of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came canada goose toronto out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us canada goose toronto in the night. We wandered in a frenzy and a dream. We ate beautiful steaks
seemed silly for the crowd to applaud or groan over what you had already felt in your fingers or even in your arms as you braced to shoot or for that matter in your eyes: when he was hot he could see the separate threads wound into the strings looping the hoop. Yet at the start of the game when you came out for warm-up and could see all the town clunkers sitting in the back of the bleachers elbowing each other and the cheerleaders wisecracking with the racier male teachers, the crowd then seemed right inside you, your liver and lungs and stomach. There was one fat guy canada goose toronto used to come whod canada goose toronto get on the floor of Rabbitss stomach and really make it shake. Hey,Gunner!Hey, Showboat,shoot!Shoot!Rabbit remembers him fondly now; to that guy he had been a hero of sorts. Throughout the early morning,
extremity of tenderness he traces again and again the arc of her eyebrow with his thumb. His sea of seed buckles, and sobs into a still channel. At each shudder her mouth smiles in his and her legs, locked at his back, canada goose toronto bear down. She asks in time, O.K.? Youre pretty. Ruth takes her legs from around him and spills him off her body like a pile of sand. He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows an expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of canada goose toronto release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair. Nature leads you up like a mother and as soon as she gets her little contribution leaves you with nothing. The sweat on his skin is cold in the air; he brings the blankets up from her feet. You were a beautiful piece, he says from the pillow listlessly, and
told his wife to keep her heart open for Grace. Christianity isnt looking for a rainbow. If it were what you think it is wed pass out opium at services. Were trying toserveGod, notbeGod. They pick up their bags and walk the way a wooden arrow tells them. Eccles goes on, explanatorily, Thi canada goose toronto s was all settled centuries ago, in the heresies of the early Church. I tell you, I know what it is. What is it? Whatisit? Is it hard or soft? canada goose toronto Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots? It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I-know-more-about-it-than-you heresies-of-the-early-Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that hes not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if its not enough to be trying to
from the furnace of damnation. Dear Ruth, Harrison says, how have you been? I canada goose toronto often worry about you. Dont worry about me, she says, canada goose toronto yet seems pleased. I just wonder, he goes on, about the ability of our mutual friend to support you in the style to which you are accustomed. The Negress brings their drinks and Harrison, as if flashing a badge, shows her the lizard-skin Ronson in his hand. Real skin, he says. Mmm, the waitress says, with lots of throat. Your own? Rabbit laughs. He loves that black chick. When she goes, Harrison leans forward with the sweet smile you use on children. Did you know, he asks Harry, that Ruth and I once went to Atlantic City together? There was another couple, she hastily tells Harry. A disgusting pair, Harrison says, who preferred the shabby privacy of their own
his memory, and the forgotten smell of that narrow plastic ribbon you braid bracelets and whistle-chains out of and of glue a canada goose toronto nd of the sweat on the handles on athletic equipment is blown down by a breeze laced with childrens murmuring. He feels the truth: the thing tha canada goose toronto t has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks. They visit Mom-mom Springer. The child is delighted; Nelson loves her, and this makes Rabbit like her. Though she tries to pick a fight with him he refuses to fight back,
and get a suit and go to work but something held him back all day. He tries to think of what it was because whatever it was murdered his daughter. Wanting to see Ruth again was some of it but it was clear after he went around to her address in the morning that she wasnt there probably off to Atlantic City with some prick and still he w canada goose toronto andered around Brewer, going in and out of department stores with music piping from the walls and eating a hot dog at the five and dime and hesitating outside a movie house but not going in and keeping an eye out for Ruth. He kept expecting to see the fat shoulders he used to ki canada goose toronto ss jostle out of a crowd and the ginger hair he used to beg to unpin shining on the other side of a rack of birthday cards. But it was a city of over a hundred thousand and the odds
of De Maupassant. We now see canada goose toronto the consequences which were inevitable by reason of them, endowed as Maupassant was with a double power of feeling life bitterly, and at the same time with so much of animal force. The first theory bears upon the choice of personages and the story of the romance, the second upon the character of the s canada goose toronto tyle. The son of a physician, and brought up in the rigors of scientific method, Flaubert believed this method to be efficacious in art as in science. For instance, in the writing of a romance, he seemed to be as scientific as in the development of a history of customs, in which the essential is absolute exactness and local color. He therefore naturally wished to make the most scrupulous and detailed observation of the environment. Thus is explained the immense