Famous Read Online Free PDF Page A

tell.”
    I severely wish he’d just leave it at that,
but I can tell he won’t.
    “I could rave all night,” I say. “Let me make
one criticism.”
    “It’s our critics who teach us,” he says.
    I guess you have to say that sort of thing
when you’re a professor.
    “I think Matthew—what’s his last name?”
    “Gardiner.”
    “I think Mr. Gardiner is too eager to lecture
his audience. There’s a certain anxiousness and immaturity there. I
knew what he wanted me to see in the first five minutes. He spent
the next twenty-five beating me over the head with it.”
    “Fascinating.”
    I’m not making this up. Jansen starred in a
movie ten years ago that was savaged because it felt more like a
lecture than a story. It was called Room 116 , about a guy
who’s lying in a hospital bed (in Room 116) dying slowly and in
immense pain. And the doctors can’t kill him ’cause it’s against
their creed or whatever. Jansen played his part well, but it’s just
scene after scene of this guy moaning in bed, and by the end of the
movie it’s like, okay, we get it, fucking kill him already. Anyway,
that little spiel I just delivered was adapted from Ebert’s review
of that movie.
    “But Matthew’s a talented director,” I add,
because I don’t want Wittig to think I’m one of those people who
hate everything. And I’m not. I like most things.
     
    Strange music leeches through the door of
Matthew the director’s apartment. It’s this highly danceable music
with this guy speaking monotonously over a drumbeat and
synthesizers. I can’t tell what he’s saying yet.
    There’s a note on the door: “Just come right
in.”
    So we go right in, me following Wittig and
feeling a little nervous but not quite as bad as you might think.
The first and only time I went to the Lewis Barker Thompson Hardy
Christmas party, I threw up in the bathroom as soon as I got to the
restaurant. I hate stuff like that. Social engagements. Mingling.
Finding that stride of charming superficiality. I just don’t know
what to say to people. I’m good for about a minute, but after that
I’m unbearable. I’m just not that interesting. I mean, I wouldn’t
want to talk to me at a party.
    But tonight is different.
    Tonight, I am not me, and that is the
greatest comfort in the world.
    Find a place. In the park. Sit and watch the
ducks. Watch the sky and turn around. I’ll be there in your dream.
Find a place. In the park. Sit and watch the ducks. Watch the sky
and turn around. I’ll be there in your dream.
    That’s what the monotone voice is saying.
Over and over.
    I like it. I don’t know why.
    It’s a studio apartment, and people have
crammed themselves between the walls like you wouldn’t believe.
There’s way more people here than were at the play. I follow Wittig
through the crowd, since he seems to know where he’s going. The
floor is hardwood, the ceiling high. Paintings, sculptures abound.
If I were the kind of person who used words like chic , I’d
say this is a very chic apartment.
    The back wall consists of windows, and they
look out high above the city. People are standing outside on the
balcony as well, leaning against the railing, smoking
cigarettes.
    Wittig turns and says something to me, but I
can’t understand him. There must be a hundred people here. Like
ants, most have assembled in the middle of the room. Bouncing.
Gyrating. A colony of dancing. Others stand in the kitchen around
the stove island. Or sit on counters, or along the walls. Certainly
this guy can’t know everyone here. If I invited everyone I knew to
a party, there’d be about eight people in the room, including my
parents. All you can hear is a jumble of voices and above
them— find a place. In the park. Sit and watch the ducks…
    Next thing I know, we’re standing in front of
this guy garbed in black, with moussed black hair, black-framed
glasses, who isn’t even thirty, and Wittig’s got his arm around my
shoulder and he’s saying, “Matt, I