The Death of All Things Seen Read Online Free Page A

felt it everywhere, in the sweep of change, in the simple pronouncement of ‘Yes we can!’
    As evidence, he had ventured out into the cold dark of a Chicago night in early November, holding Grace’s hand as the throng pressed down on Grant Park, to experience the rousing sense of history being made, John McCain, distinguished and decorated former prisoner-of-war, unable to overcome the rainbow coalition of minorities unsettled by the lies which had led to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the collapse of the economy.
    Norman consigned his parents’ deaths with McCain’s defeat, with the passing of an era, with a generation that had served and died for the American cause. It was not that Norman didn’t care, or that the nation wasn’t thankful or respectful. It was just that certain types, certain histories, mattered less in the emerging narrative. In defeat, McCain, like Norman’s parents in dying, quietly surrendered the past to the present.
    *
    Norman saved his file for the day. At times it was enough for a writer to show up. Turning, he watched in the hallway mirror his live-in nanny’s blue-grey Weimaraner, Randolph, stir and go toward the bathroom. This was part of what he was calling The New Existence . Norman listened to the faint lapping sound of the dog’s tongue drinking from the toilet bowl.
    Joanne Hoffmann, Grace’s nanny and Randolph’s owner, was also up and performing a series of contorted Yoga holds in his living room, her flannel pajama bottoms riding low on the spread of her pelvis. Beside her was a tent-like structure – sheets draped over a table in the living room – a conceit that still persisted from when Joanne had first moved in. In observing it, there was the resurrection of a routine, a filling in of life in the vacuum of what had come before. He was not fully reconciled with what it all meant, but it was part of The New Existence .
    Norman had hired Joanne on New Year’s Day, Joanne, his neighbor, fallen on hard times. Her long-term partner had dumped her. Norman had learned the disconsolate details on New Year’s Eve in the apartment hallway as Joanne was coming out to walk her dog.
    She’d mentioned her separation with an oblique apology related to the fights that had raged in the final weeks before her break-up. Fights Norman ‘must undoubtedly have overheard’. He hadn’t, but he had felt obliged to pretend he had, to respect the implosion of what he learned had been a long-term relationship.
    He learned it all in one long sentence, how management had been disinclined to extend her lease, her credit shot. She wasn’t working. She confided she was considering returning home for good, but there was a family complication. She stopped abruptly. She had a dresser and an antique table, family heirlooms, on Craigslist, priced to sell. She asked if Norman might be interested. She could show him after Randolph was let out.
    At midnight they rang in the New Year together, Joanne, in the minutes before, removing cellophane from a tray of cheeses, crackers and dips Norman had bought in the eleventh hour of the dying year. He dusted off two champagne flutes, opened a bottle of champagne, so it was done just in time, the clink of glasses after the ball dropped at Times Square, each counting down the seconds, each standing at a distance, watching the television, whereafter, Joanne produced a joint from the turned-up cuff of her cardigan. She grew her weed on a windowsill in a makeshift window box greenhouse.
    Back in the living room, Norman talked about Grace’s adoption, the trip to China, ending with the eventual undoing of his relationship with Kenneth and Grace’s delay in speaking. Joanne, in turn, talked about her ex-partner. They toasted with an understanding of their own shortfalls and an emphasis on their partner’s failings. It was good to talk.
    It helped that Norman had tangentially known Peter Coffey, a pedantic, long-standing post-doc, who, as Joanne explained, after a