Free In Partial Disgrace by Joshua Cohen, Charles Newman

and are therefore superior.” He also believed that the greatest gift you can give another person is self-control, and that the ability of men to hide their thoughts went largely unappreciated by women.
    Life for him was clearly a beautiful woman on a beautiful horse led by a beautiful dog, and he felt the only possible justification for something as unattractive and exceptional as a grown man was that by wizardry and chivalry he might keep these unlike animals together in a parade—that gentleman’s paradise: tenderness without loyalty, violence without strife.
    His male acquaintances found it strange that such an energetic man did not chafe in a house under female ownership, particularly given the airy standards of my mother, for married life was certainly nothing like a ballerina on a circus horse, but rather more a warren of untrained animals and mentally ill clowns. They also thought it imprudent for him to reinvest all of his earnings into the maintenance of a property which for all its strange beauty and uniqueness, had for a century been a wasting asset, producing less income each year. (Indeed, the whole of Cannonia would have doubled in market value had they shut down every single farm and factory.)
    My father was a triple functionary—attorney, village notary, and investment counselor—with a triple soul: conservative, liberal, and left wing. He was not hard to fathom, not so much a giant of a man as three hard, distinct men who fought spiritedly among themselves. He was a worldly concrete man, adept at finance, ball games, and sex, contemptuous of politics and religion, but a spy for the spiritual, a secret agent for the sacred. He believed sincerely that his function was to play prime minister to the queen, bluff front man for the skeptical muse, to extract money from the real economy and cheerfully recirculate it into the inefficient, living part of the culture. As such, he objectively failed at everything except the high drama of marriage and as fiduciary for other people’s money. But it was in the fourth dimension of Dogmeister Supreme, Hauptzuchtwart of Semper Vero and Master of Our Floating World, where Father truly shone, and scattered the heaped-up mountains with the simplest of gestures. A man is nothing but a handful of irrational enthusiasms, and nothing in this world can be understood apart from them.
    Yes, my father was an oral man, a primary type, who could not resist a smoke, a vowel, a puff, a sentence, a sweet, a scotch, a song, a smooch. Breathing, after all, was no less a project because it was involuntary, and the intervals between the breaths also required justification and refinement. This attitude, more than any gustatory prowess, accounted for Father’s eating habits, which went far beyond gourmet or even the gourmand.
    Family meals in Father’s view were an especial kind of torture, a fact borne out by his observation of the dogs when they were fed in the same cell. There, the bitches inevitably lost their appetite or became more aggressive, barking out commands which fell on deaf ears, though requiring ever sharpening levels of feigned attention from the brood. The sires sat proudly, horrified to eat from the same bowl as their progeny, insensitive to the alleged thrill of watching newborns masticate, and trying pathetically to nose their own dishes into a corner where they could be defended. When they were half-grown, the dogs ate just as sloppily, gulping their food without tasting it, and reverting to the pecking order they had displayed as puppies; indeed the same dogs who shoved each other out of the way at eight weeks continued to do so at eight years.
    A line seemed to be crossed at our meals, from wonder to pride to habituation to vague resentment and finally colic. There was nothing like a repast to bring out the hierarchies that everyday activities so successfully blurred and dispelled, and Father came to believe that a true family could be kept together only by avoiding