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
“You know me too well!” Hillary hops back over to the stovetop. He sniffs his gravy. In fact, Don Hillary is an unusually slight man, a frog. His narrow legs are bowed inside his creased blue jeans. He wears a striped oxford shirt, the back yoke of which he has sweated through already. The outlines of a white undershirt show. Hillary hums a few lines to himself: “La da dee, la da da. La da dee, la da da.” He taps his metal spoon against a pot edge. He guzzles port. “She’s homeless, she’s homeless,” Hillary yodels in falsetto.
“This is a great place,” Loudermilk is saying, ignoring Hillary’s unexpected rendering of Crystal Waters’s club favorite. “You and Marta have a truly extraordinary home!”
Now Hillary applies an electric can opener to the rim of a can of condensed mushroom soup. He yells, “She has her spots and I have mine! It’s pretty civilized, or should I say, civil! I’m Catalonia and she’s Spain.”
“Ha!” is the sound Loudermilk makes. He leans against a counter. It’s obvious to Harry, at least, that Loudermilk has no idea what Hillary is getting at. Foreign affairs are not his strong suit.
“If you ask her, she’d probably say something about the Balkans. She’s so fucking tragic!” Hillary consults his port once more. “Anyway, I bet you already want to get in her class next semester. Am I right? Find out what all the buzz buzz buzz is about?” Hillary is now laying the mushroom sludge over a glass casserole containing green beans. He admires his handiwork.
“I don’t know!”
“I like you, Loudermilk.” Hillary is doing something with a container of bread crumbs.
“But, I mean, what’s really tragic is we can’t repeat—” Loudermilk is beginning to say.
Harry is edging toward the door.
“No, I’m saying, for lying to me, right here”—Hillary snorts—“in my own house! You fit right in!”
Harry steps out into the hall.
Harry is in the downstairs hall of Don and Marta Hillary’s residence.
He thinks, I really need to figure out what to do.
Harry wishes he were not thinking this or anything else, for that matter. Often he wishes that he did not have to think, but now his prayer is somewhat more fervent. He has no idea where to go. He feels hot and unclean. He thinks that a logical impulse would be to go find Lizzie and say something to her about something and then leave or just leave without saying anything to anyone, but instead he goes down the hall in the direction opposite from the one they originally came. It’s like his body belongs to someone else. His legs move stiffly, automatically. He sees to his right a staircase, carpeted in white. He sees that it leads up, and Harry for some reason makes the decision to climb this stair.