A Fine and Private Place Read Online Free

a flying damn? Excuse me again, Diary. That tasted like more.
    Everything a wife could ask for. Their envy tells me that . Oh, yeah? I’d like to see the wife.
    May as well set the bottle handy. Handy brandy. Can’t think of a rhyme for “cognac.” Except “Zatzo, Mac?” and that wouldn’t take fourth prize in a contest for idiots.
    I wonder if Savonarola looked anything like Nino. One of these days I must look up a portrait of the kindly old fra of Ferrara. I’ll bet their profiles match.
    What Nino really looks like is a wicked, wicked version of Federico Fellini, that’s what. I’m chained to an aging Fellini image who creates whole planets of illusion with a wave of his fat, wet hands. Those nine fingers of his … They revulse me.
    It’s unkind of me. Really unfeeling. Nino can’t help an accident of birth any more than the Minotaur and Quasimodo could help theirs. I wouldn’t shrink from a man with, say, a gross harelip (unless he tried to kiss me, ugh). But something about that rubbery two-ply digit of his gives my stomach elevator-dropitis. And when he touches me with it … or should I say them?…
    And his ridiculous superstitions. Beyond belief. Imagine a leading power in the business world, an authentic big wheel, one of the grand moguls of Wall Street, the Bourse, and points east, actually dropping the last two letters of his surname, the name of his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, and having the poor circumcised thing (that’s a bad metaphor, considering its location) conferred on him by the official act of a judge just because the name he was born with didn’t conform to his lucky number! That’s what’s called bending fate to your will with a vengeance. He really believes in that nonsense. Not even Marco, who was born to be the prophet’s disciple, can swallow that, though he does a manful little job of trying. This name business is about the only thing I can sometimes like Marco and Julio for. Editta’s told me what pressure Nino—Big Brother—used on them to get them to drop the final t-o of Importunato the way he did. But they never would.
    What I seem to have tonight is writer’s wanderlust. Is what I seem to have tonight. No tittle, jot, or iota of discipline. Look who was going to be the Emily Dickinson of the 20th century! Only, how can the Muse compete with a third of half a billion dollars? Not to mention loyalty to a daddy who can’t keep his hands off other people’s property, thereby getting me into this hell of a hole in the first place? Oh, dad, dear dad, if only I didn’t love you, damn you, I’d let you rot where you belong, which is up the river and under the trees—six feet under. And you’d take your leave with your O so charming smile, and a butterfly kiss on the back of my neck … the kind you used to plant there when I was very small in the chest and very large in the jealous-of-mama department, whose face I can’t even remember any more.
    I was browsing through Blake’s “Songs of Experience” after dinner hunting up old friends, when “A Poison Tree” renewed our acquaintance:
    I was angry with my friend :
    I told my wrath, my wrath did end .
    I was angry with my foe:
    I told it not, my wrath did grow .
    And I water’d it in fears
    Night and morning with my tears ,
    And I sunnèd it with smiles ,
    And with soft deceitful wiles .
    And it grew both day and night ,
    Till it bore an apple bright ,
    And my foe beheld it shine ,
    And he knew that it was mine ,
    And into my garden stole
    When the night had veil’d the pole ;
    In the morning, glad, I see
    My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree .
    I hadn’t read it in years. It’s rather awful, I think, although once I doted on it. But it does about sum me up just now, I mean what’s been going on away down inside where the heat’s unbearable. The San