Love in Infant Monkeys, Lydia Millet [best motivational novels txt] 📗

had no excuse to be in the shed anymore but couldn’t tear himself away. He picked up a china figurine of a pig in a tutu and turned it upside down, pretending to scrutinize a maker’s mark.

“What I’m suggesting is that emotion can be channeled in productive directions,” said Chomsky.

“That’s not emotion you’re talking about. That’s just opinion.”

“Opinion—” started Chomsky, but she interrupted him.

“What you realize when you have a kid, if you’re a woman, is we’re animals and it’s hard to be an animal. It’s hard work. It’s dirt and danger and bile.”

“That particular brand of gender essentialism—”

“But what you also realize as a mother is—and I don’t think men really get this out of fatherhood, I think maybe they get it in other ways, like if they’re having great illicit sex or beating the living shit out of someone—is that it’s great to be an animal; it’s what the core of life is, to be an animal. Not to be human. I don’t mean to be human; I don’t mean that at all, Noam. I mean to be a mammal.”

“Oh, please,” said Chomsky. His granddaughter set down the dartboard again, a little disappointed.

“Say what you like,” said the mother. A coolness came into her voice and it occurred to K. she had a certain steely quality. “Say what you like about anything you want. I don’t care. But consider the possibility that there’s something here you can’t know. Something here you will never know, Noam. Something you will never know that would change everything.”

She pushed the door open and slammed out, leaving the three of them alone in the shed. It was just K., Chomsky and the granddaughter. The old scavenger woman had slipped out unnoticed.

K., standing over a table, had the odd impression that the light filtering through the dirty gray windows had shifted or been subdued—as though an object of enormous weight and strange design had moved silently in front of the sun.

For a second, motionless, he remembered the Hindenburg. Great airships of the past.

Chomsky turned his attention to the gerbil condo.

“See? Right there,” he said quietly to the little girl.

“It’s got this crack all the way across the bottom now, from that corner to this one.”

“But the gerbils wouldn’t mind,” said the little girl.

“Would they?”

“They might not,” conceded Chomsky. “It would work just as well for them. But the problem is, the people would probably mind.”

“How come?”

“They won’t pick it up,” said Chomsky. There was a heaviness to him now, and K. thought he looked older. “They won’t even take it now, is the thing. They’ll just think it’s junk, with a crack across the base like that.”

“Oh,” said the little girl. She blinked, and again K. thought tears were coming. She shook her head but refused to cry.

“Come on,” said Chomsky gently, and shifted the gerbil condo to hold it propped against his side so he could take her hand. “Let’s go.”

They walked out of the shed, their shoulders, to K., looking stooped. He watched out the window, still clutching the pig ballerina, as the two of them trudged toward the main garbage pit with their burden. When they reached the pit Chomsky stood at the railing for a long moment, holding the gerbil cage with his thin arms outstretched. Finally he let go.

Jimmy Carter’s Rabbit

HE CAME TO SEE me at my Atlanta office, after his move back to Plains. It was a slow afternoon and the day’s sessions were already over when the Secret Servicemen stepped into my foyer. I wasn’t expecting company; my first thought when I opened the door on them—with their clean-cut hair, dark suits and earpieces—was hearing-impaired Witnesses.

Then I caught sight of that broad, down-home grin.

Our families went to the same church when we were boys, and we had Bible Study together. He was an avid student, hand always shooting straight up with the answers, while I spent most of the class lobbing spit-balls at the back of a fat girl’s head. Our interests were different: One of us was strong and popular, the other was bookish, but it was a small town, and even though there were some differences between us we were thrown together often enough. We hung out, playing stickball in the meadow behind the general store, or ran a Cowboys ’n Injuns racket in a rotting tree house. Typically I was a cowboy and Carter was one of the braves. One time, if I remember right, he was a squaw.

Anyway, after some neighborhood unpleasantness my parents moved the family to North Carolina. That happened when I was twelve, and contact between Jimmy and me ended.

Come 1981 I hadn’t seen the guy in nearly fifty years.

He wasn’t seeking me out in a professional capacity, he told me up front. Of course, if he hadn’t said that, the conversation would be privileged. No, he just wanted to get reacquainted. Was there someplace we could settle in for a chat?

We sat out on the roof of my building, which had a couple of chairs and a table. This was back before Carter became a hobbyist vintner, but he already liked his vino; I, too, was a bit of a connoisseur. My heart lifted when he handed me an Échézeaux, and I strode boldly through the glass sliders to my liquor cabinet for a corkscrew and goblets. As I turned from him, I recall a kind of imprint on my visual cortex: a former free-world leader leaning back in a chair behind me, his legs loosely crossed. President, I thought. President and waiting. I’d stayed pretty calm till then, but some kind of delayed shock took me. I got butterfingered and dropped a glass.

Left it there. You don’t squat and clean up shards in that situation.

Watching the glittery descent of airplanes in the sky, we cradled our drinks and kicked back. I let the burgundy soak my tongue as Ravi Shankar floated out through an