. —“Ay,” says a rustic, popping up. “That’s part of the zickness. Distance belongs to it, slyness belongs to it, the queerest things on earth belongs to it!” He read aloud. His friend liked Baudelaire’s calling lovemaking “the lyric of the masses.”
After his friend left that day he found Deary inside manning the telephone like a howitzer. For clients she drew up similar plans and elevations. She fooled with rooflines. Deary and he convinced each new client that his or her personal needs—for bedrooms, kitchen, bath, living room, porch—showed unique taste.
Tonight they expected ten for dinner. On the extended cherry table he placed crystal and sterling in phalanxes on linen and lace. Maytree foresaw tonight’s distinguished crowd repeating information from the newspaper. Some of their guests wrote excellent articles and books. Consequently Maytree knew them to be—somewhere in there—vastly more learned than social life permitted.
Seeing friends used to be easier. Was it their age? Did anyone actually like adult social life? Ping-Pong brought laughter as respectable entertainment did not. He and Deary wasted their many-paned dining room on dinner parties instead of ongoing games and music. Portuguese and Azorean old-timers in Provincetown—calling themselves respectivelyLisbons and picos—enjoyed whist, singing fados, and taking grandchildren out in boats. Maytree envied them their noisy parties. He could not change Maine alone.
After they cleaned up the party, Maytree helped breathless Deary upstairs and into bed. Then down on the back steps he paged through another old red-speckled notebook by the backdoor light. It intrigued him still, what an art historian wrote of Michelangelo’s poetry: “The tensions deepen in the twenty or so poems of the middle period as the poet who is working deeply to complete the Sistine frescoes of the Last Judgment suffers the torture of loving two women and one man.” Maytree thought, Torture?
Decades’ reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only—but it was something—that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample.
—K EEP YOUR WOMAN FRIENDS, Reevadare told Lou long ago. But Lou ignored friends when she met Maytree. After Maytree ran off, people imposed on her the unwelcome dignity they accorded new widows or Nobel Prize winners. They blamed her for their own distance, fancying she caused their feeling by a vaunted opinion of herself. It drove Lou bats. At parties she danced silly dances, made far-fetched puns, sang camp songs, and all but wore lamp-shades. She could not imagine a friend more lively, and loyal, than Jane Cairo turned out to be. Jane seemed not to resent or begrudge anything Lou was by birth or hap, such as tall, or made-into-myth.
Jane often visited Lou or Cornelius or both in the dunes. Once she invited Lou to Cornelius’s
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