I guess I will get out, AlWe're friends then,... I guess I will get out, AlWe're friends then, thoughThey shake rather self-consciously and leave each otherI've searched myself and I understand it's a remnant of bourgeois aspirationsWhat a meatball, Hearn thinksHe is amused, a little contemptuousAs he passes a store front, he stares at himself for a moment, regarding his dark hair and hooked blunted noseI look more like a Jew-boy than a midwestern scionNow if I'd had blond hair, Al really would have searched himself
But there are other elementsPerhaps, or was it something else, something less definable?
His senior year he branches out, plays house football with a surprising and furious satisfactionOne play he never quite forgetsA ball carrier on the opposing team breaks through a hole in the line, is checked momentarily, and is standing there stock upright, helpless, when Hearn tackles himHe
see by chloe bags has charged with all his strength and the player is taken off the field with a wrenched knee while Hearn patters after him
You all right, Ronnie?
Yeah, fine
Good tackle, HearnOnly he knows he isn'tThere has been an instant of complete startling gratification when he knew the ball carrier was helpless, waiting to be hitThere is not even any cynical pleasure in making the All-House football team
And other fields tooHe attains a grudged notoriety by seducing a DeWolfe Street debHe even ties up with some of the men he has met through his freshman roommate, now in Speakers, receives after four years a belated invitation to one of the Brattle Hall dances
The stags line up against the wall, chat cursorily with one another, and cut in to dance with either a girl they know or the girl of a man they knowHearn smokes a cigarette or two, quite bored, and
chanel top then cuts in on a little blonde girl dancing with a tall blond clubman
The gesture toward conversation:
And your name is Betty Carreton, eh, where do you go to school?
Oh, to Miss Lucy'sAnd then the barbarity he cannot forswearAnd does Miss Lucy tell you girls how to keep it until marriage?
What did you say?
More and more often this inexplicable humorSomewhere in the cavernous and undoubtedly rotten tissues of the collective brain of Al, of Jansen, of the magazine men, the college literary critics, in the aesthetes' salons, in the modern living rooms on the quiet back streets of Cambridge, there would be the unadmitted hunger to be bored and superior at a Brattle Hall dance, either that or go to Spain
He thinks it out one nightHe can be genuinely indifferent to the Brattle Hall thing because it is the Class AA minor league affair which
omega constellation price all his training on the green lawns, at the dancing school, or riding at night in convertibles on the highways back of Cholive-oil, has satisfiedIt is for the others, the salon men, to be tortured and attracted by the extra quotient of wealth, the elaboration of social fences
And about Spain he knows he is never seriousThat war is in its last spring, and there is nothing in himself he wants to satisfy by going there, no over-all understanding or compassion which he cares to satisfyThe graduation and class week is upon him, and he is cool and friendly to his parents, bored with them too
What are you gonna do, Bob, don't you want any help? Bill Hearn asks
No, I'm going to head for New York, Ellison's father promised me a job there
This is quite a place, Bob, Bill Hearn says
Yes, a funny four yearsAnd inside himself he is strainingGo away, leave me
gucci faux aloneOnly he has learned not to say that out loud any longer
For his thesis he has been given a magna: A Study of the Cosmic Urge in Herman Melville
He functions easily through the next two years, sees himself consciously, amusedly as The Young Man in New YorkHe is first a reader and then a junior editor at Ellison and Co Harvard, New York Extension, as he terms it, and a room and kitchenette in the East SixtiesOh, I'm just a literary con man, he will say
I can't tell you how I've slaved over the thing, the lady historical novelist says to himI was so worried about the motivations of Julia, such an elusive bitch, but I think I achieved the effect I hungered for in her, the one who worries me, however, is Randall Clandeborn
Yes, Miss Helledell, two more of the same, waiterHe lights a cigarette, revolving slowly in the leather arc of their round
chanel cambon tote boo