Meeting Evil Read Free Page A

lifelong friends who uncover the strangeness hidden inside familiarity. But it is also a pining lovestory, another Kafkaesque parable of shifting perspective, and much more: Berger has insisted, in his letters to me, that
Best Friends
felt to him, in the writing, like nothing he’d ever done before. As a fellow novelist this nearly brings tears to my eyes. I can only pray that at such an age I’ll be not only working at all but working in Berger’s manner, without presumptions, without a safety net constructed of all the good reviews he’s gathered over a lifetime. Each time Berger writes he ventures out with only his style for courage.
    As a favor to my friend I have avoided the word which has dogged his years on this planet: I have not called him
comic.
But I would fail here if I didn’t report that his books have made me laugh harder, over
my
years on the planet, than any others on my shelves. I predict that you will laugh too, and that you will find, as I have, that this laughter sustains itself even after the contemplation, inevitable after absorbing more than one or two of Berger’s books, of the vast distress at the universal human plight (though it is an even-keeled, contemplative distress, as in the way of the Buddha) which necessitated their writing. Berger isn’t comic. He, like life, is merely, and hugely, fucking funny.

Meeting Evil



I

    PERHAPS John Felton had got married too young, but he really did love Joanie and, besides, she was pregnant and came from a family which, though believing abortion was wrong, would have been disgraced by an illegitimate birth, with several of its members active in local church affairs and one in the politics of the county. So he became a father the first time almost simultaneously with becoming a husband.
    Then before Melanie was quite three years of age she was joined by a newborn brother they prudently named for her mother’s uncle Philip, a small businessman who had retired on the tidy sum paid for his prime-location premises (where he had sold floor coverings) by the firm that intended to demolish them along with neighboring structures and build a medium-sized mall on the property. But Uncle Phil was conspicuously healthy and still not nearly old enough to be considered a prompt source of financial relief for his presumed heirs. They were paying too much for a house though John was himself a real-estate salesman—at the moment in a buyer’s market.
    John worked weekends, showing houses to potential buyers when there were such, and took Mondays off, which permitted Joanie to catch up on her sleep in the morning, and in the afternoon shop or visit the hairdresser. Even so—and whenever he was home he shared in the chores, including wee-hour calls from baby Phil—having to care for two small children was leaving its mark on his young wife, who, he had to admit to himself, already looked as if she had been married twice as long as was actually the case.
    It was on such a late Monday morning when, with the two-tone sound of the front-door chimes, the worst day of John’s life began, though he had already been up for hours, feeding the children and running the first of two loads of laundry through the washer/dryer and folding the garments while they were still warm. Joanie, in rumpled pajamas, was breakfasting on sugar-coated cereal at the kitchen table. She wore no makeup, in which state her eyes looked very small, and her hair was tousled. There had been a time, not long before, when in a similar condition she would still have looked like a schoolgirl.
    “Why don’t you try one of those blueberry muffins?” John asked her now.
    “Aren’t they stale?”
    “I just bought them yesterday, at Liebman’s.”
    “I don’t know,” Joan said, pushing away at least half a bowlful of sodden cereal. “I’m just not that hungry.” She drank some black coffee from her favorite mug of brown ceramic, with the yellow chipped place at the rim to avoid which she held the