Other Men's Daughters Read Online Free PDF

want to wish. And we can kiss goodby.”
    â€œWe didn’t kiss hello,” said Cynthia, who bent over, and this time was kissed as much as kisser.
    Weeks later, she said, “I was so surprised.” Which surprised him, for people think the curve of their feeling is apparent to all whom they don’t wish to deceive. Still, he was kissing in part for her sake (for therapy, for common humanity). So he could still feel himself Man of Principle, Man of Years, Doctor to Confused Patient, Professor to Easily Enchanted Student.
    In short, the Decorticate Dipsologist. Courting.

two
    In the parlor, he’d managed with talk. “I’m too old for such love. You know I like you enormously, you’re a terrific pull on me.” Any twentieth-century western parent, doctor, teacher, knew the importance of self-confidence. “But a man gets on, he relies more on what he’s done himself. Whatever love is, it’s not an accomplishment.”
    â€œThere are plenty of people incapable of it.”
    â€œNot the same. I don’t think the love system functions usefully after thirty. Real love comes at your age. I mean the early, parent-child structure of love is matched in the late teens or early twenties by the great transference. By the time you’re my age, it’s but a combination of lust and nostalgia. There’s no real room for new roots.”
    â€œBertrand Russell says he only found true passion when he was ninety.”
    â€œWas he honest?”
    â€œIf you can even lie like that at ninety, it might mean it was true at seventy.”
    â€œRussell remained adolescent. Didn’t he lose his mother very early? He had the schizoid’s passion for abstraction. His late amorousness was neurotic. He was a schizoid adolescent for seventy-five years.”
    She’d wanted him to hear a record and went off to buy it. He went off too, to buy wine, and then, in the Square, a bouquet of yellow jonquils, and, for her remembrance, a large book of Vermeers which, at home again, waiting for her, he inscribed “To my most charmingly impatient patient, in this loony summer.”
    The minutes of separation deepened his sense of the uniqueness of what was happening. This primary human illusion. As if human beings were as empty-headed as goldfish, swimming round the commonplace, astonished at perpetual novelty. Columbuses of the Bathtub. In a way, it really was that way. The neural complex was so staggering, a statistical case could be made for the absolute uniqueness of every human feeling and event. It was not true—as the Harvard poet Eliot said—that humans were most alike in their moments of passion. Everything was more or less like something else; but just considering the fantastic number of synapses involved, passionate moments corresponded to the greatest acts of intellection. Words might be displaced by grunts, but this did not mean the simplification of sensitivity. How much of his own system right now was alerted to Cynthia’s absence. Her absence was a tremendous presence in him. She was off somewhere in his town. The dakkadakka of the MTA escalator, the beaded chests, the saris, the billboards, the witch hat of Christ’s (where he and Sarah were married about the time Cynthia looked more fish than woman), fifty thousand small gleams, noises. There, now, but here, part of his milieu interieur .
    Home, the Graves in the freezer, the flowers in a blue Wedgewood vase he’d bought in London for Sarah’s thirtieth birthday, the Vermeer on the arm of his chair. Absence soaked the room. Weight. Waiting. Had something happened to her? Lovesick, dizzy, maybe she hadn’t seen an open manhole, a car. No one would notify him. Or, seeing him in his house, had she come to (out of?) her senses? Something said or not said, a gesture flicking the illusion, so that she suddenly saw the grotesqueness of their relationship and was now working up the phone call which