The bride, however, never seemed much interested in the groom as a “Kennedy.” If the bride was impressed by the name, that day they met in Washington Park and all the days thereafter, she never talked about it. The bride was a serious and moral woman, not easily wowed. She was also a woman who acquired (by the way), in the period of years in which the groom loved her, an incredible, inflationary beauty, and the groom just wants to mention that here and to put it here in words in case either of them forgets it. The truth is, she stunned the groom whenever he saw her. I mean whenever he saw her. Just the simple fact of her. Whenever she came into one room from another room. For example, stepping out of the kitchenette in Pine Hills with a plate of scrambled eggs. The groom was in love with her. That was no lie. And when he was in love with her, a minute no longer seemed like the means to an hour. Rather, each minute was an end in itself, a stillness with vague circularity, a gently suggested territory in which to be alive. This trick that love did with minutes endowed hours and days with a kind of transcendent wishy-washiness that encouraged an utter lack of ambition in the groom and was the closest thing he had ever felt to true joy, to true relief, and he still wonders what would have happened if they could have kept up with it, if they could have stayed in love like that, if maybe they could have crawled through a wormhole to a place where their love could find permanence. Because in the end, the great warring forces of our existence are not life versus death (the groom has come to believe), but rather love versus time. In the majority, love does not survive time’s passage. But sometimes it does. It must, sometimes.
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1 What is a pause? For the purposes of this document I will restrict my answer to conversational interaction only, in which a pause is a cessation of speech between two or more participants (not, for example, a moment of counterargument during one’s solitary existential inner monologue in the bathtub). Compared to a silence, a pause is briefer, a kind of baby silence—the sort of hesitation that occurs while one is fishing for the proper way to put a thing, for example. Or when one is reflecting upon what one just said with a measure of criticism or regret. Or when one is distracted by a second subject or a loud noise but wants to appear thoughtful. Nobody asked me, but I would personally time a pause at two to three seconds in duration. It may be true that pauses are, at least historically, second-rate silences, whereas silences—those yawning spans of time in which the heart sinks, the mouth dries, the truth dawns—are infinitely more consequential and worthy of study. However, this writer maintains that both pauses and silences may be what the theorist and mother of pausology Zofia Dudek calls functionally deficient (i.e., a nothing that is a something). Both are worthy of study and attention.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Birthday
You
Tecumseh
Sold
Family Happiness
End of Discussion
A Special Arrangement
Barbecue
Extravagance
Pretending
The Next Life
Part Two
Emergency
Life Like Bread
Gratitude
True Stories
Dumbwaiter
Half Asleep
The Thing that Haunts You
A Life with Dragons
Special Glass
Nude Travel
Bounty
It Buries Us
Flashes of You
Fever
Open Sea
On Fire but Not Burning
The Accidentalist
Pink Elephant
The Damage
Grief
Rain
About the Author
Also by Amity Gaige
Acclaim for Amity Gaige’s Novels
A Preview of Schroder
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Amity Gaige
Excerpt from Schroder copyright © 2013 by Amity Gaige
Cover design by Catherine Casalino.
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Twelve
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Originally published in hardcover by Other Press
First ebook edition: October 2013
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Two excerpts from this novel were first published in altered forms by Epoch—1999 (Vol. 48, No. 3) and 2001 (Vol. 50, No. 1)—for which permission is gratefully acknowledged.
ISBN 978-1-4555-5357-0