I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies – for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips.
He didn’t answer but reached over and put his hand at the root of my hair and ran his fingers out slowly to the tip ends like a comb. A little electric shock flared through me and I sat quite still. Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.
I was only purely happy until I was nine years old. I had never really been happy again.
The sickness rolled through me in great waves.
Mentally I have led a vegetable existence this summer.
My virginity weighed like a millstone around my neck.
From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naive and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.
Hadn’t my own mother told me that as soon as she and my father left Reno on their honeymoon – my father had been married before, so he needed a divorce – my father said to her, ‘Whew, that’s a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves.
Children made me sick.
I sat cross-legged on one of the beds and tried to look devout and impassive like some businessmen I once saw.
It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on.
She regarded me as a sort of interesting experiment.
She knew and I knew perfectly well I would get a straight A again in the chemistry course, so what was the point of my taking the exams; why couldn’t I just go to the classes and look on and take it all in and forget about marks or credits? It was a case of honor among honorable people, and the content meant more than the form, and marks were really a bit silly anyway, weren’t they, when you knew you’d always get an A? My.
I thought I would spend the summer reading Finnegans Wake and writing my thesis.
She looked terrible, but very wise. As she left the office, she patted my shoulder with one lilac-gloved hand. “Don’t let the wicked city get you down.
I squinted at the page. The letters grew barbs and rams’ horns. I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in a silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic or Chinese.
I wrote what the leaves looked like in autumn when I bicycled out into the hills, and how wonderful it was to live on a campus instead of commuting by bus to a city college and having to live at home, and how all knowledge was opening up before me and perhaps one day I would be able to write great books the way she did.
I’m so jealous I can’t speak. Nineteen years, and I hadn’t been out of New England except for this trip to New York. It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.
I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall and ugly and intellectual and the son of some big Greek movie producer in Hollywood, but also a Catholic, which ruined it for both of us. In addition to Socrates, I knew a White Russian named Attila at the Boston School of Business Administration.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream... I remembered everything... Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them. But they were a part of me. They were my landscape.
I have such a damned puritanical conscience that it flays me like briars when I feel I’ve done wrong or haven’t demanded enough of myself.