The Whore's Child

graduate work and he finished his own degree. He was glad I was there, he kept insisting, so there’d be two people who knew what life was really like. It’s what he’s always wanted of me, all these years, an acknowledgment of how similar he and I are.
    Which reminded me of a conversation I’d had with the producer of the script that had paid for the island house. When he approached me, he said I was the only writer he wanted for the project, implying that if I didn’t do it, he might just let the whole thing slip into turnaround. Within a few short months, though, he’d forgotten this lie. When complimenting me on my first draft, he hadn’t neglected to congratulate himself. “I
knew
you were the guy,” he said. “If you hadn’t done it, I’d have had to go to that Ruggieri asshole. You know him?” When I said I did, he sighed significantly. “He’s an okay writer, but he’s got no fucking sense of humor.”
    I fell asleep in my clothes, so I get up to undress. Clare watches, and when I climb into bed she remarks that the incision doesn’t look as puffy or angry today. Clearly, the antibiotics are working. Why the incision should have become infected to begin with is a great mystery to everyone, my doctors included, but it’s a mystery I’ve been instructed not to worry about. I’m a lucky man, they insist. The tumor was benign.
    â€œI gather you didn’t say anything to Gene,” Clare observes.
    â€œI didn’t see any point,” I tell her, and I know she understands that what I mean by this is, Why give him any fuel?
    We are quiet then, and Clare snuggles close. I’m almost asleep again when she says, “Do you want to go back and shut down that mill?”
    This surprises me. Usually she knows what I want without asking. I’m the one who has to ask.
    â€œI have no idea,” I tell her. “I’ll think about it, I guess.”
    â€œMaybe he’ll let it drop,” Clare suggests, zapping the TV with the remote. I’d turned it on fearing raised voices in the next room, though it’s quiet in there now.
    â€œGene?” I say. “He’s never let anything drop yet.” We are silent in the darkness for a while. “I had a strange dream,” I confess.
    Clare kisses my shoulder, stroking my belly with her fingernails. “You always dream when you drink too much.”
    I smile. No one knows me better than this woman. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if she knew
what
I’d dreamt while being alluded to on television, that I was walking along our stretch of beach and stepped on a needle, and then the sand was suddenly bristling with them and I was punctured again and again as I limped home, feeling something new and toxic coursing through my veins.

The Mysteries of
Linwood Hart
    OBJECTS
    When Lin Hart announced his intention to play American Legion baseball, his mother had to swallow her misgivings. For years she’d been referring to him as her little philosopher because he was prone to reveries from which he emerged with some of the strangest questions she’d ever heard, the most recent of which was, Did objects have desires? Like what? she said. A lamp? You’re thinking maybe a lamp
wants
to shine? “Possesses an active interior life” was how the boy had been assessed at school. Her own assessment was that Lin was the kind of kid you had to remind to look both ways before crossing the street, not once but every time he left the house; so now that he was riding his bike all over town his mother was hearing automobile horns in her sleep. And why this sudden interest in baseball, anyway, a sport that featured a lot of standing around between pitches, pauses in the action that would encourage his too frequent lapses into abstraction, then injure him with its eruptions of violent action? She just hoped he wouldn’t be picking his nose when the baseball hit him.
    Like so many things, this was his father’s fault. Thomas had got him a baseball glove for Christmas, determined to provide an athletic alternative to the scholarly genes his son had inherited from
her
family so powerfully that the rough physicality of the Harts had been driven deep into latency. Which was as it should be, as far as Lin’s mother was concerned. If the boy’s Foster blood was settling some genetic argument in favor of something more refined and civilized,