“Would you have preferred Moby Dick to have been told by the whale?”
His mouth fought with his impatience. “That falls into a different category of conflict. When it is man versus nature, then man is the action against a force. The force is not interesting in itself.”
She searched frantically for a better example. “The Great Gatsby.”
“Oh, Scott. He barely knew how to tie his shoes in the morning let alone write a novel. Max wrote that. He wrote all those books. But let’s not quibble. This book is about the father. No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they’re writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It’s when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.” He proceeded to cross out several more pages, shaking his head. “You simply cannot name me a book, a great book, a lasting book, that was written by a woman about a woman.”
“Mrs. Dalloway.”
“Oh, now, she’s the lens, not the object. She herself is the least material character in the book. That book is about the aftermath of war. It is about the rigidity, aka Richard Dalloway, the fear, aka Peter Walsh, and the insanity, aka Septimus Smith, of course, of war.”
There was no arguing with this man. He could take one of her most treasured books, a book that she always felt captured her own fragile relationship with the past, a book with her favorite moment in it—Clarissa and Sally and their kiss by the stone urn—and claim that it was about war. Still, there was Jane Austen, wasn’t there?
He held up his hand. “And don’t talk to me about those other English women. All those books are fairy tales written by hound-faced spinsters who never got asked to dance, let alone to marry.”
Her book. She needed to keep him focused on her book. “So you think it should be told strictly from the father’s point of view?”
“No, no. You’ve entirely misunderstood me. Keep the girl, just train her eye on the father and don’t let her slip into those little pity parties she has for all her feelings. Think”—he clenched his eyes and his jaw and his fists, then released—“Huckleberry Finn,” he said. “And let’s most certainly not follow her into her adulthood.”
“Why not?”
“We know where she’s headed. We don’t have to read it. She marries, she has babies, and they fill her with love and rage. What’s new or startling about that?”
He had changed again, transitioned smoothly from military to effeminate, his legs now tightly crossed, his lips in a bemused pout. His attitude reminded her of her college boyfriend, who’d passed through with his new husband last summer and sat for several hours on this same couch, watching with those same lips as she scrambled to meet the needs and whims of her three children, witnessing over dinner a spat with her husband about a missing Hello Kitty straw. The visit had unveiled the mystery of this man’s devastating ambivalence years ago, but she could have done without his but-for-the-grace-of-God relief as he hugged her goodbye.
Matty, struggling to get off her lap, scraped an unclipped fingernail across her neck and she reacted loudly, more loudly than it hurt. She put him on the ground and pointed him toward his toys, then returned her attention to her visitor, though she no longer knew what she wanted from him.
“I’ll just fetch myself another.” The ice, still fresh and large, rang in time with his steps. It was only ten fifteen in the morning, but she was overcome with a late-afternoon feeling from childhood, sitting at the table with a spelling book （the poem she’d written in study hall tucked safely inside） while her mother arranged fish sticks on a cookie sheet and her father carried both their glasses back to the bar. It was a perilous time of day because of its promise. Her dad was singing a song about her mother’s hair, which had been all poufed up that day at the hairdresser. Is it cotton candy? Is it marshmallow? If you try and taste it, you’re a brave fellow! Her mother was laughing. If only they fed her earlier, she could leave the room now, carry away the happy little ditty, keep it separate from other words of theirs that would lodge inside her. But her mother set the timer for seventeen minutes. Her father opened a can of dog food. Then he made a joke about her mother’s pocketbook, which was always in his way, always on top of the one thing he was looking for. Like a shitting pigeon, he said, yanking the newspaper out from under it. They kept their drinks close. Her mother slid a plate in front of her, then made her father get up from the red chair by the fridge to sit with them. He slid the spelling book toward himself and flipped to the hardest section in the back.