Childish Loves by Benjamin Markovits Read Free Book Online Page A

this girl here is something of a snob. Not attractive qualities, in either one of us, but they could play to our advantage. I mean, in forging the kind of life we need to forge for us to be comfortable together. I’m old enough to know a few unpleasant things about myself. I like to have my say. To have a wife who is curious and receptive, a natural student, who admires me and lets me talk – this, for me, is no disaster. Of course, if she were nothing besides these things, God help us. But in addition, she is patient and stubborn and maybe even a little passive-aggressive. I’m a blowhard; mostly she gets her way.’
    He seemed ashamed of talking too much and excused himself to take a leak. And coming back, with wet hands, he lifted his jacket from the round shoulders of his chair. ‘I should let you go,’ he said. ‘I should go myself.’ But even on our way out, he couldn’t help himself. ‘I’ll tell you the real trouble with Barbara’ (his first wife). ‘She knew me when I was young and stupid and couldn’t believe I had grown up to be anything else.’
    â€˜My mother likes to say that the secret to happiness is love and work. And children. I’m not sure you’re right, though, about the importance of cold blood.’
    â€˜Prodigious youth!’ he said.
    â€˜I suspect she would think, you’re better off being too much in love. Then you’ve got time afterwards to work out why.’
    â€˜I had much love for Barbara. Like Othello for Desdemona. But listen to your mother.’
    A few months after this conversation, when school was out, I got a letter from Heinz in London. I was living for free in the basement of a house in Hampstead, which belonged to friends of my parents – the use of this flat was one of my inducements for going abroad. He wanted to see how I was getting along, Heinz wrote, though the real point of his letter was the apology he offered at the end of it for his ‘outburst in that tacky bar. Real bar talk, too, full of wifely complaints. I should be ashamed of myself. I am.’ The fact is, he said, he was more upset than he knew by his negotiations with Barbara about their son’s graduation weekend – which went off almost harmlessly, he added. ‘I mean, I knew I was upset, but I wasn’t completely clear on what I was upset about. I thought I was angry with Barbara, but I was even more angry about other things that weren’t her fault, and which, you might say, she suffered from equally. The way life turns out. But let me stop here before I embarrass myself again with further confessions.’ This was the last letter I ever got from him; he didn’t answer the note I sent in return.
    *
    Of course, I had other things on my mind besides these memories. His lecture; the late summer weather, making its way by air and light into the classroom. There was a girl sitting three rows ahead of me in the sunshine of the next window along. She wore a knitted cap, even indoors, even in September; her short brown hair pushed out around the edges of it. Afterwards, I asked Heinz about her, and he said, ‘You mean the second Kostadinovic girl. The first was a delight, a real wit; at Brandeis now. But this one I don’t know what to do with. Won’t say a word.’ When she looked out the window, as she did from time to time, her face had the full dark coloring of a breathless boy’s – she might have been running all day in the sun. Something about the atmosphere of Heinz’s classroom had reminded me of the qualities my own used to bring out in me. The sexual self-consciousness; the boastfulness. The pretense of detachment. Peter once said to me, passing Heinz in the hall on the way to one of our walks, ‘The uncle with a special gift at Christmas.’ A charge just vague enough I could excuse myself for failing to stand up for a friend.
    At lunch, the Kostadinovic girl sat