expert

1.

Paul was an expert on 16th century armour
and wrote articles about it for the learned
journals, but he supported himself by doing
graphics for a scientific publishing house,
where I worked as an editor. He invited me
to lunch at his apartment once and showed me
dozens of drawings he’d made from the
collections he’d visited. The drawings all
had a mechanical but delicate precision, of
which he was justly proud. He was contemp-
tuous of Picasso. He told me he was a fake
who just didn’t know how to draw.

2.

The man who owned the grocery down the block
was a proud man, a scholar. His wife told me
he was an expert in 5 Near Eastern languages
as well as French and Spanish, but the FBI had
turned him down. One night two men held up
his store. He jumped over the counter and tried
to take the gun away and they killed him.

3.

I met him on an airplane heading for New York, a
handsome, melancholy man in a very expensive suit.
He was on his way back from Jakarta. In his profes-
sion he had to travel a lot. He was an art dealer, an
expert in Asian antiquities. I thought it sounded
like an exciting life, and he admitted it was interest-
ing but mostly he found it depressing. He’d wanted
to be a biochemist and was studying at Columbia
when the Second World War broke out. He fought
through the war as an infantryman in North Africa
at the battle of the Kasserine Pass and then in Italy.
After VE day they shipped him to the Pacific, where
he started dealing. He shook his head sadly, “I never
got back to Columbia. I always wanted to be a chemist.”

grain

1.

My brother-in-law was a concert pianist and
he supported himself by giving lessons, but his
house needed repairs and he got the idea of
speculating in the commodities market. He was
born in the Middle West, so he decided he knew
about grain and he bought spring wheat on margin.
But there were too many things to think about --
weather, changes in oil prices, foreign wars --
and his great virtue as a pianist was that he was
stubborn. Not a great virtue for a speculator. If
wheat futures started falling and he didn’t like
the price, he wouldn’t sell. The price would go
down, he’d have to cough up cash to cover his losses.
Finally he would own all this wheat, and I could see
truck after truck coming to Great Neck and covering
his lawn with load after load of golden grain.

2.

He had a cheery voice and whenever he called he had
great plans and was just on the verge of striking it
rich. And there was always a grain of truth in his
most grandiose ideas. The last time it was a lawsuit
against a giant company that had conspired against his
small one to contract his market share. When it was
settled, it would net millions. This time he was
creating new kinds of tax shelters for philanthropic
millionaires to create funding for artistic institutions.
He was working with the smartest tax lawyers in the
country. All he needed were the millionaires. But as
always he had a cash flow problem. Could we spare
five thousand to tide him over till spring

3.

She had a very active imagination. She was the kind of
of person a grain of sand in her shoe or a splinter in
her finger could send to the emergency room of the
the nearest hospital. In the winter she was travelling
to upstate New York. It had just snowed and the tempe-
rature had dropped below freezing. The hotel where
she was staying had been recently painted and the closet
of her room smelled slightly of the solvent. There were no
other rooms in the hotel. So whatever of her clothes
wouldn’t fit in the bureau she laid on the chairs and shut
the closet door tight. But at night she had trouble sleep-
ing because she thought she was being poisoned by the
fumes from the paint. She forced open one of the windows
and went back to bed. But she still smelled the fumes. She
took her sweater and socks and her underwear and stuffed
them under the closet door. Then she opened the other
window. But it was terribly cold. Finally she fell asleep
in her coat, wearing a scarf and a hat in a room that she
swore still smelled of paint.

savage

1.

I was sitting in the sun parlor of my aunt’s
living room, looking out the window at the
rain and listening to the radio describe the
savage winds that were tearing up the Atlantic
coast. A few gusts of wind gently shook the
branches of the silver maple outside the
window. Then a sudden heavy gust, a rustle of
leaves, and the huge tree slowly toppled
across the street.

2.

The dreamy, dark haired boy who lived down-
stairs from us joined the Marines and wound
up on the beach at Iwo Jima, from which he
sent me a Japanese rifle and bayonet. I tried
the bolt action and unsheathed the bayonet.
In the soft orange light of our living room, far
from the savage fight, the warm wood and
dark metal gave them the look of farm tools.

3.

This happened to me in Warsaw. I had a crush
on a handsome older boy, a poet who read
Rimbaud and Baudelaire. He finally noticed me
and invited me to a party where everybody was
drinking and smoking dope. I’d never smoked
before. So I was kind of helpless when three of
the other boys grabbed me and started pulling
off my clothes. I called out to him for help, but
he only smiled and began reciting poetry in
French. When they were through with me, he
walked out and left me there among those savages.