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When Simon wonders what kind of ani?mal he is, he identifies with the giraffe. An improbable design, a weird ensemble overall, no special reputation for wisdom, an uncle-figure at best. ed by the auto industry: niraffes on the highways. Simon too has a long neck, often ented upon, and a pe?culiar gait, sort of a shamble.He gets a call from his wife, Carol, in Philadelphia.
"You havent paid the car insurance," she says. "Oher car. I got stopped by a cop yesterday and he jacked me up about the insurance."
"Whatd you get stopped for?"
"Taillight."
"Call Bud at the offid tell him to take care of it," Simon says. "Hes got all the paperwork on the in?surance. How are you?"
"sidering what our mayor is up to, Im rea?sonably sahis thing is really w out much better than I thought it would. Your being gone, I mean."
"The absence of a plan is itself a plan," Simon says. "Heard from Sarah?"
"She called a day or so ago. Shes dropped German and history."
"Oh Lord. Why history?"
"They had to write papers."
"She hardly avoid writing papers."
"She needs a typewriter."
"Buy her a typewriter."
"Simon, Ive got other things to do. Ill give her a check but I t futz around shopping for type?writers."
"Okay, fine. Is she happy?"
"Shes been going out with some kind of Finn. I think hes a Finn. Very goodlooking. Hes in the busi?ness school."
"Hows his English?"
"Very Brit. What are you doing?"
"Reading. Walking around."
"Chasing tail."
"No Im not chasing anything."
"It was just a sociological observation. I dont care."
"I know that."
"Keep in touch."
"I will."
"Your bad brother," Simon says to Dore. "Why is he in New York?"
"Nothing for him in Denver, he thinks. Hes thirty-three. Two years in jail for auto theft. Hes on proba?tion now. He deals when he get enough moo buy something to deal. Hes good at calculating how often he hit people up. He has me down for a cou?ple of hundred every three months or so. His name is Burt."
She holds out ay wineglass. Simon p.
"Hes an engineer, actually. He desighis electric car, where you didnt have an array of batteries that had to be charged every two or three days. It had a circuit that allowed the batteries to recharge themselves just like gas engines recharge their batteries. There was a tiny puter in there somewhere. That was the car he stole. He was in partnership with these guys whod put up the development money and when the prototype worked, they cut him out of the pany. So he repos?sessed the car one night but they had the cops waiting for him."
"Couldnt he have started up again after he got out?"
"He fot how he did it. Hed hurt his brain, drink?ing busthead in jail. He tried, drove himself crazy try?ing. Hes still trying."
"Bad luck."
"Yeah. It could do y on the highway, too. My family is ly a blue-chip outfit."
She takes his glass out of his hand. "You drink too much."
"Goddamnit woman, leave my glass alone."
"Id hate to see your liver."
"Most uhat you ever will."
"And I dont like it that when we have roast lamb you take all the crag for yourself."
"Anything else?"
"Yes. This place isnt ."
"So it."
"Its a matter of setting an example. Youre the jefe grande around here."
"Whats that mean?"
"Big chief."
"Not what I feel like."
"Im talking basic reality."
A: I sometimes think of myself as a person who, you know what I mean, could have done some?thing else, it doesnt matter articularly. Just something else. I saw an ad in the Sunday paper for the CIA, a recruiting ad, maybe a quarter of a page, and I suddenly thought, it might be iing to do that. Even though Ive always been opposed to the CIA, when they were trying t Cuba down, the stuff with Lumumba in Africa, the stuff iral America. . . Then here is this ad, perfectly straightforward, "where your career is Americas strength" or something like that, "aptitude for learning a fn language is a plus" or something like that, Ive always been good at languages, and Im sitting there thinking about how my resume might look to them, starting pletely over in something pletely new, ging the very sort of person I am, and there was an attra, a defi?tra. Of course the maximum age was thirty-five. I guess they want them more malleable.
Q: So, in the evenings or on weekends --
A: Not every night or every weekend. I mean this de?pended on the circumstances. Sometimes my wife and I went to dinner with people, or watched television --
Q: But in the main --
A: It wasnt that often. It was on a while.
Q: Adultery is a sin.
A: It is classified as a sin, yes. Absolutely.
Q: The Sixth a says --
A: I know what it says. I was raised on the Sixth a. But.
Q: But what?
A: The Sixth a is wrong.
Q: Its wrong?
A: Its wrong.
Q: The whole a?
A: I dont know how it happened, whether its a mis?translation from the Aramaic or whatever, it may not even have been Aramaic I dont know, I certainly do not pretend to scholarship in this area but my sense of the matter is that the Sixth a is an error.
Q: Well if that were true it would ge quite a lot of things, wouldnt it?
A: Take the pressure off, a bit.
Q: Have you told your wife?
A: Yes, Carol knows.
Q: Howd she take it?
A: Well, she liked the Sixth a. You could reason that it was in her io support the Sixth a for the preservation of the family unit and this sort of thing but to reason that way is, I would say, to take aremely narrow view of Carol, of what she thinks. Shes not pre９9lib?dictable. She oold me that she didnt want me, she wanted a suite of hus?bands, ten or twenty --
Q: What did you say?
A: I said, Go to it.
Q: Myself, I think about being just sort of a regular person, one who worries about cer a lot, every little thing a predi of cer, no I dont want to go for my every-two-years-checkup because what if they find something? I wonder what will kill me and when it will happen and how it will happen, and I wonder about my parents, who are still alive, and what will happen to them. This seems to me to be a proper set of things to worry about. Last things.
A: I dont think God gives a snap about adultery. This is just an opinion, of course.
Q: So how do you, how shall I put it, pursue --
A: You think about this staggering cept, the mind of God, and then you think Hes sitting around w about this guy and this woman at the Beeut Travelodge? I think not.
Q: Well He doesnt have to think about every particular instance, He just sort of laid out the general prin?ciples --
A: He also created creatures who, with a single pow?erful glance --
Q: The eyes burn.
A: They do.
Q: The heart leaps.
A: Like a terrapin.
Q: Stupid youth returns.
A: Like hockey sticks falling out of a long-shut closet.
Q: Do you play?
A: I did. Many years ago.
Q: You find them in parks. You blunder upon them in parks.
A: Ive noticed that.
Q: They sit in parks a lot. Especially when theyre angry. The solitary bench. Shoulders raised, legs kig --
When he was in school at Penn, the resi?dent master was Louis Kahn. Kahn was given to mut?tering. Once he stood behind Simons draughting table and muttered for almost five mihe young ar?chitect was too intimidated to ask him what he was saying. The story was told of Kahn that when he was a young architect he had worked for Paul Cret, the French maestro who presided at Penn in the 20s. Wheher draughtsmen, thirty of them, quit for the day Kahn would take a roll of trag paper and go from board to board, leaving critiques of each archi?tects work as an overlay. He did not he boards of the firms three principals.
I love the excesses of my profession, Simon thought, heroid mock-heroics. Michael Graves and Robert Venturi, plexity and tradi as a text. All those fivers enjoying themselves as Michelangelht and his cape, Mies and his pinstripes. Michel?angelo most of all: "Where I steal I leave a knife." An appropriate High Renaissance se. The walls of the architecture labs at Penn had been covered with graffiti. "This is hell, nor are we out of it." "Hell is other architects." "The road to hell is paved with naugahyde."
White underwear with golden skin. Acres and acres of it. Was it golden? ventionally described as golden. The color of white birch stained with polyurethane. What do we think of this color bina?tion? Some people vote for bladerwear with such skin but these people are the same people who paint their bathrooms black. Walking in the garden, Modigliani said to Saint-Gaudens, about Renoir, "This roughneck will never be a painter." Dressed women, half-dressed women, quarter-dressed women. Simon was, as the womeedly told him, existing in a male fantasy, in hog heaven. He saw nothing wrong with male fantasies (the Taj Mahal, the Chrysler Building) but dehat he was in hog heaven. Where did they get such expressions? A Southernism that hed not heard in thirty years.
IN the ms, large figures shrouded in terrycloth lurch bad forth between the several bedrooms and the sihroom. Dore runs, in the ms, picks up breakfast at the market on the way back, fresh Italian rolls, green garlicked Krauterbutter, a quarter-pound of breast of veal. She has bee the manager of breakfast, takes pride in varying the fare, fine cheeses one day, a det kidew the , blueberry crepes and then chi-fried steak with beaten biscuits. "This breaded burlap," Veronica says, "nicely done, but what are you, trying to kill us, or what?"
"Try more pepper."
Still in her sweats, she washes the dishes and stows them away, theles down with the Business Day se of the Times, Revco Gets $1.16 Billion Buyout Bid, Troubled Farm Banks to Get Regulatory Aid, Jap?aba Chip Prices. Scratg a bare foot with one hand, flipping pages with the other. Then she showers, dips into MTV (shoulder to shoulder with Anne for fifteen minutes). Thens she off to the New School for her Tuesday class, Iment Strategies for the Eighties.
"Howd you get in?" Simon asks.
"Im auditing," she says. "I go early a a seat. The class is so big they ake the roll."
"You getting anything out of it?"
"You t play unless you have something to play with. Still, its educational."
After class, her nap. She throws herself on her bed and is dead to the world for an hour and a half, wearing only spun-sugar V-shaped briefs by Olga. Simon stares, on occasion, at the beautiful body at rest, face down on the bed. What miracles of bawdiness it perform without thinking, the operator quite unaware. In sleep, she scratches her belly. He feels the urge to sit on the edge of the bed (hurl himself into the bed), but does not. At night, she either puts herself together for Fizz or reads Dis. Shes bought four Dis novels in worn Everymaions at the Strand and is moving through them methodically. "The thing about Dis is," she tells him, "he khe value of a pound, when you didnt have one. All his people are scrambling for money."
"So?" Simon says.
"I identify with that."
Late at night she sits with Simon drinking a Dos Equis and listening to Horace Silver.
"Youre the mother of these guys," he says.
"Im not. Last among equals."
"Veronicas a handful."
"Shes her own person. I admire her. Shes the smartest."
"How long have you three known each other?"
Diggles. "We all worked for a retail outlet in Denver. It was called Fredericks of Hollywood of Den?ver. It had nothing to do with the real Fredericks of Hollywood."
"Is that clothes?"
"Yes. Clothes."
Dore knows orick which may one day place her among the worlds managers, how to walk. Dore always walks briskly, head up, arms swinging in good military style, moving from one very important assigo the , a bit rushed, look-what-those-apes-in-Purchasing-have-doo-us-now. Simon, having spent some time in large anizations, uands what Dores walk means, appreciate its brittle bouncy R.A.F. au?thority. Veronica dawdles and Anne lurches, although at moments of fusion all lurch, banging into each other as if blindfolded. Simon shambles.
Veronica is often out on mysterious errands which the others do not ent upon. What is she doing? Simon tries not to think about this -- its none of his business -- but he t help speculating. Is she taking a shift as a blackjack dealer in Atlantic City? Loading tainer ships in Hoboken? Re-fletg arrows at the Museum of the Ameri Indian? Pushing odi?ties in a bucket shop on Varick Street? The darker pos?sibilities he refuses to plate. She enters in a flurry, having missed dinner, and declares shes starv?ing. Simon plops a stuffed pork chop on her plate, wild rice, white asparagus. Dore and Anne scarcely notice her, theyre talking about life after death.
"No way," Anne says, "do I want to live after death. Its hard enough as it is."
"But youre not close to the e," says Dore. "The end is not near. When the end is near, you may feel differently."
"I doubt it. Ay of keeping the armpits tidy? No thank you."
"The graves a fine and quiet place. Thats not it. The graves a fine and pleasant place. Thats not it. What is it, Simon?>..</a>"
"Dont know."
"Private," says Veronica. "The graves a fine and private place. I remember that one. He goes on to say that theres no sex in the grave."
"But what if you leap over the grave and into some?thing new? Something that has been imagined only by saints and mendit friars in their robes of grass and rope?"
"Like what?" Anne says. "Some kind of church thing? I never did like church."
"Church is punishment for our sins," Dore says, "everybody knows that. The only question is whether by the time you die youve done enough church to be punished enough."
"I havent," Veronica says. "I dropped out when I was ten. Actually they asked my mother to leave be?cause she was living in sin with my father and had been for ten years and they decided it was too flagrant."
"What denomination was that?" Anne asks.
"Assembly of God. Their motto was The Fellow?ship of Excitement. It was very exg whehrew my mother out. A ittee called on her and told her. There were three men and two women. She served apple juid chocolate-chip cookies. All she said afterward was that it was a waste of apple juice."
"I kind of liked it," Dore said. "I guess it was my authoritarian personality. We were Lutheran. A rare bunch, the Lutherans, they take everything very serio藏书网usly. What were you, Simon?"
"A simple Presbyterian."
Veronica places five hundred-dollar bills oable. "A little tribution to the household ey."
"Where in the world did you get that?"
"It wasnt hooking."
"So, where?"
"O.T.B."
"You bastard! What was the horse?"
"Crushed Rose."
SIMON buys an artwork. The artwork is a print by the artist John Chamberlain as a lot of automobile bumpers smashed together into a sculp?tural block. Its very small, ten inches square, modestly framed. He has trouble plag it on the big empty walls of the apartment; wherever he puts it, it looks ri?diculous. Finally he hangs it by the front door.
Anne looks at it. "Whats that?"
"A print."
"Who by?"
"Guy named Chamberlain."
"Not very big."
"No its not."
She moves closer food look. "Car bumpers."
"Yes."
"I like it."
"So do I."
"Terribly small. For this big wall."
"This is not the Frick."
"Looks funny all alone like that."
"A brave little picture. Holds the wall."
"I guess if you like it and I like it, thats all that ts."
She turns and holds out her hand.
"Sweet of you to try."
"We get more. One of these days."
"Maybe just have this one. Symbolizing the situa?tion."
"What do you mean by the situation?"
"We have hot dogs for dinner.&quo<bdo>.９９ｌｉｂ?</bdo>t;
"How did you know I wanted hot dogs?"
"I just intuited it."
"Getting pretty domestic around here."
Shes flipping a kit knife around and catg it by the blade in a dangerous manner.
"I guess. Still, we know the truth."
Sarah calls.
"Who was that who answered the phone?" she asks.
"That was Anne."
"Whos she?"
"A guest. I was i."
"Bluebeard."
"How are you?"
"I got a ypewriter."
"What kind?"
"Smith-a. It spell fifty thousand words right."
"More than I spell right."
"Me too. I gnant. Mom tell you?"
"No. She didnt."
"Then I spontaneo<big></big>usly aborted. Last month."
"She should have told me. Or you should have told me."
"No big deal."
"This the guy from Finland?"
"Yeah. He went back."
"His reindeer were on fire."
"He was going bayhow. I told him to go."
"How do you feel?"
"Im not having world-class luck."
"Probably theres something wrong with you," Simon says. "Some kind of character flaw, final and ineradicable."
"Thats it," she says. "You ing home any time soon?"
"Itll be a while yet," he says. "Sweetie, you e over here. Whenever you want."
"Scared of what I might see," she says. "So long."
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