THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019 51
are the usual takeout menus and free
newspapers scattered on the tiled floor,
and someone has once again covered
the buzzer panel with stickers adver-
tising a locksmith. “Call Phil,” the
stickers read, again and again. There
must be a hundred of them, or hun-
dreds. Phil everywhere. Constance
reaches into her pocket for her key: a
single key, unadorned. She likes it that
way, though her ex-husband, Luke, is
convinced she’s a fool. You’re a fool!
Luke tells her every time she fishes
her single, silver key out of her pocket.
A fool!
But there’s no key, only a piece of
paper. A list. Folded over and over again
as if top secret, the ink faded though
clearly her mother’s hand. To Do, it
reads: bleach; yarn; Q-tips?; blueber-
ries?; call Constance; organize girls;
ask William.“What did I miss?” her mother wants
to know. She lies in bed eating the but-
tered toast Constance has delivered on
a tray. There are smells here beyond the
homey toast, her mother’s smells, and
the cold smell of the big black tele-phone next to the bed where her mother
and father sleep, lying straight and still,
side by side. Her mother’s clothes are
lined in the closet by color, her sweat-
ers zipped into mothproof bags; and in
the third drawer, behind the box with
her mother’s rings and pearls, the bot-
tle of gin Constance found foraging
for cigarettes weeks earlier. She had
swigged some for good measure, then
poured most of it down the drain in
the master bathroom, the counter clut-
tered with her mother’s makeup and
perfumes, the mirror smudged in places
as if her mother had pressed her face
too close to the glass.
“Nothing,” Constance says. She has
played her match, returning straight
home. Somewhere between here and
the club she saw a flattened armadillo,
its splintered shell streaked with brown
blood. Someone must have dragged it
to the dirt. She stinks of sweat dried to
salt: if you licked her you could survive
for a while but not forever. She has won
her match in straight sets. In fact, the
few onlookers, other girls’ mothers,
said they had never seen Constance
serve so well: Constance playing as if
her life depended on it. Her opponent,
a taller, older girl named Macy Lev-
itt, her glasses hooked with a needle-
point band, thought at first that Con-
stance wasn’t Constance at all, that
somehow, in the time between now
and before, Constance had been re-
placed with a different Constance, not
the Constance Macy Levitt knew from
the past but a Constance from some
distant, Amazonian tribe.- “So you’re the famous Phil,” Constance
says. He’s arrived as promised, driving
up in his big truck as if this were the
country, idling for a while, the truck’s
headlights illuminating her, casting
glare and shadow on the glass door,
the frozen courtyard, the withered
rhododendron.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Phil says, pulling out
a ring of keys, a bowling ball of keys.
“Good to meet you,” she says.
“Same,” he says.
Phil is stunningly handsome. She
wouldn’t have predicted it at all, but the
world turns in mysterious ways, as her
mother would have said. Her mother
would also have said, “There but for the
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALS
They were a restless tribe.
They did not sit in sunlight, eating grapes together in the afternoon.Cloud-watching among them was considered a disgusting waste of time.They passed the days in an activity they called “thought-provoking,”
as if thought were an animal, and they used long sticksto poke through the bars of its cage,
tormenting and arousing thinking into strange behaviors.This was their religion.
That and the light shining through the stained-glass ancestors.They preferred the name of the tree
to the taste of the apple.I was young and I wanted to prove myself,but the words I learned from them transmuted me.
By the time I noticed, the change had already occurred.It is impossible to say if this was bad.Inevitably, you find out you are lost, really lost;
blind, really blind;
stupid, really stupid;
dry, really dry;
hungry, really hungry;
and you go on from there.But then you also find
you can’t stop thinking, thinking, thinking;tormenting, and talking to yourself.—Tony Hoagland
(1953-2018)