the way of blood kin what it is his boy needs.
But Ping has continued. “It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire. I mean, Jane Bowles was hardly Marilyn or James Dean, to most people, but to me …”
Foster returns his attention. Ping is a good teacher, and there’s much to learn.
•
Set free, Barrett finds himself without an immediate direction. Beth is talking to Tyler and Nina, and Barrett lacks the energy, just now, to enter an ongoing conversation. Andrew sits one-ass-cheeked on a windowsill, looking out at the night (or at his own reflection in the glass) as he chugs another beer (he consumes freely, the way an animal does, taking all the nourishment that’s offered, as unconflicted as any creature whose earthly career depends on maximum intake balanced against minimal output). Apart from Barrett’s veneration of Andrew—because of his veneration of Andrew—they are friendly, but in no way intimate. It would be impossible for Barrett simply to walk up to Andrew and say … something about hopes for the coming year. Or anything, about anything.
Barrett decides to slip into his room and lie down for a few minutes. It strikes him suddenly as the most wonderful of all possibilities: the chance to lie quietly, alone, on his mattress, with the party playing, soft as a radio, in the next room.
When he enters his room, he leaves it in darkness, “darkness” being relative, without the blinds drawn—Knickerbocker Avenue sheds its mild orange radiance all night long. Barrett settles down on his mattress with a certain caution, as if he suffers an affliction of the joints.
His room, being white, absorbs the street glow, suffused by the lightly pulsing orange, a hint of the noir. The room is not unpleasant. But staying here, Barrett feels, more and more acutely, like an immigrant, come to a foreign country that is neither bleak nor verdant. It’s the country that would have him, since he lacked the necessary papers for more promising places, and could no longer remain where he once thought he belonged; where his skills (the adroit skinning of an antelope, the ability to leach acorns into flour) have no currency or value.
The problem that marked his earlier years: almost everything is interesting. Books, in particular, to Barrett; and learning other languages, cracking their codes, beginning to see their patterns and their mutations; and history—the scraping away of all that accumulated time to find, still living, in its own continuum, a day in the market in Mesopotamia, where a woman ponders mangoes; a night on the verges of Moscow, the black air so cold it impedes your breathing, Napoleon somewhere up there under the same frozen sky, the gray Moscow darkness with its icy stars, which have never looked so brilliant, or so remote …
But there is, as well, the world of simpler aims, the fatigue at the end of a working day, whether you’ve been flipping burgers or shingling a roof; the love you can feel for the waitresses and the cooks, the carpenters and electricians, there’s no other devotion quite like it (maybe it’s a miniature version of what men feel after they’ve been at war together); the pure boisterous teasing mayhem of going out for beers once you’ve been released from your labors,
Willy has a crazy girlfriend and Esther really should get back to her kids and Little Ed has almost saved enough to buy that secondhand Ducati …
Barrett, in his working life, was for so long the debutante who could not choose, who found every potential husband to be either more or less promising but never quite … never quite someone she could imagine seeing every day for the rest of her life, and so she waited. She wasn’t all that proud, it wasn’t as if she imagined herself too fine for any mere mortal; she simply found that her own body of inclinations and eccentricities didn’t match up quite closely enough
But Ping has continued. “It’s better, really, to go out in a blaze. That’s why we love Marilyn, and James Dean. We love the ones who walk right into the fire. I mean, Jane Bowles was hardly Marilyn or James Dean, to most people, but to me …”
Foster returns his attention. Ping is a good teacher, and there’s much to learn.
•
Set free, Barrett finds himself without an immediate direction. Beth is talking to Tyler and Nina, and Barrett lacks the energy, just now, to enter an ongoing conversation. Andrew sits one-ass-cheeked on a windowsill, looking out at the night (or at his own reflection in the glass) as he chugs another beer (he consumes freely, the way an animal does, taking all the nourishment that’s offered, as unconflicted as any creature whose earthly career depends on maximum intake balanced against minimal output). Apart from Barrett’s veneration of Andrew—because of his veneration of Andrew—they are friendly, but in no way intimate. It would be impossible for Barrett simply to walk up to Andrew and say … something about hopes for the coming year. Or anything, about anything.
Barrett decides to slip into his room and lie down for a few minutes. It strikes him suddenly as the most wonderful of all possibilities: the chance to lie quietly, alone, on his mattress, with the party playing, soft as a radio, in the next room.
When he enters his room, he leaves it in darkness, “darkness” being relative, without the blinds drawn—Knickerbocker Avenue sheds its mild orange radiance all night long. Barrett settles down on his mattress with a certain caution, as if he suffers an affliction of the joints.
His room, being white, absorbs the street glow, suffused by the lightly pulsing orange, a hint of the noir. The room is not unpleasant. But staying here, Barrett feels, more and more acutely, like an immigrant, come to a foreign country that is neither bleak nor verdant. It’s the country that would have him, since he lacked the necessary papers for more promising places, and could no longer remain where he once thought he belonged; where his skills (the adroit skinning of an antelope, the ability to leach acorns into flour) have no currency or value.
The problem that marked his earlier years: almost everything is interesting. Books, in particular, to Barrett; and learning other languages, cracking their codes, beginning to see their patterns and their mutations; and history—the scraping away of all that accumulated time to find, still living, in its own continuum, a day in the market in Mesopotamia, where a woman ponders mangoes; a night on the verges of Moscow, the black air so cold it impedes your breathing, Napoleon somewhere up there under the same frozen sky, the gray Moscow darkness with its icy stars, which have never looked so brilliant, or so remote …
But there is, as well, the world of simpler aims, the fatigue at the end of a working day, whether you’ve been flipping burgers or shingling a roof; the love you can feel for the waitresses and the cooks, the carpenters and electricians, there’s no other devotion quite like it (maybe it’s a miniature version of what men feel after they’ve been at war together); the pure boisterous teasing mayhem of going out for beers once you’ve been released from your labors,
Willy has a crazy girlfriend and Esther really should get back to her kids and Little Ed has almost saved enough to buy that secondhand Ducati …
Barrett, in his working life, was for so long the debutante who could not choose, who found every potential husband to be either more or less promising but never quite … never quite someone she could imagine seeing every day for the rest of her life, and so she waited. She wasn’t all that proud, it wasn’t as if she imagined herself too fine for any mere mortal; she simply found that her own body of inclinations and eccentricities didn’t match up quite closely enough
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