Far from Home

Walter Tevis

Far from Home

Walter Tevis

Far from Home
Copyright © 1983, 2014 by Walter Tevis
Cover art, special contents, and electronic edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover design by Brad Albright
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795342868

For Eleanora, Mimi, Stan, Rosemary, Bette, Frank, Amy, Lynn, Merle and Herry

Acknowledgments

Contents

PART ONE: CLOSE TO HOME

1. Rent Control

2. A Visit From Mother

3. Daddy

4. The Apotheosis of Myra

5. Out of Luck

6. Echo

7. Sitting in Limbo

PART TWO: FAR FROM HOME

8. The Other End of the Line

9. The Big Bounce

10. The Goldbrick

11. The Ifth of Oofth

12. The Scholar’s Disciple

13. Far From Home

Part One

Close to Home

RENT CONTROL

“My God,” Edith said, “that was the most real experience of my life.” She put her arms around him, put her cheek against his naked chest, and pulled him tightly to her. She was crying.

He was crying too. “Me too, darling,” he said, and held his arms around her. They were in the loft bed of her studio apartment on the East Side. They had just had orgasms together. Now they were sweaty, relaxed, blissful. It had been a perfect day.

Their orgasms had been foreshadowed by their therapy. That evening, after supper, they had gone to Harry’s group as always on Wednesdays and somehow everything had focused for them. He had at last shouted the heartfelt anger he bore against his incompetent parents; she had screamed her hatred of her sadistic mother, her gutless father. And their relief had come together there on the floor of a New York psychiatrist’s office. After the screaming and pounding of fists, after the real and potent old rage in both of them was spent, their smiles at one another had been radiant. They had gone afterward to her apartment, where they had lived together half a year, climbed up the ladder into her bed, and begun to make love slowly, carefully. Then frenetically. They had been picked up bodily by it and carried to a place they had never been before.