without embarrassment. I would like to be able to read them without embarrassment. If I could only do these two simple things, I feel, I would be able to pass my allotted time on this earth like a pearl wrapped in velvet.
She had the startled eyes of a wild bird
. Ah, but which one? A screech owl, perhaps, or a cuckoo? It does make a difference. We do not need more literalists of the imagination. They cannot read
a body like a gazelle’s
without thinking of intestinal parasites, zoos, and smells.
She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal
, I read. Reluctantly I put down the book, thumb still inserted at the exciting moment. He’s about to crush her in his arms, pressing his hot, devouring, hard, demanding mouth to hers as her breasts squish out the top of her dress, but I can’t concentrate. Metaphor leads me by the nose, into the maze, and suddenly all Eden lies before me. Porcupines, weasels, warthogs, and skunks, their feral gazes malicious or bland or stolid or piggy and sly. Agony, to see the romantic
frisson
quivering just out of reach, a dark-winged butterfly stuck to an overripe peach, and not to be able to swallow, or wallow.
Which one?
I murmur to the unresponding air.
Which one?
THE
BOYS’
OWN
ANNUAL,
1911
was in my grandfather’s attic, along with a pump organ that contained bats, rafter-high piles of Western paperbacks, and a dress form, my grandmother’s body frozen in wire when it still had a waist. The attic smelled of dry rot and smoked eels but it had a window, where the sunlight was yellower than anywhere else, because of the dust maybe. This buttery sunlight framed the echoing African caves where the underground streams ran, lightless, haunted by crocodiles, white and eyeless, guarding the entrance to the tunnel carved with Egyptian hieroglyphs and armed with deadly snakes and spiky ambushes planted two thousand years ago to protect the chamber of thesacred pearl, which for some reason, in stories like this, was always black. And when the hero snatched it out of the stone forehead looming bulbous and idolatrous there in the darkness,
filthy
was a word they liked, for other religions, the goddess was mad as blazes. Sinister priests with scimitars abounded, they could sniff you out like bloodhounds, their bare feet making no sound, until suddenly there was a set piece and down the hill went everyone, bounding along, loving it, yelling like crazy, bullets thudding into bodies into the scrub, into the surf, onto the waiting ship where Britain stood firm for plunder.
The issue with the last installment had never come; it wasn’t in the attic. So there I was, suspended in mid-story, in 1951, and there I remain, sometime, waiting for the end, or finishing it off myself, in a book-lined London study over a stiff brandy, a yarn spun to a few choice gentlemen under the stuffed water buffalo head, a cheerful fire in the grate, or somewhere on the veldt, a bullet in the heart; who can tell where such greedy impulses will lead? Such lust for blind white crocodiles. In those times there were still chiefs in ostrich feathers and enemies worth killing, and loyalty, or so the story said. Through the attic window and its golden dust and flyhusks I could see the barn, unpainted, hay coming out like stuffing from the loft doorway, and around the cornerof it my grandmother’s cow. She’d hook you if she could, if you didn’t have a pitchfork. She was sneaking up on someone invisible; possibly my half-uncle, gassed in the first war and never right since. The books had been his once.
STUMP
HUNTING
1.
Dead stumps are the favorite disguises of wild animals. How often have you been roaring past in your motorboat or paddling in your canoe when you’ve seen a dead stump sticking out of the water and said to yourself,
That looks like an animal
?
Just the head of course. Swimming.
And then when you came up to it, it was only a dead stump.
Don’t be deceived! Usually these objects really are
She had the startled eyes of a wild bird
. Ah, but which one? A screech owl, perhaps, or a cuckoo? It does make a difference. We do not need more literalists of the imagination. They cannot read
a body like a gazelle’s
without thinking of intestinal parasites, zoos, and smells.
She had a feral gaze like that of an untamed animal
, I read. Reluctantly I put down the book, thumb still inserted at the exciting moment. He’s about to crush her in his arms, pressing his hot, devouring, hard, demanding mouth to hers as her breasts squish out the top of her dress, but I can’t concentrate. Metaphor leads me by the nose, into the maze, and suddenly all Eden lies before me. Porcupines, weasels, warthogs, and skunks, their feral gazes malicious or bland or stolid or piggy and sly. Agony, to see the romantic
frisson
quivering just out of reach, a dark-winged butterfly stuck to an overripe peach, and not to be able to swallow, or wallow.
Which one?
I murmur to the unresponding air.
Which one?
THE
BOYS’
OWN
ANNUAL,
1911
was in my grandfather’s attic, along with a pump organ that contained bats, rafter-high piles of Western paperbacks, and a dress form, my grandmother’s body frozen in wire when it still had a waist. The attic smelled of dry rot and smoked eels but it had a window, where the sunlight was yellower than anywhere else, because of the dust maybe. This buttery sunlight framed the echoing African caves where the underground streams ran, lightless, haunted by crocodiles, white and eyeless, guarding the entrance to the tunnel carved with Egyptian hieroglyphs and armed with deadly snakes and spiky ambushes planted two thousand years ago to protect the chamber of thesacred pearl, which for some reason, in stories like this, was always black. And when the hero snatched it out of the stone forehead looming bulbous and idolatrous there in the darkness,
filthy
was a word they liked, for other religions, the goddess was mad as blazes. Sinister priests with scimitars abounded, they could sniff you out like bloodhounds, their bare feet making no sound, until suddenly there was a set piece and down the hill went everyone, bounding along, loving it, yelling like crazy, bullets thudding into bodies into the scrub, into the surf, onto the waiting ship where Britain stood firm for plunder.
The issue with the last installment had never come; it wasn’t in the attic. So there I was, suspended in mid-story, in 1951, and there I remain, sometime, waiting for the end, or finishing it off myself, in a book-lined London study over a stiff brandy, a yarn spun to a few choice gentlemen under the stuffed water buffalo head, a cheerful fire in the grate, or somewhere on the veldt, a bullet in the heart; who can tell where such greedy impulses will lead? Such lust for blind white crocodiles. In those times there were still chiefs in ostrich feathers and enemies worth killing, and loyalty, or so the story said. Through the attic window and its golden dust and flyhusks I could see the barn, unpainted, hay coming out like stuffing from the loft doorway, and around the cornerof it my grandmother’s cow. She’d hook you if she could, if you didn’t have a pitchfork. She was sneaking up on someone invisible; possibly my half-uncle, gassed in the first war and never right since. The books had been his once.
STUMP
HUNTING
1.
Dead stumps are the favorite disguises of wild animals. How often have you been roaring past in your motorboat or paddling in your canoe when you’ve seen a dead stump sticking out of the water and said to yourself,
That looks like an animal
?
Just the head of course. Swimming.
And then when you came up to it, it was only a dead stump.
Don’t be deceived! Usually these objects really are
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