Other Men's Daughters by Richard Stern

phone’s part of her flesh. Like a limb.”
    â€œShe hasn’t done her French, she hasn’t begun her social studies report, she’s been on that phone since seven-fifteen. I’m not going to live behind Esmé’s Telephonic Chinese Wall.” Sarah wore silvered eyeglasses which slipped down her nose; the rims made horizons in the black eyes.
    â€œPerhaps we should get the children their own phone.”
    â€œI think that would be criminal indulgence. A phone is not a decent substitute for human intercourse.”
    Merriwether related an anecdote Thomas Fischer had told him about walking with Bohr in the woods near Copenhagen the year Fischer won his Nobel. “Bohr touched the trees with his cane and told Tom how odd it was one could feel the tree through the cane. There must be interactions that can be literally felt.”
    Sarah’s head bobbed angrily, the glasses slipped down, she shoved them back. She could not bear his lectures; he stood over her as if she were an auditorium. “Esmé’s indolence has nothing to do with subtle interactions.”
    â€œYou’re right as rain. I didn’t mean she shouldn’t do her homework. But I do think adolescents animate all sorts of things with their feelings. You know how the girls are with their little doo-dads. Telephoning is like that.”
    â€œI suppose you do know about telephoning.”
    Were the creaking backstairs significant for her? He got up. “I’m sorry, Sarah. If I call someone again at night, I’ll try to talk more quietly.”
    Snort. Sarah had never been a facial actress, she didn’t pout, didn’t wink, but in recent months, she’d developed a variety of sub-verbal grunts, plus a few eye-narrowings and lip-pursings which broadcast her discontent. In the emotional husbandry of the Merriwethers, they were as telling as curses.
    That night, Dr. Merriwether found himself checking her breathing before he went downstairs. Cynthia asked if she could bring some hash for the weekend.
    â€œHash?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI don’t get it. Why?”
    â€œBecause it’d be nice.”
    â€œOh. You mean hashish. Cannabis .”
    â€œWon’t you take it with me?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Actually, he was astonished. He’d first thought Cynthia was talking about corned-beef hash. When he caught on, he felt as he’d felt when she’d danced for him, “out of it”; and then, depressed. Did the girl think their relationship needed this kind of bolstering? Couldn’t she enjoy herself without it? “Yet it’s their sign,” he told himself ( their assigning her to “The Young”). Was part of his feeling for her the joy of learning about a new species? Terrible idea. Had laboratory life so deformed him that even intimacy was heuristic? Though love and learning were old associates. (Maxim Schneider told him Sappho’s love poems came at her pupils’ graduations.) But he wanted Cynthia, not her bulletins.
    At least not her hash.
    â€œDon’t bring it. If we need it, there’s even less sense to all this than we know there is.”
    â€œI just thought it might relax us.”
    â€œI’m paranoiac about exposure here, Cynthia. You’re a minor, this is my town. Your hash might, well, settle mine.”
    â€œAll right. I won’t.”
    â€œIt’s so easy for someone like me to subvert his pleasures. I’m such a proper, cautious type. You’ll soon see what a swamp you’re letting yourself into.”
    â€œI love you. I won’t bring it. I’ll just bring this little book I have for you.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œ Nineteen Ways to Sodomize a Minor .”
    The next day, Cynthia called him at the university to say she couldn’t come that weekend; her father was coming to see her between legal meetings in Philadelphia.
    â€œCan’t you tell him