Ordinary Love and Good Will (25 page)

When I look back on the succeeding eighteen years, I see someone, neither boy nor man but a nameless intermediate form, who has received as a gift an endless number of wishes. The only rule governing these wishes is that they must be specific. And of course they are, because particularity is his genius (inclination, prevailing spirit). But the moral of all wish tales is that, though wishes express power or desire, their purpose is to reveal ignorance: the more fulfilled wishes, the more realized ignorance.

Tom likes it in town. He has a group of friends on our block and the next one, four boys who ride bikes, read comic books, play endless wavelike games of territorial defense.
They have quickly filled him in on who’s who in the superhero universe, and he is saving part of his newspaper money for a hipper bicycle, one with solid metal spoke covers.

Liz, too, is more naturally attuned to this life, though she has cried and suffered over the change, over our loss and shame, over my present “aimlessness.” Still, she eats lunch with friends she has made at work, and also does something I remember my mother doing—traveling around the kitchen, sink to stove to refrigerator, telephone receiver wedged between cheek and shoulder. We have a bathtub. She spends a lot of time there. She goes to the Episcopalian church.

As for me, I think often of Lydia Harris, her dignity, her slender but muscular hands, the very African shape of her head, the grace that she never failed to express. I think of her, and Annabel, too, with what seems like love. Once in a while, I think that if I could talk long enough and eloquently enough, I could make Lydia understand, but I don’t know what I would have her understand, and events have carried us beyond communication, anyway. For a long time, I looked for some kind of judgment at her hands. Now I can imagine what it would be, and anything I might say would sound, at least to me, like excuses.

Liz and the counselor have a program mapped out aimed at “recovery.” One of the counselor’s handouts pictures this as a ladder, with a man climbing steps labeled “denial,” “anger,” “bargaining,” and so forth. I am loitering at the bottom of the ladder, I suppose. But it seems to me that what they want of me is to make another whole thing, the way I made a whole of my family, my farm, my time, a bubble, a work of art, a whole expression of my whole self. No, I say, though only to myself (the counselor has real power over our custody arrangement). Let us have fragments, I say. Let the racial hatred that has been expressed through us lie next to the longing I feel for Lydia Harris;
let Tom’s innocence lie next to his envious fury; let Liz’s grief for the farm lie next to her blossoming in town; let my urge to govern and supply every element of my son’s being lie next to our tenuous custody; let the poverty the welfare department sees lie next to the wealth I know was mine. If these things are allowed, if no wholes are made, then it seems to me that I can live in town well enough, and still, from time to time, close my eyes and feel a warm, wet breeze move up the valley, hear the jostling and lowing animals in the barn, smell the mixed scent of chamomile and wild roses and warm grassy manure, and remember the vast, inhuman peace of the stars pouring across the night sky above the valley, as well as the smaller, nearer, but not too near, human peace of the lights of Moreton scattered over the face of Snowy Top.

A novel

A sparkling, funny, and provocative novel about love, war, sex, politics … and a group of friends and family who gather for the transformative days in the Hollywood hills.

“A sharp-edged comedy of manners.”
—The Denver Post

Available in hardcover from Knopf
978-1-4000-4061-2 • $26.00 (Can: $32.00)

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Fiction/Literature/978-1-4000-3383-6

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