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I talked to him just the other dayA novelty part, runs about five inches by one inch, and he pays three fifty a foot where he could have paid a dollar fifty a foot and come out a long, long ways aheadYou multiply this over a large order, you’re talking a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake, and he never knew itHe could have put a hundred grand in his pocket
The Swede found himself hanging on in P he explained, the way he had hung on in Newark, in large part because he had trained a lot of good people to do the intricate work of making a glove carefully and meticulously, people who could give him what Newark Maid had demanded in quality going back to his father’s days; but also, he had to admit, staying on because his family so much enjoyed the vacation home he’d built some fifteen years ago on the Caribbean coast, not very far from the Ponce plantThe life the kids lived there they just lovedand off he went again, Kent, Chris, Steve, water-skiing, sailing, scuba diving, catamaraningand though it was clear from all he had just been telling me that this guy could be engaging if he wanted to be, he didn’t appear to have any judgment at all as to what was and wasn’t interesting about his worldOr, for reasons I couldn’t understand, he didn’t want his world to be interestingI would have given anything to get him back to fendi spy bag replica Kiler, Fortgang, Lasky, Robbins, and Honig, back to the fourchettes and the details of how to get a good glove done, even back to the guy who’d paid three fifty a foot for the wrong grade of deerskin for a novelty part, but once he was off and running there was no civil way I could find to shift his focus for a second time from the achievements of his boys on land and sea
While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds underweight
“The operation went okay?”
“Just fine,” he replied
“A couple friends of mine,” I said, “didn’t emerge from that surgery as they’d hoped toThat operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get the cancer out
“Yes, that happens, I know
“One wound up impotent,” I said”The other’s impotent and incontinentIt’s been rough for themIt can leave you in diapers
The person I had referred to as “the other” was meI’d had the surgery in Boston, and–except for confiding in a Boston friend who had helped me through the ordeal till I was back on my feet–when I returned to the house where I live alone, two and a half hours west of Boston, in the Berkshires, I had thought it best to keep to myself both louis vuitton wien the fact that I’d had cancer and the ways it had left me impaired
“Well,” said the Swede, “I got off easy, I guess
“I’d say you did,” I replied amiably enough, thinking that this big jeroboam of self-contentment really was in possession of all he ever had wantedTo respect everything one is supposed to respect; to protest nothing; never to be inconvenienced by self-distrust; never to be enmeshed in obsession, tortured by incapacity, poisoned by resentment, driven by angerlife just unraveling for the Swede like a fluffy ball of yarn
This line of thinking brought me back to his letter, his request for professional advice about the tribute to his father that he was trying to writeI wasn’t myself going to bring up the tribute, and yet the pilzzle remained not only as to why he didn’t but as to why, if he didn’t, he had written me about it in the first placeI could only conclude–given what I now knew of this life neither overly rich in contrasts nor troubled too much by contradiction–that the letter and its contents had to do with the operation, with something uncharacteristic that arose in him afterward, some surprising new emotion that had come to the foreYes, I thought, the letter grew out of Swede Levov’s belated discovery of what it means to be not healthy but sick, to be not strong but weak; what it means to omega speedmaster day-date not look great–what physical shame is, what humiliation is, what the gruesome is, what extinction is, what it is like to ask “Why?” Betrayed all at once by a wonderful body that had furnished him only with assurance and had constituted the bulk of his advantage over others, he had momentarily lost his equilibrium and had clutched at me, of all people, as a means of grasping his dead father and calling up the father’s power to protect himFor a moment his nerve was shattered, and this man who, as far as I could tell, used himself mainly to conceal himself had been transformed into an impulsive, devitalized being in dire need of a blessingDeath had burst into the dream of his life (as, for the second time in ten years, it had burst into mine), and the things that disquiet men our age disquieted even him
I wondered if he was willing any longer to recall the sickbed vulnerability that had made certain inevitabilities as real for him as the exterior of his family’s life, to remember the shadow that had insinuated itself like a virulent icing between the layers and layers of contentmentYet he’d showed up for our dinner dateDid that mean the unendurable wasn’t blotted out, the safeguards weren’t back in place, the emergency wasn’t yet over? Or was showing up and going blithely on about everything that was endurable his omega watch orange way of purging the last of his fears? The more I thought about this simple-seeming soul sitting across from me eating zabaglione and exuding sincerity, the farther from him my thinking carried meThe man within the man was scarcely perceptible to meI could not make sense of himI couldn’t imagine him at all, having come down with my own strain of the Swede’s disorder: the inability to draw conclusions about anything but exteriorsRooting around trying to figure this guy out is ridiculous, I told myselfThis is the jar you cannot openThis guy cannot be cracked by thinkingThat’s the mystery of his mysteryIt’s like trying to get something out of Michelangelo’s David
I’d given him my number in my letter–why hadn’t he called to break the date if he was no longer deformed by the prospect of death? Once it was all back to how it had always been, once he’d recovered that special luminosity that had never failed to win whatever he wanted, what use did he have for me? No, his letter, I thought, cannot be the whole story–if it were, he wouldn’t have comeSomething remains of the rash urge to change thingsSomething that overtook him in the hospital is still thereAn unexam-ined existence no longer serves his needsHe wants something recordedThat’s why he’s turned to me: to record what might otherwise be forgottenOmitted and chanel classic bags forgotten

But instead, before remembering her childhood room could completely undo her, she would find a diner or a luncheonette and sit on a stool at the counter and order a BIT and a vanilla milk shakeSaying the familiar words, watching the bacon curl on the grill, watching for her toast to pop up, carefully removing the toothpicks when she was served, eating the layered sandwich between sips of the shake, concentrating on crunching the tasteless fibers from the lettuce, extracting the smoke-scented fat from the brittle bacon and the flowery juices from the soft tomato, swilling everything in with the mash of the mayonnaised toast, grinding patiently away with her jaws and her teeth, thoughtfully pulverizing every mouthful into a silage to settle her down–concentrating on her BLT as fixedly as her mother’s livestock focusing on the fodder at the trough–gave her the courage to go on aloneShe would eat the sandwich and drink the shake and remember how she got there and go onBy the time she left Chicago she had discovered she no longer needed a home; she would never again come close to succumbing to the yearning for a family and a home
In Oregon she was involved in two bombings
Instead of stopping her, killing Fred Conlon had only inspired her; quilted chanel bags after Fred Conlon, instead of her being crippled by conscience, she was delivered from all residual fear and compunctionThe horror of having killed, if only inadvertently, an innocent man, a man as good as any she would ever hope to know, had not taught her anything about that most fundamental prohibition, which, stupefyingly enough, she had failed to learn to observe from being raised by Dawn and himKilling Conlon only confirmed her ardor as an idealistic revolutionary who did not shrink from adopting any means, however ruthless, to attack the evil systemShe had proved that being in opposition to everything decent in honky America wasn’t just so much hip graffiti emblazoned on her bedroom wall
He said, “You planted the bombs
“At Hamlin’s and in Oregon you planted the bombs
“Was anyone killed in Oregon?”
“Yes
“People,” he repeated”How many people, Merry?”
“Three,” she said
There was plenty to eat at the communeThey grew a lot of their own food and so there was no need, as there had been when she first got to Chicago, to scavenge for wilted produce outside supermarkets at nightAt the commune she began to sleep with a woman she fell in love with, the wife of a weaver whose loom Merry learned to operate when she was not working dior logo with the bombsAssembling bombs had become her specialty after she’d successfully planted her second and thirdShe loved the patience and the precision required to safely wire the dynamite to the blasting cap and the blasting cap to the Woolworth’s alarm clockThat’s when the stuttering first began to disappearShe never stuttered when she was with the dynamite
Then something happened between the woman and her hus- band, a violent argument that necessitated Merry’s leaving the commune to restore peace
It was while hiding in eastern Idaho, where she worked in the potato fields, that she decided to flee to CubaAt night in the farm camp barracks she began to study SpanishLiving in the camp with the other laborers, she felt even more passionately committed to her beliefs, though the men were frightening when they were drunk and again there were sexual incidentsShe believed that in Cuba she could live among workers without having to worry about their violenceIn Cuba she could be Merry Levov and not Mary Stoltz
She had concluded by this time that there could never be a revolution in America to uproot the forces of racism and reaction and greedUrban guerrilla warfare was futile against a thermonuclear superstate that would stop at nothing to torebki louis vuitton defend the profit principleSince she could not help to bring about a revolution in America, her only hope was to give herself to the revolution that wasThat would mark the end of her exile and the true beginning of her life
The next year was devoted to rinding her way to Cuba, to Fidel, who had emancipated the proletariat and who had eradicated injustice with socialismBut in Florida she had her first close brush with the FBIThere was a park in Miami full of Dominican refugeesIt was a good place to practice Spanish and soon she found herself teaching the boys there how to speak EnglishAffectionately they called her La Farfulla, the stutterer, which did not prevent them from mischievously stuttering when they repeated the English words she taught themIn Spanish her own speech was flawlessAnother reason to flee to the arms of the world revolution
One day, Merry told her father, she noticed a youngish black bum, new to the park, watching her tutoring her boysShe knew immediately what that meantA thousand times before she’d thought it was the FBI and a thousand times she’d been wrong–in Oregon, in Idaho, in Kentucky, in Maryland, the FBI watching her at the stores where she clerked; watching in the diners and the cafeterias where she washed sac chloe dishes; watching on the shabby streets where she lived; watching in the libraries where she hid out to read the newspapers and to study the revolutionary thinkers, to master Marx, Marcuse, Malcolm X, and Frantz Fanon, a French theorist whose sentences, litanized at bedtime like a supplication, had sustained her in much the same way as the ritual sacrament of the vanilla milk shake and the BLTIt must be constantly borne in mind that the committed Algerian woman learns both her role as “a woman alone in the street” and her revolutionary mission instinctivelyThe Algerian woman is not a secret agentIt is without apprenticeship, without briefing, without fuss, that she goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbagShe does not have the sensation of playing a roleThere is no character to imitateOn the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a continuity between the woman and the revolutionaryThe Algerian woman rises directly to the level of \ tragedy
Thinking: And the New Jersey girl descends to the level of idiocy
“The New Jersey girl we sent to Montessori school because she was (, so bright, the New Jersey girl who at Morristown High got only A’s and B’s–the New Jersey girl rises directly to the level of disgraceful ;, replica santos cartier playac

Thinking: And the New Jersey girl descends to the level of idiocy
“The New Jersey girl we sent to Montessori school because she was (, so bright, the New Jersey girl who at Morristown High got only A’s and B’s–the New Jersey girl rises directly to the level of disgraceful ;, playactingThe New Jersey girl rises to the level of psychosist: Everywhere, in every city where she went to hide, she thought ‘$ she saw the FBI–but it was in Miami that she was finally discovered while stuttering away on a park bench trying to teach her boys to speak EnglishYet how could she not teach them? How could she turn away from those who had been born to nothing, condemned to nothing, who appeared even to themselves to be human trash? On the second day when she came to the park and found the same young black bum pretending to be asleep on a bench beneath a blanket of newspapers, she turned back to the street and began to run and she did not stop until she saw a blind woman begging in the street, a large black woman with a dogThe woman was jiggling a cup and saying softly, “Blind, blind, blind On the pavement at her feet lay a ragged wool coat inside which Merry realized she could hideBut she prada borse couldn’t just take it from her; instead she asked the woman if she could help her beg, and the woman said sure, and Merry asked if she could wear the woman’s dark glasses and her coat, and the woman said, “Anything, honey,” and so Merry stood in the sun in Miami in that heavy old coat, wearing the dark glasses, shaking the cup for her while the woman chanted “Blind, blind, blind That night she hid out alone beneath a bridge, but the next day she went back to beg with the black woman, once again disguised by the coat and the glasses, and eventually she moved in with her and her dog and took care of her
That was when she began to study religionsBunice, the black woman, sang to her in the mornings when they awoke in the bed where they slept, she and Merry and the dogBut when Bunice got cancer and died, that was the worst: the clinics, the ward, the funeral at which she was the only mourner, losing the person she’d loved most in the worldthat was the hardest it ever was
During the months while Bunice was dying she found in the library the books that led her to leave behind forever the Judeo-Christian tradition and find her way to the supreme ethical imperative of ahimsa, the systematic purse logo reverence for life and the commitment to harm no living being
Her father was no longer wondering at what point he had lost control over her life, no longer thinking that everything he had ever done had been futile and that she was in the power of something dementedHe was thinking instead that Mary Stoltz was not his daughter, for the simple reason that his daughter could not have absorbed so much painShe was a kid from Old Rimrock, a privileged kid from paradiseShe could not have worked potato fields and slept under bridges and for five years gone about in terror of arrestShe could never have slept with the blind woman and her dogIndianapolis, Chicago, Portland, Idaho, Kentucky, Maryland, Florida–never could Merry have lived alone in all those places, an isolated vagabond washing dishes and hiding out from the police and befriending the destitute on park benchesAnd never would she have wound up in NewarkLiving for six months ten minutes away, walking to the Ironbound through that underpass, wearing that veil and walking all alone, every morning and every night, past all those derelicts and through all that filth–no! The story was a lie, its purpose to destroy their villain, who was chanel quilted replica himThe story was a caricature, a sensational caricature, and she was an actress, this girl was a professional, hired and charged with tormenting him because he was everything they were notThey wanted to kill him off with the story of a pariah exiled in the very country where her family had triumphantly rooted itself in every possible way, and so he refused to be convinced by anything she had saidHe thought, The rape? The bombs? A sitting duck for every madman? That was more than hardshipMerry couldn’t survive any of itShe could not have survived killing four peopleShe could not have murdered in cold blood and survived
And then he realized that she hadn’t survivedWhatever the truth might be, whatever had truly befallen her, her determination to leave behind her, in ruin, her parents’ contemptible life had driven her to the disaster of destroying herself
Of course this all could have happened to herThings happen like this every day all over the face of the earthHe had no idea how people behaved
“You’re not my daughter
“If you wish to believe that I am not, that may be just as wellThat may be for the best
“Why don’t you ask me about your mother, Meredith? Should I ask you? Where was white chanel watch ceramic your mother born? What is her maiden name? What is her father’s name?”
“I don’t want to talk about my mother
“Because you know nothing about herOr about the person you pretend to beTell me about the house at the shoreTell me the name of your first-grade teacherWho was your second-grade teacher? Tell me why you are pretending to be my daughter!”
“If I answer the questions, you will suffer even moreI don’t know how much suffering you want
“Oh, don’t worry about my suffering, young lady–just answer the questionsWhy are you pretending to be my daughter? Who are you? Who is ‘Rita Cohen’? What are you two up to? Where is my daughter? I will turn this matter over to the police unless you tell me now what is going on here and where my daughter is
“Nothing I’m doing is actionable, Daddy
The awful legalismNot only the awful Jainism, but this shit too”No,” he said, “now it isn’t–now it’s just horrible! What about what you did do!”
“I killed four people,” she replied, as innocently as she might once have told him, “I baked tollhouse cookies this afternoonThe Jainism, the legalism, the egregious innocence, all of it desperation, all of it to distance herself from the four who are 2.55 chanel jumbo

Why Rita hadn’t explained to the Swede whose emissary she was, said nothing about Merry until the tour had been concluded, was undoubtedly so she could size up the Swede first; or maybe she said nothing for so long the better to enjoy toying with himMaybe she just enjoyed the powerMaybe she was just another politician and the enjoyment of power lay behind much of what she did
Because the Swede’s desk was separated from the making department by glass partitions, he and the women at the machines could command a clear view of one anotherHe had instituted this arrangement so as to wrest relief from the mechanical racket while maintaining access between himself and the floorHis father had refused to be confined to any office, glass-enclosed or otherwise: just planted his desk in the middle of the making room’s two hundred sewing machines–royalty right at the heart of the overcrowded hive, the swarm around him whining its buzz-saw bee buzz while he talked to his customers and his contractors on the phone and simultaneously plowed through his paperworkOnly from out on the floor, he claimed, could he distinguish within the contrapuntal din the sound of a Singer on the fritz and with omega speedmaster day-date his screwdriver be over the machine before the girl had even alerted her forelady to the troubleVicky, Newark Maid’s elderly black forelady, so testified (with her brand of wry admiration) at his retirement banquetWhile everything was running without a hitch, Lou was impatient, fidgety–in a word, said Vicky, the insufferable boss–but when a cutter came around to complain about the fore-118 man, when the foreman came around to complain about a cutter, when skins arrived months late or in damaged condition or were of poor quality, when he discovered a lining contractor cheating him on the yield or a shipping clerk robbing him blind, when he determined that the glove slitter with the red Corvette and the sunglasses was, on the side, a bookie running a numbers game among the employees, then he was in his element and in his inimitable way set out to make things right–so that when they were right, said the next-to-last speaker, the proud son, introducing his father in the longest, most laudatory of the evening’s jocular encomiums, “he could begin driving himself–and the rest of us–nuts with worrying againBut then, always expecting the worst, he was never disappointed for chanel big longNever caught off guard eitherAll of which goes to show that, like everything else at Newark Maid, worrying worksLadies and gentlemen, the man who has been my lifelong teacher–and not just in the art of worrying–the man who has made of my life a lifelong education, a difficult education sometimes but always a profitable one, who explained to me when I was a boy of five the secret of making a product perfect–’You work at it,’ he told me–ladies and gentlemen, a man who has worked at it and succeeded at it since the day he went off to begin tanning hides at the age of fourteen, the glover’s glover, who knows more about the glove business than anybody else alive, MrNewark Maid, my father, Lou LevovNewark Maid, “don’t let anybody kid you tonightI enjoy working, I enjoy the glove business, I enjoy the challenge, I don’t like the idea of retiring, I think it’s the first step to the graveBut none of that bothers me for one big reason–because I am the luckiest man in the worldAnd lucky because of one wordThe biggest little word there is: familyIf I was being pushed out by a competitor, I wouldn’t be standing here smiling–you know me, I would be standing here shoutingBut who I am louis vuitton wien being pushed out by is my own beloved sonI have been blessed with the most wonderful family a man could want: a wonderful wife, two wonderful boys, wonderful grandchildren
The Swede had Vicky bring a sheepskin into the office and he gave it to the Wharton girl to feel
“This has been pickled but it hasn’t been tanned,” he told her”It’s a hair sheepskinDoesn’t have wool like a domestic sheep but hair
“What happens to the hair?” she asked him”Does it get used?”
“Good questionThe hair is used to make carpetUp in Amsterdam, New YorkBut the primary value is the skinsThe hair is a by-product, and how you get the hair off the skin and all the rest of it is another story entirelyBefore synthetics came along, the hair mostly went into cheap carpetsThere’s a company that brokered all the hair from the tanneries to the car-petmakers, but you don’t want to go into that,” he said, observing how before they’d really even begun she’d filled with notes the top sheet of a fresh yellow legal pad”Though if you do,” he added, touched by–and attracted by–her thoroughness, “because I suppose it does all sort of tie together, I could send you to talk to those peopleI think the family is still chanel white watch aroundIt’s a niche that not many people know aboutIt’s all interestingYou’ve settled on an interesting subject, young lady
“I think I have,” she said, warmly smiling over at him
“Anyway, this skin”–he’d taken it back from her and was stroking it with the side of a thumb as you might stroke the cat to get the purr going–”is called a cabretta in the industry’s terminologyThey only live twenty or thirty degrees north and south of the equatorThey’re sort of on a semiwild grazing basis–families in an African village will each own four or five sheep, and they’ll all be flocked together and put out in the bushWhat you were holding in your hand isn’t raw anymoreWe buy them in what’s called the pickled stageThe hair’s been removed and the preprocessing has been done to preserve them to get hereWe used to bring them in raw–huge bales tied with rope and so on, skins just dried in the airI actually have a ship’s manifest–it’s somewhere here, I can find it for you if you want to see it–a copy of a ship’s manifest from 1790, in which skins were landed in Boston similar to what we were bringing in up to last yearAnd from the same ports in Africa
It could have been his father talking chanel quilted replica to

Everybody who flashed the signs of goodness he took to be goodEverybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyalEverybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligentAnd so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress–probably had never even begun to see into himselfWhat was he, stripped of all the signs he flashed? People were standing up everywhere, shouting “This is me! This is me!” Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea of who or what they were than he hadThey believed their flashing signs tooThey ought to be standing up and shouting, “This isn’t me! This isn’t me!” They would if they had any decency”This isn’t me!” Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world
Sheila Salzman may or may not have been listening to Dawn’s every word, but Shelly Salzman surely wasThe kindly doctor wasn’t merely acting like the kindly doctor but appeared to have fallen somewhat under Dawn’s spell–the spell of that alluring surface whose underside, as she presented it to people, was as charmingly straightforward as it could beYes, torebki louis vuitton after all she’d been through, she looked and she behaved as though nothing had happenedFor him there was this two-sidedness to everything: side by side, the way it had been and the way it was nowBut Dawn made it sound as though the way it had been was still the way it wasAfter the tragic detour their lives had taken, she’d managed in the last year to arrive back at being herself, apparently just by not thinking about certain thingsAnd arrived back not merely at Dawn with her face-lift and her petite gallantry and her breakdowns and her cattle and her decisions to change her life but back at the Dawn of Hillside Road, Elizabeth, New JerseyA gate, some sort of psychological gate, had been installed in her brain, a mighty gate past which nothing harmful could travelShe locked the gate, and that was thatMiraculous, or so he’d thought, until he’d learned that the gate had a nameThe William Orcutt III Gate
Yes, if you’d missed her back in the forties, here once again was Mary Dawn Dwyer of Elizabeth’s Elmora section, an up-and-coming Irish looker from a working-class family that was starting to do okay, respectable parishioners at StGenevieve’s, the classiest Catholic church in town–miles uptown from the church by the docks where omega automatic seamaster her father and his brothers had been altar boysOnce again she was in possession of that power she’d had even as a twenty-year-old to stir up interest in whatever she said, somehow to touch you inwardly, which was not often true of the contestants who won at Atlantic CityBut she could do that, lay bare something juvenile even in adults, by nothing more than venting ordinary lively enthusiasms through that flagrantly perfect, strikingly executed heart-shaped faceMaybe, until she spoke and revealed her attitudes as not so different from any decent person’s, people were frightened of her for looking like thatDiscovering that she was not at all a goddess, had no interest in pretending to be one–discovering in her almost an excess of no pretense–made even more riveting the brilliant darkness of her hair, the angular mask not much bigger than a cat’s, and the eyes, the big pale eyes almost alarmingly keen and vulnerableFrom the message in those eyes one would never have believed that this girl was going to grow up to be a shrewd businesswoman resolutely determined about turning a profit as a cattle breederWhat excited the Swede’s tenderness always was that she who wasn’t at all frail nonetheless looked so delicate and frailThis always chanel classic flap impressed him: how strong she was (once was) and how vulnerable her kind of beauty caused her to appear, even to him, her husband, long after one might imagine that married life had dulled the infatuation
And how plain Sheila looked sitting alongside her, purportedly listening to her, plain and proper, sensible, dignified, and drearyEverything in her severely withheldThere was nothing hearty in SheilaThere was lots in DawnThere once was in himThat once described everything there was in himIt was not easy to understand how he could ever have found in this prim, severe, hidden whatever-she-was a woman more magnetic than DawnHow pathetic he must have been, how depleted, a broken, helpless creature escaping from everything that had collapsed, running in the headlong way that someone in trouble will take flight in order to make a bad thing worseAlmost all there was to attract him was that Sheila was someone elseHer clarity, her candor, her equilibrium, her perfect self-control were at first almost beside the pointShrinking from such a blinding catastrophe–disconnected as he’d never been before from his ready-made life; notorious and disgraced as he’d never been before–he turned in a daze to the one woman other than his wife whom he saddle christian dior knew even remotely in a personal wayThat was how he got there, seeking asylum, hounded–the forlorn reason for a straight arrow so assertively uxorious, so intensely and spotlessly monogamous, hurling himself at such an extraordinary moment into a situation he would have thought he hated, the shameful fiasco of being untrueBut amorousness had little to do with his clutchingHe could not offer the passionate love that Dawn drew from himLust was far too natural a task for someone suddenly so misshapen–the father of someone gruesomely misbegottenHe was there for the illusionHe lay atop Sheila like a person taking cover, digging in, a big male body in hiding, a man disappearing: because she was somebody else, maybe he could be somebody else too
But that she was someone else was what made it all wrongAlongside Dawn, Sheila was a well-groomed impersonal thinking-machine, a human needle threaded with a brain, nobody he could want to touch, let alone sleep withDawn was the woman who had inspired the feat for which even his record-breaking athletic career had barely fortified him: vaulting his fatherThe feat of standing up to his fatherAnd how she had inspired it was by looking as spectacular as she looked and yet talking like everyone dior china el

It was true in the tanneries, where the tanning process is like cooking and the recipes are handed down from the father to the son, and it was true in the glove shops and it was true on the cutting-room floorThe old Italian cutters would train their sons and no one else, and those sons accepted the tutorial from their fathers as he had accepted the tutorial from hisBeginning when he was a kid of five and extending into his maturity, the father as the authority was unopposed: accepting his authority was one and the same with extracting from him the wisdom that had made Newark Maid manufacturer of the country’s best ladies’ gloveThe Swede quickly came to love in the same wholehearted way the very things his father did and, at the factory, to think more or less as he didAnd to sound as he did–if not on every last subject, then whenever a conversation came around to leather or Newark or gloves
Not since Merry had disappeared had he felt anything like this loquaciousRight up to that morning, all he’d been wanting was to weep or to hide; but because there was Dawn to nurse and a business to tend to and his parents to prop up, because everybody else was paralyzed by omega speedmaster replica disbelief and shattered to the core, neither inclination had as yet eroded the protective front he provided the family and presented to the worldBut now words were sweeping him on, buoying him up, his father’s words released by the sight of this tiny girl studiously taking them downShe was nearly as small, he thought, as the kids from Merry’s third-grade class, who’d been bused the thirty-eight miles from their rural schoolhouse one day back in the late fifties so that Merry’s daddy could show them how he made gloves, show them especially Merry’s magical spot, the laying-off table, where, at the end of the making process, the men shaped and pressed each and every glove by pulling it carefully down over steam-heated brass hands veneered in chromeThe hands were dangerously hot and they were shiny and they stuck straight up from the table in a row, thin-looking as hands that had been flattened in a mangle and then amputated, beautifully amputated hands afloat in space like the souls of the deadAs a little girl, Merry was captivated by their enigma, called them “the pancake hands Merry as a little girl saying to her classmates, “You want to make five dollars a dozen,” torebki louis vuitton which was what glovemakers were always saying and what she’d been hearing since she was born–five dollars a dozen, that was what you shot for, regardlessMerry whispering to the teacher, “People cheating on piece rates is always a problemMy daddy had to fire one manHe was stealing time,” and the Swede telling her, “Honey, let Daddy conduct the tour, okay?” Merry as a little girl reveling in the dazzling idea of stealing timeMerry flitting from floor to floor, so proud and proprietary, flaunting her familiarity with all the employees, unaware as yet of the desecration of dignity inherent to the ruthless exploitation of the worker by the profit-hungry boss who unjustly owns the means of production
No wonder he felt so untamed, craving to spill over with talkMomentarily it was then again–nothing blown up, nothing ruinedAs a family they still flew the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from slave-driven great-grandfather to self-driven grandfather to self-confident, accomplished, independent father to the highest high flier of them all, the fourth-generation child for whom America was to be heaven itselfNo wonder he couldn’t shut chanel white watch upIt was impossible to shut upThe Swede was giving in to the ordinary human wish to live once again in the past–to spend a self-deluding, harmless few moments back in the wholesome striving of the past, when the family endured by a truth in no way grounded in abetting destruction but rather in eluding and outlasting destruction, overcom-122 ing its mysterious inroads by creating the Utopia of a rational existence
He heard her asking, “How many come in a shipment?”
“How many skins? A couple of thousand dozen skins
“A bale is how many?”
He liked finding that she was interested in every last detailYes, talking to this attentive student up from Wharton, he was suddenly able to like something as he had not been able to like anything, to bear anything, even to understand anything he’d come up against for four lifeless monthsHe’d felt himself instead to be perishing of everything”Oh, a hundred and twenty skins,” he replied
She continued taking notes as she asked, “They come right to your shipping department?”
“They come to the tanneryThe tannery is a contractorWe buy the material and then we give it to them, and we give them the process to use and then they balenciaga handbags motorcycle convert it into leather for usMy grandfather and my father worked in the tannery right here in NewarkSo did I, for six months, when I started in the businessEver been inside a tannery?”
“Not yet
“Well, you’ve got to go to a tannery if you’re going to write about leatherI’ll set that up for you if you’d like thatThey’re primitive placesThe technology has improved things, but what you’ll see isn’t that different from what you would have seen hundreds of years agoSaid to be the oldest industry of which relics have been found anywhereSix-thousand-year-old relics of tanning found somewhere–Turkey, I believeFirst clothing was just skins that were tanned by smoking themI told you it was an interesting subject once you get into itMy father is the leather scholarHe’s who you should be talking to, but he’s living in Florida nowStart my father off about gloves and he’ll talk for two days runningThat’s typical, by the wayGlovemen love the trade and everything about itTell me, have you ever seen anything manufactured, Miss Cohen?”
“I can’t say I have
“Never seen anything made?”
“Saw my mother make a cake when I was a kidShe had made him laughA feisty innocent, eager to fendi big l

Take a good look at what she did to your norms
“I don’t know what you want from meYou’ve always been too smart for meIs this your response? Is this it?”
“You win the trophyYou always make the right moveYou’re loved by everybodyYou marry Miss New Jersey, for God’s sakeThere’s thinking for youWhy did you marry her? For the appearanceWhy do you do everything? For the appearance!”
“I loved her! I opposed my own father I loved her so much!”
Jerry is laughing”Is that what you believe? You really think you stood up to him? You married her because you couldn’t get out of itDad raked her over the coals in his office and you sat there and didn’t say shitWell, isn’t that true?”
“My daughter is in that room, JerryWhat is this all about?”
But Jerry does not hear himHe hears only himselfWhy is this Jerry’s grand occasion to tell his brother the truth? Why does someone, in the midst of your worst suffering, decide the time has come to drive home, disguised in the form of character analysis, all the contempt they have been harboring for you for vintage gucci bags all these years? What in your suffering makes their superiority so fulsome, so capacious, makes the expression of it so enjoyable? Why this occasion for launching his protest at living in the shadow of me? Why, if he had to tell me all this, couldn’t he have told it to me when I was feeling my oats? Why does he even believe he’s in my shadow? Miami’s biggest cardiac surgeon! The heart victim’s savior, DrLevov!
“Dad? He fucking let you slide through–don’t you know that? If Dad had said, ‘Look, you’ll never get my approval for this, never, I am not having grandchildren half this and half that,’ then you would have had to make a choiceBut you never had to make a choiceBecause he let you slide throughEverybody has always let you slide throughAnd that is why, to this day, nobody knows who you areYou are unrevealed–that is the story, Seymour, unrevealedThat is why your own daughter decided to blow you awayYou are never straight about anything and she hated you for itYou keep yourself a secretYou don’t choose ever
“Why are you saying this? uhr rolex What do you want me to choose? What are we talking about?”
“You think you know what a man is? You have no idea what a man isYou think you know what a daughter is? You have no idea what a daughter isYou think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country isYou have a false image of everythingAll you know is what a fucking glove isThis country is frighteningOf course she was rapedWhat kind of company do you think she was keeping? Of course out there she was going to get rapedThis isn’t Old Rimrock, old buddy–she’s out there, old buddy, in the USAShe enters that world, that loopy world out there, with what’s going on out there–what do you expect? A kid from Rimrock, New Jersey, of course she doesn’t know how to behave out there, of course the shit hits the fanWhat could she know? She’s like a wild child out there in the worldShe can’t get enough of it–she’s still acting upA room off McCarter HighwayAnd why not? Who wouldn’t? You prepare her for life milking the cows? For what kind of life? Unnatural, all artificial, all hermes tas of itThose assumptions you live withYou’re still in your old man’s dreamworld, Seymour, still up there with Lou Levov in glove heavenA household tyrannized by gloves, bludgeoned by gloves, the only thing in life–ladies’ gloves! Does he still tell the great one about the woman who sells the gloves washing her hands in a sink between each color? Oh where oh where is that outmoded America, that decorous America where a woman had twenty-five pairs of gloves? Your kid blows your norms to kingdom come, Seymour, and you still think you know what life is!”
Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive
“You wanted Miss America? Well, you’ve got her, with a vengeance–she’s your daughter! You wanted to be a real American jock, a real American marine, a real American hotshot with a beautiful Gentile babe on your arm? You longed to belong like everybody else to the United States of America? Well, you do now, big boy, thanks to your daughterThe reality of this place is right up in your kisser nowWith the help of your daughter you’re as chanel j12 white watch deep in the shit as a man can get, the real American crazy shitAmerica amok! America amuck! Goddamn it, Seymour, goddamn you, if you were a father who loved his daughter,” thunders Jerry into the phone–and the hell with the convalescent patients waiting in the corridor for him to check out their new valves and new arteries, to tell how grateful they are to him for their new lease on life, Jerry shouts away, shouts all he wants if it’s shouting he wants to do, and the hell with the rules of the hospitalHe is one of the surgeons who shouts: if you disagree with him he shouts, if you cross him he shouts, if you just stand there and do nothing he shoutsHe does not do what hospitals tell him to do or fathers expect him to do or wives want him to do, he does what he wants to do, does as he pleases, tells people just who and what he is every minute of the day so that nothing about him is a secret, not his opinions, his frustrations, his urges, neither his appetite nor his hatredIn the sphere of the will, he is unequivocating, uncompromising; he is chanel big ki

But he couldn’t help it, not when he remembered how at seven Merry would eat herself sick with the raw batter while baking two dozen tollhouse cookies, and a week later they’d still be finding batter all over the place, even up on top of the refrigeratorSo how could he hate the refrigerator? How could he let his emotions be reshaped, imagine himself being rescued, as Dawn did, by their leaving it behind for an all-but-silent new IceTemp, the Rolls-Royce of refrigerators? He for one could not say he hated the kitchen in which Merry used to bake her cookies and melt her cheese sandwiches and make her baked ziti, even if the cupboards weren’t stainless steel or the counters Italian marbleHe could not say he hated the cellar where she used to go to play hide-and-seek with her screaming friends, even if sometimes it spooked even him a little to be down there in the wintertime with those scuttling miceHe could not say he hated the massive fireplace adorned with the antique iron kettle that was all at once insufferably corny in Dawn’s estimation, not when he remembered how, early every January, he would chop up the Christmas tree and set it afire there, the whole thing in one go, so that the explosive blaze of the bone-dry branches, the great whoosh and the loud crackling and the dancing shadows, cavorting devils climbing to the ceiling from the four walls, would transport Merry into a delirium of terrified delightHe could not say he hated the ball-and-claw-foot bathtub where he used to give her baths, just because decades of indelible mineral stains from the well water streakedthe enamel and encircled the drainHe could not even hate the f ^ toilet whose handle required all that jiggling to get the thing to stop gushing, not when he remembered her kneeling beside it and throwing up while he knelt next to her, holding her sick little forehead
Nor could he say he hated his daughter for what she had done–if he could! If only, instead of living miu miu nappa chaotically in the world where she wasn’t and in the world where she once was and in the world where she might now be, he could come to hate her enough not to care anything about her world, then or nowIf only he could be back thinking like everybody else, once again the totally natural man instead of this riven charlatan of sincerity, an artless outer Swede and a tormented inner Swede, a visible stable Swede and a concealed beleaguered Swede, an easygoing, smiling sham Swede enshrouding the Swede buried aliveIf only he could even faintly reconstitute the undivided oneness of existence that had made for his straightforward physical confidence and freedom before he became the father of an alleged murdererIf only he could be as unknowing as some people perceived him to be–if only he could be as perfectly simple as the legend of Swede Levov concocted by the hero-worshiping kids of his dayIf only he could say, “I hate this house!” and be Weequahic’s Swede Levov againIf he could say, “I hate that child! I never want to see her again!” and then go ahead, disown her, forevermore despise and reject her and the vision for which she was willing, if not to kill, then to cruelly abandon her own family, a vision having nothing whatsoever to do with “ideals” but with dishonesty, criminality, megalomania, and insanityBlind antagonism and an infantile desire to menace–those were her idealsIn search always of something to hateYes, it went way, way beyond her stutteringThat violent hatred of America was a disease unto itselfLoved being an AmericanBut back then he hadn’t dared begin to explain to her why he did, for fear of unleashing the demon, insultThey lived in dread of Merry’s stuttering tongueAnd by then he had no influence anywayDawn had no influenceHis parents had no influenceIn what way was she “his” any longer if she hadn’t even been his then, certainly not his if to drive her into her frightening blitzkrieg mentality it required no more than for her own tiffany co jewelry father to begin to explain why his affections happened to be for the country where he’d been born and raisedStuttering, sputtering little bitch! Who the fuck did she think she was?
Imagine the vileness with which she would have assaulted him for revealing to her that just reciting the names of the forty-eight states used to thrill him back when he was a little kidThe truth of it was that even the road maps used to give him a kick when they gave them away free at the gas stationSo did the offhand way he had got his nicknameThe first day of high school, down in the gym for their first class, and him just jerking around with the basketball while the other kids were still all over the place getting into their sneakersFrom fifteen feet out he dropped in two hook shots–swish! swish!–just to get startedAnd then that easygoing way that Henry “Doc” Ward, the popular young phys ed teacher and wrestling coach fresh from Montclair State, laughingly called from his office doorway–called out to this lanky blond fourteen-year-old with the brilliant blue gaze and the easy, effortless style whom he’d never seen in his gym before–”Where’d you learn that, Swede?” Because the name differentiated Seymour Levov from Seymour Munzer and Seymour Wishnow, who were also on the class roll, it stuck all through gym his freshman year; then other teachers and coaches took it up, then kids in the school, and afterward, as long as Weequahic remained the old Jewish Weequahic and people there still cared about the past, Doc Ward was known as the guy who’d christened Swede LevovSimple as that, an old American nickname, proclaimed by a gym teacher, bequeathed in a gym, a name that made him mythic in a way that Seymour would never have done, mythic not only during his school years but to his schoolmates, in memory, for the rest of their daysHe carried it with him like an invisible passport, all the while wandering deeper and deeper into an American’s life, forthrightly chanel logo necklace evolving into a large, smooth, optimistic American such as his conspicuously raw forebears–including the obstinate father whose American claim was not inconsiderable–couldn’t have dreamed of as one of their own
The way his father talked to people, that got him too, the American way his father said to the guy at the pump, “Fill ‘er up, MacCheck the front end, will ya, Chief?” The excitement of their trips in the DeSotoThe tiny, musty tourist cabins they stopped at overnight while meandering up through the scenic back roads of New York State to see Niagara FallsThe trip to Washington when Jerry was a brat all the wayHis first liberty home from the marines, the pilgrimage to Hyde Park with the folks and Jerry to stand together as a family looking at FDR’s graveFresh from boot camp and there at Roosevelt’s grave, he felt that something meaningful was happening; hardened and richly tanned from training through the hottest months on a parade ground where the temperature rose some days to a hundred twenty degrees, he stood silent, proudly wearing his new summer uniform, the shirt starched, the khaki pants sleekly pocketless over the rear and perfectly pressed, the tie pulled taut, cap centered on his close-shaven head, black leather dress shoes spit-shined, agleam, and the belt–the belt that made him feel most like a marine, that tightly woven khaki fabric belt with the metal buckle–girding a waist that had seen him through some ten thousand sit-ups as a raw Parris Island recruitWho was she to sneer at all this, to reject all this, to hate all this and set out to destroy it? The war, winning the war–did she hate that too? The neighbors, out in the street, crying and hugging on V-J Day, blowing car horns and marching up and down front lawns loudly banging kitchen potsHe was still at Parris Island then, but his mother had described it to him in a three-page letterThe celebration party at the playground back of the school that night, everyone they hermes borse knew, family friends, school friends, the neighborhood butcher, the grocer, the pharmacist, the tailor, even the bookie from the candy store, all in ecstasy, long lines of staid middle-aged people madly mimicking Carmen Miranda and dancing the conga, one-two-three kick, one-two-three kick, until after two aVictory, victory, victory had come! No more death and war!
His last months of high school, he’d read the paper every night, following the marines across the PacificHe saw the photographs in Life–photographs that haunted his sleep–of the crumpled bodies of dead marines killed on Peleliu, an island in a chain called the PalausAt a place called Bloody Nose Ridge, Japs ferreted in old phosphate mines, who were themselves to be burned to a crisp by the flamethrowers, had cut down hundreds and hundreds of young marines, eighteen-year-olds, nineteen-year-olds, boys barely older than he wasHe had a map up in his room with pins sticking out of it, pins he had inserted to mark where the marines, closing in on Japan, had assaulted from the sea a tiny atoll or an island chain where the Japs, dug into coral fortresses, poured forth ferocious mortar and rifle fireOkinawa was invaded on April 1, 1945, Easter Sunday of his senior year and just two days after he’d hit a double and a home run in a losing game against West SideThe Sixth Marine Division overran Yontan, one of the two island air bases, within three hours of wading ashoreTook the Motobu Peninsula in thirteen daysJust off the Okinawa beach, two kamikaze pilots attacked the flagship carrier Bunker Hill on May 14–the day after the Swede went four for four against Irvington High, a single, a triple, and two doubles–plunging their planes, packed with bombs, into the flight deck jammed with American planes all gassed up to take off and laden with ammunitionThe blaze climbed a thousand feet into the sky, and in the explosive firestorm that raged for eight hours, four hundred sailors and aviators omega seamaster de ville die

Welcome to my first blog

Surgery was all I ever wanted. Ever since high school. Even then I was wrapping my hands before every game and soaking them afterward. If you want to be a surgeon, you have to take care of your hands. Some of the kids used to rag me about it, call me chickenshit. I never fought them. Playing football was risk enough. But there were ways. The one that got on my case the most was Howie Plotsky, a big dumb bohunk with zits all over his face. I had a paper route, and I was selling the numbers along with the papers. I had a little coming in lots of ways. You get to know people, you listen, you make connections. You have to, when you’re hustling the street. Any asshole knows how to die. The thing to learn is how to survive, you know what I mean? So I paid the biggest kid in school, Ricky Brazzi, ten bucks to make Howie Plotsky’s mouth disappear. Make it disappear, I said. I will pay you a dollar for every tooth you bring me. Rico brought me three teeth wrapped up in a paper towel. He dislocated two of his knuckles doing the job, so you see the kind of trouble I could have got into.