A novelty part, runs about five inches by one...
A novelty part, runs about five inches by one inch, and he pays three fifty a foot where he could have paid a dollar fifty a foot and come out a long, long ways aheadYou multiply this over a large order, you're talking a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake, and he never knew itHe could have put a hundred grand in his pocket
The Swede found himself hanging on in P he explained, the way he had hung on in Newark, in large part because he had trained a lot of good people to do the intricate work of making a glove carefully and meticulously, people who could give him what Newark Maid had demanded in quality going back to his father's days; but also, he had to admit, staying on because his family so much enjoyed the vacation home he'd built some fifteen years ago on the Caribbean coast, not very far from the Ponce plantThe life the kids lived there they just lovedand off he went again, Kent, Chris, Steve, water-skiing, sailing, scuba diving, catamaraningand though it was clear from all he had just been telling me that this guy could be engaging if he wanted to be, he didn't appear to have any judgment at all as to what was and wasn't interesting about his worldOr, for reasons I couldn't understand, he didn't want his world to be interestingI would have given anything to get him back to Kiler, Fortgang, Lasky, Robbins, and necklace pearl chanel Honig, back to the fourchettes and the details of how to get a good glove done, even back to the guy who'd paid three fifty a foot for the wrong grade of deerskin for a novelty part, but once he was off and running there was no civil way I could find to shift his focus for a second time from the achievements of his boys on land and sea
While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds underweight
"The operation went okay?"
"Just fine," he replied
"A couple friends of mine," I said, "didn't emerge from that surgery as they'd hoped toThat operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get the cancer out
"Yes, that happens, I know
"One wound up impotent," I said"The other's impotent and incontinentIt's been rough for themIt can leave you in diapers
The person I had referred to as "the other" was meI'd had the surgery in Boston, and--except for confiding in a Boston friend who had helped me through the ordeal till I was back on my feet--when I returned to the house where I live alone, two and a half hours west of Boston, in the Berkshires, I had thought it best to keep to myself both the fact that I'd had cancer and the ways louis vuitton purses it had left me impaired
"Well," said the Swede, "I got off easy, I guess
"I'd say you did," I replied amiably enough, thinking that this big jeroboam of self-contentment really was in possession of all he ever had wantedTo respect everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by angerlife just unraveling for the Swede like a fluffy ball of yarn
This line of thinking brought me back to his letter, his request for professional advice about the tribute to his father that he was trying to writeI wasn't myself going to bring up the tribute, and yet the pilzzle remained not only as to why he didn't but as to why, if he didn't, he had written me about it in the first placeI could only conclude--given what I now knew of this life neither overly rich in contrasts nor troubled too much by contradiction--that the letter and its contents had to do with the operation, with something uncharacteristic that arose in him afterward, some surprising new emotion that had come to the foreYes, I thought, the letter grew out of Swede Levov's belated discovery of what it means to be not healthy but sick, to be not strong but weak; what it means to not look great--what physical shame is, what chanel earings humiliation is, what the gruesome is, what extinction is, what it is like to ask "Why?" Betrayed all at once by a wonderful body that had furnished him only with assurance and had constituted the bulk of his advantage over others, he had momentarily lost his equilibrium and had clutched at me, of all people, as a means of grasping his dead father and calling up the father's power to protect himFor a moment his nerve was shattered, and this man who, as far as I could tell, used himself mainly to conceal himself had been transformed into an impulsive, devitalized being in dire need of a blessingDeath had burst into the dream of his life (as, for the second time in ten years, it had burst into mine), and the things that disquiet men our age disquieted even him
I wondered if he was willing any longer to recall the sickbed vulnerability that had made certain inevitabilities as real for him as the exterior of his family's life, to remember the shadow that had insinuated itself like a virulent icing between the layers and layers of contentmentYet he'd showed up for our dinner dateDid that mean the unendurable wasn't blotted out, the safeguards weren't back in place, the emergency wasn't yet over? Or was showing up and going blithely on about everything that was endurable his way of purging the last of his fears? The more I discount hermes thought about this simple-seeming soul sitting across from me eating zabaglione and exuding sincerity, the farther from him my thinking carried meThe man within the man was scarcely perceptible to meI could not make sense of himI couldn't imagine him at all, having come down with my own strain of the Swede's disorder: the inability to draw conclusions about anything but exteriorsRooting around trying to figure this guy out is ridiculous, I told myselfThis is the jar you cannot openThis guy cannot be cracked by thinkingThat's the mystery of his mysteryIt's like trying to get something out of Michelangelo's David
I'd given him my number in my letter--why hadn't he called to break the date if he was no longer deformed by the prospect of death? Once it was all back to how it had always been, once he'd recovered that special luminosity that had never failed to win whatever he wanted, what use did he have for me? No, his letter, I thought, cannot be the whole story--if it were, he wouldn't have comeSomething remains of the rash urge to change thingsSomething that overtook him in the hospital is still thereAn unexam-ined existence no longer serves his needsHe wants something recordedThat's why he's turned to me: to record what might otherwise be forgottenOmitted and forgottenWhat could it be?
Or maybe he was just a happy buy chanel bag