Free The Apprentice Lover by Jay Parini Page A

sort of info I really want to know, like who in my high school class got knocked up and had to ring the wedding bells. Not me, I tell you. I’m not going home, not to Luzerne County. That’s history. It’s funny how clear you can see things from a distance. I recommend it, though you might think of Paris, not Saigon, as about the right sort of distance. You think about home in ways you never could when it’s right around the corner, or in your face.
    I could have chucked it, the war thing. Gone to Canada like Buzz Mooney or shattered my pinkie toe with a jackhammer like Benny Dixon’s cousin from Nanticoke. Some days I think I should have pinched the doctor’s butt at the physical or just walked into the exam with a real hard-on and started jerking off on the spot. Guys do that kind of shit, and it works. But I made a decision. Just do it. Go to the fucking war.
    Sometimes you just got to do something. Whatever it is, you got to make it happen, goddamn it. Make it happen. You do what you got to do, Asshole. And you do it well.
    Hey, enough philosophy for one letter. War turns you philosophical, they say. Eddie claims there is more philosophy in this platoon per square inch than at Harvard and Yale, and I swear he’s right. You should hear some of this shit. If you’re lucky, maybe I’ll pass along some of the good stuff, and maybe someday it will mean something to you. Then again, maybe it won’t.
    So write me, Asshole, when you can take a minute off from slapping your dick around. I don’t know why I’d like to hear from you, since you’re a prick and always were, but I would.
    Your Big Bro in Lotus Land,
Nicky

five
    M aria Pia pointed in the direction of Grant’s study. “He is expecting you,” she said, in the local dialetto . Given her tone and expression, she might well have said, “He will cut off your prick if you disturb him, but be my guest.”
    I knocked softly.
    â€œIndeed,” he shouted.
    Indeed? I leaned close to the door, then knocked again.
    â€œLorenzo, I’m waiting.”
    He was slumped in a leather chair, wearing his wire-rimmed reading glasses. La Stampa was open on his lap, and a glass of neat whiskey lay half drunk on the table beside him. His white, voluminous hair stood up like a coxcomb, complemented by frothy eyebrows that seemed to move independently of each other. “So you like to swim,” he said. “I didn’t wait for you to come ashore.”
    I felt guilty. “Were you expecting me sooner?”
    â€œYes,” he said, “but no matter. I will get Maria Pia to bring us tea, unless you’d rather whiskey?”
    â€œTea is fine.”
    â€œGood. Sit down.”
    While he was gone, I scanned the room. The wooden desk was a trestle table that faced out from the wall, smothered in scraps of paper. A fountain pen lay beside a pot of India ink, and I remembered that the two letters he’d sent me were elegantly scripted, not sloppily typed orscratched in ballpoint. A dagger—unsheathed—glimmered beside the inkpot; it had a carved ivory handle. On the opposite wall were marks in a wooden board, the signs of target practice.
    There was a colorful map of the ancient world beside the board, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases on the other walls that supported an extremely old set of the Encyclopedia Britannica ; below it, the New York edition of Henry James vied for attention with a handsome set of Balzac in purple cloth bindings. Odd volumes of the Temple Shakespeare scattered among other books. One shelf was devoted to Italian novelists and poets, most of them fairly recent: Eugenio Montale, Ignazio Silone, Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi. Moravia was there in abundance. Gore Vidal’s Julian nestled beside I, Claudius . There was a nice run of Graham Greene in what looked like first editions. (As I soon learned, most of them were signed by Greene, who had spent a part of each year in