Stories
Page 27
He has that strange, unnerving detachment now, said Ellen, that’s what upsets me, even though it makes it easier to be with him. Sometimes he was querulous. I can’t stand them coming in here taking my blood every morning, what are they doing with all that blood, he is reported to have said; but where was his anger, Jan wondered. Mostly he was lovely to be with, always saying how are you, how are you feeling. He’s so sweet now, said Aileen. He’s so nice, said Tanya. (Nice, nice, groaned Paolo.) At first he was very ill, but he was rallying, according to Stephen’s best information, there was no fear of his not recovering this time, and the doctor spoke of his being discharged from the hospital in another ten days if all went well, and the mother was persuaded to fly back to Mississippi, and Quentin was readying the penthouse for his return. And he was still writing his diary, not showing it to anyone, though Tanya, first to arrive one late-winter morning, and finding him dozing, peeked, and was horrified, according to Greg, not by anything she read but by a progressive change in his handwriting: in the recent pages, it was becoming spidery, less legible, and some lines of script wandered and tilted about the page. I was thinking, Ursula said to Quentin, that the difference between a story and a painting or photograph is that in a story you can write, He’s still alive. But in a painting or a photo you can’t show “still.” You can just show him being alive. He’s still alive, Stephen said.
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HAMISH HAMILTON
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Hamish Hamilton is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in the United States of America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2017
First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 2017
Copyright © David Rieff, 2017
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the publications in which these stories first appeared: ‘Debriefing’ and ‘Old Complaints Revisited’ appeared in American Review; ‘Project for a Trip to China’ in the Atlantic Monthly; ‘The Dummy’ in Harper’s Bazaar; ‘Unguided Tour’, ‘Pilgrimage’, ‘The Letter Scene’ and ‘The Way We Live Now’ in the New Yorker; ‘American Spirits’ (originally entitled ‘The Will and the Way’) and ‘Doctor Jekyll’ in Partisan Review; and ‘Baby’ in Playboy
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover image: ‘Artificial Flowers’, 1975 © Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017)
Photo: Tate, London 2017
ISBN: 978-0-241-98272-3