sing out, louise

‘I wonder if someone in this situation has been trapped,’ I mused to my husband, Jason, in the hotel room, pulling a floor-length dress over my head. The wedding invitation had urged us to wear modest clothing because the Eucharist would be present. It was for the Eucharist, then, that I was wrestling a thick anti-intercourse pair of tights up towards my waist. ‘I had a lot of imagination and I entrapped you. You should be eternally grateful I didn’t give you a weird baby. In almost any other situation you would have ended up with a weird baby.’ ‘That’s true,’ he said, neatly tying his Pride trainers, which cause Midwestern women in elevators to first compliment him and then fall hideously silent. ‘What would you have preferred?’ He paused, but I already knew. ‘Mountain-top philosopher who invented a new kind of veganism where the bee told him the secret in the glade.’

Halsey Edge was a tall scrawny man of fifty-something with a pinched yellow face and no hair at all. He called himself "a ghoul by profession and inclination"--his only joke, if that is what it was--by which he meant he was an archæologist, and he was very proud of his collection of battle-axes. He was not so bad once you had resigned yourself to the fact that you were in for occasional catalogings of his armory--stone axes, copper axes, bronze axes, double-bladed axes, faceted axes, polygonal axes, scalloped axes, hammer axes, adze axes, Mesopotamian axes, Hungarian axes, Nordic axes, and all of them looking pretty moth-eaten. It was his wife we objected to. Her name was Leda, but he called her Tip. She was very small and her hair, eyes, and skin, though naturally of different shades, were all muddy. She seldom sat--she perched on things--and liked to cock her head a little to one side. Nora had a theory that once when Edge opened an antique grave, Tip ran out of it, and Margot Innes always spoke of her as the gnome, pronouncing all the letters. She once told me that she did not think any literature of twenty years ago would live, because it had no psychiatry in it. They lived in a pleasant old three-story house on the edge of Greenwich Village and their liquor was excellent.