He’s the only soul alive who knew the deceased intimately.
I felt like giving old Jane a buzz.
All of her work was unsigned- a minot enough fact, but at the time, a disproportionately refreshing one. Bambi Kramer’s and Ridgefield’s pictures had all been either signed or- and it somehow seemed even more irritating- initialled.
He was one of those bald guys that comb all their hair over from the side to cover up the baldness. I’d rather be bald than do that.
I didn’t care what kind of a job it was, though. Just so people didn’t know me and I didn’t know anybody.
As a matter of fact, I’m the only dumb one in the family.
For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world – not life and death, perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things – work out rather beautifully.
It would not interfere with your being a nun. I live like an evil-minded monk myself.
I packed up and joined Bobby, my stepfather, in Rhode Island, where I spent the next six or eight weeks, till art school reopened, investigating that most interesting of all summer-active animals, the American Girl in Shorts.
He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.
Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes, the only place they’ll still be floating will be inside my mind. That’s quite interesting, because if you look at it a certain way, that’s where they started floating in the first place.
He took two steps at a time, but slowly, holding onto the banister, putting his whole body into it, as if the act of climbing a flight of stairs was for him, as it is for many children, a moderately pleasurable end in itself.
PS In my last letter I casually asked if the young lady in the blue outfit in the foreground of your religious picture was Mary Magdalene the sinner. If you have not as yet replied to my letter, please go on refraining. It is possible that I was mistaken and I do not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my life. I am willing to stay in the dark.
The hole in the shoulder of his T shirt was not a cute hole. The excess material in the seat of his seersucker shorts, the excess length of the shorts themselves, were not cute excesses.
Then, with instantly one-pointed concentration, as if only he and the notebook existed- no sunshine, no fellow passengers, no ship- he began to turn the pages.
Though his speaking voice was, in the usual connotation, well bred, it carried considerably more than adequately, as though he had some sort of understanding with himself that anything he had to say would sound pretty much all right- intelligent, literate, even amusing or stimulating- either from Teddy’s vantage point or from that of the people in the row behind, if they were listening.
You always got these very lumpy mashed potatoes on steak night, and for dessert you got Brown Betty, which nobody ate, except maybe the little kids in the lower school that didn’t know any better – and guys like Ackley that ate everything.
Just because they’re crazy about themself, they think you’re crazy about them, too, and that you’re just dying to do them a favor. It’s sort of funny, in a way.
I could feel a terrific lecture coming on. I didn’t mind the idea so much, but I didn’t feel like being lectured to and smell Vicks Nose Drops and look at old Spencer in his pajamas and bathrobe all at the same time. I really didn’t.
Accidenti ai quattrini. Finiscono sempre col darvi una malinconia del diavolo.