Cardinal Numbers: Stories Read Online Free Page A

recovered manuscript)

IS THIS CIVILIZATION?
    A MERICAN ARCHITECTURE IS WHAT you can see from the road.
    That’s what I tell my class, and they put it down in their notebooks. The stout girl in the front row (I think her name is Bonnie) looks pointedly at her watch. She is dutiful, like all my students, but not interested in much. I think: This isn’t what I had in mind, either. I dismiss them ten minutes early and sit in the quiet room watching it snow.
    My apartment is chilly, the furnace clacking down below. I place my new space heater by the tub and soak a long time. The nightgown I put on has been washed so often the piping has come loose from around the collar. I take out some cold lentils, dress them with olive oil and what can be squeezed from a hard old lemon half, listen to a Dave Clark Five album, the oldest in my collection. On the back cover, under a leafy bower of red ballpoint ink, are my initials, S.E.A. Later, I get in bed to read, but my head tows me under. I fall asleep with all the lights on, the book cradled in my arm like a doll.
    BARBARA intercepts me outside the library. She is giving a dinner party for “interesting women,” and wants me to attend. An NPR reporter will be there, a peace activist visiting from Israel, two illustrators, an oncologist, and Sue Willens from the Drama Department. Barbara glitters with enthusiasm, or it could just be snow settling on her lashes. I don’t think much of an obligation to be interesting, but say I’ll call her by the weekend.
    Someone has to do the freshman lit. surveys, and it’s Barbara. Possibly having been raised on a farm with eight brothers is useful in this respect. She speaks constantly of her family, of her writing hardly ever, which is how I can tell she’s serious about it.
    Though it’s completely out of sequence, I spend today’s class on Louis Sullivan. We look at details of the Carson Pirie Scott store, foliage intricately incised above the doorways. I show slides of Sullivan’s small-town Minnesota banks, slides Corey and I took one summer. Mistakenly among them is one he must have snapped without my knowing. In workshirt and white slacks, I kneel by a picnic table and stare at my hand. My expression is one of dismay, as if something were painfully embedded there. The sun is low behind me. I am unsettled by the picture, unable to recall ever having seen it before.
    I take the long way home, two legs of a triangle. Ice lumps turn in the slow porridge of the river. Long mill buildings, low storage lockers, seem solid and husklike at once. In a livelier, more solvent city, I realize, all this would be reclaimed, the brick blasted clean and a design center or galleria installed. Much prettier this way, dead.
    MY office is small to begin with, and on top of that, I double up. Alice has been teaching here for nearly thirty years, and she is very particular. I would say fussy, but her unrelenting dignity precludes it. Clear pushpins only are allowed on the cork board we share and I must stand in the hall to smoke. But Alice has given me the desk by the window because, she says, “You’re pale as shortening.”
    Guiltily, I am clearing away a month’s unopened mail. Outside, while turning everything to mush, the sun resembles something membranous and insubstantial. I scrabble through drawers for a cigarette, decide to chew a rubber band instead. There is a card from Holly, my brightest student of two years ago; on its front, a woodcut of mountains, and under that, “La poesía es como el pan, para todos.”
    Inside there is this:
This will need to be in a hurry because I have a tutorial in forty minutes. This town, like you said, is full of noise, but I’m getting along. I have a room near campus in a house with turret gables and I’m seeing a man who makes sailboats, which is okay though he’s not very physical. We might go down to Baja this summer. Nothing much to say, except when I do something I want it to be the way you would.
    I