A Strange Commonplace Read Online Free Page A

should lie. She is seventeen, and wearing a black velour dress with silver stitching on the bodice, and the dress accents the soft contours of her breasts. Perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, or perhaps it’s her breasts or her dress he cares for. Midnight. He leans across the table and kisses the girl, then gets up and sits next to her, puts an arm around her shoulders and a hand under her skirt. He strokes her thigh where the flesh meets the tops of her stockings. She doesn’t try to stop him but she keeps her thighs pressed tightly together. He kisses her again; perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, or perhaps it’s her thighs or her stockings he cares for. He is nineteen. He’s saying vapid things to her and then suddenly says that he’ll meet her, no matter what, in five years, at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, where people look down at the rink, by the statue of Prometheus. What? she says. Who? The glamorous ice, he says. You know. He looks at her very closely. I could say bella bella, he says. You know that Saroyan story? She does not. About 1:15 A.M. They kiss in windless cold on the roof of her apartment building and manage a sex act that neither of them is much good at. Still and all, still and all. Five years pass, he is married. He actually goes to Rockefeller Center on New Year’s Eve, as dumb as they come. Another bad movie on a moronic theme. The wind is strong and bitterly cold, and his wife will be very angry yet hatefully silent that he has not shown up at the quiet little boring fucking party that her boring fucking friends in her circle, as she calls it, give each year. Suddenly, he can smell the girl, a light perfume, or soap, an ingenuous smell, and he turns around, but she is not there. She will not be there. He circles the block, looking at faces. Perhaps he cares for her more than he thinks he does, but he doesn’t. What is it, then, that he does care for? She will not be there. I could say bella bella, he says in a whisper. He heads for the subway and his wife and the little boring party. Better late than never. Maybe.

Brothers
    R AY AND HIS OLDER BROTHER, WARREN, SHARED EVERYthing. That’s the kind of hairpins they were, as Warren liked to say, using an expression employed by Jimmy Cagney in Strawberry Blonde, a quiet, oddly dark movie, in which he plays a dentist, or perhaps a barber. Although the movie is intended to be sunny, there is a persistent sadness to its story. The great Jack Carson is Jimmy’s nemesis, and, oddly enough, both Ray and Warren reminded me of him in many of the roles he inhabited. They both flaunted a blustery, friendly, yet oily charm, a kind of nervous, blunt manliness that is endemic among American men. Both brothers married fairly late in life and both had children: Warren, a daughter, whose name I forget, a beautiful child who became a beautiful woman. Ray had two children, a daughter, who died in an automobile accident in Sheepshead Bay at the age of twenty-three; and a son who joined the Marine Corps and simply cut off all connections with his family, such as it was, to live, as Ray took absurd and wistful pleasure in calling “a real life for a real man.” Warren was a greengrocer and earned a good living, although his wife complained that he “worked like a nigger,” and Ray became a credit investigator for Dun & Bradstreet, invested wisely, as they say, became a Republican as soon as he had established a modest portfolio (and how Warren loved to edge that phrase with venom whenever he spoke of his “tycoon” brother). They had, of course, stopped sharing. Warren was relieved when his wife died, for she had begun to scorn him, hate him, really, for reasons that she never disclosed to anyone. He decided to stay in the same small apartment in which the family had lived for years, and he kept a bedroom ready for his daughter should she decide to stop living what he called her wild life; but she never came home to