• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Given your recent contretemps?”

“Exactly. I will be putting myself in professional jeopardy if I continue to dawdle or say no.”

“What do you want to do? In your heart of hearts?”

“I want the museum to prosper, even to grow, but not in that direction. I do not want it to become the Mausoleum of Man.”

He laughed again. Then he stopped and took me by the arm. “Then don’t do it, Norman. Because, if you do, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

He was telling me something I already knew, but his saying it gave me the courage of my convictions. I felt a weight lift as we climbed to a high bluff and followed the path along the edge of a precipice buffeted by a clean, salt-smelling breeze.

In wending our way back to the party, we spoke about what had become known as the “coin crisis.” That led to observations about what is genuine and what is false. After some desultory rambling on the subject, Izzy said, “I used to think that finding and championing what’s real was the most important thing a historian could do. That is, I thought that the best way to expose the fake, the exaggerated, and the meretricious was to establish the real and the valuable.”

We paused to watch an eagle turning in a gyre over a sunlit headland. When we resumed our walking, Izzy went on, “Alas, Norman, relativism and fads have grown so persuasive in my discipline that it now matters more who said or wrote something than what is said or written. And if the real, in the form of truth or beauty, is no longer believed to exist, what’s the point in searching for it?”

We rejoined the party for a last glass of wine. We clinked glasses. “In vino veritas,” he proffered.

“Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes.”

Now, as I try to record the events of the day, I find myself sinking into a depthless funk. Was it Izzy’s pessimism, I wondered, sitting there in the growing gloom of a summer evening. It could have been the invidious comparison between my wifeless, childless state and the happy people at the party. I was in thrall to Hamlet’s plaint, “How weary, flat, stale and unprofitable / seem to me all the uses of this world.”

Because nothing seemed real. The face I stared at in the bathroom mirror I saw as an apparition in silvered glass. And even if I achieved everything I wanted, I knew it would not stand the acid of time. Most especially, I asked myself, how real is this that I write? Are not words themselves a kind of counterfeiting insofar as they are a substitute for the real, a secondhand reality at best, a mere shadow, a pale reflection? Except, perhaps, for great poetry, wherever it is found. In that instance words achieve, I would like to believe, the crystalline solidity of living rock. Or is that just another of the necessary fictions by which we live?

A slow, agonizing week passed. I was soon trapped in my own routines, and in my predicaments, my house like a prison with a work-release program called the office. The weekend arrived for the day of the concert. I could not escape conjuring in my fevered imagination what Diantha might be doing with her hip-hopping ex-swain. A gig. No doubt with a party afterward with lots of drugs. What had she said? I’m a normal young woman. I need a man.

I was determined not to call the cottage to see if in fact she had decided to go the concert. She scarcely answers my phone calls, anyway. And when she does, she scarcely speaks to me. Things have deteriorated between us. She’s adamant about one thing: Alphus must go. Period. My appeals are in vain. If only she knew him. He wouldn’t hurt a soul. He could speak to Elsie in her own language.

I was determined not to drink, not even one of the cans of beer Alphus and Ridley were having as they sat in front of the television watching the Red Sox.

Instead I made myself a cup of green tea. It’s supposed to be good for you. But I don’t like the taste. It gives me a sense of futility. I tried. I sipped the wretched brew. I looked at the clock on the wall. I recalled the picnic at Izzy’s. But it was no good. I picked up the phone