Gravity's Revolt: Part Four: Part Four

GRAVITY’S

REVOLT:

PART FOUR

Part Four

William Guy

Copyright © 2000 by William Guy.

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Contents

CHAPTER SIX

INTERLUDE: HAL

CHAPTER SEVEN

For G., without whom absolutely nothing

CHAPTER SIX

The separation from Becky, the trial-run separation that is (as opposed to the real thing which would come when she went off to Radcliffe about a month and a half later) was only four weeks in duration, and yet even at the very moment when it was ending and we were being re-united with her, I knew that the relationship which once obtained among the three of us had already lost something which it would never regain, some innocence perhaps, if I may be permitted the rather audacious use of that word which, in the minds of some I’m sure, the nature of my sexual involvement with Becky will no doubt long since have precluded—in fact the feeling I experienced when I emerged from the rickety two-engine prop-plane (straight out of the last scene in Casablanca) which had carried us from the airport at Boston across Massachusetts Bay to a landing-strip on Cape Cod and saw suntanned Becky, wearing a grey sweater and enticingly tight faded blue jeans, barefoot to boot in the wind-whipped grey air against the tawny dunes beside her brother George behind a fence waiting to greet us as her arriving house-guests, was one of instant doom—

It was the sickness of the smile on Becky’s face that prompted this feeling of doom, that drove it into my psyche like a jaggèd splinter of glass up into the sole of a foot, the sickness of the smile and the strange, the sidewise, almost squinch-eyed way she seemed to look at us, or the way she seemed to be looking off into the distance sickly so as not to have to look directly at us from too much disgust as we got out of the plane—this sick expression may have lasted for only a moment, in fact it did change in the brief time it took me to look down and locate the steps by which to disembark from the plane and then to look back up and find our not too distant greeters once again—I had first seen Becky, and she had first seen me, I am convinced, and she had tellingly reacted, involuntarily, just as I emerged from the door—by the time that I was safely descending the little red shoebox of stairs that the airline’s attendants had provided us, its clients, with, Becky had somehow recovered for the nonce at least, she had become all appropriate feigned waves and friendly laughter, the gorgeous teeth were gleaming in the bronzed face, the unruly sun-streaked hair was being tucked back behind her ears in that habitual gesture of hers, and as we drew near the fence, the high-pitched sound of pseudo-delight was being emitted, the familiar purring, cooing sound which Becky threw like some ventriloquist, and arms to hug us were being extended across the chain-link barrier, kisses suitably decorous for viewing by George (even though supposedly he knew), i.e. cheek-pecks, were being exchanged—that first curdled expression on Becky’s face had gotten quickly stirred over, stirred back down into the brew of bubbly greetings—

But I can see now that it had foreshadowed all, the whole unraveling which it would take us one more month to achieve in time, and I can also see now that if at this moment I had simply turned my back on Becky, if I had just retreated back up into the airplane for the return trip from Cape Cod to Boston and never spoken to her again, the vastation of our relationship would not have been any more complete than it turned out to be eventually from my having ridden out the next four mostly miserable weeks (although these weeks did have their moments I must add)—the question that naturally arises then from my conviction about this moment, my intuition about what the look on Becky’s face had meant, is What had happened to Becky to turn her so forcibly against us?—

I suppose I should say first of all, as part of any answer that I might be able to make, that she had not turned completely or conclusively against us, that subsequent proximity could not help but revive certain sparks of the old affection and the old attractions that had governed our relationship for so long, but still a difference had arisen, and whatever good times we now enjoyed would seem exceptions—

And of course one thing I must allow for also is the possibility, or rather let’s call it the fact that I, and Vinnie as well, had somehow changed in Becky’s absence, during that interval—he that is giddy thinks the world turns round, he that has cooled slightly in his feelings toward his adolescent lover may tend in large part, from guilt perhaps at turning against the one who has pleased him so much in the past, to try to project that cooled-off feeling out on to her, to look for signs of his own disillusionment as coming from her instead—I would not be able to deny that I had seen certain advantages in having Becky away, i.e. in having her out of my life for awhile—the amount of work I was able to do once she had left for Colorado amazed even me, one did derive almost a certain joy in the knowledge that one could spend a whole day without distractions from what one wanted to do—not that there didn’t remain certain onerous aspects of my job, not that there weren’t certain kinds of intellectual work which I preferred decidedly to certain other kinds of maybe more menial, clerical work, but just the freedom to at least give my job a fair chance to offer me either satisfaction or disgruntlement without being shunted off to the corner by my preoccupation with Becky, by my being drawn in her direction almost every day, by my re-arranging the day in her favor, constituted an interesting experiment, which I found pleasure in conducting—Vinnie said that she too felt a kind of freedom to work, a freedom to forge ahead on her artistic projects without having to worry that there would be some great new erotic crisis from my quarter interfering with any of them—

In other words, we in our own fashion had not been totally loyal to Becky, at least in thought, so that part of what I saw or suspected I saw on her face that first moment, from the door of the airplane, on the Cape Cod runway, was no doubt colored by some of my own changed feelings—not that, in my case, such changed feelings, such fledgling resolve as to the advisability of an eventual disengagement from Becky perhaps, could stand up too long either against the thought of seeing and maybe touching her again as the time for our reunion grew near or against the fact at last of really seeing her in all the dazzle of her charms, but I would at least not want to imply that doubts or negative feelings about the relationship came solely from her side—they did come significantly from her side I think, but as I have now admitted, not solely—

As for what had altered Becky’s perception of us, it may have been something as simple as her discovery, or her re-discovery, that there was in fact a world of interest and companionship elsewhere, and of an interest and companionship befitting her more fully than her relationship with us did—I of course am having to guess at any thought-process she may have undergone or undertaken while she was away from us, but my guess would be that having fallen in with a bunch of like-minded people her own age as part of her summer job, she must have experienced a release like unto the release into our work which Vinnie and I had experienced once Becky was gone, such release, the bliss of finding her own proper sphere, leading her to ask why she should bother any longer with the difficulties and especially the inferior status, the status of sidekick at best, of plaything at worst, of her relationship with Vinnie and me—

It occurs to me here that I may never have spelled out anywhere in these pages just what Becky’s summer job was or how she had managed to land it—I perhaps ought to backtrack a bit—the reader will recall that when Becky spent a week of her spring vacation visiting Tanya MacLeod on Cape Cod, there was some talk, some hope that the two of them might manage to find jobs for the following summer there—Becky in particular had harbored vague, rather unrealistic fantasies about finding some sort of theater job (unrealistic in that the competition for jobs in such a desirable place as Cape Cod would have been fierce and the spoils unlikely to have fallen to someone so unfocused and unaggressive in her planning as was our friend)—in the event, as I suggested when I wrote about them then, I think that Tanya and Becky spent more time staying home and baking cookies, sipping tea, than they did in searching actively or honestly for jobs—

For awhile after the spring break there had also been some talk of Becky’s serving as an intern in a law office in downtown Pittsburgh for part of the summer, either in her father’s office, or in some other office where his influence would have effected an entrée for her—I myself had fervently hoped that Becky might take this sort of stay-at-home job so that she and I could keep on copulating almost every evening, it had given me great pleasure to imagine the two of us stickily clinging to each other as an orange twilight oozed from outside in through the slatted shutters of the little side bedroom of our apartment, the wail of cicadas and the sound of baseball games below us in the street waxing and waning, but this vision of mine remained one of those passages we did not take/Towards the door we never opened/Into the rose-garden—I never did hear any definite explanation as to why no job as a legal intern had ever turned up for Becky—she herself had not been too enthusiastic whenever this type of position had gotten mentioned, mostly by her father, at the dinner table, when we would happen to be there, Becky’s professed anti-business side would evidently balk every time at the prospect of helping lawyers write out legal briefs advancing businesses’ claims—I can remember the way her eyes had rolled on several occasions when her father had described the advantages which would accrue to her from having had this kind of summer-experience in the real world, that fiction fathers always love to invoke, to descant on to their indulged offspring—

At any rate, what Becky had ended up doing before she joined her family for its three week vacation on Cape Cod was to work as a trail-hand at a national park out in Colorado for three weeks for no pay, a summer job for rich kids—the biology teacher at Ellis, an old hippy, had told her about the opportunity to do this kind of work, and had told her how to apply for the program, had even called one of the directors of the program, a friend of hers, on Becky’s behalf—for the performance of certain necessary maintenance tasks the strapped national park service depended then and evidently still depends now upon the labors of volunteers (as the Pentagon does not have to)—both the work itself and the conditions of Becky’s job were evidently rugged in the extreme—crews would go trekking off into the wilderness where they would camp and do repair work, build fences for several days before coming back to even some modicum of civilization—just this summer, on a trip we took to visit a friend in New Hampshire, Vinnie and I gave a ride to two hitch-hiking goddesses who were doing, in the White Mountains, something like what Becky evidently had done out in Colorado—these semi-superhuman females said that they were in charge of a way station for mountain climbers, a rough lodge or hutch maintained by the National Park Service—in addition to being very beautiful and very suntanned in their khaki shorts, their t-shirts, and their mountain-climbing boots, with their knapsacks on their backs, these two were very jocky, i.e. Amazonic athletes, their conversation was all about the training runs which they performed each day at dawn with some of the boys in their group and about the cold showers they had rigged up from running mountain stream water—all of which talk reminded me of the things Becky had sometimes talked about in her letters back to us from Colorado about the life close to nature which she had found it such a joy (she said) to be leading—

At first the job had come as something of a shock if one judged again from the letters she sent us, being thrown together with so many new people seemed to constitute a cold mountain bath to Becky’s sense of self-esteem—she spent pages agonizing over her interactions with her colleagues or rather her failures successfully to interact with any of them, her tendency to make snap judgments about them before she even got to know them—she deplored her tendency to make such judgments and yet she could not seem to help herself, she was too threatened evidently, the exempt status as special which her coddled life had up until this time afforded her was being challenged rather rudely, and Becky’s first reaction was to lash out at those who were revealing to her her rather ordinary status, who had revealed to her the fact that she was only one part of the world and would have to earn her own way—in one sense of course I’m being very unfair to Becky , we all have trouble and we all suffer anxieties establishing ourselves in a new environment and as far as earning her own way was concerned, she had already earned her own way into Radcliffe which was a signal achievement, but in another sense I have already recorded at various places in this account my own suspicions about the bail-out from the proper work of interacting with her peers that Becky had used her relationship with us, two adults, to effect throughout her senior year, about the long-term unhealthiness for her of thus sidestepping the obstacles which she would only have grown stronger and more mature from having forced herself to confront—the experience in Colorado was forcing her to face up to, not find a detour around such obstacles and thus preparing her for Radcliffe in a salutary way, but Becky balked at first—she calmed down later on, she adjusted to and she came to enjoy her situation, from the evidence of letters—she came to enjoy it to such an extent I’d say that finally the thought of regressing into her relationship with us after she had escaped it, grown beyond it, must have started seeming almost monstrous to her—Becky was not unperceptive (as I was somewhat pleased to see again from reading her letters, pleased in that it was delightful to be reminded by her wit and by her really rather scintillating prose style, of why Becky had attracted me in the first place, in a way it restored some of my own self-esteem or a belief in my faculties of judgment) nor was she totally dishonest, and thus I think that the falsity of resuming her relationship with us, or of re-lapsing into it, must ultimately have caused her real inner strife—

For purposes of dramatization I have ascribed her revelation about this matter, her slightly sickened crystallization, to the moment when she first saw me appearing in the door of the Cape Cod airplane—actually, I have been amazed in reading over the letters she sent us from Colorado, to see that Becky had already been apprised of her real psychic conflict much earlier—she wrote her letters to us in a funny sort of purple ink, perhaps from some kind of cheap pen, on equally cheap paper—some of the letters, which I have gotten out to look at now, as memory-prods for this section, are starting to fade or their words have sunken through to the other side of the page, they are suffering from a combination of strange chemical effects—the result of this deterioration has in one case been to show me that Becky may have been having grave doubts about her relationship with us even as she was extolling the greatness of its virtues and her extreme longing for its reinstatement in the lives of all three of us—at the end of one paragraph, saying how her depression about herself and about the group in which she found herself would always grow greatest at night, before she went to sleep, she said I really miss you two terribly and then she blotted something assiduously out except that what the fading of the ink is now allowing eerily, to my amazement, to emerge is the ghostly question do I? in parentheses which she wrote right after her great protestation of longing for us—in other words, although she was not yet ready openly to say so, Becky was already beginning to understand out in the mountains that she would not be able to return comfortably to us and just resume the relationship—that rather sick look I thought I had seen on her face at the airport was a product not of that one particular moment but of a period of brooding upon the fact that she would still be forced to carry through with something which she’d apparently outgrown, namely the impulse to have us as the two people she thought she most cared about in the world as her summer house guests on the Cape—

In this light the rest of the summer then might in one sense be described as my attempt to stick my thumb (or something else a little bit longer if not stronger) in the dyke of our eroding three-way relationship—from having brooded myself, in a letter which I wrote to Becky during her stint out on the range, about the problem of trying to carry on in something totally outmoded when one has seen beyond it to a new, to what one feels is a far more appropriate way of life, I of all people should have known how futile it was to try to hold this sort of psychic slippage in my lover back, I of all people should have recognized how odious my efforts must have seemed to Becky as she was anxious to move on past Vinnie and me to the next phase—this brooding of mine grew out of the literary project I had somewhat bewilderedly woken up to find myself at work on after Becky had left—I would not have believed it possible, given the mood in which I had gone off to the conference in Princeton, the mood of total disgust with Calvin and all that I thought his teaching said about me for having once been attached to or at least interested in it, and given the determination I had felt to make the conference absolutely the very last time that I would ever agree to deal in any way with anything that had to do with Calvin, but somehow, by my very persuasive adviser and by an editor at one of the big religious publishing houses who had been present at the conference, scouting prospects I suppose, I had been talked, flattered or cajoled into buffing up my doctoral dissertation so as to have it considered for publication as a book—I had only agreed to the proposal that these two eminent men had made because I had thought that sending the manuscript off would be a matter virtually of fetching a typescript from my closet, whisking clumps of dust from off its yellowing title page, and putting the whole defunct thing in the mail without so much as deigning to re-read it—I had thought I cared so little about its contents—the fact, however, was that out of some morbid curiosity I had started reading the first page for the first time in several years, had somehow gotten hooked on that, the writing did seem rather good (authorial vanity at work), the argument was interesting enough even though rebarbative and truculent and somewhat self-righteously defiant (meaning at odds with the modern world, Quixote tilting on his ass)—I was interested to find out what outlandish assertions this strange person, in whom I thought I could scarcely discern the faintest strains of myself (whoever that was), was going to make next—

I should have just continued reading that way, a little wryly removed from the leaves I was turning—unluckily for me, there was a pencil within reach of where I sat, I idly picked the pencil up at one point because I saw how the change of one word in one sentence would be immeasurably efficacious in tightening an assertion up—having let that one word snare me, I was suddenly susceptible to the plaints of others, which pleaded refurbish me too, and soon it was whole sentences, whole paragraphs, whole arguments, whole approaches that seemed to taunt me or to tempt me—what the labors I got sucked down into led me to write to Becky about was the strangeness, the difficulty of having to step back into an old self…

Well, perhaps I’ll simply quote from the passage in my letter, which I have here before me on the desk as a memory-prod—it again (as in the case of the missive which I never sent to my cousin Rick) gives me a strange feeling to be able to read over one of my old letters, I wince more often than I smile at some of the phrases I once coined (my stilted epistolary style), no doubt thinking they were clever at the time (will I wince similarly someday at the phrases which I now am turning on these pages?)—letters are something which one probably needs to think of oneself as consigning to the sea or to the wind, one certainly does not (unless one keeps copies) expect ever to see them again—I come to have this particular letter which I’m about to quote from and also the other two which I wrote to Becky while she was out in Colorado during this summer of ’75, because she had considered them so dangerous, so throbbingly incriminatory owing to their sexual innuendoes, because of the insinuating semi-possessive tone which they struck toward her body and toward her being, that she had instantly returned them when she had gotten the chance…I’ll give a minor example of this strain in them which she considered dangerous, of what one might refer to as their unpastorly tone—in her first letter to Vinnie and me, for some reason, Becky had talked about how stacked all the girls with whom she was working were—in response to this interesting piece of information I had written back Why are you so obsessed with all the girls being stacked? Are you afraid that of all people you have no endowments wherewith to rival them in amplitude of beauteous baggage?—I then extravagantly went on to quote some lines from the reverend John Donne (my precursor in pastoral lechery?): Off with that girdle, like heavens Zone glittering/ But a far fairer world incompassing./ Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,/ That the eyes of busie fools may be stopt there./ Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chyme,/Tells me from you, that it is now bed time.

It was because my letters contained various passages such as this one (some worse than this) that Becky came running into our bedroom and stuffed them into my suitcase almost as soon as Vinnie and I had arrived at the Griersons’ cottage at Truro, thus I now have them myself, to re-read and to wince at—it is from one of these letters then that I can read my own account of how difficult I was finding it to carry on when I had long since grown sick of and wanted to cast off the chrysalis of a certain past phase of my own life, in this case the phase which had produced my work on Calvin—I wrote:

There is one whole section of theological discussion in the second chapter which reflects my theology of almost two years ago, i.e. the kind of thing for which you as ringleader and all your classmates in the senior high class used to attack me with such vehemence, and I might add with so much justification—there is no way that I can revise this section piecemeal and so there have been many times this week when I have been strongly tempted just to chuck the whole thing in keeping with that wonderful directive from the young Auden (my spiritual guide): ‘It is time for the destruction of error’—what this would do to the structure and the logic of my book, besides leaving a gaping hole there, is something I have not really had the courage to consider—Dr. Buttrick, whose theological sympathies are so universal and who seems capable of finding some good in almost any formulation, told me I ought to leave the chapter in there just as it stands—it would be a great relief to do so although the person who has been through the events of the last six months with two such expert ikon-busters as you and Vinnie have proven to be continues kicking against the idea of such an easy capitulation to his former complacent outlook—I now can’t leave unchallenged statements which at one time I would have considered as the unshakeable pillars of my whole existential/ philosophic outlook…

There is something truly pathetic (or so I feel now) about my writing to Becky in this vein, something pathetically deluded about my foolish faith in her continued kindly disposition toward, her continued interest in and admiration of the struggles of my conscience, something pathetic about my thus revealing myself to her—at a time when she was gathering psychological forces wherewith to cast both Vinnie and me off with great vehemence and great disgust, I am in effect casting my private pearls before the dear little swinelette who was getting ready to trample on them out of her feelings of rejective rage, to trample on me in toto, to cast off her senior year at Ellis in her hurry to assume the more majestic mantle of her freshman year at Radcliffe, but anyhow, my point here is that of all people, from having recently faced a similar problem myself in the intellectual sphere, I should have appreciated the vexation which it might be to Becky in the existential sphere to have to carry on again in her affair with me which she had now outgrown, but I did not, my lust for her, my obsession with the magical parts of her body, my desire to touch those parts pretty much blinded me to her feelings—

I had pretended all along that I wanted solely what was best for Becky or at least that I wanted what she wanted and that I respected her freedom, that disinterestedly I wanted to see her grow and harbored no schemes for ever holding on to her, for ever holding her back—this pretence had earlier been pricked by my reaction first of all just to the looming general fact that she’d be growing up and going away and then secondly, more painfully, with more particularity, by the fact that she’d be growing up and going away to Radcliffe, to a world of privilege and power which would soon make her scorn both Vinnie and me despite our (as I preferred to think of them) more spiritual, our less superficially flashy pursuits and attainments and values—when threats had arisen that is, the true egocentric ignobility of my feelings had amply manifested itself already, but still, the real test, the real crunch was about to come now—that was why I opened this chapter with the glimpse of Becky which I got from the door of the airplane—the fact that I reacted with such panic, with such pain, and with such a desire to protest, to what I took at that moment to be the sign of Becky’s dereliction, to what I took to be her readiness to reject me, is indicative or rather predictive of the way that I was about to react to the whole unraveling of our relationship during the next month, i.e. I was not really ready to support what was best for Becky if that best included her deciding that she was now sick of me—acceptable growth on her part was hemmed round in my mind by a rather strict and limited set of conditions—just the fact that I have so little to report here about her three weeks out in Colorado, is significant, i.e. that I never took the trouble to find out about them from Becky, that I chose to close my mind against hearing about any outside world which might have been luring Becky away—from having once been or from having at least at my best aspired to be her expansive pastor and enabler, expounding to her the great fact that the world was all before her where and which way to choose her modes of self-assertive triumph and growth (especially sexual self-assertive triumph and growth), from having been to her a voice of liberation, of full and abundant life, I had turned into a warped autistic fender off of any evidence that Becky could bring back and show of having gone off and grown…

But this will all come out if I simply relate the sequence of the next month’s events—I have gotten carried away reliving the pain of that first panicky moment as I was stepping off the plane—

To take up from that moment then, to try and go on evoking the peculiar quality of the day of our reunion as we re-grouped for our last act: I think that even if one were to discount or to allow for the distortions which were prompted by my particular paranoia this day, my sense of losing control, there really was something destructive, something hostile about the way Becky was acting toward us, beginning with the way she acted all during the fairly long car-ride from the airport to the Griersons’ cottage in Truro—it was as if, having decided that the relationship with us was now over, she meant to trash it immediately, get the work of destruction over and done with within the first few minutes by certain biting remarks—we were riding between dune-y stretches along a straight road, the spectacular sky is what I remember with particular vividness from this interval, that is I remember certain seams of gold that struggled to rip through the billowing and rather stormy-looking grey-purplish sacks above the grey tumuli, the violet, the strangely violent-looking light that made one wonder what season it actually was—the steam that still rose up from the road as a result of earlier showers, the steam and the smell of imperfectly laid-to-rest dust or sand that rose from the damp asphalt were both suggestive of summer, but otherwise, it would have been hard to determine the exact time of year, there was something ferociously hibernal about the gathering of grey clouds and about the sunlight’s struggle to split open its bulging retainers—

When I was not being distracted by the spectacular glories of this scene and of this skyscape, though, I was being equally distracted by the spectacular glories of my girlfriend (for so I still styled her and desired her)—she really was amazing (if somewhat unusual)-looking, strikingly attractive in a strangely animal self-absorbed physical way, in the self-satisfied way of the adolescent athlete who emerges with her wet hair and glowing skin from the shower after her workout (as if life were but to sleep, feed, and exercise)—the bronzed flesh of her face and of her body ( what one saw of it, the arms exposed with their sun-bleached hairs by the rolled up sleeves of the sweatshirt) and the gleaming white teeth, and the sun-streaked thicket of her hair gave off their aura, they made me ache with the desire to touch my friend as we were riding along, to reach over the seat and cup her breasts in my hands, to snuggle my nose against her check, to kiss her ear, some move so foolish—it was these physical aspects and a kind of winning nonchalance, a kind of rakish elegant angle at which she was holding her head, half-laughingly thrown back, that made her attitude toward us when it was shown seem much more shockingly repulsive—she turned on us at some point early in the ride and said she thought her parents were somewhat pissed at having Vinnie and me arrive there, she wanted to warn us—what an introduction!—pissed was the exact term which she used, she made no effort to mitigate the harshness of the picture of her parents she had drawn and their displeasure—so arrant had her word-choice been in fact that even George it seemed to me, who was not what you would call the most congenial, the most outgoing of hosts, enigmatically hidden as he was behind a pair of grey reflective non-see-through sunglasses, appeared to almost jump in alarm at Becky’s would-be indiscretion, he tried to correct it somewhat, to tone it down a little at least, explaining to us about the house guests just preceding us, the couple who had left that very day on an earlier plane—the wife was that same person the news of whose serious illness had upset the last dinner party we had attended at the Griersons’ house, the farewell party for Becky—in writing up that occasion, I wrote about how upset Wheezie had become after having talked to that woman on the phone just before we arrived and about how Mr. G. had more or less brusquely brought the proceedings back to what he considered some semblance of civilized order by his accentuation of positive topics—the gloom, the discomfort on that occasion had been bad enough—now, according to George, there was the further gloom for both her parents of having seen this woman, who really had looked awful according to both Becky and George, for the first time in almost a year, which gloom had led Wheezie to express the wish that they, the Griersons, could have entertained this other couple for an extra week, not have had to dismiss them after such a relatively short visit so that we could have their room—as George explained the matter, it was this sort of unforeseen regret on the part of their mother that Becky had been referring to in her rather unsubtle way—it was not so much that his parents were pissed as that they did not know what to do about the woeful state of this friend of theirs and would have liked to keep her there awhile longer, perhaps (I gathered) from a fear that if they let her go now, they would never see her again—

In one sense, as the Griersons’ house guests for the next however many days, we might have expected to be spared any knowledge at all of this internal family matter—it wasn’t our fault after all that we were coming in after and in a sense ousting this unfortunately afflicted couple, it had not been our intention to disrupt anyone or anything when we had long ago accepted the Griersons’ invitation to spend some time at their summer retreat, we had simply accepted in good faith—we weren’t exactly just house guests of course, we were something more than house guests and something less than real family members, a little less than kin and more than kind—we occupied some intermediate ground, so that maybe if we were going to enjoy the perks of this more intimate status, then we would also have to share in some of the family tensions too, we couldn’t expect to limit our family membership to solely the up-side, a quasi family member had a responsibility to suffer some of the hard times too—nevertheless, I would say that this revelation which Becky had made of her parents’ apparent displeasure caused both Vinnie and me to feel unfairly ill at ease for almost a whole day, or should I say more ill at ease than we had felt