Foreign Bodies Read Online Free PDF Page B

What’re you after?”
    He was someone who could hold on to a thread. He let nothing dangle, he followed through. The heat in his voice — was it artificial, pumped up? Anyhow she let it draw her out. “You’ll laugh,” she said, “because I’ve had different ideas at different times, and they all add up to the same. Sometimes I think I could be a foreign correspondent, or even a sort of detective, going all over to figure things out. And sometimes I think about archaeology, digging up old secrets everyone’s forgotten. But lately” — she was babbling, and did she dare? — “I’ve thought about making up a sort of dictionary.”
    “Miss Samuel Johnson, lexicographer. Pleased to meet you.” A relief: he wasn’t laughing. Instead he was examining her as if she was some unfamiliar insect or bird, or a kind of unknown root rumoredto be edible. “But Miss Johnson, ma’am, one can’t help observing that none of these have any sensible connection —”
    “Oh, but they’re all just alike. They’re things that start out hidden, and then you find them out. I mean it wouldn’t be a dictionary of
words
, nothing like that. Nothing that’s ever existed before.”
    “How about cloud shapes? Elephants, giraffes, shoes, chimneys with smoke coming out, pies, puddings, cheese. Balloons, obviously. Tuna fish in or out of the can, with little cloud-drawings all around. Or what about a dictionary of famous crooks, serial killers, say, in alphabetical order —”
    “If you’re going to do
that
,” she said (a tug of confusion just behind her eyes), “I won’t tell it.” And immediately did: “A dictionary of feelings. Moods. Smells. Feelings that everyone’s somehow felt, only there’s no name for them. Look,” she cried, “you
can’t
make fun of everything there is!”
    “I can of everything that isn’t. It sounds to me,” he said mildly, “that you’re well on your way to being a run-of-the-mill high school teacher. English lit, possibly — all that sensibility.”
    “And you,” she shot back, “are just a run-of-the-mill false prophet. And what’s more, you’re not on your way to it, you’re already there.”
    She was shamed: why hadn’t he heard what lay beating below that unlucky spew of wayward nonsense? It was inchoate; it was worse than clouds, it had no shape at all.
I want to make my mark:
this wasn’t what she meant really, it was foolishness, it was trite (yes!), a fantasy, a kind of crippled poem; she was incriminated. The trouble with liking poetry (she did like it, she liked it immensely), exhaling the words almost aloud but mainly under your breath so that no one would hear you freakishly murmuring, was that it inflamed you, it made you want your life on this round earth to
count
, the way the poet and the poem counted.
Ah, love, let us be true to one another! for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new . . .
A mark, a mark, a dent in history, a leaving — even (even!) if not her own. She all at once seized on it;
this
was what shewas after: to be attached in some intimate way to a marvel, a force, a prodigy, the other side of the moon, where ordinary mortals could never go. Or to plummet into the sun! The big dark room was over-heated: gilt cornices, mirrored walls, dim chandeliers sprouting fat electric candles, statuettes of gods on fluted pedestals. A male singer in an oiled pompadour was whining slowly into a microphone, elongating the vowels like stretched taffy. The band had lurched into a foxtrot; couples pressed shoulders and hips close, the men’s bowties coming undone, the women’s armpits seeping sweat. And now the wedding cake was wheeled in on a cart, like a belated and infirm guest gallantly overdressed in too many fringes and tassels. On its topmost ledge stood the stiff little sugar bride and groom with their tiny black staring licorice toy eyes. A child in a long pink gown and a garland in her hair ran