graduate school. It would be supper this time, practiced, complicated, natural—after cigarettes and gin, which we drank neat.
He had an intimation, a skepticism of all this domesticity. It seemed to me one of the minor deceptions, though most fraught. My friends, after all, were married—to men whose hours were already set. Adam might come home from his books or his little office at the university at any time. The food waste would have appalled him, the deception even more. He lived on frankness and economy. He wrote sometimes: “The first sentence can be like the rapping of a gavel, or it can sidle up to endear itself. It can thump you on the back with fraternal heartiness, or it can tap you for a loan. There are writers like prosecutors, and others with a bedside manner, and others still, with that particular note of instruction which can drive you up the wall. The thing is, I recognize every literary style at once, and I detest them all.” So on. I was trying translations of some sort of diaries. “An appointment is less romantic than a rendezvous. A rendezvous is more clandestine than a date. How to explain, then, that I saw my lover yesterday, that he is a prince, an assassin, a masterspy. And also my immediate boss. No, no.” I simply could not cook. Logic seemed to require those trial runs in the kitchen, which were entirely alien to his cast of mind, entirely natural to mine. I was prepared to go to lengths. I guess I overdid it. My sense of limit in these things was shot. I got a job reporting. Then we left each other. Here I am.
In the first year, the Standard sent me to those poor sensational families, until they had become so commonplace they were no longer news but subject for political reflection by our feature writers. Anyway, there was the Movement in the South. Then, there were demonstrations against so many things. I went to a meeting of black school principals in Anacostia, Washington, D.C. I went as a reporter and Consultant. A consultant. By that time, any journalist who had stuck a while with unsensational blacks was accepted as of their number in that way.
At lunch the first day in the cafeteria of the University of Maryland, where the conference was, a one-armed black teacher asked me to cut his meat. I have the shakes a good part of the time (which interferes no end with taking notes). I tried to cut his ham steak. I was shaking quite a lot. I think he thought it was because of his lost arm. He said, “Sweetheart, you need a drink.” That part of Maryland is dry. He offered me the key to his room, in which he had a fifth of bourbon. The number on his room key was the same as mine. It turned out that by some bureaucratic mix-up at least four people had the same single-room assignment—two ministers, the teacher, and I. We all found rooms elsewhere. I called old friends in Bethesda.
When the meetings were over, around midnight, there were of course no cabs. A small, kind black Anacostia parent, owner of a funeral parlor, offered to drive me to Bethesda—which he graciously said was only twenty minutes out of his own way home. Two hours later, we were still driving. I thought he was lost. Then I thought he wasn’t. Suddenly, he pulled over to the side of the highway. I thought, Good grief, I am over twenty. I am a liberal. I should have thought it through. But does it need to be right here beside four lanes of nighttime traffic? A white state trooper had pulled up behind us. The Anacostia parent turned off the ignition. “We’ve done something wrong, I guess,” he said. I thought, But we haven’t. The trooper shined his flashlight through the windshield. He said, “Folks, you made a wrong turn at that last turnoff. Lots of people miss it.” We drove on to Bethesda. The Anacostia parent had been truly lost.
In his small, airless apartment the sportswriter served local wine, cheap Scotch, and beer. His wife, and the other sportswriters’ wives, four of them pregnant, two not
He had an intimation, a skepticism of all this domesticity. It seemed to me one of the minor deceptions, though most fraught. My friends, after all, were married—to men whose hours were already set. Adam might come home from his books or his little office at the university at any time. The food waste would have appalled him, the deception even more. He lived on frankness and economy. He wrote sometimes: “The first sentence can be like the rapping of a gavel, or it can sidle up to endear itself. It can thump you on the back with fraternal heartiness, or it can tap you for a loan. There are writers like prosecutors, and others with a bedside manner, and others still, with that particular note of instruction which can drive you up the wall. The thing is, I recognize every literary style at once, and I detest them all.” So on. I was trying translations of some sort of diaries. “An appointment is less romantic than a rendezvous. A rendezvous is more clandestine than a date. How to explain, then, that I saw my lover yesterday, that he is a prince, an assassin, a masterspy. And also my immediate boss. No, no.” I simply could not cook. Logic seemed to require those trial runs in the kitchen, which were entirely alien to his cast of mind, entirely natural to mine. I was prepared to go to lengths. I guess I overdid it. My sense of limit in these things was shot. I got a job reporting. Then we left each other. Here I am.
In the first year, the Standard sent me to those poor sensational families, until they had become so commonplace they were no longer news but subject for political reflection by our feature writers. Anyway, there was the Movement in the South. Then, there were demonstrations against so many things. I went to a meeting of black school principals in Anacostia, Washington, D.C. I went as a reporter and Consultant. A consultant. By that time, any journalist who had stuck a while with unsensational blacks was accepted as of their number in that way.
At lunch the first day in the cafeteria of the University of Maryland, where the conference was, a one-armed black teacher asked me to cut his meat. I have the shakes a good part of the time (which interferes no end with taking notes). I tried to cut his ham steak. I was shaking quite a lot. I think he thought it was because of his lost arm. He said, “Sweetheart, you need a drink.” That part of Maryland is dry. He offered me the key to his room, in which he had a fifth of bourbon. The number on his room key was the same as mine. It turned out that by some bureaucratic mix-up at least four people had the same single-room assignment—two ministers, the teacher, and I. We all found rooms elsewhere. I called old friends in Bethesda.
When the meetings were over, around midnight, there were of course no cabs. A small, kind black Anacostia parent, owner of a funeral parlor, offered to drive me to Bethesda—which he graciously said was only twenty minutes out of his own way home. Two hours later, we were still driving. I thought he was lost. Then I thought he wasn’t. Suddenly, he pulled over to the side of the highway. I thought, Good grief, I am over twenty. I am a liberal. I should have thought it through. But does it need to be right here beside four lanes of nighttime traffic? A white state trooper had pulled up behind us. The Anacostia parent turned off the ignition. “We’ve done something wrong, I guess,” he said. I thought, But we haven’t. The trooper shined his flashlight through the windshield. He said, “Folks, you made a wrong turn at that last turnoff. Lots of people miss it.” We drove on to Bethesda. The Anacostia parent had been truly lost.
In his small, airless apartment the sportswriter served local wine, cheap Scotch, and beer. His wife, and the other sportswriters’ wives, four of them pregnant, two not
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