Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates & Elaine Showalter
Author:Joyce Carol Oates & Elaine Showalter [Joyce Carol Oates & Elaine Showalter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780812976540
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2006-09-12T10:03:32.394000+00:00
4
Gregory Hofstadter was in oil and rarely seen. He flew everywhere, dined with princes and premiers; there is a photograph of him in Gus-tave's room, riding in a jeep across ice-cream-smooth slopes of sand in the company of fierce white-clothed Arabs! What a father! He traveled third-class and slept with vermin, just for fun; he made a religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he had an audience (in a group of six) with the Pope, he snapped a picture of Khrushchev when Khrushchev was in Berlin, and Khrushchev seems to be waving at him! He went surfing out in California, in early May, and the Premier of Bongata ferried him about in a gigantic yacht one August; he was a regular guest at Saari's villa on the Italian Riviera, and I heard him talk animatedly with Father about just what electronic music was striving for: he had been in a special audience, including Queen Elizabeth, treated to the premiere of “Symphony for Silence” by Baxterhouse.
He took Gustave and Gustave's cousin and me all the way downtown to a concert, which was held in an expensive, modern, concrete-block auditorium at the very center of the city. Though the city was being rebuilt, no one went down there anymore; just a few people who had to work there, and misguided tourists. But no women ventured into the city because why should they? Why, indeed! All you will find in the city is streets littered with papers, wrappers, dirt, grit, spit, bloody phlegm coughed up by bums, and on the blowy park benches the bums themselves looking humble and malicious in their shabby clothes. (“And each one of them a pervert,” Gregory Hofstadter said in a cheerful, angry voice to us children.) No “Ladies Day” at the local theaters can lure our lovely mothers down to this squalor! Do they care if they can get in for fifty cents, or if a ripple-haired movie star will be on stage in person? They don't give a damn and they are absolutely right. Gregory Hofstadter swore at the congested traffic and blew his nose, waiting for a light to change, as if he had to get rid of his nervous energy somehow.
“I hope this trio or whatever it is is good,” he said to Gustave. “We're going to a lot of trouble to get down here.”
Gustave sat up front with his father, and Maureen and I sat in back. Maureen had pale, sharp-boned cheeks, a very pretty pink spring coat; she was Gustave's age, two years older than I. She played the piano and the harp, Gustave said. She attended Miss Chote's School for Girls, a most exclusive and expensive school in Fernwood Heights, whose students were the sisters and cousins of the Johns Behemoth boys.
Mr. Hofstadter was having trouble because if he got in the right lane, cars ahead of him would slow to make right turns. If he lurched over into the left lane, swearing under his breath, the car ahead of him always paused to make a very slow, creaky left turn.
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