Free Cast in Doubt by Lynne Tillman

probably hate their becoming lovers. I should hate it also if she got on with Roger, and so I immediately amend my letter to include a shovelful of dirt aimed his way. I believe Gwen knew Stephen the Hermit; but he’s so rarely in sight these days, I needn’t mention him. And Duncan is back in England, falling in love over and over, I suppose. God, what if she liked South African Wallace, and what if she went to bed with him, just to spite me; but I will not put one more negative comment in this letter, as I want her to visit me. I ought not put her off by portraying a scene filled with lunatics and failures. I give the letter to Yannis to mail immediately, express. It will reach her in no time. I will also telephone her. That will speed her to me.
    The clippings Gwen mails me are like aspects of her, small pieces of her. André Malraux’s book
Lazarus
sounds interesting. A meditation on death, the review says; I suppose Gwen has read it already. She keeps up with everything, and the subject of death fits her mordant humor, as it does mine. I see that a Dr. Christiaan Barnard has done a twin-heart operation. There’s a CIA file on Eartha Kitt, of all people, because she yelled at LBJ’s wife at a dinner party in 1968. She yelled about our boys’ being sent to be murdered. Good for her. I would have liked to have been there.
    They ought to hire Roger for the CIA, he’d be perfect, a perfect architect for intrigue. He was furious when we lost the war in Vietnam. We didn’t lose it, he bleated, we gave it away! I lorded it over him that our Kissingers ultimately had to bow low to tiny Vietnam. I could just imagine all those beefy military men in their uniforms, with stars on their chests, stunned and helpless, like octopuses lying on the harbor, gasping their last breaths. So many discussions with Roger about the parallels with Great Britain, when it lost its empire, and how he foresaw the end of Western civilization! I answered, if the U.S. is the last outpost of the West, then good riddance to it. I don’t entirely mean that. After all, I am of the West. But what will come next? Sometimes I am glad to be old.
    I believe I am patriotic in my fashion. I certainly wouldn’t dupe my government and the people the way Nixon did. Power to the People indeed. Perhaps now our masculine American men will develop the self-deprecating humor Englishmen display so effortlessly. It charmed me when Duncan used to say he was so hopeless he couldn’t organize lunch. One couldn’t imagine an American man professing to hopelessness, to helplessness. I miss Duncan. I may even seek out the hermit Stephen; he’s somewhere not that far from here, I heard, in the mountains. Perhaps he is in Mátala, living the life of a hippie. I believe the hippies are still there, in those caves. I couldn’t live in a cave. Why on earth would one want to?
    Alone, unencumbered by Yannis’ incredulous or contemptuous gaze, I raise my hand and clench it into a fist, making a Black Power salute, which I would never do in public. It’s odd, these kinds of desires. And the things one does alone in a room that one would never do in company. My arthritis doesn’t allow me to close my hand fully, the index finger won’t flatten, the pinky pokes up, and my hand flops open again. I lie down on the bed, my bones creaking. I’ve had creaking bones all my life. I never had a middle age, I went from twenty to sixty. In a sense, I’m used to being old. I like to imagine I take it in stride, that it is my stride, in fact.
    I had my moments—raving with Gwen around New York and Cambridge years ago—and still do from time to time. But deep inside me lives a prim, elderly man, and sometimes a woman, like my mother or one of my aunts, or a combination of both, who constantly shakes this head of mine from side to side, as if to say, Oh, no, not that, and oh no, you can’t do that, and none of the family ever did, and so on.
    At the time they were popular I couldn’t