My Summer With George Read Free Page A

can have total control: the story makes it true. But in life, no one can possibly have total control. People who pretend to it are pretentious and fake, and I loathe them. You adore the hero who assumes control in the movies, because he really has the supernatural powers he claims: the movie gives them to him. Only godly power can make control bearable, can redeem it, and godly power is found only in fiction. George’s obvious lack of control—his flustered manner, the discomfort he could not or did not try to mask—deeply appealed to me, a person whose social graces, painfully acquired over the years, conceal scars from self-inflicted wounds. So I challenged him with a smile.
    “What do you mean, a hell of a house? A hell of a nice house or a hell of an awful house?”
    “A hell of a big house!” he exploded, his head pivoting as he examined the ceiling, the staircases, the dining room, with its table that seated forty.
    “Ah, yes, that it is.” I dredged up the usual question for breaking the ice at parties. “How do you know the Altshulers?”
    “Don’t. Never heard of ’em. Who are they? Was that woman who grabbed me and dragged me over here an Altshuler?”
    I laughed. “You sound as if you feel dragooned.”
    “I don’t like being dragged—or dragooned,” he said grumpily, looking around him warily. He returned to me. His eyes began to focus on me. “I’m visiting Edgar Allen. The actor—you know him? We’ve been pals since prep school. He’s a hell of a good actor. Did you see him in The Little Merman? He was great. Terrific.”
    My mind, as always when I meet someone new, was whirring with deductions. That he was socially uncomfortable was immediately apparent. He had a strange vocabulary—very enthusiastic and male and American, full of great s and terrific s and a hell of s—the kind of language one hears from men who had problems learning to become men, who had had to learn how to speak something they consider the language of men, like boys who learn in prep school to call each other bro and invite each other to go out for a brewski. But since I had spent many years learning how to be a woman, I was not entirely without sympathy for such men. He sounded enthusiastic, sincere, and a little naive, like the open palm of a hearty handshake, suggesting good intentions, good wishes. His speech was the male equivalent of the lockjaw speech so prevalent among Connecticut matrons, or the gushing effusiveness of middle-class women in Atlanta or Charleston. I dislike fake tones of voice; I prefer voices that reflect reality, that reveal a bit of edge, bitterness, sorrow, anger. But George’s display of innocence and openness seemed to me self-protective, masking and deflecting attention from the intensity that showed in his piercing eyes and the tiny, tremulous lines around his mouth. And those drew me mightily.
    He’d gone to prep school. I always note class markers. That meant he’d probably prefer light chat, meaningless conversation. Most men liked to talk about sports—it was the only dependable subject, actually, with men—but I had cultivated an ignorance of sports as carefully as men cultivate knowledge of them, and I could not converse in that language. Politics was tricky, since one never knew, and I take politics too seriously to discuss it lightly. Money is a boring subject, and I refuse to discuss it or its markers—cars, houses, boats, acquaintance with Alan Greenspan or David Geffen. So all that was left was persons or the arts. Persons was safer.
    At this point, I had merely a certain sympathy for and interest in George Johnson, a little quickening of attention, a heightening of the hormones, and it was easy enough for me, with my long, self-conscious training in party conversation, to extract the relevant facts about him. He’d been born in Louisiana but now lived in Kentucky and edited the Louisville Herald. He was, it seemed, in his mid-fifties (god, he looked good), and he was