some reading. On the other hand, there was always the issue of money. His mood, so relaxed, benign, began to shift a little.
“Margie said we’d waive our percentage—you could keep the whole fee.”
“What’s involved?”
“SAT prep, initial evaluation. You should have all the materials. They’d be in the green plastic—”
“I’m sure I do.”
“Then it’s a yes?”
It’s a yes.
The temptation to mimic her was suddenly very strong. Julian mastered it. “Why not? I might as well start somewhere.”
“You’re a doll, Julian. Eleven till one, but these evaluations sometimes go longer, depending on the client. It’s in West Mill, thirty-seven Robin Road.”
He wrote the client’s name and the directions on a Moroccan-bound memo pad he carried, using a Mont Blanc fountain pen with dark blue ink, almost black, that came from a shop on Regent Street. Then he opened the green plastic folder to see if there was anything unusual in the manual’s approach to bringing the hapless up to speed; at least, what passed for up to speed in this society, in these times. Of course there was not.
Inez makes 75 percent of her free throws in basketball. What is the probability, to the nearest tenth of a percent, that she will make her first three free throws and miss her fourth?
The answer, 10.5 percent, popped up in Julian’s mind—literally, white figures on a black mental screen—at once, before he’d even had a chance to scan the multiple choices. There it was, D, 10.5 percent. A, B, and C—100 percent, 75 percent, 25 percent—were to catch the idiots, E—17.5 percent—to catch all the other catchables. Julian checked the step-by-step teaching guide to the Inez problem, thought of one or two variants—although none could resemble the actual unconscious method he used—flipped through to the verbal section.
negligent : forsake ::
A) ostentatious : vaunt
B) illustrious : succeed
C) adamant : concede
D) mendacious : deceive
E) tenacious : clutch
Clearly D. Transparently so, as if there were an arrow pointing to the letter. He envisioned the tedium of explaining to—he checked his memo pad for the name—Brandon why A and E were wrong, hoped he wouldn’t have to do the same for B, or heaven help him, C as well.
Julian took a last luxuriant drag from his cigarette, then put it out although an inch or more remained unsmoked. Disgusting to smoke it down to the tiniest butt, evidence of the addict, the pig. On the memo pad he wrote:
negligent is to forsake as
mendacious is to deceive
There was a poem somewhere in that little couplet. What came next? He sat bent over the memo pad, thinking, thinking. Nothing came. His mood, so lighthearted to begin the day—he glanced out, the starlings were gone—darkened some more. He rose and went into his tiny bathroom.
The first thing Julian did, without quite knowing why, a whim, really, was to shave off his beard. How full it had grown, like some woodcutter, hippie, or rabbi. He felt a little mental lift from that triple-barreled joke. Julian used an Eagle Brand straight razor from Thiers-lssard, sharpened to a fine edge on a stone he kept in his kit, shearing off the beard in long tessellated swaths of foamy hair that piled up in the sink. His bare face appeared, section by section like jigsaw pieces, a fine face. When there was nothing left of the beard but that strange little tuft under the lower lip, he paused. There was a name for that tuft, some appropriately low name for what really was a gutter affectation, but Julian couldn’t bring himself to shave it off. He liked that little thing. And on a face as distinguished as his, how could the effect be gross? It would be more like a diacritic from an ancient tongue, or a single-lettered surname, or one that began with
ff
. He left it on, a tiny badge of . . . something special.
Julian consulted his USGS map. He believed in good maps, always got one first thing on arriving somewhere new. He found the
“Margie said we’d waive our percentage—you could keep the whole fee.”
“What’s involved?”
“SAT prep, initial evaluation. You should have all the materials. They’d be in the green plastic—”
“I’m sure I do.”
“Then it’s a yes?”
It’s a yes.
The temptation to mimic her was suddenly very strong. Julian mastered it. “Why not? I might as well start somewhere.”
“You’re a doll, Julian. Eleven till one, but these evaluations sometimes go longer, depending on the client. It’s in West Mill, thirty-seven Robin Road.”
He wrote the client’s name and the directions on a Moroccan-bound memo pad he carried, using a Mont Blanc fountain pen with dark blue ink, almost black, that came from a shop on Regent Street. Then he opened the green plastic folder to see if there was anything unusual in the manual’s approach to bringing the hapless up to speed; at least, what passed for up to speed in this society, in these times. Of course there was not.
Inez makes 75 percent of her free throws in basketball. What is the probability, to the nearest tenth of a percent, that she will make her first three free throws and miss her fourth?
The answer, 10.5 percent, popped up in Julian’s mind—literally, white figures on a black mental screen—at once, before he’d even had a chance to scan the multiple choices. There it was, D, 10.5 percent. A, B, and C—100 percent, 75 percent, 25 percent—were to catch the idiots, E—17.5 percent—to catch all the other catchables. Julian checked the step-by-step teaching guide to the Inez problem, thought of one or two variants—although none could resemble the actual unconscious method he used—flipped through to the verbal section.
negligent : forsake ::
A) ostentatious : vaunt
B) illustrious : succeed
C) adamant : concede
D) mendacious : deceive
E) tenacious : clutch
Clearly D. Transparently so, as if there were an arrow pointing to the letter. He envisioned the tedium of explaining to—he checked his memo pad for the name—Brandon why A and E were wrong, hoped he wouldn’t have to do the same for B, or heaven help him, C as well.
Julian took a last luxuriant drag from his cigarette, then put it out although an inch or more remained unsmoked. Disgusting to smoke it down to the tiniest butt, evidence of the addict, the pig. On the memo pad he wrote:
negligent is to forsake as
mendacious is to deceive
There was a poem somewhere in that little couplet. What came next? He sat bent over the memo pad, thinking, thinking. Nothing came. His mood, so lighthearted to begin the day—he glanced out, the starlings were gone—darkened some more. He rose and went into his tiny bathroom.
The first thing Julian did, without quite knowing why, a whim, really, was to shave off his beard. How full it had grown, like some woodcutter, hippie, or rabbi. He felt a little mental lift from that triple-barreled joke. Julian used an Eagle Brand straight razor from Thiers-lssard, sharpened to a fine edge on a stone he kept in his kit, shearing off the beard in long tessellated swaths of foamy hair that piled up in the sink. His bare face appeared, section by section like jigsaw pieces, a fine face. When there was nothing left of the beard but that strange little tuft under the lower lip, he paused. There was a name for that tuft, some appropriately low name for what really was a gutter affectation, but Julian couldn’t bring himself to shave it off. He liked that little thing. And on a face as distinguished as his, how could the effect be gross? It would be more like a diacritic from an ancient tongue, or a single-lettered surname, or one that began with
ff
. He left it on, a tiny badge of . . . something special.
Julian consulted his USGS map. He believed in good maps, always got one first thing on arriving somewhere new. He found the
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