The wintry sun, coming in at a slant through the window, gave everything a frozen, precisely detailed look; nothing seemed real, and I felt as though this were some complicated film I’d started watching in the middle and couldn’t quite get the drift of.
But he felt invigorated just to stand by the door, unnoticed, munching his barbecued potato chips and breathing the same perilous ozone of corruption.
My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn’t pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee.
Do you know what Julian says about the Divine Comedy? That it’s incomprehensible to someone who isn’t a Christian? That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own term, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one.
Nobody said anything. Dust motes floated in a sunbeam.
I couldn’t imagine what Henry was doing, but as disconnected as his actions seemed, I had a childlike faith in him and, as confidently as Dr Watson observing the actions of his more illustrious friend, I waited for the design to manifest itself.
In the water, a dark plume of blood blossomed by her foot; as I blinked, a thin red tendril spiraled up and curled over her pale toes, undulating in the water like a thread of crimson smoke.
I watched it all happen quite calmly – without fear, without pity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity – so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart.
All of a sudden I found myself able to see him as the world saw him, as I myself had seen him when I first met him – cool, well-mannered, rich, absolutely beyond reproach. It was a convincing illusion that even I, who knew the essential falseness of it, felt oddly comforted.
The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture; of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college... the idea was so truly heavenly that I’m not sure I thought, even then, it could ever really happen, but I like to believe I did.
Neither one cares about anybody but himself – or herself, as the case may be. They like to present a unified front but I don’t even know how much they care about each other.
But here we were only strangers, in a place where strangers were rare.
Maybe he’d divined in me – correctly – this cowardice, this hideous pack instinct which would enable me to fall into step without question.
When I disagreed – strenuously – and asked what was wrong with focusing one’s entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: “There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty – unless she is wed to something more meaningful – is always superficial.
Nothing’, he said. ‘Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.’ He brushed the dirt from his hands. ‘But then it changed,’ he said. ‘The night I killed that man.
Except that there’s not much which matters a great deal.
It was a beautiful night, full moon, the meadow like silver and the housefronts throwing square black shadows sharp as cutouts on the grass.
It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods amd seasons was to see it a thousamd different ways.
It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent.
He was a lovely man. Not many like him. Gentle, charming. People always felt sorry for him because of his back, though I’ve never met anyone so naturally gifted with a happy disposition, and of course the customers loved him... outgoing fellow, very sociable, always was... ‘the world won’t come to me,’ he used to say, ‘so I must go to it.’ –.