Foreign Bodies Read Online Free PDF

in Leo’s gene pool there lurked a remote yet renowned cantor. Folklore had it that cantors, when they were not outright fools, had low intelligence. Such defamation could not apply to Leo. He was reading Nietzsche and Aldous Huxley.
    Bea, in her private way, hid her infatuation from Laura, who would only have jeered at its pointlessness:
Leo isn’t for the likes of you
. The likes of Bea! Laura’s goals were meager. In her senior year she became engaged to Harold Bienenfeld. Her wedding dress had a six-foot lace train. At the close of the ceremony the ring boy, in chargealso of the rented cage, released four practiced white doves. They circled over the startled guests and then flew docilely back into their cage. Its floor was thick with mottled droppings.
    “I suppose you’ll be the next one,” Leo said.
    “The next what?” Though of course she knew.
    They were standing side by side near an ice sculpture — twin mermaids embracing — at the base of which lay wide oval platters of sliced melon, layer upon layer of pink, orange, green, studded with swollen strawberries still attached to their leafy stems. The strawberries resembled surgically removed organs freshly lifted from the gash in an anaesthetized belly.
    “Bride, wife, mother, teacher.”
    “I’d rather be an Indian chief,” Bea retorted.
    “There can’t be two chiefs in one tribe.”
    “Who’s the other?”
    “Your sibling, Prince Marvin. Only he’s the other kind of Indian, a Princeton rajah. And you’re the pauper who got sent to a public college, for free.”
    “Marvin’s good at math. They gave him a scholarship.”
    “And what are you good at?” Leo asked. She was almost certain he wasn’t needling her. He was looking for useful information. Or else — it was what she feared — whatever she might say would mean nothing to him, it was only prattle to pass the time.
    At nineteen Bea was truthful. “I want to make my mark in the world,” she told him. The instant it was out, she felt humiliated.
    “An aspiration as admirable as its expression is trite,” Leo said, and gave her an impatient little push. “Hey, come on, a waltz, even if they’re lousy at it. Baboons on harmonicas, who cares?”
    Trite: should she be hurt? Truthful was reckless. He judged her by his cousin Laura, by the intertwined frozen mermaids (“Sapphists,” he muttered), and by the second-rate wedding band; he judged her by Harold Bienenfeld, who was going into his father’s accounting business. If you mean to make your mark, how else can you put it? Better never to tell. If you told, it was only natural that you’d be ridiculed.At the end of the dance, he let her drop backward in a dip, a ballroom maneuver she had seen only in the movies. The fast swooping motion, thrusting her nearly all the way down with her head close to the floor, and up again into the cavern of his long jacket sleeves breeding warmth, whirled her into a moment of vertigo. His face streaked in her vision.
    “A mark? Any old mark?” — as if nothing had intervened. “Or is there something explicit you have in mind?” A stir of nausea. She slowed her breath, hoping to thwart an upward-creeping gas bubble. It broke silently in her throat. “Because,” he said, “I’m all for the explicit. You’ve got to
know
, and you’ve got to know that you know. Beethoven of the twentieth century, for instance, that’s me. Maybe Stravinsky. Hindemith maybe. Kiddo, just call me Doctor Faustus. Captain of my fate.”
    She saw that under the mockery — of her, of himself — he was as driven as Marvin, the Princeton rajah. But still he was only a poor Chicago boy stuck with his father’s relations in a five-story Bronx walkup. Laura had told her that he slept on a foldaway couch in the dining room, where in the mornings he was in everyone’s way.
    “You’re not a bad dancer,” he admitted. “I’ve been with worse. But you’re never going to make it with the Bolshoi, so how about it?