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Took my first high school date to Henry’s for a sodaTook her for a black-and-white soda after the movieBut a black-and-white doesn’t mean a soda anymore on Bergen StreetIt means the worst kind of hatred in the worldA car coming the wrong way on a one-way street and they ram meFour kids drooping out the windowsTwo of them get out, laughing, joking, and point a gun at my headI hand over the keys and one of them takes off in my carRight in front of what used to be Henry’sIt’s something horribleThey ram cop cars in broad daylightTo explode the air bagsHeard of doughnuting? Doing doughnuts? You haven’t heard about this? This is what they steal the cars forTop speed, they slam on the brakes, yank the emergency brake, twist the steering wheel, and the car starts spinningWheeling the car in circles at tremendous speedsKilling pedestrians means nothing to themKilling motorists logo dolce

You’re still in your old man’s dreamworld, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heavenA household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life–ladies’ gloves! Does he still tell the great one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is!”
Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive
“You wanted Miss America? Well, you’ve got her, with a vengeance–she’s your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, quilted chanel bags you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughterThe reality of this place is right up in your kisser nowWith the help of your daughter you’re as deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shitAmerica amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter,” thunders Jerry into the phone–and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it’s shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of the hospitalHe is one of the surgeons who shouts: if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shoutsHe does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives costume jewelry chanel want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatredIn the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is kingHe does not spend time regretting what he has or has not done or justifying to others how loathsome he can beThe message is simple: You will take me as I come–there is no choiceHe cannot endure swallowing anything
And these two are brothers, the same parents’ sons, one for whom the aggression’s been bred out, the other for whom the aggression’s been bred in
“If you were a father who loved his daughter,” Jerry shouts at the Swede, “you would never have left her in that room! You would never have let her out of your sight!”
The Swede is in tears at his dior china deskIt is as though Jerry has been waiting all his life for this phone callThat something’s grotesquely out of whack has made him furious with his older brother, and now there is nothing he will not sayAll his life, thinks the Swede, waiting to lay into me with these terrible thingsPeople are infallible: they pick up on what you want and then they don’t give it to you
“I didn’t want to leave her,” says the Swede”You don’t understandYou don’t want to understandThat isn’t why I left herIt killed me to leave her! You don’t understand me, you won’tWhy do you say I don’t love her? This is terrible He suddenly sees his vomit on her face and he cries out, “Everything is horrible!”
“Now you’re getting itRight! My brother is developing the beginning of a point of viewA point of view of his own instead of everybody else’s point of viewTaking something other than the party chanel j12 white watch lineNow we’re getting somewhereThinking becoming just a little untranquilizedEverything is horribleAnd so what are you going to do about it? NothingLook, do you want me to come up there and get her? Do you want me to get her, yes or no?”
“No
“Then why did you call me?”
“I don’t know
“Nobody can help you
“You’re a hard manYou are a hard man with me
“Yeah, I don’t come off looking very goodAsk our father if I doYou’re the one who always comes off looking goodAnd look where it’s got youRefusing to give offenseTolerant respect for every positionSure, it’s ‘liberal’–I know, a liberal fatherBut what does that mean? What is at the center of it? Always holding things togetherAnd look where the fuck it’s got you!”
“I didn’t make the war in VietnamI didn’t make the television warI didn’t make Lyndon Johnson Lyndon JohnsonYou forget where this beginsWhy she threw the torebki louis vuitton

The Swede told himself, “Forget the dough, write it off–you can’t compare a bull to a painting,” and in this way managed to control his disappointment when he saw Meditation #27 go up on the very spot where once there had been the portrait of Merry that he’d loved, a painstakingly perfect if somewhat overly pinkish likeness of the glowing child in blond bangs she had been at sixIt had been painted in oils for them by a jovial old gent down in New Hope who wore a smock and a beret in his studio there–he’d taken the time to serve them mulled wine and tell them about his apprenticeship copying paintings in the Louvre–and who’d come to the house six times for Merry to sit for him at the piano, and wanted only two thousand smackers for the painting and the gilt frameBut as the Swede was told, since Orcutt hadn’t asked for the additional thirty percent it would have cost had they purchased #27 from the frame shop, the five grand was a bargain
His father’s comment, when he saw the new painting, was “How much the guy charge you for that?” With reluctance Dawn replied, “Five thousand dollars
“Awful lot of money for a first coatWhat’s it going to be?”
“Going to be?” Dawn had replied sourly”Well, it ain’t finishedI hope it ain’t___Is it?”
“That it isn’t ‘finished,’” said Dawn, “is the idea, Lou
“Yeah?” He looked again”Well, if the guy ever wants to finish it, I can tell him how
“Dad,” said the Swede, to forestall further criticism, “Dawn bought it because she likes it,” and though he also could black chanel quilted have told the guy how to finish it (probably in words close to those his father had in mind), he was more than willing to hang anything Dawn bought from Orcutt just because she had bought itIrish envy or no Irish envy, the painting was another sign that the desire to live had become stronger in her than the wish to die that had put her into the psychiatric clinic twice”So the picture is shit,” he told his father later”The thing is, she wanted itThe thing is she wants againPlease,” he warned him, feeling himself–strangely, given the slightness of the provocation–at the edge of anger, “no more about that picture And Lou Levov being Lou Levov, the next time he visited Old Rimrock the first thing he did was to walk up to the picture and say loudly, “You know something? I like that thingI’m gettin’ used to it and I actually like itLook,” he said to his wife, “look at how the guy didn’t finish itSee that? Where it’s blurry? He did that on purpose
In the back of Orcutt’s van was his large cardboard model of the new Levov house, ready to unveil to the guests after dinnerSketches and blueprints had been piling up in Dawn’s study for weeks now, among them a diagram prepared by Orcutt charting how sunlight would angle into the windows on the first day of each month of the year”A flood of sunlight,” said Dawn”Light!” she exclaimed”Light!” And if not with the brutal directness that could truly test to the limit his understanding of her suffering and of the panacea she’d devised, by implication she was damning purse logo yet again the stone house he loved and, too, the old maple trees he loved, the giant trees that shaded the house against the summer heat and every autumn ceremoniously cloaked the lawn in a golden wreath at whose heart he’d hung Merry’s swing once upon a time
The Swede couldn’t get over those trees in the first years out in Old RimrockIt was more astonishing to him that he owned trees than that he owned factories, more astonishing that he owned trees than that a child of the Chancellor Avenue playing field and the unbucolic Weequahic streets should own this stately old stone house in the hills where Washington had twice made his winter camp during the Revolutionary WarIt was puzzling to own trees–they were not owned the way a business is owned or even a house is ownedIf anything, they were held in trustYes, for all of posterity, beginning with Merry and her kids
To protect against ice storms and high winds, he had cables installed in each of the big maples, four cables forming a rough parallelogram against the sky where the heavy branches opened dramatically out some fifty feet upThe lightning rods that snaked from the trunk to the topmost point of each tree he arranged to have inspected annually, just to be on the safe sideTwice a year, the trees were sprayed against insects, every third year they were fertilized, and regularly an arborist came around to prune out the deadwood and check the overall health of the private park beyond their doorMerry’s family’s trees
In the fall–just as he had louis vuitton wien always planned it–he’d be sure to get home from work before the sun went down, and there she would be–just as he had planned it–swinging high up over the fallen leaves encircling the maple by the front door, their largest tree, from which he’d first suspended that swing for her when she was only twoUp she would swing, nearly into the leaves of the branches that spread just beyond the panes of their bedroom windowsand, though to him those precious moments at the end of each day had symbolized the realization of his every hope, to her they had meant not a goddamn thingShe turned out to love the trees no more than Dawn had loved the houseWhat she worried about was AlgeriaThe kid in that swing, the kid in that treeThe kid in that tree who was now on the floor of that room
The Orcutts had come early so that Bill and Dawn would have time together to go over the problem of the link that was to join the one-story house to the two-story garageOrcutt had been away in New York for a couple of days, and Dawn was impatient to get this, their last problem, resolved after weeks of thinking and rethinking how to create a harmonious relationship between the very different buildingsEven if the garage was more or less disguised as a barn, Dawn didn’t want it too close, overwhelming the distinctiveness of the house, but she was afraid that a link twenty-four feet long, which was Orcutt’s proposal, might impart the look of a motel
They ruminated together almost daily, not only over the dimensions but now over whether chanel reporter bag the effect should perhaps be that of a greenhouse rather than of the simple passageway first plannedWhenever Dawn felt that Orcutt was trying to impose on her, however graciously, a solution that had more to do with some old-fashioned architectural aesthetic of his own than with the rigorous modernity she had in mind for their new home, she could be quite peeved, and she even wondered, on those few occasions when she was outright furious with him, if it hadn’t been a mistake to turn to someone who, though he had considerable authority with the local contractors–guaranteeing a first-class construction job)–and an excellent professional reputation, was “essentially a restorer of antiques Years had passed since she’d been intimidated by the snobbery that, fresh from Elizabeth and the family home (and the pictures on the wall and the statue in the hallway), she’d taken to be more or less Orcutt’s whole storyNow his credentials as county gentry were what she was most cutting about when the two of them were at oddsThe angry disdain disappeared, however, when Orcutt came back to her, usually within twenty-four hours, having alighted on–in Dawn’s words–”a perfectly elegant plan,” whether it was for the location of the washer-dryer or a bathroom skylight or the stairway to the guest room above the garage
Orcutt had brought with him, along with the large one-sixteenth-inch scale model out in the van, samples of a new transparent plastic material he wanted her to consider for the walls and the roof of the old omega li

The other two were what we identified as “sissies And that was why I now asked the Swede a question about Jerry that I would never have dreamed of asking in 1949, when I had no clear idea what a homosexual was and couldn’t imagine that anybody I knew could be oneAt the time I thought Jerry was Jerry, a genius, with obsessive naivete and colossal innocence about girlsIn those days, that explained it allBut I was really looking to see what, if anything, could roil the innocence of this regal Swede–and to prevent myself from being so rude as to fall asleep on him–so I asked him, “Is Jerry gay?”
“As a kid there was always something secretive about Jerry,” I said”There were never any girls, never close friends, always something about him, even besides his brains, that set him apart
The Swede nodded, looking at me as though he understood my deeper meaning as no human being ever had before, and because of this probing stare that I would swear saw nothing, all this giving that gave nothing and gave away nothing, I had no idea where his thoughts might be or if he even had “thoughts When, momentarily, I stopped speaking, I sensed that my words, rather than falling into the net of the other person’s awareness, got linked up with nothing in his brain, went in there and vanishedSomething about the harmless eyes–the promise they made that he could never do anything other than what was right–was becoming annoying to me, which has to be why I next brought up big black bag his letter instead of keeping my mouth shut until the bill came and I could get away from him for another fifty years so that when 2045 rolled around I might actually look forward to seeing him again
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrongYou might as well have the brain of a tankYou get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong againSince the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperceptionAnd yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof fake birkin cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anywayIt’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong againThat’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrongMaybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the rideBut if you can do that–well, lucky you
“When you wrote me about your father, and the shocks he’d suffered, it occurred to me that maybe Jerry had been the shockYour old man wouldn’t have been any better than mine at coming to grips with a queer son
The Swede smiled the smile that refused to be superior, that was meant to reassure me that nothing in him ever could or would want to resist me, that signaled to me that, adored as he was, he was no better than me, even perhaps a bit of a nobody beside me”Well, fortunately for my father, he didn’t have toJerry was the-son-the-doctorHe couldn’t have been prouder of anyone than he was of Jerry
“Jerry’s a physician?”
“In Miami
“Married? Jerry married?”
The smile againThe vulnerability in that smile was the surprising element–the vulnerability of our record-breaking muscleman faced with all the crudeness it takes to stay aliveThe smile’s refusal to recognize, let alone chanel quilted replica to sanction in himself, the savage obstinacy that seven decades of surviving requires of a manAs though anyone over ten believes you can subjugate with a smile, even one that kind and warm, all the things that are out to get you, with a smile hold it all together when the strong arm of the unforeseen comes crashing down on your headOnce again I began to think that he might be mentally unsound, that this smile could perhaps be an indication of derangementThere was no sham in it–and that was the worst of itThe smile wasn’t insincereHe wasn’t imitating anythingThis caricature was it, arrived at spontaneously after a lifetime of working himself deeper and deeper intowhat? The idea of himself neighborhood stardom had wreathed him in–had that mummified the Swede as a boy forever? It was as though he had abolished from his world everything that didn’t suit him– not only deceit, violence, mockery, and ruthlessness but anything | remotely coarse-grained, any threat of contingency, that dreadful i harbinger of helplessnessNot for a second did he stop trying to make his relation to me appear as simple and sincere as his seeming relationship to himself
Unless, unless, he was just a mature man, as devious as the next mature manUnless what was awakened by the cancer surgery– and what had momentarily managed to penetrate a lifelong comfy take on things–the hundred percent recovery had all but extinguishedUnless he was not a character with no character to reveal gucci indy bag but a character with none that he wished to reveal–just a sensible man who understands that if you regard highly your privacy and the well-being of your loved ones, the last person to take into your confidence is a working novelistGive the novelist, instead of your life story, the brazen refusal of the gorgeous smile, blast him with the stun gun of your prince-of-blandness smile, then polish off the zabaglione and get the hell back to Old Rimrock, New Jersey, where your life is your business and not his
“Jerry’s been married four times,” said the Swede, smiling
“And you?” I had already figured, from the ages of his three boys, that the fortyish blonde with the golf clubs was more than likely a second wife and perhaps a thirdYet divorce didn’t fit my picture of someone who so refused to register life’s irrational elementIf there had been a divorce, it had to have been initiated by Miss New JerseyOr being married to someone who had to keep the achievement looking perfect, someone devoted heart and soul to the illusion of stability, had led her to suicideMaybe that was the shock that had befallenPerversely, my attempts to come up with the missing piece that would make the Swede whole and coherent kept identifying him with disorders of which there was no trace on his beautifully aging paragon’s faceI could not decide if that blankness of his was like snow covering something or snow covering nothing
“Me? Two wives, that’s my limitI’m a piker next to my chanel white watch bro

She sensibly told him what all his adoration of her meant, told him that he was no more himself with her than Dawn was Dawn at the psychiatric clinic, explained to him that he was out to sabotage everything–but he was in such a state that he went on anyway telling her how, when they ran away together to Ponce, she could learn Spanish and teach techniques of speech therapy at the university there, and he could operate the business from his Ponce plant and they could live in a modern hacienda up in the hills, among the palms, above the Caribbean
What she did not tell him about was Merry in her house–after the bombing, Merry hiding in her houseShe told him everything except thatThe candor stopped just where it should have begun
Was everyone’s brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him?
This sense of inadequacy he might once have described to her; he could talk to Sheila, talk about his doubts, borse gucci his bewilderment–all the serenity in her allowed for that, this magician of a woman who had given Merry the great opportunity that Merry had thrown away, who had supplanted with “a wonderful floating feeling,” according to Merry, half at least of her stutterer’s frustration, the lucid woman whose profession was to give sufferers a second chance, the mistress who knew everything, including how to harbor a murderer
Sheila had been with Merry and she had told him nothing
All the trust between them, like all the happiness he’d ever known (like the killing of Fred Conlon–like everything), had been an accident
She’d been with Merry and said nothing
And said nothing nowThe eagerness with which others spoke seemed, under the peculiar intensity of her gaze, to strike her as a branch of pathologyWhy would anyone say that? She herself was to say nothing all evening, nothing about Linda Lovelace or Richard Nixon or HHaldeman and John Ehrlichman, her advantage over other people being that her head was not filled by what filled everybody else’s headThis way of hers, of lying in wait behind herself, the Swede had once taken to be a mark of her superiorityNow he thought, “Icy bitchWhy?” Once she had said to him, “The influence you allow others to have on you, it’s absoluteNothing so captivates you as quilted chanel bags another person’s needs And he had said, “I think you are describing Sheila Salzman,” and, as always, he was wrong
He thought she was omniscient and all she was was cold
Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyoneThe excision of certain assurances, the last assurances, made him feel as though he had gone in one day from being five to being one hundredIt would give him comfort, he thought, it would help him right then if, of all things, he knew that resting out in the pasture beyond their dinner table was Dawn’s herd, with Count, the big bull, protecting themIf Dawn still had Count, if only CountA relief-filled, realityless moment passed before he realized that of course it would be a comfort to have Count roaming the dark pasture among the cows, because then Merry would be roaming among the guests, here, Merry, in her circus pajamas, leaning up against the back of her father’s chair, whispering into her father’s earOrcutt drinks whiskeyA mischievous intelligence that was utterly harmless–back then unanarchic and childish and well within bounds
Meanwhile he heard himself saying, “Dad, take some more steak,” in what he knew was a hopeless effort–a good son’s ef-357 fort–to get his self-abandoned father to be, if not tranquil, less insistently chagrined over the inadequacies chanel classic bags of the non-Jewish human race
“I’ll tell you who I’ll take some steak for–for this young lady Spearing a slice from the platter that one of the serving girls was holding beside him, he dumped it onto Jessie’s plate; he had taken Jessie on as a full-scale project”Now pick up your knife and fork and eat,” he told her, “you could use some red meatSit up straight,” and, as though she believed he could well resort to violence if she did otherwise, Jessie Orcutt drunkenly mumbled, “I was going to,” but began to fiddle with the meat in such a clumsy way that the Swede feared his father was going to start cutting her food for herAll that crude energy that, try as it might, could not remake the troubled world
“But this is serious business, this children business Having gotten Jessie taking nourishment, he was in a state again about Deep Throat”If that isn’t serious, what is anymore?”
“Dad,” said the Swede, “what Shelly is saying is not that it’s not seriousHe agrees it’s seriousHe’s saying that once you’ve made your case to an adolescent child, you’ve made your case and you can’t then take these kids and lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key
His daughter was an insane murderer hiding on the floor of a room in Newark, his wife had a lover who dry-humped her over the sink in their family chanel tote kitchen, his ex-mistress had knowingly brought disaster upon his house, and he was trying to propitiate his father with on-the-one-hand-this and on-the-other-hand-that
“You’d be surprised,” Shelly told the old man, “how much the kids today have learned to take in their stride
“But degrading things should not be taken in their stride! I say lock them in their rooms if they take this in their stride! I remember when kids used to be at home doing their homework and not out seeing movies like thisThis is the morality of a country that we’re talking aboutWell, isn’t it? Am I nuts? It is an affront to decency and to decent people
“And what,” Marcia asked him, “is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?”
The question so surprised him that it left him looking a little frantically around the table for somebody with an opinion learned enough to subdue this woman
It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the familyBill Orcutt was coming to Lou Levov’s aid”And what is wrong with decency?” Orcutt asked, smiling broadly at Marcia
The Swede could not look at himOn top of all the things he could not think about there were two people–Sheila and Orcutt–he could not look atDid Dawn consider Bill Orcutt handsome? He never thought soRound face, snout nose, puckering lower lippiggy-looking devil wears prada chanel necklace basta

He should have heeded his mistrust and contacted immediately the agents who had interviewed him and Dawn at the house the day after the bombingHe should have picked up the phone the moment he understood who Rita Cohen was, even while she was seated in his officeBut instead he had driven directly home from the office and, because he could never calculate a decision free of its emotional impact on those who claimed his love; because seeing them suffer was his greatest hardship; because ignoring their importuning and defying their expectations, even when they would not argue reasonably or to the point, seemed to him an illegitimate use of his superior strength; because he could not disillusion anyone about the kind of selfless son, husband, and father he was; because he had come so highly recommended to everyone, he sat across from Dawn at the kitchen table, watching her deliver a long, sob-wracked, half-demented speech, a plea to tell the FBI nothing
Dawn begged him to do whatever the girl wanted: it remained possible for Merry to go unapprehended if only they kept her out of sight until the destruction of the store–and the death of DrConlon–had been forgottenIf only they hid her hermes tas somewhere, provided for her, maybe even in another country, until this war-mad witch-hunt was over and a new time had begun; then she could be treated fairly for something she never, never could have done”She’s been tricked!” and he believed this himself–what else could a father believe?–until he heard it, day after day, a hundred times a day, from Dawn
So he’d turned over the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet slippers, the stuttering book; and now he was to meet Rita Cohen at a room in the New York Hilton, this time bearing five thousand dollars in unmarked twenties and tensAnd just as he’d known to call the FBI when she asked for the scrapbook, he now understood that if he acceded any further to her malicious daring there’d be no bottom to it, there would only be misery on a scale incomprehensible to all of themWith the scrapbook, the leotard, the ballet slippers, and the stuttering book he had been craftily set up; now for the disastrous payoff
But Dawn was convinced that if he traveled over to Manhattan, got himself lost in the crowds, then, at the appointed afternoon hour, certain he wasn’t being tailed, made his way to the hotel, Merry herself would be there waiting miu miu coffer for him–an absurd fairy-tale hope for which there wasn’t a shred of justification, but which he didn’t have the heart to oppose, not when he saw his wife shedding another layer of sanity whenever the telephone rang
For the first time she was got up in a skirt and blouse, gaudily floral bargain-basement stuff, and wearing high-heeled pumps; when she unsteadily crossed the carpet in them, she looked tinier even than she had in her work bootsThe hairdo was as aboriginal as before but her face, ordinarily a little pot, soulless and unadorned, had been emblazoned with lipstick and painted with eye shadow, her cheekbones highlighted with pink greaseShe looked like a third grader who had ransacked her mother’s room, except that the cosmetics caused her expressionlessness to seem even more fright-eningly psychopathic than when her face was just unhumanly empty of color
“I have the money,” he said, standing in the hotel room doorway towering above her and knowing that what he was doing was as wrong as it could be”I have the money,” he repeated, and prepared himself for the retort about the sweat and blood of the workers from whom he had stolen itDo come in,” the girl saidI’d like you to meet gucci clearance my parentsMom and Dad, this is SeymourAn act for the factory, an act for the hotelDo make yourself at home
He had the money packed into his briefcase, not just the five thousand in the tens and twenties she’d asked for but five thousand more in fiftiesA total of ten thousand dollars–and with no idea whyWhat good would any of it do Merry? Merry wouldn’t see a penny of itStill, he said yet again–summoning all his strength so as not to lose hold–”I’ve brought the money you requested He was trying hard to continue to exist as himself despite the unlikeliness of everything
She had moved onto the bedspread and, with her legs crossed at the ankle and two pillows propped up behind her head, began lightly to sing: “Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, my encyclo-pid-e-a, oh Lydia, the tattooed lady
It was one of the old, silly songs he’d taught his little daughter once they saw that singing, she could always be fluent
“Come to fuck Rita Cohen, have you?”
“I’ve come,” he said, “to deliver the money
“Let’s f-f-f-fuck, D-d-d-dad
“If you have any feeling for what everyone is going through–”
“Come off it, SwedeWhat do you know about ‘feeling’?”
“Why are you treating us like this?”
“Boo-hooYou came big black bag here to fuck meWhy does a middle-aged capitalist dog come to a hotel room to meet a young piece of ass? To fuck herSay it, just say, ‘I came to fuck you
“I don’t want to say any such thingStop all this, please
“I’m twenty-two years old
Could this lead to Merry, this onslaught of sneering and mockery? She could not insult him enoughWas she impersonating someone, acting from a script prepared beforehand? Or was he dealing with a person who could not be dealt with because she was mad? She was like a gang memberWas she the gang leader, this tiny white-faced thug? In a gang the authority is given to the one who is most ruthlessIs she the most ruthless or are there others who are worse, those others who are holding Merry captive right now? Maybe she is the most intelligentMaybe she is the most corruptMaybe this is all a game to them, middle-class kids out on a spree
“Don’t I suit you?” she asked”No crude desires in a big guy like you? Come on, I’m not such a frightening personYou can’t have met your match in little meA child in terror of being disgracedIsn’t there anything else in there except your famous purity? I bet there isI bet you’ve got yourself quite a pillar in there,” she fake birkin said

One is just the same as threeIt gets your point over
“And you don’t have to mention the other stuff
“What other stuff?”
“The Virgin Mary
“That is not stuffIf he asks, ‘Do you have any statues?’ just tell him no, just tell him, ‘We don’t have statues, we don’t have pictures, the one cross and that’s it’” Religious ornaments, he explained, statues like those in her dining room and her mother’s bedroom, pictures like those her mother had on the walls were sore subjects with his fatherHe wasn’t defending his father’s positionHe was just explaining that the man had been brought up a certain way, and that’s the way he was, and there was nothing anybody could do about it, so why stir him up?
Opposing the father is no picnic and not opposing the father is no picnic–that’s what he was discovering
Anti-Semitism was another sore subjectWatch out what you say about JewsBest to say nothing about JewsAnd stay away from priests, don’t talk about priests”Don’t tell him that story about your father and the priests when he was a caddie at the country club as a kid
“Why would I ever tell him that?”
“I don’t know, but don’t go near it
“Why?”
“I don’t know–just don’tBecause if she told him that the first time her father realized priests had genitals was in the locker room when he used to caddie on weekends, that up until then he didn’t even dior logo think they were anatomically sexual, his own father might very well be tempted to ask her, “You know what they do with the foreskins of the little Jewish boys after the circumcision?” And she would have to say, “I don’t know, MrWhat do they do with the foreskins?” and MrLevov would reply–the joke was one of his favorites–”They send them to IrelandThey wait till they got enough of them, they collect them all together, then they send them to Ireland and they make priests out of them
It was a conversation the Swede would never forget, and not so much because of what his father said–all that he’d expectedIt was Dawn who made it an unforgettable exchangeHer truthfulness, how she had not seriously fudged about her parents or about anything that he knew was important to her–her courage was what was unforgettable
She was more than a full foot shorter than her fiance and, according to one of the judges who’d confided in Danny Dwyer after the pageant, had failed to be in the top ten in Atlantic City only because without her high heels she measured five foot two and a half, in a year when half a dozen other girls equally talented and pretty were positively statuesqueThis petiteness (which may or may not have disqualified her from a serious shot at runner-up–it hardly explained to the Swede’s satisfaction why Miss Arizona should walk off winner rolex chain of the whole shebang at only five three) had simply deepened the Swede’s devotion to DawnIn a youngster as innately dutiful as the Swede–and a handsome boy always making the extra effort not to be mistaken for the owner of his startling good looks–Dawn’s being only five foot two quickened in him a manly urge to shield and to shelterUp until that drawn-out, draining negotiation between Dawn and his father, he’d had no idea he was in love with a girl as strong as thisHe even wondered if he wanted to be in love with a girl as strong as this
Aside from the number of crosses in her house, the only other thing she lied about outright was the baptism, an issue on which she finally appeared to capitulate, but only after three solid hours of negotiations during which it seemed to the Swede that, amazingly enough, his father had yielded on that issue almost right off the batNot until later did he realize that his father had deliberately let the negotiation string out until the twenty-two-year-old girl was at the end of her strength and then, shifting by a hundred and eighty degrees his position on baptism, wrapped up the deal giving her only Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the Easter bonnet
But after Merry was born, Dawn got the child baptized anywayShe could have performed the baptism herself or got her mother to do it but she wanted the real gucci clearance thing, and so she got a priest and some godparents and took the baby to the church, and until Lou Levov happened to come upon the baptismal certificate in a dresser in the unused back bedroom of the Old Rimrock house, no one ever knew–only the Swede, whom Dawn told in the evening, after the freshly baptized baby had been put to bed cleansed of original sin and bound for heavenBy the time the baptismal certificate was unearthed, Merry was a family treasure six years old, and the uproar was short-livedThough that didn’t mean that the Swede’s father could shake the conviction that what lay behind Merry’s difficulties all along was the secret baptism: that, and the Christmas tree, and the Easter bonnet, enough for that poor kid never to know who she wasThat and her grandma Dwyer–she didn’t help eitherSeven years after Merry was born, Dawn’s father had the second heart attack, dropped dead while installing a furnace, and from then on there was no dragging Grandma Dwyer out of StEvery time she could get her hands on Merry, she spirited the child off to church, and God alone knew what they pumped into her thereThe Swede, far more confident with his father–about this, about everything, really, than he’d been before becoming a father himself–would tell him, “Dad, Merry takes it all with a grain of saltIt’s just Grandma to her, and what Grandma 2.55 chanel jumbo doesGoing to church with Dawn’s mother doesn’t mean a thing to Merry either way But his father wasn’t buying it”She kneels, doesn’t she? They’re up there doing all that stuff, and Merry is kneeling–right?”
“Well, sure, I guess so, sure, she kneelsBut it doesn’t mean anything to her
“Yeah? Well it does to me–it means plenty!”
Lou Levov backed off–that is, with his son–from attributing Merry’s screaming to the baptismBut alone with his wife he wasn’t so cautious, and when he was riled up about “some Catholic crap” the Dwyer woman had inflicted on his granddaughter, he wondered aloud if it wasn’t the secret baptism that all along lay behind the screaming that scared the hell out of the whole family during Merry’s first yearPerhaps everything bad that ever happened to Merry, not excluding the worst thing that happened to her, had originated then and there
She entered the world screaming and the screaming did not stopThe child opened her mouth so wide to scream that she broke the tiny blood vessels in her cheeksAt first the doctor figured it was colic, but when it went on for three months, another explanation was needed and Dawn took her for all kinds of tests, to all kinds of doctors–and Merry never disappointed you, she screamed there tooAt one point Dawn even had to wring some urine out of the diaper to take it to the doctor for a omega automatic seamaster tes

Barry’s wife, Marcia, a literature professor in New York, was, by even the Swede’s generous estimate, “a difficult person,” a militant nonconformist of staggering self-certainty much given to sarcasm and calculatedly apocalyptic pronouncements designed to bring discomfort to the lords of the earthThere was nothing she did or said that didn’t make clear where she stoodShe had barely to move a muscle–swallow while you were speaking, tap with a fingernail on the arm of her chair, even nod her head as if she were in total agreement–to inform you that nothing you were saying was correctTo encompass all her convictions she dressed in large block-printed caftans–an extensive woman, for whom a disheveled appearance was less a protest against convention than a sign that she was a thinker who got right to the pointNo nonsense, no commonplace stood between her and the harshest truths
Yet Barry enjoyed herSince they couldn’t have been more dissimilar, perhaps theirs was one of those so-called attractions of oppositesIn Barry, there was such thoughtfulness and kindly concern–ever since he was a kid, and the poorest kid the Swede had known, he’d been a diligent, upright gentleman, a solid catcher in baseball, eventually the class valedictorian, who, after his stint in the service, went to NYU on the GI BillThat’s where he met and jnarried Marcia SchwartzIt was hard for the Swede to understand how a strongly built, not unhandsome guy sacs hermes like Barry could free himself at the age of twenty-two from the desire to be with anybody else in this world but Marcia Schwartz, already so opinionated as a college girl that the Swede had to battle in her presence to stay awakeSat there and listened to herDidn’t at all seem to care that she was a slob, dressed even in college like somebody’s grandmother, and with those buoyant eyes, unnervingly enlarged by the heavy spectaclesDawn’s opposite in every wayFor Marcia to have spawned a self-styled revolutionary–yes, had Merry been raised within earshot of Marcia’s mouthbut Dawn? Pretty, petite, unpolitical Dawn–why Dawn? Where do you look for the cause? Where is the explanation for this mismatch? Was it nothing more than a trick played by their genes? During the March on the Pentagon, the march to stop the war in Vietnam, Marcia Umanoff had been thrown into a paddy wagon with some twenty other women and, very much to her liking, locked up overnight in a Djail, where she didn’t stop talking protest talk till they were all let out in the morningIf Merry had been her daughter, things would make senseIf only Merry had fought a war of words, fought the world with words alone, like this strident yentaThen Merry’s would be not a story that begins and ends with a bomb but another story entirelyA bomb tells the whole fucking story
Hard to grasp Barry’s marrying that womanMaybe it had to do with his family’s being so poorWho knows? Her chloe bag bay animus, her superior airs, the sense she gave of being unclean, everything intolerable to the Swede in a friend, let alone in a mate–well, those were the very characteristics that seemed to enliven Barry’s appreciation of his wifeIt was a puzzle, it truly was, how one perfectly reasonable man could adore what a second perfectly reasonable man couldn’t abide for half an hourBut just because it was a puzzle, the Swede tried his best to restrain his aversion and neutralize his judgment and see Marcia Umanoff as simply an oddball from another world, the academic world, the intellectual world, where always to be antagonizing people and challenging whatever they said was apparently looked on with admirationWhat it was they got out of being so negative was beyond him; it seemed to him far more productive when everybody grew up and got over thatStill, that didn’t mean that Marcia was really out to needle people and work them over just because she was so often needling people and working them overHe couldn’t call her vicious once he’d recognized that this was the way she was accustomed to socializing in Manhattan; moreover, he couldn’t believe that Barry Umanoff–who at one time was closer to him than his own kid brother–could marry someone viciousAs usual, the Swede’s default reaction to not being able to fathom cause and effect (as opposed to his father’s reflexive suspiciousness) was to fall back on a lifelong strategy and become purse logo tolerant and charitableAnd so he was content to chalk up Marcia as “difficult,” allowing at worst, “Well, let’s just say she’s no bargain
But Dawn loathed herLoathed her because she knew herself to be loathed by Marcia for having been Miss New JerseyDawn couldn’t stand people who made that story the whole of her story, and Marcia was especially exasperating because the pleasure of explaining Dawn by a story that had never explained her–and 34i hardly explained her now–was so smugly exhibitedWhen they’d all first met, Dawn told the Umanoffs about her father’s heart attack and how no money was coming into the house and how she realized that the door to college was about to be slammed shut on her brotherthe whole scholarship story, but none of it made Miss New Jersey seem like anything but a joke to Marcia UmanoffMarcia barely bothered to hide the fact that when she looked at Dawn Levov she saw no one there, that she thought Dawn pretentious for raising cows, thought she was doing it for the image–it wasn’t a serious operation Dawn ran twelve, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week; as far as Marcia was concerned it was a pretty House and Garden fantasy contrived by a rich, silly woman who lived, not in stinky-smelling New Jersey, no, no, who lived in the countryDawn loathed Marcia because of her undisguised superiority to the Levovs’ wealth, to their taste, to the rural way of life they loved, and loathed her beyond loathing gucci bangle watch because she was convinced that privately Marcia was altogether pleased about what Merry was alleged to have done
The privileged place in Marcia’s feelings went to the Vietnamese–the North VietnameseShe never for a moment compromised her political convictions or her compassionate comprehension of international affairs, not even when she saw from six inches away the misery that had befallen her husband’s oldest friendAnd this was what led Dawn to make the accusations that the Swede knew to be false, not because he could swear to Marcia’s honorableness but because for him the probity of Barry Umanoff was beyond question”I will not have her in this house! A pzghas more humanity in her than that woman does! I don’t care how many degrees she has–she is callous and she is blind! She is the most blind, self-involved, narrow-minded, obnoxious so-called intelligent person I have ever met in my life and I will not have her in my house!”
“Well, I can’t very well ask Barry to come by himself
“Then Barry can’t come
“Barry has to comeMy father gets a terrific boot out of seeing Barry hereHe expects to see Barry hereIt’s Barry, Dawn, who got me to Schevitz
“But that woman took Merry inDon’t you see? That’s where Merry went! To New York–to them! That’s who gave her a hiding place! Somebody did, somebody had toA real bomb thrower in her house–that excited herShe hid her from us, hid Merry from her parents when she needed her parents chanel watches most

The pure, buoyant unrestrained pleasure of stridingHe didn’t care if he played ball ever again–he just wanted to step out and strideIt seemed somehow that the ballplaying had cleared the way to allow him to do this, to stride in an hour down to the village, pick up the Lackawanna edition of the Newark News at the general store with the single Sunoco pump out front and the produce out on the steps in boxes and burlap bagsIt was the only store down there in the fifties and hadn’t changed since the Hamlin son, Russ, took it over from his father after World War I–they sold washboards and tubs, there was a sign up outside for Frostie, a soft drink, another nailed to the clapboards for Fleischmann’s Yeast, another for Pittsburgh Paint Products, even one out front that said “Syracuse Plows,” hanging there from when the store sold farm equipment tooRuss Hamlin could remember from earliest boyhood a wheelwright shop perched across the way, could still recall watching wagon wheels rolled down a ramp to be cooled in the stream; remembered, too, when there was a distillery out back, one of many in the region that had made the famous local applejack and had shut down only with the passage of the Volstead ActClear at the back of the store there was one window that was the Upost office–one window was it, and thirty or so of those boxes with the combination locksHamlin’s general store, with saddle christian dior the post office inside, and outside the bulletin board and the flagpole and the gas pump–that’s what had served the old farming community as its meeting place since the days of Warren Gamaliel Harding, when Russ became proprietorDiagonally across the street, alongside where there’d been the wheelwright shop, was the six-room school-house that would be the Levovs’ daughter’s first schoolKids sat on the steps of the storeYour girl would meet you thereA meeting place, a greeting placeThe familiar old Newark News he picked up had a special section out here, the second section, called “Along the Lackawanna Even that pleased him, and not just reading through it at home for the local Morris news but merely carrying it home in his handThe word “Lackawanna” was pleasing to him in and of itselfFrom the front counter he’d pick up the paper with “Levov” scrawled at the top in Mary Hamlin’s hand, charge a quart of milk if they needed it, a loaf of bread, a dozen fresh-laid eggs from Paul Hamlin’s farm up the road, say “See ya, Russell” to the owner, and then he’d turn and stride all the way back, past the white pasture fences he loved, the rolling hay fields he loved, the corn fields, the turnip fields, the barns, the horses, the cows, the ponds, the streams, the springs, the falls, the watercress, the scouring rushes, the meadows, the acres and acres of woods he loved with all of a new country white chanel bag dweller’s puppy love for nature, until he reached the century-old maple trees he loved and the substantial old stone house he loved–pretending, as he went along, to throw the apple seed everywhere
Once, from an upstairs window, Dawn saw him approaching the house from the foot of their hill while he was doing just that, flinging out one arm, flinging it out not as though he were throwing a ball or swinging a bat but as though he were pulling hand-fuls of seed from the grocery bag and throwing them with all his strength across the face of the historic land that was now no less his than it was William Orcutt’s”What are you practicing out there?” she said, laughing at him when he burst into the bedroom looking, from all that exercise, handsome as hell, big, carnal, ruddy as Johnny Appleseed himself, someone to whom something marvelous was happeningWhen people raise their glasses and toast a youngster, when they say to him, “May you have health and good fortune!” the picture that they have in mind–or that they should have in mind–is of the earthy human specimen, the very image of unrestricted virility, who burst so happily into that bedroom and found there, all alone, a little magnificent beast, his young wife, stripped of all maidenly constraints and purely, blissfully his”Seymour, what are you doing down at Hamlin’s–taking ballet lessons?” Easily, so easily, with those large chanel purses protecting hands of his he raised the hundred and three pounds of her up from the floor where she stood barefoot in her nightgown, and using all his considerable strength, he held her to him as though he were holding together, binding together, into one unshatterable entity, the wonderful new irreproachable existence of husband and father Seymour Levov, Arcady Hill Road, Old Rimrock, New Jersey, USAWhat he had been doing out on the road–which, as though it were a shameful or superficial endeavor, he could not bring himself openly to confess even to Dawn–was making love to his life
About the intensity of his physical intimacy with his young wife he was actually more discreetTogether they were rather prudish around people, and no one would have guessed at the secret that was their sexual lifeBefore Dawn he had never slept with anybody he’d dated–he’d slept with two whores while he was in the Marine Corps, but that didn’t count really, and so only after they were married did they discover how passionate he could beHe had tremendous stamina and tremendous strength, and her smallness next to his largeness, the way he could lift her up, the bigness of his body in bed with her seemed to excite them bothShe said that when he would fall asleep after making love she felt as though she were sleeping with a mountainIt thrilled her sometimes to think she was sleeping beside an enormous rockWhen rolex watches for women she was lying under him, he would plunge in and out of her very hard but at the same time holding himself at a distance so she would not be crushed, and because of his stamina and strength he could keep this up for a long time without getting tiredWith one arm he could pick her up and turn her around on her knees or he could sit her on his lap and move easily under the weight of her hundred and three poundsFor months and months following their marriage, she would begin to cry after she had reached her orgasmShe would come and she would cry and he didn’t know what to make of it
“What’s the matter?” he asked her
“Do I hurt you?”
“NoI don’t know where it comes fromIt’s almost as if the sperm, when you shoot it into my body, sets off the tears
“But I don’t hurt you
“Does it please you, Dawnie? Do you like it?”
“I love itThere’s something about itit just gets to a place that nothing else gets toAnd that’s the place where the tears areYou reach a part of me that nothing else ever reachesAs long as I don’t hurt youit’s just strange not being alone,” she saidShe stopped crying only when he went down on her for the first time”You don’t cry this way,” he said”It was so different,” she said”How? Why?”
“I guess I guess I’m alone again
“Do you want me not to do it again?”
“Oh, no,” she laughed, “absolutely nothow did you know how to do that? Did you ever do that knock off chanel earrings before?”
“Ne

“Don’t you know what’s made Merry Merry? Sixteen years of living in a household where she was hated by that mother
“For what? Tell meHated her for what?”
“Because she was everything Lady Dawn wasn’tHer mother hated her, SwedeIt’s a shame you’re so late in finding outHated her for not being petite, for not being able to have her hair pulled back in that oh-so-spiffy country wayMerry was hated with that hatred that seeps into you like toxinLady Dawn couldn’t have done a better job if she’d slipped poison into her a meal at a timeLady Dawn would look at her with that look of hatred and Merry was turned into a piece of shit
“There was no look of hatredSomething may have gone wrongI know what mulberry bags she’s talking aboutWhat you’re calling hatred was her mother’s anxietyBut it was about the stutteringMy God, it wasn’t hatred
“Still protecting that wife of yours,” said Rita, laughing at him again”Incredible incomprehensionYou know why else she hated her? She hated her because she’s your daughterIt’s all fine and well for Miss New Jersey to marry a JewBut to raise a Jew? That’s a whole other bag of tricksYou have a shiksa wife, Swede, but you didn’t get a shiksa daughterMiss New Jersey is a bitch, SwedeMerry would have been better off sucking the cows if she wanted a little milk and nurturanceAt least the cows have maternal feelings
He had allowed her to talk, he had allowed himself to listen, white chanel j12 watch only because he wanted to know; if something had gone wrong, of course he wanted to knowWhat is the grudge? What is the grievance? That was the central mystery: how did Merry get to be who she is? But none of this explained anythingThis could not be what it was all aboutThis could not be what lay behind the blowing up of the buildingA desperate man was giving himself over to a treacherous girl not because she could possibly begin to know what went wrong but because there was no one else to give himself over toHe felt less like someone looking for an answer than like someone mimicking someone who was looking for an answerThis whole exchange had been a ridiculous mistakeTo expect this kid to talk to omega seamaster watch him truthfullyShe couldn’t insult him enoughEverything about their lives transformed absolutely by her hatredHere was the hater–this insurrectionist child!
“Where is she?”
“Why do you want to know where she is?”
“I want to see her,” he said
“Why?”
“She’s my daughterMy daughter is being accused of murder
“You’re really stuck on that, aren’t you? Do you know how many Vietnamese have been killed in the few minutes we’ve had the luxury to talk about whether or not Dawnie loves her daughter? It’s all relative, SwedeDeath is all relative
“Where is she?”
“Your daughter is safeYour daughter is lovedYour daughter is fighting for what she believes inYour daughter is finally having an experience saddle handbags of the world
“Where is she, damn you!”
“She’s not a possession, you know–she’s not propertyShe’s not powerless anymoreYou don’t own Merry the way you own your Old Rimrock house and your Deal house and your Florida condo and your Newark factory and your Puerto Rico factory and your Puerto Rican workers and all your Mercedes and all your Jeeps and all your beautiful handmade suitsYou know what I’ve come to realize about you kindly rich liberals who own the world? Nothing is further from your understanding than the nature of reality
No one begins like this, the Swede thoughtThis can’t be what she isThis bullying infant, this obnoxious, stubborn, angry bullying infant cannot be my daughter’s omega automatic geneve prote