Love Always Read Online Free PDF Page B

tourists.
    When she first moved to the city, the fairy-tale aspects of life there fascinated Lucy—things were so excessive, the veneeronly intensified how primitive everything really was. It took awhile to realize that there was no proper ending to the fairy tale: things were simply out of control, and no one was in charge once the strobes were unplugged and the interview was over. It was people’s own fault if they didn’t get the joke. Mayor Koch was right there doing his best to amuse, on
Saturday Night Live
, if you wanted to tune in.
    It could be scary if you let yourself focus on the chaos, so most people kept their sanity by focusing, instead, on things. Those who would still take a risk focused on people. When they did, of course they gave the people magical powers: everyone was exceptional and mysterious, romanticized out of proportion. Real people couldn’t save anyone if they were in trouble, but heroes and heroines could. Since it was the tendency of many women to exaggerate men’s importance and abilities anyway, men fared particularly well in New York.
    Les Whitehall had led a charmed life: he was attractive, intelligent and amusing. People who didn’t know him well would be slow to spot the fear disguised as optimism. He was always well spoken, an extrovert. The older generation knew to watch out for men like Les Whitehall, but in New York someone who was that together easily impressed people. What Lucy’s grandmother knew to call “a smoothie” was now, at natural-food stores in the city, the name of a refreshing drink. In another town (might as well say another world) it might never have been apparent to anyone, including Les, that he wasn’t achieving as much as he might. When Lucy met him, he was writing a novel, taking a course in philosophy, playing racquetball and jogging two miles a day, in addition to his job as a college teacher. He commuted to teach classes outside the city four days a week. This made him a maverick to New Yorkers, and exotic to his students and colleagues. In a town where every waitress was an actress, every cab driver a philosopher, where the construction workers were doing field work for their Ph.D.’s in psychology, and the hospital orderly sang opera, you gradually came to assume that every Nathan’s hot dog was actually a dehydrated roast beef. It was taken for granted that people weren’t what they appeared to be, and no matter whatthey were, you hoped that actually they were more than they seemed. The city was overcrowded, after all; people who couldn’t swim had no excuse for setting out for the island to begin with. Nobody cared much about anyone’s past. The present simply didn’t exist, and the real interest was in the future. Ask any New Yorker where to get the Sunday
Times
on Saturday night.
    Les Whitehall was from Carbondale, Illinois, and if he had stayed there, he would have gone into business (his father and uncle owned a hardware store), bought a cruisemobile, married and had children. He was saved by a scholarship. He went to Princeton, where he dated lanky, loquacious women. He learned early that it was better to be quiet than to speak and make a mistake. Much to his surprise, his silence was accepted as the appropriate response of a superior mind. Everyone at Princeton was assumed to be intelligent until proven otherwise. More than the people he grew up with, the people who crowded around him at college thought in terms of black and white. It seemed appropriate to Les that from then on, those were the colors in which his classmates, in their tuxedos and elegant dresses, would be dressed. He kept up with a few people from that crowd. Lucy could never feel close to any of them. She was no longer sure why she had been so impressed with Les Whitehall. His optimism was part of it. And he had simply been so conspicuous in a town where almost no one stood out that she had been taken in. He was tall but not too tall, handsome but casual, one of those men