Free Twice Told Tales by Daniel Stern Page A

father in New York—he was at least seventy-five and he has an older brother.”
    To make matters worse he showed me the obituary in the International Herald Tribune, which told us all that Noah had “passed away” after a long illness. (He would have been amused at the euphemism—“Which way,” he would ask with bursting bladder at a first-time bar, “to the euphemism?”) I was glad of this last, strangely, because I’d sometimes been afraid of a much more abrupt end for Noah. He had, after all, come apart that night in Chasen’s and had cast himself as the older waiter in the Hemingway story, the waiter who had sympathy for the suicidal old man. But, infantile insomnia notwithstanding, Noah went a draftee not a volunteer into the army of Death.
    The German producer went on and on; he knew Noah well, it seemed. He even knew that the scar had a story; only, after dinner and after being joined by a beautiful young woman, thin-boned arched nose, a woman who listened with intent gray eyes, she seemed as delicate as the man was gross, and after a certain amount of wine it seemed that his story of the scar was entirely different, no anti-Semitic sergeant, something about a poker game and an accusation of cheating and a fight and being sent home before the Battle of the Bulge, the last part matched all right.
    Back in the hotel lobby, formica tables and fluorescent lighting, sterile, successful, relentlessly international, over a fresh, clean-tasting Poire eau de vie, I tuned him out; all I could think to do was recite to myself Noah’s and Hemingway’s parody of the Lord’s Prayer, Our nada which art in Nada, nada be thy name …
    And I felt the weight of years, of months, of minutes whose foolish nature was simply to pass, felt this along with a weird joy at the moments still to come. It was late at night and the woman was gazing at me sympathetically while the producer kept alternating reminiscences of Noah with pieces of the film deal. “I never met your friend,” she said in some accent I could not place, “but I am sorry.”
    I would have liked to have dumped the man and spent the rest of the time telling the beautiful young woman with sympathetic, oriental eyes about my hopeless attempt to write stories so that one of them could be mine and would be my place and how that had not worked out, which was why I was listening to her friend or lover talk death and deals alternately in Florence.
    Instead, before the evening finished I hit the German producer—hit him for no other reasons than that I wished to believe that Noah had refused to tell the sergeant that he was not Jewish, gaining a scar and an end to his war in the process; that I wished to believe that the men in Noah’s family died young and that Noah’s sense of doom had some roots in reality, which did not seem to be so, hit the innocent German producer for no more sensible reasons than that Noah was dead before his time, and that I had lost any place I might have had, and the German producer was in Florence with a woman who looked like a woman I could have been happy with.
    At least for a time, which is not a small point, not nada since apparently what we spend in bars, clean, well-lighted, or otherwise, apparently what we spend everywhere is not money, stolen or earned, not energy, not talent, not love, but ourselves.

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
a story

I PUT THE LITTLE book down on his desk. It was hard to find a place for it; there were hundreds of loose manuscript pages, books, bound galleys, copies of Publisher’s Weekly, letters from God knows who all squashed for an inch of space on that desk.
    I noticed how gently I placed it there, even though I’d planned to rage in like a storm. Gideon did that to me; I don’t know why. I didn’t like that in myself, being so careful with a cripple.
    “Why’d you give me that book?”
    “I thought it might help.”
    “If you didn’t think I could write the book why’d you sign it