Read American Appetites for Free Online

squalid and intensely romantic; like the room in which he’d lived for a year, the most emotionally turbulent year of his life, in Ann Arbor, in 1959.
    He had been a scared boy of twenty-two, skinny and round-shouldered and chronically perplexed, overworked in his graduate studies and exhausted by self-imposed deadlines and tyrannical dreams of perfection, prematurely weary of living, like a creature in whom spasms of life articulate themselves even as the creature sinks, ebbs, dies, like a pebble tossed carelessly into a pond: its very weight, its quidditas , dooming it to extinction. Ian McCullough had come to the University of Michigan on a fellowship, suffused with enthusiasm for the future, and within two months he had lapsed into depression, compulsive thoughts, a preoccupation with suicide: a preoccupation with the horror of realizing that, in his flesh, in his skin, in his very being, he was incapable of determining any connection with anything or anyone outside him. Just as we lie alone in our graves, so indeed do we live alone , he’d thought repeatedly, so hypnotized by these damning words that he’d long forgotten where he had first heard them. He had never told anyone, not even Glynnis, not even Denis Grinnell, of the visit he had once made to the most highly regarded professor in the Michigan philosophy department at that time, a former student of Wittgenstein, in order to confront the man with a proposition: “If there is no logical , no necessary , no causal connection between interior and exterior consciousness, shouldn’t we all kill ourselves? What is the point of continuing?” The reasonableness with which these words were spoken quite belied the desperation behind them, but the man merely smiled at Ian, as at a son, and said, “You’re undernourished, you’ve been neglecting your health, I know the symptoms: your blood sugar is down.”
    Not long afterward, in any case, Glynnis entered his life: and changed it forever.
    Their meeting was sheerly accidental: Ian had been in a cafeteria, “behaving strangely,” as Glynnis afterward said, as if he were dizzy, or walking in his sleep; suddenly his nose began to bleed, and he seemed helpless to deal with it: blood on his shirt, splotches on the floor, so very red, so suddenly and humiliatingly public. . . . Desperate, he’d searched his pockets for a tissue but found nothing. And a very attractive red-haired girl advanced upon him, asking matter-of-factly, “Can I help?”
    Yes. Yes. Oh yes.
    HE WAS SAYING , now, to Sigrid Hunt, in his most practical, fatherly tone, “This doesn’t mean that you are cruel, or selfish, or vindictive—or ‘unnatural.’ It doesn’t mean that you might not, at another time in your life, really want to have a baby.” Sigrid listened, listened very hard. “And if it’s a question of money. . . .”
    She shook her head slowly, wiped her face with a towel soaked in cold water that Ian had given her. “I can’t accept money from you,” she said. “Even as a loan.”
    â€œSurely, as a loan?”
    â€œI just don’t think I can do that, Dr. McCullough.”
    â€œAre we back to ‘Doctor’!”
    Ian smiled, stared at her, thinking, Why am I so angry? I am in no way an angry man.
    â€œBut I think you had better do that, under the circumstances,” he said gently. “Don’t you?”
    She stared at the floor, wriggled her bare, dirty toes. In moving she released a scent, an odor, of flesh upon which perspiration has newly dried, gummy, talcum-y, reminding Ian of those days, now long past, when he’d changed his infant daughter’s diapers: the relief in tossing away the soiled diaper; the small cheery reliable pleasure of affixing the new into place; the comforting smell, now long forgotten, of baby powder.
    Sigrid said, not meeting his eye, “But this is a loan, of