The Second Coming

of American Booksellers.”
    â€œGood luck, John.”
    â€œThat’s the way it goes. But this is not a bad place.”
    Ehrlichman was right. It was not a bad place.
    Roosevelt was elected shortly after he was born. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Roosevelt grinned. Roosevelt was elected again. Will Barrett had never known another President. He was sick of Roosevelt’s grin.
    Years passed. He woke many times. The cave was companionable. The living rock was warm and dry. There were times when the ceiling of the cave seemed to open to the sky. As he gazed up, the darkness turned bright. Yet he always knew this couldn’t be so. He smiled at himself.
    The war came. His father was happy. Most people seemed happy. Fifty million people were killed. People dreamed of peace. Peace came. His father became unhappy. Most people seemed unhappy.
    The boy lay prone in the Georgia swamp, watchful and silent, unwounded cheek pressed against the ground, the Sterlingworth shotgun cradled in his arms. Ground fog lay straight as milk, filling the hollows between the pin oaks.
    So this is how it is, the boy thought, grim and exultant. This is one of the secrets nobody tells you. There are two secrets to life nobody tells you: screwing and dying. What they tell you about is love and the hereafter. Maybe they are right. But it is screwing and dying you have to deal with. What they don’t tell you is how good screwing is and how bad it is to grow old, get sick, and die. Very well.
    He and his daughter Leslie were going home after Marion’s funeral. Yamaiuchi drove the Rolls. The back of his head was as sleek as a seal. He looked like Sammy Lee, the small muscular Olympic diver. Will Barrett was watching the bare winter woods. Why do woods have a certain look after funerals? He and Marion had gazed at dozens of woods after dozens of funerals in North Carolina. He remembered going home after his father’s funeral. When the limousine stopped at the railroad crossing on Theobald Street, a nondescript place he had passed a hundred times walking home from school, he noticed that this place had a different look, an air of suspension, of pause and hiatus, like the policeman at the cemetery who stood still in front of the stopped traffic. This was the same place where he had thought about Ethel Rosenblum and fallen down.
    Leslie’s granny glasses clashed as she folded the stems. Clearing her throat, she turned toward him. She crossed her legs. The panty hose whispered. Her face with its hazed eyes and thin handsome lips had the expression of Barbara Stanwyck in that part of the movie where she tells everybody off.
    â€œLet me tell you something, Poppy.”
    â€œOkay.” It is evident that she is not only going to tell me something but also tell me off in that sense in which some people conceive it to be an act of courage to ignore convention and usage and get it all up front as the saying goes (God, I hope she doesn’t say, let’s let it all hang out).
    â€œPoppy, let me say this.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œYou and Mom—God knows I love you both, but you blew it. You both blew it.”
    â€œWe did?”
    â€œYou better believe it. You both blew it.”
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œNeither of you was ever honest with the other—or with yourself.”
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œNot once in your entire married life were you and Mom ever honest with each other. Yet I am grateful to you because I have learned from it.”
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œYou should at least have admitted to each other what your marriage was based on. Then who knows, something might have come out of it, something creative. I’ve discovered that the hard way: lying to yourself makes it impossible to be creative in a relationship.”
    â€œHow were we dishonest?”
    â€œYou never once admitted to each other or to yourselves why you married.”
    â€œWhy did we marry?”
    â€œYou married Mom to get the Peabody fortune. Mom married you—I would like to say you were a catch and I guess you were—mainly to get married. Now that’s not a bad basis for a relationship—the French have been doing it for years—as long as you admit it. Mom could not conceive the future without marriage. Fortunately times have changed.”
    â€œI see.”
    â€œJason and I level. We believe that only if people level is there a chance of