The Lost and the Sublime by Lynn Bentley

Author:Lynn Bentley [Bentley, Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

It was with this party, more especially with Sharon’s part in it, that a decided change began to come over their way of living. The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet of her existence; it became the entire solace and justification for what they chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment's happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.

These "parties" gradually became their chief source of entertainment. Still in love, still enormously interested in each other, they yet found as spring drew near that staying at home in the evening captured them. Books were unreal; the old magic of being alone had long since vanished. They preferred to be bored by a stupid musical comedy, or to go to dinner with the most uninteresting of their acquaintances, so long as there would be enough cocktails to keep the conversation from becoming utterly intolerable.

Through the damp and uninspiring month of March he was prepared for his new role in salesmanship. Lacking enthusiasm he was capable of viewing the turmoil and bustle that surrounded him only as a fruitless striving toward an incomprehensible goal. Obvious evidenced only by the rival mansions of his boss. That these power hungry vice-presidents and trustees should be actually the fathers of the "best men" he had known at Stanford seemed to him incongruous.

He ate in an employees' lunchroom up-stairs with an uneasy suspicion that he was being uplifted, wondering through that first week if the dozens of young clerks, some of them alert and immaculate, and just out of college, lived in flamboyant hope of crowding onto that narrow slip of cardboard before the catastrophic 70’s. The conversation that interwove with the pattern of the day's work was mostly irrelevant. He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom.

Then, abruptly, he quit. He had remained in bed all one Monday, and late in the evening, overcome by one of those attacks of moody despair to which he periodically succumbed. She wanted him to whine. If he had she would have attacked him bitterly, for she was greatly annoyed, but he only lay there so utterly miserable that she felt sorry for him. Cuddling up to him, she stroked his head, saying how little it mattered, how little anything mattered so long as they loved each other.

In mid-April came a letter from the real-estate agent in Newburyport, encouraging them to take their current home for another year at a slightly increased rental, and enclosing a lease made out for their signatures.

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