Asa, as I Knew Him by Susanna Kaysen

Author:Susanna Kaysen [Kaysen, Susanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9780307513540
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-10T14:00:00+00:00

The Discrepancies

What Asa had said to me was, “I had a boyhood friend who died.” This was in passing, in the middle of a conversation about friendship. “Who?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s dead.”

“I know.”

“His name was Reuben. He had an accident.”

“When was this? What kind of accident?”

“Oh, it was ages ago. We were teenagers. He was climbing something and he fell.”

“What?”

“What?”

“What was he climbing?” Sometimes conversation with Asa was impossible. He would retreat into stupidity and I would have to spell everything out for him.

“He was climbing the Mystic River Bridge. What do you want to know all this for?”

“Don’t you want to know things about me and my life?”

“Sure.” And his face settled into the expression of lust that he thought was affection. He was capable of affectionate feelings, but these produced a worried expression, as though it hurt to feel them. “I want to know everything.” He put his hand on the back of my thigh and slid it down to the dip behind my knee. We were in his office; in a week he was going to be forty-two. He didn’t want to know anything about me except how my breasts fit into his palms. We were still in the kissing stage.

“So?” I said.

“Huh?” He had gone behind his cloud. Was it purposeful or inadvertent? Maybe he was hung over. I examined his enormous eyes: bloodshot, but that wasn’t unusual. Still, they were puffy underneath and he smelled of witch hazel, which, being slightly alcoholic, gave me the impression of booze by association.

“Are you asleep? Tell me the story.”

“I was up too late,” he said. This was his euphemism for having drunk too much the night before. He picked up a pencil and pressed the eraser to his lips. He had a habit of caressing inanimate objects in my presence. He would fondle his ruler, stroking it up and down, press paper clips to his cheeks, tap himself on the head with his magnifying glass. I enjoyed his displacement; it was I he wanted to press to his flesh. A year later I was reduced to being jealous of his tools. “You kiss the ruler but you won’t kiss me!” I said to him three weeks before I left my job. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he responded.

But this day, when he put his pencil to his mouth, I was bold and we were enough in love so that when I moved it and put my lips there instead, he kissed me back. The pencil fell on the floor. I tasted him—shaving soap at the corners of his mouth, his coffee, his Lucky—and sighed. He sighed too. It was morning; hours would have to pass before we held each other.

“So what happened?”

“He was a daredevil. Very good-looking, one of those boys who’s the natural leader of the group. I worshiped him—I guess.” The pencil, retrieved, was tapped on his chin while he pondered whether he had, actually, worshiped. “He was Jewish,” Asa said, looking sidelong at me.

“Did he look it?” I asked.

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.