To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

by Joshua Ferris

Then a woman would pass by, one of thousands of New York women, coltishly long legged, impossibly high booted, always singly, or in pairs and trios, in possession of that beauty whose greatest cruelty was that it meant no harm, and as I died a little of want and agony, I said to myself, Things could be so much better.

Her internalization of Catholicism and its institutional disappointments suited a dental office perfectly, where guilt was often our last resort for motivating the masses.

Isn’t there something besides grown women defiling themselves on the Internet you find beautiful?”

An Irish son attends a wake and buries the dead and then sits at home in private despair, but a Jewish son has seven nights to share his burden and his broken heart with his family and friends.

I wished it had turned out differently. I wished I had been better all around. I wished above all that when I believed something, like that I was finally over her, that I knew myself even the slightest bit.

“I’m sorry I kept you up. You were trying to hold things together,” I said. “You did a good job. Did I tell you that, that you did a good job holding things together?” No response. “Did I ever thank you?”

He was free to bark and command, to covet, to conquer, to advance, to own, to borrow and bend and leverage and take, to conduct himself with the implacable autism of obscene wealth.