Read My Life as a Man for Free Online

“ for business reasons. ” They had decided on Shadley. Only her father , of the five, refused to make the improvement. “ I ain ’ t ashamed, ” he told the other four—and went on from there, he informed his daughter, to become the biggest success of them all. As if, Sharon protested to Zuckerman, that proved anything! What about the sheer ugliness of that name? What about the way it sounded to people? Especially for a girl! Her cousin Cindy was Cindy Shadley, her cousin Ruthie was Ruthie Shadley—she alone of the girls in the family was still Shatzky! “ Come on, will you please—I ’ m a trademark, ” her father told her, “ I ’ m known nationwide. What am I supposed to become all of a sudden, Al ‘ the Zipper King ’ Shadley? Who ’ s he, honey? ” Well, the truth was that by the time she was fifteen she couldn ’ t bear that he called himself “ the Zipper King ” either. “ The Zipper King ” was as awful as Shatzky—in ways it was worse. She wanted a father with a name that wasn ’ t either a joke or an outright lie; she wanted a real name; and she warned him, some day when she was old enough, she would hire a lawyer and go down to the county courthouse and get one. “ You ’ ll get one, all right—and you know how? The way all the other nice girls do. You ’ ll get married, and why I ’ ll cry at the wedding is out of happiness that I won ’ t have to hear any more of this name business —“ and so on, in this vein, for the five tedious years of Sharon ’ s adolescence. Which wasn ’ t quite over yet. “ What is Shatzky, ” she cried sorrowfully to Zuckerman, “ but the past tense of Shitzky? Oh why won ’ t he change it! How stubborn can a person be! ”
    In her denunciations of the family name, Sharon was as witty as she would ever be—not that the wit was intentional. The truth was that when she was not putting on a three-ring circus for him, Sharon was pretty much of a bore to Zuckerman. She didn ’ t know anything about anything. She did not pronounce the g in “ length, ” nor did she aspirate the h in “ when ” or “ why, ” nor would she have in “ whale ” had the conversation ever turned to Melville. And she had the most Cockney Philadelphia o he had ever heard on anyone other than a cabdriver. If and when she did get a joke of his, she would sigh and roll her eyes toward heaven, as though his subtleties were on a par with her father ’ s—Zuckerman, who had been the H. L. Mencken of Bass College! whose editorials (on the shortcomings of the administration and the student body) Miss Benson had likened in their savage wit to Jonathan Swift! How could he ever take Sharon up to Bass with him to visit Miss Benson? What if she started telling Miss Benson those pointless and interminable anecdotes about herself and her high-school friends? Oh, when she started talking, she could bury you in boredom! Rarely in conversation did Sharon finish a sentence, but rather, to Zuckerman ’ s disgust, glued her words together by a gummy mixture of “ you knows ” and “ I means, ” and with such expressions of enthusiasm as “ really great, ” “ really terrific, ” and “ really neat ” … the last usually to describe the gang of kids she had traveled with at Atlantic City when she was fifteen, which, to be sure, had only been the summer before last.
    Coarse, childish, ignorant, utterl y lacking in that exquisiteness of feeling and refinement of spirit that he had come to admire so in the novels—in the person—of Virginia Woolf, whose photograph had been tacked above his desk during his last semester at Bass. He entered the army after their feverish, daredevil month together secre tly relieved at having left behind him (seemingly as he had found her) Al and Minna ’ s five-foot nine-inch baby girl; she was a tantalizing slave and an extraordinary lay, but hardly a soul mate for someone who felt as he did about great writers and great books. Or so it seemed,