chapter one...(part 1)

I found the grocery list my father had magnetted to the refrigerator with one of the magnets Epi must have picked up from the bank before she left him. it had a picture of a man in a white shirt and tie waving back at all the people opening their refrigerators. "First USA. Number One in Customer Service" it read. It was the kind of gaudy American junk that started appearing in his condo since he'd married Epi, like the enormous silver and topaz rings on his index finger. i read his list, the usual concoction of salmon steaks, vegetables, wine and Pepperidge Farm cookies. He was into the Linzer ones lately, the kind with the powdered sugar and gooey filling.

"What about Houston," he'd said last night. He'd been trying to get me to think of a place where i could start my new post college life and career. The night before, he'd come up with New York.
"Perhaps," I said giving his suggestion with as much weight as the powdered sugar that floated from his lips and dusted the front of his sweater. It was the sugar speaking, or the two glasses of wine. The panic such suggestions once inflicted on me when i first arrived in those early days of June had vanished.

I locked the door behind me and headed down the stairs toward the mailboxes. I eyed the third box from the left, looking for a patch of white from inside. I'd looked from the kitchen window at least ten times that morning waiting for a sign of mail.

All i needed was hope. Hope that Elizabeth had written. Hope that she had not moved on and forgotten me. I patch of white provided that hope and so I walked past the box without opening it. Hope was better than evidence and in Elizabeth's case, hope was a lot more enjoyable than the actual letters she was sending these days.

"I found this card and thought of you," was the last thing she'd written to me. On the front of the card was a picture of a yellow volkswagon bug, the kind I'd driven at UC Santa Barbara. That was a week ago. I had saved the card from the morning, not opening it until after I'd left the Broken Egg where I was currently employed as a waitress. I'd put the unopened letter in my pocket and the hope that she'd written something along the lines of "I miss you more than ever and my life is not the same with you," got me through six hours of "I ordered scrambled not poached."

My father walked to work so I drove his car to the grocery store. A white Toyota Corolla with a black door that he'd found at the junk yard. The hood was held down with some rope. Inside it smelled like an ashtray with a light dusting of ashes coating everything. Made me feel nautious to be in it but Rachel took back the Bug that she'd lent me as soon as I moved in and she got back from roaming around Mexico and Central America. I think maybe she felt okay to be doing nothing with her life but travelling and hanging ourt with German heroin addicts in Talum as long as I was loafing around in Santa Barbara. Or maybe it was just a coincidence that she was now looking for a real job and need her car back. I had a bad habit sometimes of giving myself way too much importance in other people's lives.

I drove to Lunardi's my father's favorite overpriced shopping venue on the south side of Los Gatos. The lettering of the word "Lunardi's" was in the old 50's style type trying to make shoppers think they were going back to a better time. A more wholesome time of caring and goodness, when things meant something. High prices, that's what Lundardis stood for, but my dad loved it.

I saw a parking spot close to the entrance and honked a couple of times to get the man pulling out in front of me to hurry up and move before someone else took it. People in Los Gatos moved slowly it seemed to me because they had nothing really pressing on them. I had a board game growing up called Candy Land. That's how I thought of Los Gatos with all its boutiques and antique stores. Its cyclists in their lycra sipping cappucinos without ever seeming to get on their expensive carbon bikes.

Inside the store it was all old-time quaintness and modern rip-off. Pyramids of products. Butchers in silly white hats. The produce displayed in bins designed to look like farm baskets. It made me want to puke but i had to admit the service was better than at Safeway on University. At Lunardi's all I had to do was wonder -- get that where-is-paprika-look -- on my face and some nice middle-age, slightly overweight white guy stopped what he was doing -- stacking solid white tuna in a pyramid and came to my rescue. Safeway, they'd just tell you they were out. "We don't have eggs, no more," they'd say just to get rid of you.

I took a basket and headed over to the fish section. White fish, yellow fish, pink fish. Shrimp. Dead lobster, live lobster. Scallops on a stick ready for the barbeque. Crab. Crabcakes. Trout. Tuna. I got that "Where the heck was salmon?" look and instantly, help arrived.

"Can I help you?" the man behind the counter asked. His name was Jim. I knew this because my father introduced me to him the last time we came shopping. I also met the lady in the bakery, Alice, slicing up coffee cake. And George on aisle seven stocking cans of smoked oysters. My father had stopped them all, interrupted their work, and told them all about me and my life, my recent graduation, my plans to go into the publishing business.

"How's your dad?" Jim asked as he plonked a couple of heavy salmon steaks onto the scale. He seemed concerned. I was used to this look from people who had encountered my dad during one of his high-flying manic moments when he'd talk to anyone like they were long-time buds. And Lunardi's with all of their staff so damn friendly and helpful, only just encouraged him. Sometimes, I'd wonder off and look for tampons, or toothpaste and come back and find him talking a mile-a-minute to one of the bag boys, or the some other anonymous behind-the-scenes sort of employee that people generally overlooked. He'd ask them their names, where they were going to school and then talk about his days in the shipyard in Scotland when he was about their age. He didn't care if they were trying to maneuver eighty shopping carts, or sweeping up a ketchup spill he'd talk and talk, chuckling at his own jokes. Totally oblivious my mother used to say about him.
"He's doing good," I said.
"Nice man," Jim said. "Scottish, isn't that right?"
"Yes," I said and took the two steaks from Jim. Ten bucks a piece.
"You take care now," Jim said.

I found the cookies on aisle seven. He used to be into Milanos. First the plain old chocolate kind then the orange ones. When they came out with the double chocolate version he liked them a lot but said the concept of double-chocolate epitomized what was wrong with America. "A culture of excess," he said as he bit into the cookie and examined the extra layer of chocolate. I thought the double chocolate ones were the best especially cold from the refrigerator so that they snapped when you bit into them. I put two bags into my basket and went over to the produce section for his small red potatoes and green beans. He liked to boil the potatoes and steam the green beans. The fish he wrapped in foil and put in the oven, or rather “flung” in the oven as he liked to say. It was his favorite fixings when he was in his up phase which had been for the past two weeks. I could do no wrong. He just wanted me to enjoy life, don’t worry about looking for real work, he’d say because he didn’t consider my job as a waitress real. “Go sit by the pool and read a book,” he’d say and so I did. I didn’t read, of course, I brought paper and pen and composed letters to Elizabeth. He came down to the pool and joined me with a glass of wine. The Home Owner’s Association forbid wine by the pool but he was ant-HOA most of the time and called them Nazis. So I enjoyed his manic phase sipping my wine, thinking of Elizabeth and shielding my paper from the splashes he made when he dove into the pool creating a loud smack where his white belly hit first.

At the cash register, Allison, asked how my father was doing. I bet they all thought he was the most pleasant guy, so friendly, such a talker with his cute Scottish accent.

“And how are you Hon? “ she asked. “Your dad tells me you just graduated college. Good for you. Whatcha gonna do now?”
“I’m thinking about going into publishing,” I told her. Better to give the same story my dad was spreading around town. Keep it simple.
“Publishing,” she said, “Now that’s pretty exciting.”
Yes, it would be, I thought , if it was true or if it was my plan. But it was a good line and people liked it and sometimes the more I said it, the more it seemed feasible. I mean the first step to anything was having a plan. Wasn’t that right? And sometimes in the middle of the night, lying on my dad’s couch I thought, why not go into publishing. Why not? And so I told myself that somewhere down the road, who knew when, or where, or how, or even, why, I would go into publishing. The plan had a lovely calming affect upon me. I stopped staring at the walls thinking how am I ever going to support myself, find enough money to live somewhere like a real adult. And then pretty soon, whenever I felt freaked out about my future, I just told myself I was going into publishing and I felt better immediately.

As I walked out of Lunardi’s I eyed the payphone to the left of the doors next to the kid’s mechanical horse. There was a woman, perhaps early forties with a small boy who kept tugging at her arm to let him ride the thing. The saddle where all the kids sat was worn away and smooth, made me want run my hand on it. I don’t know why exactly. I was filled with strange desires these days, perhaps it was the freedom from any kind of restraint. Who knew me here in this town. I could do anything I wanted, but there was a down side to that. I was doing nothing – which was what I wanted. The only one around to suggest maybe I ought to do something, was my father and he was too whacked out on PepperidgeFarms cookies and the vague idea of my future in publishing to offer me any direction. But it was too late, the kid sat on the saddle and the only way I could touch it was to risk felony. The mother reached into her purse and pulled out a cell phone while the kid crawled up onto the horse. He sat there yanking on the little handles coming out of the neck of the horse – the kind of thing he would probably look back on one day and wonder, “how did I hang onto that horse.” He kicked his tennis shoes at the ribs of the horse where someone with a sparay can had scrawled, “You suck,”.

“Hang on a sec, sweetie, “ His mother said while she punched in a number on the cell phone, obviously calling someone who was not programmed in. Perhaps someone elicit, I thought, while I picked up the handset of the phone. I had the long distance 800 number and my pin memorized so that I could basically call anywhere in the world I wanted just by laying the tip of my finger on a set of buttons. I wasn’t pleased with the payphones close proximity to the bucking bronco and the mother on the cell. But what could I do? I turned my back and pressed the numbers for my calling card, then Elizabeth’s number in Dallas. As the phone rang I heard the mother on the cell say, “Yeah, well fuck it,” which was basically the mood I was in calling Elizabeth. The last time I talked with her, which was only two days ago, I swore I wouldn’t call again for at least a good two-or three days. There was somethin in her tone, or maybe it was just her choice of words – “So good to hear from you,” It was so cliché without any real meaning that I finished off the remaining half a bottle of 28.95 Napa Chardonay my father had splurged on. And I don’t even really like Chardonay especially when it’s luke warm from sitting by the side of the couch for four hours.

The stupid kid would not stop kicking the side of the horse so I turned and glared at the woman who had found fifty cents and was jiggling it in her palm bu too distracted with her elicit phone call to slip in the the coin slot.

I was tempted to just pay for the kid’s ride, when she leaned over and fed the machine.

“Alan, don’t be such a loser,” she said as the horse started rocking back and forth and the kid’s face lit up with delight. That was childhood right there, I thought. Your mother having an elicit phone conversation right in front of you because she can.

I turned my back and waited for someone to pick up in Dallas. Usually it was Amanda, their maid, a black lady who didn’t say much but who always seemed to be working quietly in the background while Elizabeth and I left for breakfast, returned for lunch and a swim, then headed back our for drinks and a movie.

Frankel’s residence she’d say just like all my old elementry school friends were trained to say when they picked up the phone.

“Hello,” Elizabeth’s mother’s voice came on the line.
I was tempted to hang up immediately and I was never sure why. She’d been nice as can be to me but I go this sense from her that she looked down on me somehow, like I was not fully developed, like she could tell I only skimmed Dante’s Inferno in our complit class, unlike her daughter who highlighted the footnotes. Maybe Honu had a right to look down upon me. I mean footnotes only pleased me when they filled 3/4 of a page. leaving less to read. Maybe she saw me for the loser I was more clearly than her daughter or even I could see.


“ My darling,” he mother said. I thought I could hear the crackle of a cigarette and the delicate clink of a wine glass on ceramic tiles. “Tell me, how are you, Elaine?’

“Good, good,” I said. I wished the lady with the kid would move off a little and give me some peace and quiet. But then, maybe here outside of Lunardi’s was the closest she came to privacy.

“What have you been up to, Kiddo?” Her questions were like darts hitting the bullseye of my uselessness. I felt the sting of them long before they hit their target mostly because I’d been stabbing at myself with the same questions for the past three months since graduation.

“Well,” I said, thinking. The boy’s ride had ended but he just sat there jiggling the handholds waiting for it to start up again, not realizing the fun was over.

“Not much, you know, just trying to figure things out,” I said. I was going to add that I was thinking about applying to a summer program at UCLA in journalism when she interrupted and said, “Amanda, have you seen Liz?”

That was it, I would never call that house again. I was a little nobody from San Jose California, living off Pell grants and student loans who had never heard of Ella Fitzgeraled or Duke Ellington before sharing a suite at Francisco Torres with their darling daughter. I’d never been to the French Riviera or flown on the Concorde. Inside my suitecase that September that I arrived at UCSB were two new pairs of Levis, a pair of shorts , a tee-shirt my mother swore looked cute on me and four fresh new pairs of underpants. I’d brought one thin pillow for my bed, a poster of the Who for my wall and a clock radio. By the time I’d arrived, one day before the first day of class, Elizabeth’s side of the dorm looked like something out of one of the furniture store magazines my mother used to look at and sigh with her down quilt all puffy and fluffy, her rattan rug, to match the shades she’d had sized and fitted to the window on her side of the room. A light, that I would later learn was Art Deco, cast a warm golden glow over everthing.

Surely, there’d been somekiind of mix-up in room assignments. Elizabeth was probably supposed to get Emily from Beverly Hills, I thought as Honu came on the phone and said, “Kiddo, Liz isn’t here right now. I’ll let her know you called.”

The lady and the kid were walking toward their car. She was steering him with her hand on the back of his round blond head. I hung the receiver up and just stared for a moment. Calling Dallas was a little like going under anesthesia and then waking up to a jarring white light and disoriented nausea. I looked out at the parking lot and past it to the clutter of stores and gas stations, street lights and the power cables. I watched people load up their trunks with groceries, stand at the pump and stare into space while they filled their tanks, or cautiously walk through a cross-walk looking out for something to run them over. It was all so busy and hurried and full of going and coming, and getting and doing and it made me feel so empty and sad. I did not want to be a part of any of it. I did not want to rush or scurry or to think of bank accounts, or meetings, or anything that all these people seemed to have running through their heads. I did not want to be any of them. But what did I want to be part of? That was the question.

Maybe it was just this wretchedly beautiful sunny white light all around that was the problem. Not a cloud in the sky or a hint of a storm brewing or anything to disturb the complete banality of it. I wanted fog and mist, pouring rain, wind that pushed behind me – something bigger than me that I felt, not this lifeless hollow happy light, like some silly woman at a party who says to everyone, “It was realy nice to meet you,” and always walks off in search of someone newer. I crossed the parking lot, looking at peoople’s faces. Did anyone share my feelings? Was there someone who wasn’t fitting in, wasn’t sure what the hell to do with the next fifty years. I looked around.

A bagboy leaned against a garbage can smoking. He looked about my age, probably never went to college, Did he have plans for the future I wondered, or was putting people’s tomato sauce and tampons into paper bag’s enough? Of course not, I’d done my share of crap jobs. Mindlessness was okay for about a month, I found before the self-doubts took all the fun out of not thinking. Shouldn’t I be thinking, I’d start thinking, even though there was something pleasantly freeing about not thinking, just doing: first the heavy items, then the soft items. Plonk. Plonk. Plonk. I found myself admiring the bagboy as he leaned there calmly smoking, ruining his health and future. He’d go inside, stand at the end of the counter and wait for items to move toward him.

I got in the car and just sat there for a moment with the key in the ignition, waiting for a twist of the wrist to fire it up. I found myself in this kind of pause mode a lot recently. Standing at the kitchen sink with one hand on the faucet and staring out the window but not seeing anything outside. The other day, I was standing at the counter at the Double Rainbow café having ordered a cappucino. I’d paid the six or seven dollars it cost and stood there while the guy behind the counter moved to the left and started blasting the milk with steam. The loud swooshing sound transported me back to the Madeleine café on campus at UCSB. I could see the cast iron black chairs and tables, the small glass vases and silk flowers on the tables. The ceiling fan whirring, the high windows overlooking the bike path and a stream of students walking and riding to their next class when the guy behind the counter made the oddest sound that woke me and brought me back to the present. It was a “puh” sound, a kind of force of air through the lips.
I turned to him and must have looked startled.

He laughed and said, “that’s practically the same look my cat makes when I do that do her.”

Who was this idiot I thought, breathing on me. I glanced quickly up at him as I took my capuccino. He was a blur of pastel. I’d seen his type before, mostly behind the counters at jewelry stores or in the women’s shoe department. Feminin features with bad facial hair and gelled curls. I took my coffee and sat at one of the tables. I really hated the café with it’s silly neon double rainbow that gave off a terrible buzzing sound on top of the bad radio that played non-stop but the only other café in town was always packed with cyclists in lycra who never seemed to get on their bikes and give up a table. I had only been seated a few minutes – and began to stare with my pen held aloft over a blank piece of paper – when the guy sat down at my table and started telling me about his day.

He was saying something about riding his bike up a steep hill and how he can usually do it under forty-five minutes but this day it took him longer because he’d made himself run six miles the night before.

“You ever been up Bowman?” he asked. A man with a small child walked in the door. The guy at my table gave a quick look over his shoulder then leaned in close to me.
“You look strong. What do you weigh 105? 110? Perfect power to weight ratio.”

“Excuse me, we’d like to order some ice-cream here,” the man with the child announced seeing how the guy at my table was obviously messing up his precious ice-cream schedule.

“Why certainly,” the guy at my table said. “What can I get you?” He jumped up that afternoon and returned to his spot behind the counter leaving me wondering whether I needed to find a new coffee shop.

I took the longer route home instead of making a left on Saratoga, I continued on along University, the central thoroughfare through Los Gatos. A collection of useless boutiques filled with home furnishing nik-naks, harking back to a whiter, less immigrant infused period in American history, overpriced restaurants, upscale chains such as Anne Taylor, and lowscale chains like the Gap trying for the upscale sheen by hiking up their prices on plain black t-shirts. I drove past the Broken Egg, my current place of employment. Wayne, the manager was standing outside taking a break. His apron tied around his waist smeared with breakfast grease. I didn’t want him to see me so I looked straight ahead, as if I had a plan, a place to be in a hurry – which would be reason enough to explain why I could not work Wednesdays, Thursdays, or Fridays, apart from the fact that I simply did not want to work Wednesday, Thurdays or Fridays, ever. Further up the street on the left was the Double Rainbow cafe. I slowed slightly as I passed and looked inside the doorway. Maybe I would go in and write another letter to Elizabeth, I thought. I noticed the effeminite guy wiping down a table.


I parked in my father’s parking spot. It was easily recognizible by the large gash in the post at the exact height of the large gash in the side of the his car. The same turn taken wide had further damaged the post so that the internal metal meshing holding the cememt in place was visible. It was just the sort of thing that drove my mother crazy. The bad driving, of course, but more the messing up of nice places, like this condominium, in his unique ways. Sometimes I sided with her. He was full of himself and goddamned bloody annoying as she had said last week when I visited her at her studio over by Capitol Expressway, autorow, San Jose. She’d left it at that, as if that summed him up completely, as if I was completely on her side about who was more messed up out of the two of them.


I opened the gate to the condominium grounds. The sprinklers were spraying water across the neat lawns, clippered bushes and wide cement footpaths winding from condo to condo. I walked past the mailboxes. There was definitely a piece of mail inside. I could open the door, and find junk mail, or a bill, I considered, or I could let it sit there and imagine it to be a letter from Elizabeth – a nice hope that would get me through cooking dinner and into the evening. Or, I thought, as my dad’s neighbor, Susan, appeared at the top of the stairs by her front door, I could simply not live in some fantasy world, open the mailbox door, get the gas bill and drink an extra couple glasses of wine at dinner. I put the key in the lock and turned it.

“Would you speak to your father for me, hon?” Susan said. I glanced up at her. She was
wearing a business skirt looking thing – the kind that’s so ugly and unstylish, it’s considered professional wear -- and tennis shoes.
I opened the door to the mailslot. Immediately I saw, Elizabeth’s neat printing, all the letters the same height, the numbers penned in different colors like she liked to do, and my name underlined with a little squiggly flourish of a pink pen. My heart sank because I knew what such attention to the address meant. Little content.

“What?” I said.
“Tell your father that the association rules don’t permit use of the communal hose.”
I lifted the letter out of the box. It was stiff, obviously a card she’d picked up during one of her shopping sprees in Highland Park with her highschool friend Deedee of whom she always said she no longer felt very close to but seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time with since graduation.

“I’ll tell him, “ I said to Susan. She was talking about the hose he’d hauled up to his deck from the garden faucet below to water the moribund collection of potted plants Epi had left behind when she left him six months ago. The hose had been hanging there for a couple of weeks, I think, just to taunt the association because he’d only watered the plants the one time, tricking water on the brown shrivelled leaves while he sat back on the deck chair and drank wine.

“Thank you,” she said and still just stood there. I could see her out of the side of my eye as I walked up the stairs. She hadn’t lived there when I left for college. She was maybe ten years old than me, early thirties. She probably worked in a bank downtown. Or maybe in Human Resources at the hospital. Not really smart I guessed. Probably never heard of Nabakov or Dante or even went to college. Probably went to Los Gatos High, took a job typing in the HR department and just stayed there typing up memos and filing really well. Then maybe someone died or moved on and the new girl they hired left too because she couldn’t stand the awful cubicles, so they gave Susan a try. And Susan worked hard. Ate her lunch at her desk, little sandwhiches in ziplock baggies, cut celery (just to have something to nibble on when she really wanted a bagel with cream cheese from the coffee shop next door filled up with cyclists who never went on bike rides). Then maybe she applied internally for a position. They didn’t really want her but they took her on at a paycut, a sort of trial period, just to see if she fit in. She worked late, even took some work home and completed some spreadsheets on her old computer at home that was so slow it took twice the time it would have taken at work, so she was really working triple time.

“How’s it going?” she asked, interupting my re-write of her life.
“Huh?” I said. I was just about to put the key in the front door.
“I hear you just graduated from college. Congratulation. Any plans?”
“Publishing,” I said. I quickly turned the key and opened the door before she asked for more details.
“Good for you,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said and closed it.

I put the groceries on the counter and sat down at the dinner table with the letter. I held it up to the light, shook it, put it down and considered if I should open it right then. It might be one of her restaurant menus that she liked to fold up and send to me with circles around the food items that she had that day. Last week she sent one from Go-Go Burgers and circled all the extras she'd added. the list was long: avocado, bacon, cheese, grilled onions. At the end of the list, she wrote, "and now I must go to the vomitorium". I put the letter aside. I could feel one of my late-afternoon panic attacks coming on. Maybe it was just the pure silence apart from the tick-tick-tick of the sprinklers and the incessant hum of the refrigerator and the somehow the sight of little things like my father's dead plants on the deck or Epi's embroided table cloth with the hearts and rainbows that she left behind when she packed up and left to stay with her sister, something about it all made me feel like it would take hold of me, shoot out roots and wrap around my legs and ankles tie me to this spot forever.

I opened the bottle of wine and reached for a glass from the cabinet. My father had quite a few, all shitty things with chips here and there, micro-scratches from the dishwasher. I looked for the best one of the lot -- "Los Gatos 1985 Art and Wine Celebration". I knew Epi must have dragged him to this too. He'd have hated the crafts and all the cheery people trying to sell him wood carvings, and colored glass hanging flowers for the kitchen window.

As I poured the glass of wine, I looked up and stared at the glass window ornament in the shape of a unicorn refecting red, yellow and pink across the dirty dishes in the sink.

I sat down on the leather couch across from the glass windows leading out to my father's deck. I would become a drunk, I considered, but not just some ordinary drunk. I'd go to Lunardi's and buy good wine and sit on my father's deck and read books until I figured out something to do with my life. I could see it all now. One day, years down the road, I thought, as I worked in a vineyard having earned a degree in vinology or whatever it's called, I would think of how I had just let things happen. I had allowed my life to run its own course. I poured another glass of wine. I sniffed it the way you're supposed to, sipped it and let it roll around my palate. Maybe I approached life the wrong way. Maybe I was too forceful. I should let things happen as they will, let life come to me. Surely that's what Elizabeth was doing, letting her father supply with a job in the fashion industry, letting him give her an apartment to rent in Manhattan in September. Perhaps life would come to me in a similar tho less exciting, sort of boring, and entirely dull fashion.

Outside people were swimming and splashing in the condo pool. I took my glass of wine out to the deck and looked down on them. A man was floating on his back, extremely boyant from the flab around his torso. A woman on a deck chair holding a paperback in one hand and a cigarette in the other paid no attention to him, her head slightly tipped forward intensly reading. Probably smack in the middle of some steamy sex scene. They repulsed me for no particular reason and yet at the same time I wouldn't mind being them that very moment, free and having fun on a weekday, their jobs in the service industry secure, their car payment in the mail, their stocks doing well, a vacation to the Big Island set for later in the year, and maybe a couple of steaks in the refrigerator and a tub of sour cream for their baked potatoes. If I became a drunk at eighteen would I ruin my chances of having such a simple, pleasing, artery clogging existence I wondered. Was I dooming my chances right now of becoming simple and socially acceptable? I found a new pimple on my chin and ran my finger over it until it bled. Then used the sleeve of the shirt Elizabeth had given to me -- a sample of a new style her father's company was marketing -- to wipe away the blood.

"Watch" the man said as he drifted over to the side of the pool. He put his head against the cement and looked up at the woman.

"Mmm?" she said, and the way she slowly turned her head from the book to him, I could tell it was a small concession she was making to turn to look at him -- when probably Jake, or Randy, or Carlton in the book was just about to plunge his manhood into Virginia's womanhood -- that i felt like they didn't repulse me so much. But then, maybe that was the wine.

The man dove underneath the water and started walking on his hands with his hairy legs sticking out of the water. He was making his way slowly to the otherside of the pool, when the woman stopped looking and turned back to her book.

He came up out of breath, and slung his head to one side to clear the hair off his face. "You see?" he asked. She didn't look up or answer this time. I watched him the way a scientist might look down through a microscope at some gelatinous gob of goo stuck to a slide looking for signs of life. How was it, I wondered that people like him got by in the world so well. They wore ties, and had desks, perhaps their name on a door and they still needed applause for walking on their hands in a pool.