BISCUIT TIN
2015; Wiley; Volume: 103; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2015.0034
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Humanities and Scholarship
Resumo1 2 9 R B I S C U I T T I N P E T E R L A S A L L E What was said to Stephanie, the line that she couldn’t get out of her head, was perhaps the result of how everybody had been drinking a little too much. Or, Stephanie could tell that Devereaux, the so-called creative writer, had consumed too much scotch. They were all sitting around in the low lamplight snagging silver and gold in the half- finished glasses in the living room. Low jazz played on the stereo as a background to the conversation there at the get-together that she and Jacob hosted. And later that night, afterwards, her husband, Jacob, told her she shouldn’t have made that much out of it, what Devereaux had said. Jacob told her that he, Jacob, personally had put up with just about enough of Devereaux over the years, and for Jacob (he was older than Stephanie and the reason that she first came to the States after they’d met, then married, so long before – Jacob had been on academic exchange in the U.K. at the university where she had been teaching at the time, in Bristol), yes, as far as Jacob was concerned, Devereaux was a spoiled child. Jacob said she 1 3 0 L A S A L L E Y shouldn’t take anything Devereaux said at all seriously, and in Jacob’s opinion the real embarrassment, an ongoing one, was how Devereaux always tried so hard to act hip in his black turtlenecks and black jeans and the rest of his posturing; it was a guise, Jacob said, that became more and more ridiculous as Devereaux aged, with his mane of prematurely gray hair, even his nose having been broken somewhere along the way seeming to be what Devereaux considered his ticket to putting on the noisy Hemingway persona. Jacob told her that Devereaux probably only said what he had because he was still smarting from the fact that she, as departmental chair now, had flatly turned Devereaux down on any appeal for a raise the semester before – Stephanie had explained to Devereaux in her o≈ce then that the university was cutting back across the board, there simply wasn’t any money for raises like that, despite how much Devereaux had published in the last few years. The truth of the matter was that before Devereaux said what he did say – before that moment and when Stephanie wanted to believe that everybody still left at the party had surely enjoyed themselves, that the party had been a success – she had been thinking that her life was at last adding up to being a worthwhile one indeed, as she let her mind wander, nearly float out of that living room, she herself having perhaps enjoyed a bit more white wine than she was used to. (There was an image of a very blue sky that seemed to fill her thoughts when she was content lately, as clichéd as that could sound, or, more exactly, the image of a very blue sky as she walked along. And when she had been the pretty, smiling little girl that she had been in primary school in Liverpool , the exceptional student always brighter than everybody else when it came time for tests, there was the blue sky over the redbrick bungalows as she came up her street carrying her book satchel in the afternoon, seagulls sighing overhead, Stephanie feeling good about everything; or, later, the blue sky close to enormous , as on one distinctly remembered afternoon when she’d left a seminar room where she had contributed brilliantly to the discussion , Stephanie walking amidst the green lawns and many turrets and spires of King’s College at Cambridge and hearing played from somebody’s open window a song from Rubber Soul, maybe ‘‘I’m Looking Through You,’’ with its trademark Lennon- B I S C U I T T I N 1 3 1 R McCartney vocal harmony and wheezy harmonica – she was no longer a girl then but an attractive young woman on full government scholarship...
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