Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

Late that night Nordstrom found himself sleepless because he hadn't had his two hours of dancing. He had enjoyed the ballet but he was losing what little of the spectator was left in him: he was becoming an amateur in the true sense—one who loved the doing, and had the beginner's openness about life that had been lost for transparent reasons since his childhood. Now in the middle of energetic insomnia he knew that he couldn't turn on the stereo at three A.M. because Sonia and Phillip were sleeping. He got up and tiptoed into the den in his pajama bottoms and danced an hour without music, hearing only a clock ticking and the shuffle of his bare feet on the carpet.

Feb. 17, 78: Have been planning this long trip for after I resign to include both S. America and Africa. Startling how close Rio is to Dakar. Desk covered with atlases, maps from National Geographic, guidebooks for a month now, but the energy is fast disappearing. Why should I want to know the strange when I am ignorant of the familiar. Really noticed my ankle the other morning for the first time in years. I like the crow on the cover of The Grateful Dead album but it is very difficult music to dance to. I bought a parka and snowmobile boots from a sporting goods store on Boylston and have been walking a great deal after work. The snow is wonderful this year despite the occasional near paralysis of the city. Between five and eight is the best time to walk. First the electric urge for people to get home from work, then the dinner silence and then the people going out for the evening. Have spent a great deal of time helping people get unstuck from their parking places. Wisconsin makes one an expert on snow and getting unstuck. Old man and wife buried in their Chrysler which I shoveled out as he was gasping, then rocked the car until it came free. He gave me a five-dollar bill refusing to take it back. He said it was for "a hot supper and a few drinks." Gave it to a bum a few blocks farther on. Bought a dozen Hawaiian shirts off the rack at Jordan Marsh for the trip I perhaps have lost interest in though I told the travel agent to go ahead. Always thought them in bad taste but now I like the silken feeling, strange colors though I haven't worn one out of the apartment not finding an occasion to do so. Have come to think in my cooking of the new cuisine minceur as narcissistic and partly silly though a few good ideas. People could eat what they chose if they did not ignore pushing their bodies a bit. Since dancing my belt has gone down two notches. Closely studied a flounder I filleted so as to get further sense of what I was eating. Fragile pearl-colored bones, spine in which through a filament of paste, the fish's body receives instruction from its tiny brain. Swim there and there and there. Wonder what he had seen in his watery life. Made a small court bouillon so as not to waste this carcass which had assumed outsize importance by the time I finished studying it. Then I cooked a handful of vermicelli in the stock and had it for a snack after dancing. Had a streak of tripe this week as I bought too much by the butcher's mistake: tripe Milanese, menudo —Mexican tripe stew—then the justly famed tripe à la mode de Caen. Old man in shipping department has cancer of liver so have put through an authorization for a bonus as he wants to die in his birthplace in Galway, Ireland, where his mother still lives. My own mother wrote to say she is getting along fine and her cousin, also widowed, is moving in. She said she had a fine letter from Laura. Got a hard-on in a taxi thinking about Laura's butt, more picturing it than thinking. She had small breasts but was justly vain about her legs and butt. How clearly I remember her Debussy dance so many years ago in the hot gymnasium. It takes my breath away now but there is no bitterness. I have been having some intuitions about sex though ill formed as a whole. For instance I saw the movie Pretty Baby and though the girl is a superb beauty it was her mother that owned sexual appeal. It is the life unlived that makes men want so young a girl. To be twelve and thirteen, be careless and silly, with floppy grace. The world at face is so frightening no wonder. She becomes her mother in a night. I longed so often for that girl at the kitchen sink in Marblehead but it is the nature of such things not to return. For instance Ms. Dietrich as she chooses to be called is married to a city planner, childless, in her mid-thirties and my executive secretary though she could easily run the company. Last Thursday we did a twelve-hour day to prepare for audit, the last three hours at the apartment after I prepared a light dinner. It was hard and tedious work and afterward we drank a bottle of Korbel champagne to ease our sore necks and eyes. I have known this woman closely for three years but was startled by the effect of the wine on her. She wept and said she was crying for me because Jews had taken both my wife and daughter. So shocking it was funny and I said now, now Ms. Dietrich that's utter nonsense. She embraced me and then I knew that she wanted to tumble, and though she is a little chubby to be my type, I thought to myself why not. So we carried on at some length and once when we were up and down on each other I "awoke" with a start when I was looking plainly at her bottom and I said to myself "this is reality." The sensation lasted acutely for several days. And like the feeling when I was roasting the lamb last summer I decided not to doubt it as it seems to me that doubt is often an example of self-pity, a kind of whining about existence. Poor pitiful me, and that rot. Henry did not doubt that he could help my father into death, open the gate for him and shake his hand as he entered nothingness or whatever on earth eternity is. I don't read books on mystical matters as, like Lutherans, special powers are ascribed. My dealings in Tokyo with Orientals do not lead me to think they are any different from us. Henry is one Indian among a hundred sorry ones I have known. He gave me a turtle claw. It was wonderfully funny at the office when Ms. Dietrich pretended nothing had happened, all rather Germanic. Intimacies can be frightening in the light of day. As on the walk after I was lost and then found the gravel road, I'd been thinking solidly of giving up money and power. I would rather make an omelette. When I was young and had to hoe the garden or dig a garbage hole I would resent it and then get lost in doing these things for hours. Ms. Dietrich is so self-conscious because she is trying to be Ms. Dietrich every minute. Like Phillip trying to be unique and doing so by this stream of talk as if he would vanish if he stopped talking. How strange we all are. One minute we're laboring over the accounts and the next moment we're chewing on each other's bodies like dogs. Or bears. Henry and Father once saw two bears make love across a lake in Canada through binoculars. Read the other day that whales commit homosexual acts.

Spring proved to be obnoxiously difficult for Nordstrom. It was incredibly complicated for him to resign his job. The owners of the company were a family of New Hampshire aristocrats, crankish Yankees who plainly didn't want to be abandoned by their managerial wunderkind. They offered everything and when their largess was refused they grew resentful. It was even more difficult and confusing to give away the money. Sonia didn't want it and his mother was hysterical. The E.F. Hutton man insisted he see a psychiatrist and Nordstrom readily agreed out of curiosity and his understanding that, to others, he was committing an outrageous act. His mother's tearful attitude was that he had worked so hard all his life for the money. The broker went to New York to see Sonia, hoping that she could make her father behave sensibly. Sonia came to Boston and they had lunch with the broker whom Nordstrom actually had a great deal of respect for. But Nordstrom was diffident and ended up convincing them later that afternoon by giving twenty-five grand to the National Audubon Society though he had no special fascination for birds. He liked to watch shorebirds by the hour on weekends near Ipswich but wasn't curious about the names given them. When he saw a particular species the second time he would remember the first time he saw it. That saved him from having to carry around a birdbook.