The Bend of the World: A Novel by Jacob Bacharach Read Free Book Online

only by his initials. How long have you two been seeing each other?
    About six months, I said.
    Seven, said Lauren Sara.
    Well, be prepared, Nana said. The true tests of relationships occur at eight months, three years, and seven years. The last one is famous but less consequential, because by then you’re too exhausted to care. How long did you date Katherine, Junior?
    Three years, I said.
    Well, there, you see. Empirical confirmation. Oh dear, here comes Mildred. I abhor her. You’d both better run off before she gets here. Don’t worry, you have plenty of time. She drags herself around like a walrus with that walker. Have you seen Arlene? Good Lord, this show. You know, there was a time, before the war of course, when you could meet real, live fascists. Half your grandfather’s graduating class at Yale, for God’s sake. I have to suspect they’d be embarrassed by this whole charade. The Nazis deserve something more substantial than a game of dress-up, if you’d like my opinion. In any case, if you run into Arlene again, tell her that I think her show is a triumph . . . of the will.
    13
    Your grandmother’s a trip, Lauren Sara said.
    We were smoking in the courtyard. The party was winding down. Arlene and a gaggle of curators and museum administrators and other people in important geometric glasses had bundled Steinman off to a private dinner party. Tom and Julian and the art fags had gone off to the same bar where Lauren Sara and I had first met, which was a popular post-dinner stop-off for the curators and their visiting artists owing to its collection of works by local artists and carefully designed tumbledown chic, and this was, not coincidentally, why Tom and his gang had gone there; not having been invited to the dinner, they hoped to head Steinman et al. off at the pass, so to speak, hoping to offer up the few moments of public sycophancy that they believed to be their natural and inalienable right as minor vassals in the little feudal country of Art. Julian, whose preferred topics of conversation ranged from an expensive new squash racket to the weight savings of the expensive new components on his expensive road bike, would not enjoy himself, and Tom, seeing that Julian wasn’t enjoying himself, would get angry and sulk, because as he saw it, before he’d met Julian, or Julian him, his boyfriend’s life had been a dull and effectively meaningless existence, days at the office followed by hard workouts, tasteless expensive dinners at pricey but inferior restaurants, and the heroic intake of beer and scotch, to be compensated for by more and harder workouts, all of it surrounded by and fueled by and bathed in money—Julian was no Internet millionaire or New York finance wunderkind, but he made the sort of money that I associated with my parents and their friends; Tom, of course, was poor; I doubted the museum paid him more than thirty thousand a year, if that, but he considered himself glamorous; before him, Julian had gone to steakhouses and trashy gay house parties where everyone took off their shirts or swam naked in the pool; now he went to openings and galas and met artists and similar subspecies. These things were so self-evidently superior to Tom that he couldn’t see how wasted they were on Julian, and he attributed Julian’s sour moods to ungratefulness. In his version of things, his inversion of things, Tom incredibly played the role of the older, wealthier man, and Julian was the kept woman chafing against the very comforts she’d originally sought. It might have occurred to me that this said something about the way we all misapprehend our relationships, but it did not.
    14
    My grandmother is nuts, I said.
    She seems super-rich.
    Not really, I said. I guess maybe she used to be. Nobody talks about it, and I used to think there was, like, a dark secret or something. But then I figured out that after my grandfather died she gave a bunch away. Ill-advisedly, as my dad says. And then she lost a