*
HER MOTHER USED to insist on accompanying her all the way on to the train, fussing over her, talking to the conductor, afraid Bethany would miss her stop, fall asleep and wake up in Manhattan. But then one time the train actually began pulling out of the station with Joyce Vincent still on board and she had had to pull the emergency cord. The police were there by the time that one was over. So that put a stop to the humiliation; now her mother just handed her her overnight bag in the parking lot, hugged her, and anxiously watched as she took the stairs to the platform.
It was always nighttime when Bethany rode the train — Friday night when she left, Sunday night when she returned — and she liked the insular, underpopulated, anonymous feel of the sixty-five-minute ride each way. She was fifteen and she did not welcome being looked at. The conductor took her ticket and after that she didn’t have to deal with another face, besides her own reflection in the darkened window, the whole rest of the way.
No one to make fun of how she looked, or to pretend to ignore it in a patronizing way, which was maybe worse; no one to judge her or exclude her; no eyes in which to see her own pitiable nature reflected. It was sweet to get away from her mother, too, not because she was unsympathetic to Bethany’s problems but because she was way too sympathetic. She secretly loved it when Bethany or her brother Kevin fucked up — because it confirmed her own view that the damage done by her ex-husband, the kids’ father, was insurmountable and continued to ramify. She wallowed in her children’s failures, as in her own. Still, she put them on the train to Rhinebeck every weekend to see him, because that’s what the court had ordered.
Kevin hadn’t been on one of these trips with her in about three months now. He just didn’t want to go. Nothing special against his father: it’s just that there was a lot of stuff going on most weekends at home, parties and such, and he didn’t want to miss it. What were they going to do, make him go? He was two years older than his sister and was starting to go bad in a serious way. Bethany knew about a lot of things, drugs and stupid petty crime, that her parents would fall over dead if they ever found out about. Mostly, though, he was just so nasty. No compassion for anyone. Boys were different, but Bethany wondered if this state of advanced bitterness was something she herself was about to grow into, considering all she and her brother had in common.
On the bright side, her dad had been a lot nicer to her since Kevin had stopped coming. He felt so guilty all the time anyway. He had this small house he was renting in Rhinebeck, which was kind of a wealthy town, and a job at a different branch of the same bank he had worked at in Ulster, back before everything blew apart. It was easy, in his chronic state of remorse, to get things out of him. Last month he had bought her these Doc Martens she liked, just because she saw them in a store window. Eighty bucks.
Outside, she knew, were trees, and scrub, and the highway, and the houses and cluttered yards of poor people, and from time to time the river. No loss, not being able to see any of it. She got out her Discman and put on the new Kid Rock.
Some of her pseudo-friends, hearing where she went on weekends, told her stories about getting stoned in the train-car bathrooms, which were huge on account of the wheelchair-access laws. Or hiding in them to beat the fare. Or having sex in there, on a bet. Bethany wasn’t interested. She was still a little scared of experiences like that. It was one reason she secretly didn’t mind missing the various parties on Saturday nights, the keggers in the woods, the gatherings at the elementary-school playground.
“Can’t,” she’d say. “I have to go visit my dad.”
“Oh, right,” they’d say. “Drag.”
They were pulling into the Rhinebeck station now, and there he was. He stood in the floodlit parking lot, hands jammed in his pockets, next to his car. He wore a big parka over his suit. Too vain to wear his glasses, he squinted at the train, trying to find her face in one of the bright windows. Bethany watched him search for her. The music blasted in her ears.
* MESSAGE *
MAYBE LUXURY DOESN’T MAKE YOU SOFT AFTER ALL
COMPROMISE IS JUST A POLITE WORD FOR
SURRENDER
“I make images and they make images, so why not put them together?” Mr Rodrigue said. “Would Andy Warhol have done this? Yes.”
THE WOMB IS OVERRATED
Self-appointed moral critics throughout the ages have warned of moral declines when what they should have hailed was moral change. Today is no different.
May Technology Bring Us Together
“Who wants to call themselves ‘Jew’?” Ms. Bleyer asked. “We’ve been called Jews for 4,000 years. It’s played out. Heeb just sounds so much cooler.”
In February 1994, Benetton began its campaign for peace.
*
THE FRANTIC, ESCALATING nature of publicity was such that people all over the country got sick of the story of Jean-Claude Milo within weeks, and forgot it in all but outline; still, even after it all seemed to have blown over, Palladio received no inquiries regarding new business of any kind, nor even any expressions of patient support from faithful clients wondering when and where they expected to reopen. If the connection between these two phenomena — Milo’s death and the obsolescence of Palladio — seemed at least instinctively obvious to the world at large, to Mal it remained frustratingly oblique. For whether one saw Milo as a martyr to his art or simply as an inadequately supervised lunatic, the fact was that he had never expressed any dissatisfaction with his life at the mansion, never made any attempt to dissociate himself from it. Indeed, the last two years had been indisputably the most productive of his life. Why should his death, even taking into account its violent circumstances, reflect on the larger concerns of the place, or on the nature and the quality of the work that was done there?
Mal couldn’t fathom it. With little else to do, he brooded on it with increasing bitterness until he gradually lost touch with the idea that the whole episode, to one way of thinking at least, had not been about him at all. In the popular fascination with the story he could see only a calculated, opportunistic effort to bring him down. He was an innovator, a visionary, and there are always people — hordes of people, in fact — who are interested in seeing such a person fail.
At some point he resigned himself to the idea that Molly, wherever the hell she had gone, was not going to come back; but the most alarming aspect of this realization was how little effort it took to resign himself to it. He had never felt as though he understood women anyway. Still, he wondered what had come over him — barely two months ago he had been ready to throw everything away for her, he had been fixing up a villa to surprise her with on their honeymoon. His ex-wife would never have recognized him.
The lawsuits were settled. The artists had dispersed, back to the lives they had forsworn in order to come to Virginia, though the blow was softened for most of them by their considerable savings. Mal let Colette go with a year’s severance, money that came out of his own pocket. Every morning he drove from his room in the Sheraton to his room in Shays’s office building, where he now sat by himself, answering the phone when it rang. One morning, as he tilted back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach, staring up at the whorls on the stamped-tin ceiling, his cell phone went off in his pocket: it was his contractor, calling from Umbria. The marble bought at great expense for the small terrace facing the hillside had cracked in the first frost; the quarry was refusing to replace it, insisting that the problem could only be attributed to incompetent masonry. When Mal hung up fifteen minutes later he felt less depressed, his energies less scattered, than at any time in the last few months, and when he thought about it he realized that he had managed to forget that he did still have a home somewhere in the world after all, even if it was one he had never lived in. Then there was Italy itself, a country he had always loved, a country that understood the ancient verities, unlike America, which masked its cultural rootlessness with the constant exaltation of the new, which had, in place of a sense of eternity, perfected the art of forgetting so as to be able to learn the same things over and over again with undiminished enchantment.