Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry Read Free Book Online Page B

just from arguing with you.”
    “Look, I’m an experienced dad,” he said. “I’ve got nine children to your one. You may well find yourself in need of my expertise.”
    “Godwin, not this time,” I said, stiffening my spine. “This is something I want to do alone.”

14
    “Self-parody is the first portent of age,” I said to myself as I cruised through Jacksboro, the first town on my route south. Jacksboro was distinguished among the small towns of the region for having kept intact a block of old limestone buildings; the buildings were in no way appealing, but they
were
consistent in an area where few things were, architecturally speaking. The stone buildings of Jacksboro looked as if they’d all crack to bits and fall down if you whacked them a time or two with a big sledgehammer.
    I drove on to Decatur, reflecting cheerfully that there wasn’t a single man-made structure within one hundred miles of my house that wasn’t ugly. The Kimball Museum in Fort Worth, which happens to be precisely one hundred miles from my front door, is the first appealing building one can hope to encounter in any direction, if one starts from my house.
    “Self-parody is the first portent of age” was not some little personal warning I was issuing to myself; it was an alternative first sentence to my novel.
    “The first portent of age is self-parody,” I said, to see if changing the word order would help things along. It seemed to me from what I could remember of novel writing, an activity I had unfortunately let lapse for nearly twenty years, that the first sentence of a book was of critical, even crucial, importance. If you could think of a good one, all the other sentences might follow after it obediently. They might just come marching briskly out of your brain, like well-drilled soldiers.
    It was apparent to me that my girlfriends’ boyfriends sentence wasn’t working, although I had set my heart on it. Certainly it was an accurate reflection of my life, and though I’m odd, in the end I may not be all that odd. Several of my girlfriends now had boyfriends who looked to me for fatherly counsel. I spent a good many hours each week dispensing advice to the bewildered young men who—often to their intense surprise—had been adopted as the boyfriends of my older, but still perplexing, girlfriends. It was ironic, of course, that fatherly counsel was what I had been called on to provide—after all, I had never even seen my own child, and as yet had given her
no
counsel—but, if ironic, it might also be paradigmatic.
    More odd, if possible, was the fact that I rarely spoke directly to these lucky young men. I relayed my counsel through the often cloudy medium of the girlfriends. I might say to Jeanie Vertus, “Why don’t you tell Carver this? You could just mention that I mentioned it.”
    Or I might say to Nema Remington, “I think A.B. ought to consider such-and-such.” Nema, never one to let the grass grow under a useful thought, would promptly call her husband and demand that he consider such-and-such.
    In that way, life proceeded. The process reminded me a little of a teen-age party game, popular in the fifties, of passing Life Savers from boy to girl on the ends of toothpicks. It was a game that suggested kissing, yet a sharp object stood between you and the kiss. Sharp objects also stood between the boyfriends and me—i.e., the girlfriends. That the girlfriends were sharp was fine with me. Their sharp behavior was what had got me interested in the girlfriends in the first place; life is too short to wasteon dull women, of which there are far too many—most of them employed in the television industry, or so I had once thought.
    One or two of my girlfriends’ boyfriends were actually young in age—Marella Miracola’s, for example—but the ones who seemed to need the most counseling were merely young in mind.
    “He’s a child, you see,” my girlfriends were always saying to me gravely in the wake of some