America was the great whore, he yelled with a bark in his throat. Fornication and lusts of the flesh, he cried in the frozen air, puffing balls of frosty smoke from his mouth while holding forth in competition with the clamorous traffic. A sign of the times, I heard one frothing street preacher call out as I passed in the snow on my evening tramp. Some say it’s a good thing, breeding tolerance and inclusion. No stake in the ground, line in the sand, rock of ages. We’re living at a time where all that’s categorical and certain is spent. I wondered about that for a while, trying to find any correlation? I came to no firm conclusion. Infidelity it’s common as cancer or heart attack in the West. It’s almost de rigueur in the modern age. These things happen with monotonous frequency these days. In doing so I must have inadvertently mentioned to someone the state of affairs that had prompted the shift. In the end I had to notify work of my change of address. ABSOLUTEįlorence looked likely in summer. The next day I found myself flicking through the glossy brochures at the local travel department. The sexual connotations were subtly suggested by the woman’s sheer dress. Was she an unwilling participant in this famous historic seduction? No such reticence in my particular case, I recalled. Leading his prize by the wrist, I noted, suggesting perhaps a degree of reluctance on the woman’s part. Painted in a frieze on the smooth clay surface were the fabled figures of Helen and Paris, the latter leading her away from Sparta to the battlements of Troy. It wasn’t just the vase but the image on the surface of the thing that caught my attention. Red figure, it said on the label, 480 BC, a wine drinking cup, on loan from the German collection. One day, about three months later, I spotted this stunning Greek vase at the gallery. In the end we’re all brute creatures looking for comfort. I took to carrying pieces of cake in my pocket to feed the furry creatures. On the way through Central Park, I made friends with the squirrels. On Sundays I became a regular at the Met. Disconnection is the prevailing disease of our time. People on sidewalks, body heat, faces, movement, noises and warmth. Simply to be in their general vicinity was enough, like a surrogate family. Strangers, moving bodies, it didn’t matter. I knew a man once who was so schmuck lonely he wandered the streets at night just to be around people. I’m thirty-three years old, a number that holds in certain circles some allegorical significance. I increased my hours of work, putting in overtime at the office of Zellsnick and Co, the architectural firm where I’ve been practicing for the past ten years. Exhaustion seemed the best trick at the time. I was also doing my best to tire myself out in order to provide some catatonic and careless sleep. It was an aimless, automatist thing, a contrivance to put me into a trance, help work off bitterness, anger, the attendant grief. So I found cheaper lodgings on the lower East Side, Manhattan, three stories up.įor a time, maybe a month or so, I tramped the streets of an evening, head down into the guttering wind, like Greta Garbo only with less chic. No one wants to come home each night to stare at reminders of rampant sex from the angled vantage of a bedroom doorway. My first reaction to the change of fortune was to find a smaller apartment some distance away from the ill-fated love nest. I had a cousin who was a buddy, but he was killed when the towers came down. There was no one else I was close enough to, to share this shit with. And I didn’t want to sound like a loser Jew. We seldom connect apart from the odd email. I have a sister, Ruth, who lives across state West Coast, California. You don’t go around telling all and sundry that your wife of two and a bit years has been balling silly the guy next door and run off into the night without so much as a backward glance.īoth my parents are dead. Not ones anyway that could be counted as close. We tend to have associates and colleagues but no particular friends. And then there’s the thing about men of my age. Spilling the miscarried contents of my guts to office monkeys is not my style. I’m a private, some may even say, diffident man. And I mean it only in the sense that this was the prevailing wisdom of the time, if one can call it that go abroad, seek out sights, find distraction. When I say they, I mean it only in a generic sense because I didn’t tell anyone about what had happened. Take a break, seek beguilement, get out and about.
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