Love and Glory
- Автор: Паркер Роберт Браун
- Год: 1983
- Язык: английский
- Год: Delacorte
- ISBN: 978-0-385-29261-0
- Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Электронная книга - «Love and Glory». Краткое содержание книги:
“Want to watch TV?” Jennifer said.
“No.”
“Come sit on Mamie’s lap and draw,” Margaret said. “I’d love a picture of me.”
“I can’t draw on your lap,” Sue Sue said. “There’s no place for the paper.”
Merchent said, “Jennifer, why don’t you take her out for a while.”
Margaret said, “Oh, no. No. No. The poor thing. She wants to be with all the people. Doesn’t she, Sue Sue? She wants to visit with the company too.”
“Well,” Merchent said, “if you stay, Sue Sue, you have to let us talk, okay?”
“I can talk too,” she said.
“But not when someone else is talking,” Jennifer said.
Sue Sue got in her grandmother’s lap and put her face against her grandmother’s shoulder and said, “Nobody likes me.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Margaret said. She was on her third scotch and was beginning to slush her S’s. “Don’t be silly, everyone loves you.”
“When’s he going home?” Sue Sue said.
Jennifer said, “Suzanna!”
Margaret was patting Sue Sue on the back. “She’s just tired,” she said. “Are you tired, sweetie?”
Merchent sipped his beer from a tall tulip-shaped glass. “I’ll have to look into the Balderston article,” he said. “Did you happen to see the review of my Teasdale book in J.A.P.A.?”
Sue Sue was continuing to talk against her grandmother’s shoulder. “Nobody likes me,” she said. “Nobody likes me.” The repetition became a kind of chant.
“Mamie loves you,” Margaret said. She drank scotch with her free hand. “I’ll have just one more drink, dear,” she said to John. “Not too much, just one jigger.”
“Could you get that for my mother, Jennifer?” Merchent said. Jennifer put down her barely touched bourbon and water and got her mother-in-law’s glass and put more scotch in and ice. I noticed she didn’t use a jigger.
“You’re sure just one jigger, Jennifer?”
“Absolutely,” Jennifer said.
“Nobody likes me,” Sue Sue crooned. “Nobody likes me.”
I said, “I don’t recognize the Journal.”
“Journal of the American Poetry Association,” Merchent said. “Very reputable.”
Margaret was singing “Rock-a-bye baby, in the tree-top” and rocking Sue Sue back and forth. Sue Sue continued to chant “Nobodylikesme nobodylikesme.” Neither Sue Sue nor Margaret was very loud. But they were steady.
“Let me get it for you,” Merchent said. “It’s really a rather interesting piece.” He got up and went out of the room. I looked at Jennifer. Her face was bright, intelligent, charming, interested. Her eyes were blank.
“Rockabyenobodylikesmebabyinthenobodylikesmetree top.”
The fireplace was made of fieldstone and covered nearly the whole inner wall of the study. Two other walls had bookcases. The rear wall faced out onto the veranda and beyond it down the slope of lawn and rock and garden was the ocean, white-flecked and uneasy. The color of a slate roof.
“Nobodylikesmethecradlewillfallnobodylikesmedown willcomebabycradleandall.”
I could feel a small trickle of sweat run down my side from my right armpit. Merchent came back in with his copy of J.A.P.A. open to the review of his critical study of the poetry of Sara Teasdale.
“Let me read it to you,” Merchent said. “I’m not sure Mother’s heard this yet either.” I nodded. I don’t know what Jennifer did. I didn’t look at her. “ ‘There is real insight,’ ” Merchent began, “ ‘in Professor Merchent’s analysis of the dramatic polarities...’ ”
Margaret continued to sing softly to Sue Sue, who continued to whine softly to Margaret. When Merchent finished reading I said the proper things, glanced at my watch, pretended to be surprised, and said, “Son of a gun. I didn’t realize the time. I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”
Jennifer said, “I’ll drive you to the train, Boonie,” and went to get her coat and mine.
Merchent said, “We’ll have to do this more often, Boone,” and shook hands.
Sue Sue said, “You got my picture?”
I showed her that I did. Then Jennifer was back and we left.
On the ride to the station I said to Jennifer, “Maybe I should have taken two pictures.”
Jennifer said, “It wouldn’t have mattered. She’d have kept drawing until you eventually said no thank you and the rest would have been the same.”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s good, I was feeling guilty.”
Jennifer laughed briefly. “Join the group,” she said.
Chapter Thirty
“What do you do for social life, Boonie?” Jennifer said. We were alone in the teaching fellows’ office, studying. It was evening and the building was empty except for us and the night cleaning man who shuffled about, dragging his big trash barrel and emptying wastebaskets into it. Jennifer had made us two cups of instant coffee with hot water from the office percolator, and we were taking a break.
“I talk with you,” I said. “When I should be studying.”
“Besides that?”
“I haven’t much time for much besides that. I teach my two sections and grade freshmen compositions — ugh — and take my own classes and study and work weekends as a carpenter. Sometimes I have a couple of beers with the guys I work with.”
“No girls?”
I shook my head.
“That’s too bad,” Jennifer said. “You have a great capacity for affection.”
The fist that I kept clenched inside me tightened a little. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”
We were quiet, sipping coffee. Somewhere, on another floor, a vacuum cleaner hummed. Jennifer’s makeup was perfect, her hair exactly in place. She’d been at school since nine o’clock in the morning, but she looked as if she’d just arrived. Her commitment to her appearance was large. As we sat I thought about aging. Neither of us was old, but we looked different than we had. Jennifer’s face was more interesting now. There were no lines, no double chins, and yet it was the face of a thirty-six-year-old woman. What had changed?
“You’re too closed in, Boonie,” Jennifer said. “You’re the most entirely autonomous person I’ve ever met, but you pay a high price for it.”
“Not as high a price as I paid when I wasn’t autonomous,” I said. “When you married Merchent I nearly went under. By the time I bottomed in L.A. a derelict, I was dying. If autonomy means being in control of your life, I had none. Now I do. And I will never lose it again.”
It was the first time I’d ever spoken with her in anything but general terms about the bad years. And I found my voice thick with intensity when I spoke of it now. I realized as I heard the intensity how vital my self-control was, how much it meant to me to have dragged myself up out of the bad years. Jennifer heard the intensity too.
“Would you like to tell me about it?” she said.
The vacuum cleaner on the floor above continued. The tone of its hum alternated slightly as it moved forward and backward over the industrial carpeting. Jennifer was leaning forward at her desk, her chin resting on her folded hands.
“Yes,” I said. “I would. I can’t remember long stretches of it, but I can give you some highlights.”
I talked for nearly an hour in surprisingly lucid chronology. The keeping of my journal probably helped the sequence of events in my head, and some of what I told her I remembered from my journal entries rather than from the events themselves.
The vacuum cleaner had gone by the time I finished speaking, and when I finished, the silence was complete. Jennifer had not moved, her enormous eyes steady on my face, her chin still resting on her hands.
“My God,” she said.