I don't live in either my past or my future. I'm interested only in the present.
If you can concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man. Life will
be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we're living
now.
I rode a wave one evening, long after the sun had set, with the first
stars already out, that stood up and seemed to bend off the reef toward
open water, which was impossible. There was a dark, bottle-green light in
the bottom of the wall and a feathering whiteness overhead. Everything
else—the wind-riffled face, the channel ahead, the sky—was in shades of
blue-blackness. As it bent, and then bent some more, I found myself seemingly
surfing toward north Viti Levu, toward the mountain range where
the sun rose. Not possible, my mind said. Keep going. The wave felt like a
test of faith, or a test of sanity, or an enormous, undeserved gift. The laws
of physics appeared to have been relaxed. A hollow wave was roaring off
into deeper water. Not possible. It felt like a runaway train, an eruption of
magical realism, with that ocean-bottom light and the lacy white canopy.
I ran with it. Eventually, it bent back, of course, found the reef, and
tapered into the channel. I didn't tell Bryan about it. He wouldn't believe
me. That wave was otherworldly.
West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time.
Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim
Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago
friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid
them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning
from Miss This-or-that's and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands
waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the
matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'?
the Schultzes'?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved
hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St.
Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside
the gate.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,
began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the
dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came
suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back
from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our
identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted
indistinguishably into it again.
That's my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede
towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street
lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly
wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a
little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent
from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are
still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has
been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan
and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in
common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
The thing was, I couldn't think of a room or a house or anything to
describe the way Stradlater said he had to have. I'm not too crazy about
describing rooms and houses anyway. So what I did, I wrote about my
brother Allie's baseball mitt. It was a very descriptive subject. It
really was. My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. He was
left-handed. The thing that was descriptive about it, though, was that he
had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In
green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he
was in the field and nobody was up to bat. He's dead now. He got leukemia
and died when were up in Maine, on July 18, 1946. You'd have liked him. He
was two years younger than I was, but he was about fifty times as
intelligent. He was terrifically intelligent. His teachers were always
writing letters to my mother, telling her what a pleasure it was having a
boy like Allie in their class. And they weren't just shooting the crap.
They really meant it. But it wasn't just that he was the most intelligent
member in the family. He was also the nicest, in lots of ways. He never
got mad at anybody. People with red hair are supposed to get mad very
easily, but Allie never did, and he had very red hair. I'll tell you what
kind of red hair he had. I started playing golf when I was only ten years
old. I remember once, the summer I was around twelve, teeing off and all,
and having a hunch that all of a sudden, I'd see Allie. So I did, and sure
enough, he was sitting on his bike outside the fence—there was this
fence that went all around the course—and he was sitting there,
about a hundred and fifty yards behind me, watching me tee off. That's the
kind of red hair he had. God, he was nice kid, though. He used to laugh so
hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about
fell off his chair. I was only thirteen and they were going to have me
psychoanalyzed and all, because I broke all the windows in the garage. I
don't blame them. I really don't. I slept in the garage the night he died,
and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it.
I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that
summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that time, and
I couldn't do it. It was a very stupid thing to do, I'll
admit, but I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know
Allie. My hand still hurts me once in a while, when it rains and all, and
I can't make a real fist any more—not a tight one, I mean—but
outside of that I don't care much. I mean I'm not going to be a goddam
surgeon or violinist or anything anyway.
In my line of work, I've seen all kinds of women. Some beautiful. Some
ugly. Some just plain in between. And—being neither senile nor a man
with aspirations to sainthood—whenever the opportunity presented itself
(with or without my encouragement), I bedded the beautiful ones
(although sometimes they bedded me), passed on the ugly ones altogether
(not being a greedy man), but allowed myself discourse with the in-betweeners
on a fairly regular basis, not being one to look the other way
when such things as discourse and other entertainments are freely
offered. So the in-betweeners made out all right, too.
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking
that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes.
They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world
would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing
on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid
of so many things.
