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“Don, my cosmetics! All my stuff. How could you do this?” “I’ve made some sort of error?” “The opposite. It’s like—everything is exactly where it was. In the same position.” “I took photos. Your system was impossible to understand. I did the same with your clothes.”
“To the world’s most perfect woman.” It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.
“Striped bass en papillote,” she said. “Which is to say in paper, since this is our paper anniversary.” “Incredible. You solved the problem and the result is disposable.” “I know you hate clutter. So we’ll just have the memory.” Rosie waited while I tasted it. “Okay?” she said. “Delicious.” It was true.
“You’re overfunctioning,” said Gene. “You know what my doctor said about that book you’ve been reading? ‘Give it to someone you hate.’ All that obsessing, and the difference you make to the outcome is negligible compared to the big game.”
My revulsion at handling animals increased in proportion to the size of the animal. It was irrational but felt instinctual, hence difficult to overcome. I undertook hypnotherapy, but attributed my cure to the Cat Rescue Incident, in which it had been necessary to save a housemate’s kitten that had jumped into the toilet—a doubly unpleasant task. I learned that I could create an intellectual separation from the physical sensation in an emergency. Once I knew the brain configuration, I was able to reproduce it well enough to dissect mice and assist in the delivery of a calf. I was confident that
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“Jeeesus,” she said. “You don’t have any feelings at all.” I was suddenly angry. I wanted to shake not just Lydia but the whole world of people who do not understand the difference between control of emotion and lack of it, and who make a totally illogical connection between inability to read others’ emotions and inability to experience their own. It was ridiculous to think that the pilot who landed the plane safely on the Hudson River loved his wife any less than the passenger who panicked.
Don is not quite an unreliable narrator, but he misses social cues that the reader does not. Talk a little more about this narrative device. Do you ever find it limiting? On the contrary, it’s a very effective device for conveying Don’s character at the same time as telling the story. And it’s one of the key sources of comedy: the disconnect between what Don describes and what we think is really happening.
