6136
THALIA SELZ
caustically. They have made me wince today, and I am going to
kill Joshua over again if I have the chance.
"What
about
his relationships with women?"
My mother is bristling. Hands on hips, shoulders thrust for–
ward pugnaciously, she glares at me. The white tower of her
hair, still ramped and turreted like the Tower of Babel, trembles
down its proud spiral with the passion of her defense. "Just
because he didn't sleep with Sarah and break her
heart!
Well,
Nanette was crazy about him and they had
quite
an affair together
later on, I can tell you. Also, there were
several
other girls before
he moved away, and then that married woman he lived with
later ... Oh, I was his confidante all right, and I used to say to
him, 'Settle
down,
Joshua! Settle on
one
of them before it's too
late!' And you see? I was right."
I am thunderstruck and some of it must show, for Jason roars
with laughter and claps me a brother's clap on the shoulder. "Did
you think he was going to carry the torch forever?"
''Carry the torch for whom?"
We are all confused and stare at one another and then off in
several directions toward the somber black pines and the passive,
sky-colored lake.
So that I no longer have even that leg to stand on.
Later that night I paced beside the lake, upon the round
smooth pebbles the glaciers had broken and caressed down from
rocks and left behind
in
their vast, magnificent passage, and I tried
to understand and thaw that secret, hard core of my anger.
Absurd! I tossed into the charcoal dust of night, settling, like
an invisible, infinitely soft fall of black snow, on the invisible,
tender surface of the summer lake.
Absurd, but why not? I argue now, sitting stiffly upright in
the icy sharp cold, arguing with Joshua who smiles into my
eyes,
as always, with an air of infinite relinquishment.
I observe him this time in earnest annoyance. My determina–
tion. My passionate nature. I am so used to getting my way
be–
cause I know what I want.
If
he hadn't been so evasive I could
have helped him do really good work again, as he did in our
basement. Perhaps that's only conceit, but my mother and father
seem to help each other work somehow; they still spar over sex,
