“Mae” by Virginia Reeves

Excerpt:

Jennifer wakes to the cat vomiting. The sound makes Stephen, the man trying to prove his potential as her kids’ fill-in father, jump out of bed like he did when the neighbor kids lit firecrackers in the alley—like trouble, something to reckon with. He’s naked, and she tries to swallow the slight nausea she always feels at the sight of naked men—even beautiful naked men, which this one might be said to be, by some.

“It’s the cat,” she says. “She always vomits when I refill her food bowl; she’s the binge-and-purge type.”

He laughs, like he does, at her wit, an unsure laugh that says, I’m not sure that I get it, but I’m good-humored, so understand that I want to get it. I’m trying really hard to get it.

He’s already pulling on his shorts and t-shirt. He’s careful not to let the kids see him without clothes—”Wouldn’t want to give them the wrong idea,” he says.

“Right,” she says back, “Wouldn’t want to give them the right idea.”

“Can I find something under the sink to clean it up with?” he asks.

She nods into her pillow, rolling away to cover her nose, the smell bringing back her nausea. She hates the cat, always has, but it was her husband’s before he’d met her, the other woman, they used to joke, and now such a source of displaced love that to get rid of the thing would be unimaginable. The cat is getting old, too—ribs like rebar under her thick coat, fur left in clumps on the bathmat, teeth discarded in corners—an incisor in her son’s closet, an indescribable chip by her daughter’s bookshelf. She both fears and welcomes the cat’s death. Fear for her children, welcome to quiet mornings, an absence of hair stuck to her wet, clean feet every time she steps from the shower.

Read the whole thing at 42 opus.

“Le jour où j’ai commencé à écrire” by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Excerpt

J’ai oublié l’heure exacte du jour précis où j’ai pris la décision de commencer à écrire, mais cette heure existe, et ce jour existe, cette décision, la décision de commencer à écrire, je l’ai prise brusquement, dans un bus, entre la place de la République et la place de la Bastille. Je n’ai plus la moindre idée de ce que j’avais fait auparavant ce jour-là, car, dans mon souvenir, à cette journée réelle de septembre ou d’octobre 1979 où j’ai commencé à écrire se mêle le souvenir du premier paragraphe du livre que j’ai écrit, qui racontait comment un homme qui se promenait dans une rue ensoleillée se souvenait du jour où il avait découvert le jeu d’échecs, livre qui commençait, je m’en souviens très bien, c’est la première phrase que j’ai jamais écrite, par : “C’est un peu par hasard que j’ai découvert le jeu d’échecs.” Ce que je sais avec plus de certitude, le souvenir se précise maintenant davantage, c’est que, rentré chez moi ce jour-là, ce lundi-là, je ne sais si c’était vraiment un lundi, mais il me plaît en tout cas de le croire (j’ai toujours éprouvé un petit penchant naturel pour le lundi), j’ai écrit la première phrase de mon premier livre dans ma chambre de la rue des Tournelles, dos à la porte, en face du mur. J’ai écrit la première version de ce livre en un mois, sur une vieille machine à écrire (et, comme je ne savais pas encore taper à la machine, je progressais avec deux doigts, maladroitement : en même temps que j’écrivais, j’apprenais à taper à la machine).

Read everything here:  Jean-Philippe Toussaint : Le jour où j’ai commencé à écrire.

Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues” (NYRB)

Excerpt:

My own childhood had been the story of this and that combined, of the synthesis of disparate things. It never occurred to me that I was leaving the London district of Willesden for Cambridge. I thought I was adding Cambridge to Willesden, this new way of talking to that old way. Adding a new kind of knowledge to a different kind I already had. And for a while, that’s how it was: at home, during the holidays, I spoke with my old voice, and in the old voice seemed to feel and speak things that I couldn’t express in college, and vice versa. I felt a sort of wonder at the flexibility of the thing. Like being alive twice.

But flexibility is something that requires work if it is to be maintained. Recently my double voice has deserted me for a single one, reflecting the smaller world into which my work has led me. Willesden was a big, colorful, working-class sea; Cambridge was a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the culture warns against it! As George Bernard Shaw delicately put it in his preface to the play Pygmalion, “many thousands of [British] men and women…have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue.”

Few, though, will admit to it. Voice adaptation is still the original British sin. Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases. If you lean toward the Atlantic with your high-rising terminals you’re a sell-out; if you pronounce borrowed European words in their original style—even if you try something as innocent asparmigiano for “parmesan”—you’re a fraud. If you go (metaphorically speaking) down the British class scale, you’ve gone from Cockney to “mockney,” and can expect a public tar and feathering; to go the other way is to perform an unforgivable act of class betrayal. Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular. There’s no quicker way to insult an ex-pat Scotsman in London than to tell him he’s lost his accent. We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.

Read the whole thing.