Months might go by without one of Jessie's phone...
Months might go by without one of Jessie's phone calls, and then she'd phone three times after they were already in bed for the night"Seymour, I'm calling to tell you how much I like you
"Well, Jessie, thank you
"Do you?"
"Of course I do
"Yes, I like you, SeymourDid you know I liked you?"
"Yes, I did
"I always admired youWe've always admired you and liked you
"Well, we like you, Jessie The night after the bombing, around midnight, after Merry's photograph had been on television and everybody in America knew that the day before she had said to somebody at school that Old Rimrock was in for a big surprise, Jessie tried to walk the three miles to their house to see the Levovs but on the unpaved country road, alone in the dark, had twisted her ankle and, two hours later, still lying there, was nearly run over by a pickup truck
"Okay, my friend Jessie, fill me inWhat is a drag and a whip?" You couldn't say his father didn't try to get along with people for all that he really couldn'tIf she was a guest of his children, then she was his friend, regardless of how repelled he might be by the cigarettes, by the whiskey, by the unkempt cartier santos 100 hair and the rundown shoes and the burlap tent concealing the ill-used body--by all the privilege she had squandered and the disgrace she had made of her life
"A drag is a hunt and it's not with a foxIt's over a line that's laid by a man on a horse ahead of youthat has a scent in a bagIt's to make the effect of a huntThe hounds go after itThere are huge, huge fences, and it's done in a sort of a courseHuge, huge, thick brush fencesEight, ten feet wide with bars on topDown there there's a lot of stee-plechasing and a lot of good riders and everybody gets out there and bombs through those places and it's fun
It appeared to the Swede to be as much her confoundment with her predicament--a tipsy woman, out at a party, blabbing uncontrollably--as his father's genial I'm-just-a-dope inquiry that drew her disastrously on, each slurred word unsuccessfully stimulating her mouth to try to produce one that rang clear as a bellClear as the "Daddy!" that had pealed out perfectly from behind the veil of his daughter the Jain
He knew what his father was thinking without bothering to look up from where he was using the tongs to make a pyramid of the gucci bookbag reddest coalsFun, his father was thinking, what is it with them and fun? What is this fun? What is so much fun? His father was wondering, as he had ever since his son had bought the house and the hundred acres forty miles west of Keer Avenue, Why does he want to live with these people? Forget the drinkingThey would bore me to death in two minutes
Dawn had one brief against them, his father had another
"Anyway," Jessie was saying, trying, with the cigarette-holding hand, to stir into being some sort of conclusion, "that was why I went to school with my horse
"You went to school with a horse?"
Again she impatiently pursed her lips, probably because this father, who thought he was helping her out with his questions, was driving her even more rapidly than usual to whatever collapse was in storeWe both got on the train at the same time," she told him"Wasn't I lucky?" she asked, and to the surprise of both Levov men, as though she weren't at all in serious straits--as though that was just a laughable illusion that disgustingly self-satisfied sober people persisted in having about drunks--laid a flirtatious hand on the side of Lou Levov's gucci men wallet head
"I'm sorry, I don't understand how you got on the train with a horseHow big was this horse?"
"In those days horses were on horsecarsLevov, as though his lifelong bewilderment at the pleasures of Gentiles had at last been put to restHe took her hand from where it lay on his hair and, as though to squeeze into her everything he knew about life's purpose that she would seem to have forgotten, held it firmly between his own handsMeanwhile, under the impetus of that force which, by failing to size up the situation, would lead her into humiliation before the night was through, Jessie went waveringly on
"They were all leaving with the polo circuit and they were all going down south in the winter trainThe train stopped in PhiladelphiaSo I put my horse in with themI put my horse in the car two cars up from where I was bunked in, waved good-bye to the family, and it was great
"How old were you?"
"I was thirteenI didn't feel homesick at all, and it was just great, great, great"--here she began to cry--"fun
Thirteen, his father was thinking, a pisherke, and you waved good-bye to the family? What was the matter? Was something the matter with dolce purse them? What the hell were you waving good-bye to your family for at thirteen? No wonder you're shicker now
But what he said was "That's all right, let it all outWhy not? You're among friends Unsavory as the job must have seemed to him, it had to be done, and so he removed the glass from her one hand, discarded for her the freshly lit cigarette in the other, and took her into his arms, which was perhaps all she had been asking for all along
"I see where I have to be a father again," he said to her softly, and she could say nothing, she could only weep and let herself be rocked by the Swede's father, whom, on the one other occasion she had met him in her life--when, some fifteen years back, they had gone to picnic on the Orcutts' lawn for Fourth of July--she had tried to interest in skeet shooting, yet another of those diversions that had long defied Lou Levov's Jewish comprehensionFor "fun" pulling a trigger and shooting with a gun
That was the day when, on the way back home, they'd passed a handmade sign on the road by the Congregational church that said "Tent Sale" and Merry had begged the Swede, in her fervent way, to stop and buy one for louis vuitton taschen her