Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Personae
- I: Early Days
- One. Control
- Two. Doubt
- Three. Fate
- Four. Same
- Five. Fine Arts
- Six. In Loco Parentis
- Seven. Settling
- Eight. Neighbors
- Nine. Prospects
- Ten. The Lucky
- Eleven. Instruction
- Twelve. Same
- Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
- Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
- Fifteen. The Reason
- Sixteen. That Person
- Seventeen. Predictably
- II: Writing Teacher
- Eighteen. Early Poems
- Nineteen. Motivation
- Twenty. Allegory
- Twenty-One. Grief
- Twenty-Two. A Portrait
- Twenty-Three. Veils
- Twenty-Four. Soft Power
- Twenty-Five. Lists
- Twenty-Six. A Break
- Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
- Twenty-Eight. Custom
- Twenty-Nine. Parity
- Thirty. Fortune
- III: Volta
- Thirty-One. Images
- Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
- Thirty-Three. Letters
- Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
- Thirty-Five. Love
- Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
- IV: Your Best Reader
- Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
- Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
- Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
- Forty. Détente
- Forty-One. Worlds
- Forty-Two. Recognition
- Forty-Three. Persistence
- Forty-Four. And Then
- Forty-Five. Mingling
- Forty-Six. You
- Forty-Seven. Persona
- Forty-Eight. Est et Non
- Forty-Nine. The Author
- Epilogue
- Afterword: The Libertine
- Acknowledgments
- About the Authors
“Except, dude, that I am not being literal and would you listen to me for one half a second, please? I called them, right? And it sounds like nobody answered the ad at all so they’re totally desperate, basically, plus, like, bethonged? And I got you an interview. It’ll be easy, I swear to god. I know it’s something you can do. I mean, I feel partially responsible for the fact that you never get laid and this is, like, my Christmas present to you this year, you know? I feel totally guilty, man. I mean, look at you.”
Harry asked what Loudermilk planned to do without him.
“Without you? Don’t you worry about me! Dude, for one I’m not going to constantly obsess over the possibility of offending your intense-crazy paranoid-schizoid sense of smell every time I fucking have to unleash a totally normal, healthy, and respectable duke or dukes here in the free-form cuarto de baño de Evelyn. And I’m also totally going to finally be able to stop bothering you while you’re at work writing something epic and being an insane genius, by the way?”
The very next day Harry went. He’d very compliantly let Loudermilk walk him over to the Delta Psi Kappa HQ, and then as usual he’d let Loudermilk do the talking. The girls did not bat an eye. Two of them were blondes who seemed to have recently had the opportunity to cook their hides in the full heat of the equatorial sun, while the third was a speckled redhead with a fat if well-shaped face who kept touching her narrow mouth, as if to reassure herself of its persistence between nose and chin. All three of them kept nodding at whatever anyone said, and the shorter blonde was all, “I totally bet he would so be at home up there, oh my god! My cousin is kind of sad or whatever and he lived in an attic for a while and it totally worked for him.”
“Nice,” the redhead told her.
There was some whispering, and then the three of them brought Harry up the back stairs while Loudermilk loitered, examining the nap, or so he claimed, of a pool table in a bookless room with a very big bar and a creepy coffered ceiling they apparently liked to call the Library.
Harry didn’t know what else to do, so he let them guide him. To be honest, he didn’t feel that weird. He either said nothing or made a motion with his head if it was absolutely necessary. They took him up to a small suite of rooms rank with mildew and said some things about when trash had to be moved and where it went. They were smiling at him a lot, blinking and staring as if he were a baby animal. Mostly, he felt like they were harmless enough.