All the Time in the World by E. L. Doctorow Read Free Book Online Page B

master bedroom.
    Oh.
    I’m sorry, I sometimes speak tactlessly. After Mother died, I married and brought my wife here to live. I’ve never stayed anywhere else for any length of time. And certainly never ownedproperty again. So this is the house—please don’t misunderstand me—this is the house I’ve continued to live in. I mean mentally. I ranged all through these rooms from childhood on. Until they reflected who I was, as a mirror would. I don’t mean merely that its furnishings displayed our family’s personality, our tastes. I don’t mean that. It was as if the walls, the stairs, the rooms, the dimensions, the layout were as much me as I was. Is this coherent? Wherever I looked, I saw me. I saw me in some way measured out. Do you experience that?
    I’m not sure. Your wife—
    Oh, that didn’t last long. She resented the suburbs. She felt cut off from everything. I’d go off to work and she’d be left here. We hadn’t many friends in the neighborhood.
    Yes, people here stick to themselves. The boys have school friends, but we hardly know anyone.
    This tea helps. Because this is a dizzying experience for me. It’s as if I were squared off, dimensionalized in these rooms, as if I were the space contained by these walls, the passageways, the fixed routes of going to and fro, from one room to another, and everything lit predictably by the times of day and the different seasons. It is all and indistinguishably … me.
    I think if you live in one place long enough—
    When people speak of a haunted house, they mean ghosts flitting about in it, but that’s not it at all. When a house is haunted—what I’m trying to explain—it is the feeling you get that it looks like you, that your soul has become architecture, and the house in all its materials has taken you over with a power akin to haunting. As if you, in fact, are the ghost. And as I look at you, a kind, lovely young woman, part of me says not that I don’t belong here, which is the truth, but that you don’t belong here. I’m sorry, that’s quite a terrible thing to say. It merely means—
    It means life is heartbreaking.

    HE CAME BACK? He was here again?
    Yes. It seemed so sad, his just sitting out there, so I invited him in.
    You what!
    I mean, it wasn’t what you thought, was it? So why not?
    Right. Why wouldn’t you invite him in, since I told him if he came around again I’d call the cops?
    You should have invited him in yourself when he told you he’d lived in this house.
    Why is that a credential? Everyone has lived somewhere or other. Would you want to relive your glorious past? I shouldn’t think so. And this is not the first time.
    Don’t start in, please.
    Husband says white, wife says black. The way it works. So the world will know what she thinks of her husband.
    Why is it always about you! We’re not the same person. I have my own mind.
    Do you, now!
    Hey, you guys, we got an argument brewing?
    Close your door, son. This doesn’t concern you.
    Every time another man comes into this house you go berserk. A plumber, someone to measure for the window blinds, the man who reads the gas meter.
    Ah, but is your man a man? Awfully fruity-looking to me. Wears his white hair in a ponytail. And those tiny little hands. What does the well-known fag-hag have to say?
    He’s a PhD and a poet.
    Jesus, I should have known.
    He gave up his teaching job to travel the country. His book is on the dining-room table. He signed it for us.
    A wandering minstrel in his Ford Falcon.
    Why are you so horrible!
    ARGUING IS INSTEAD OF SEX .
    It has been a while.
    This is better.
    Yes.
    I don’t know why I get so upset.
    You’re just a normally defective man.
    So we’re all like this? Thank you.
    Yes. It’s an imperfect gender.
    I’m sorry I said what I said.
    I’m thinking now, with all three of them in school all day, I should get a job.
    Doing what?
    Or maybe go for a graduate degree of some kind. Make myself useful.
    What brings this on?
    Times