A Strange Commonplace Read Online Free

distrustful of crude irony. Ah yes. This moment of adventure, as he later wryly called this period, served as the rough bona fides to remove him from the privilege that was and would always be his. Then he began to write fiction. His short stories and then his first two novels possessed the nice ability to tell readers, with subtle ironies meticulously sprinkled among suburban motifs, what they were certain they already knew: and did, a bright comfort. Touches of incest helped the prose considerably. So his career went well. Soon he became, if he is to be believed, an alcoholic, a lucky break, as the cynics on the corner might have said. For his alcoholism was prelude to his drying out, getting straight, choosing love and life, and realizing that simply being alive is, after all, good. This new venture into his psyche served as the entrée to ore, as he called it, for a “harrowing, courageous, and, finally, sadly redemptive” memoir, written in “fiercely intelligent prose,” in which he confesses to numerous flaws, failings, weaknesses, and sins, and implies that he does not, ever, expect to be forgiven for the things that he has done to friends, family, and loved ones. His forgiveness nonetheless ensues, and to the merry tune, as the guys might say, of more than reputable sales. He had unspoken fantasies of winning the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or both, but settled for a week on the Times’ s “And Bear In Mind” list and a respectable film option. He hoped that John Cusack would play him in the movie that would surely be made, one that would be, he hoped, harrowing, courageous, and, finally, sadly redemptive. He might have said, however, film, the word favored by the young fellows in front of the candy store.

Claire
    M Y FIRST WIFE MET A WOMAN WHOSE NAME, AS I recall, was Claire. Met is perhaps the wrong word, since Claire was abruptly in my first wife’s life, or circle, as she liked to call it, and, in some vaguely peripheral way, in my own. My first wife knew many people whom I did not, nor did I want to. This arrangement, if that’s what it was, worked fairly well, or so I choose to believe: it was a long time ago. Claire, however, was someone I did get to know, slightly, but I can’t remember having a conversation with her about anything of a personal nature. What I do remember was her beauty. She was amazingly beautiful, possessed of a kind of innate, profound womanliness, a deep feminine actuality. The semi-idiotic pout that marks commercialized and marketable eroticism was foreign to Claire; she simply stunned people into silence, a silence that was, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavy with resentment. She neither adorned nor exploited this beauty, but was as Helen, Helen at that magical instant when she made Paris stupid with desire. Just before she died at twenty-three of ovarian cancer, I found out that she’d had a child at the age of twelve, a child who was the issue, it seems, of coterminous incestuous relationships that she’d carried on with her father and his younger brother, Uncle Ray. She called these entanglements romances. She wasn’t sure which of the two had fathered the child, whom she had drowned in the kitchen sink and left in a trash basket, snugly wrapped in the World Telegram, in Sunset Park. Odd that I should think of her after all these years, a memory occasioned by watching an old Irene Dunne movie on television. I don’t believe that her name was Claire after all.

Rockefeller Center
    N EW YEAR’S EVE, 1949. THE YOUNG MAN IS SITTING IN A booth in a Bronx saloon with a young woman. He doesn’t care for her but she is pretty. They had stopped off for a quick drink on the way to somewhere, a party, a Fifty-second Street club, a movie. Now it is 11:30 and they are still in the saloon, half-drunk. He is dramatically suggesting that he is falling in love with her, but this is a lie, and she, of course, knows it, despite her youth. She is, however, flattered that he