The Nix

by Nathan Hill

And Faye’s opinion was that everyone should want to be liked—not out of vanity but because wanting to be liked provided an essential social lubricant.

ERNIE BANKS PROBABLY FEELS SOMETHING ELSE, too, whenever he hits a home run. Along with the sense of professional mastery, there’s probably this other, uglier feeling—what would you call it? Payback? Retaliation? Because isn’t one reason men are moved to greatness partly the need to respond in a grand way to the people who cut them most deeply?

Maybe next to the actual world was this fantasy, this other life where he inherited the farm with the salmon-red house. Sometimes those fantasies can be more persuasive than one’s own life, Faye knows.

Hers was not a soul large enough to nourish another.