Am I Alone Here? : Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (9781936787265) by Orner Peter

Author:Orner, Peter [Orner, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 2016-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

The Infinite Passion of Expectation. You could make a case that this phrase alone captures the ambition and loneliness of not only San Francisco but also our battered, eternally optimistic country. The passion of our expectations has always governed our days.

Knowing that these expectations will, for most of us, never be met in a single lifetime rarely limits our passion for the future. Thus our hope and our despair.

“Around the Dear Ruin” opens in a shabby studio above the Gari-baldi Club on Columbus Street in North Beach. It’s the late 1950s. A merchant marine named Leo Brady is just home from sea and about to see his new wife, the wondrous Clara, for the first time in months. Leo’s illusions of a joyous reunion are quickly snuffed.

My sister married Leo Brady because he was a merchant seaman and made good wages, and because he was gone most of the time. She and her five-year-old boy had been living on the sales of her cable car etchings that tourists to San Francisco picked over in the little art galleries and bookstores, and on the sporadic sales of her oil paintings. They were married a few days after he came from sea, and a week later his ship sailed again for the Orient. In the six weeks he was away, the steamship company sent her, at his request, all his wages. But the day that he returned was unrewarding for Leo.

Unrewarding. Very much so. On the day of Leo’s homecoming, Clara is lying in bed. She’s twenty-six and mysteriously sick. She refuses to allow either her husband or her brother to call a doctor. Clara has such a hold, love mixed with fear, over both Leo and Eddie that neither of them would dare defy her. She’s in an extraordinary amount of pain, and yet, to the last, she retains her sense of humor. Between moans of agony, she advises Eddie: “Always remember to contradict your teachers. It makes good biography.”

Clara is one of those people. Even in her final hours, she’s a force of nature. Eddie and Leo can’t take their eyes off the wreckage that used to be Clara Ruchenski. All they can do is listen, as Clara, increasingly delirious, delivers screed after screed. In one merciless diatribe, she describes Leo, even though he’s right there in the room, beside her bed, black fedora in hand. He’s wearing only socks so as not to disturb the patient by clomping around too much in his boots.

“How simple are his wants. All he desires is to identify himself with artists. He married Clara Ruchenski because she’d had an exhibit in some dank little gallery and sold a painting once a year. How happy he was on our wedding night. I thought people didn’t get that happy anymore, not since before the Flood when everybody was a brute with a big, smiling face. No, no, I’m wrong!” she wailed, tossing her head from side to side. “I take it all back. I never did think like that about Leo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.