Free Glass Grapes by Martha Ronk Page B

phrases and his words of American slang, albeit with a slight but pronounced accent. He sees the narrator looking at her and then at him and he accords her a quizzical if fleeting moment of attention as if he were noting the pressure of her overt attention. Paola laughs easily as if the efforts on his side were only communal and not at all meant, as the narrator is sure they are meant, for her.
    He calls her a cultural geisha, his only and always public acknowledgment of her gifts; Paola speaks to him only of office arrangements, train schedules, and the abroad students, knowing that these are the absolute arrows to his heart. What the narrator has to come to try to see is whether their behavior is a philosophical choice or a moral failing. And to whom would it make a difference? Certainly not to the narrator, since it has nothing to do with her, but to anyone? And if the narrator is drawn ever more powerfully to the man, for what reason could it be except to state the obvious, to bring into the open all that is, not hidden from anyone since everyone knows even if no one speaks of it, including the almost totally self-involved student who burns her arms with cigarettes and weeps into the night. So, the question becomes whether the narrator knows that someone will be hurt and who that someone will be. She must come to recognize the crudeness of her own responses, knowing as she does the sexual odor coming off Paola’s clothes and squirminess of the men smoking cigars at the back of the café.
    If the narrator becomes the interpreter of events between the man and the woman, what does that mean except that they have maneuvered her, without lifting a finger, only counting on her pallor and paranoia, into a position that they had not even dared to hope for and have, therefore, a witness which neither one of them is willing to be and which makes their affair not more but less real, for the very unreliability of the witness, and also, somehow, protected.
    Like a person without a reflection, each needs another sort of person to be a witness, which is why the narrator is useful to them and perhaps why the affair ultimately fails or is able, depending on the complicity of the narrator and her ability to dampen her own ardor and to become, devotedly, the third point in the triangle, to go on unacknowledged for quite some time.

My Son and the Bicycle Wheel
    In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. . . . It was around that time that the word “Readymade” came to mind to designate this form of manifestation. A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these “Readymades” was never dictated by aesthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference.
    â€”Marcel Duchamp
    He said, my son said, you just don’t get it, I’m not like you. What does it mean, I’m not like you. I think differently, act differently, move about differently, don’t like you, can’t stand you and what about the waver in both our voices when we come to this point in the conversation. A street sign: Go Left or None of Your Business. That could be it, I’m asking too many questions as usual and interfering in his life, of course.
    You’d get on with them, he says, you’re like them, but I don’t. I couldn’t do it, work there I mean or anything.I can’t adopt the pose, manage the portfolio, stand at attention and besides they think I’m weird. You don’t see me, but they do and they know I don’t fit in. You’d fit in, he says it again, you would, because it’s where you went to school and everything, but not me and I don’t want to anyhow.
    It’s a hot day and growing hotter and I hate talking on the telephone when I’m late and it seems I’m always late when he calls with something important to say.
    He makes up stories. Sometimes when he’s talking I am back in