The Widening Gyre

...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me." Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?" "Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does.

Shopping is never over,” Susan said. “It is merely suspended.

Thank you sir," she said. "I hope that your friend feels better soon." I shrugged. "The ways of the Lord" I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant.

How the hell can you be liberated and accept alimony?” I said. Again the smile, innocent, beautiful, glorious, and satanic. “Exploit the oppressor,” she said.

Later, early Christmas morning, I was still awake, and Susan was asleep, on her back, with her mouth open slightly. I looked at her face. Her eyes moved slightly behind her eyelids. I watched her sleep; watched her while she dreamed in some remote incorporeal place away from me; watched her with the growing certainty that some of her would always be remote, away from me, unknowable, unobtainable, never mine. Watched her and thought these things and knew, as I could know nothing else so surely, that it didn’t matter.

Can you analyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?” I said. “I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love.

The women looked naked, in a way that women never do in skin magazines. These women were real, with the fine roughening of skin here and there, the tiny sag at the breast, the small folds across the stomach that real women, and men, have. It made them more, rather than less, seductive, I thought, because it emphasized their nakedness, and in a sense their vulnerability. It also made me feel a little sadder for them. That kind of vulnerability shouldn’t be handed around. It was for someone who loved you and was vulnerable too.

When you thought about it, silence was rarely silent. Silence was the small noises you heard when the larger noises disappeared.

No olive?” I said. “Only a fucking beast would have an olive in his martini,

Ronni looked at the menu and then smiled at me. “Do you mind eating here, Mr. Spenser?” “No. I like it. I eat French crap a lot.

You know what they’re buying with food stamps? Cupcakes. I saw a woman in front of me at Star Market …” “Do you know what they were reading in my kid’s English class? Girls and boys both? You ever hear of Eldridge Cleaver?” Ronni Alexander had a glass of wine. “As long as the private sector has to compete with the government for money, the interest rates will stay up. It’s simple supply and demand …” I noticed that Ronni Alexander had finished her wine and gotten another. The smoke thickened in the room. Born-again Christians didn’t seem to sweat lung cancer.

I said to Paul, “You have to carry a purse in public.” He adjusted the shoulder bag. “It’s to hold my tutu,” he said.

The early bird catches the worm.

I drank some whiskey. When you’ve been nursing it out of a bottle neck, a glass and ice seems like being on the wagon.

To say that Susan shopped would be like saying that sharks eat. It was disciplined frenzy. While

I want her with me,” I said, “and more than that, I want her to want to be with me.

The thing is,” I said, “that to be what I am, I need to feel the way I do about you. No matter how you feel about me.” “I feel good about you,” she said. “I do love you, you know.” “Yeah. But even if you didn’t. The way I feel about you is my problem, not yours. And it’s absolute. It can’t be compromised. It could exist without you.” “Dead or alive,” Susan said. In her face was that quality of serious amusement that so often invested her.

Dewar’s and water,” I said. “Yes. I don’t care really, but everyone at work says if you don’t order by name they give you bar whiskey.

Who is he?” “Jiminy Cricket,” I said. “He hangs around to make

from Arlington Street and onto the bridge. He had his hands in his coat pockets. “You Spenser?” he said. “Yes.

and tested room service. I left her at work Monday

I ate in the silence and drank my coffee and looked occasionally at Susan’s picture on my desk. Let us be true to one another, dear.