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and it wouldn’t have meant anything.
    “Maybe I could go up to Portland,” she said. “There must be something in Portland. Portland’s on everybody’s mind these days. Portland’s a drawing card. Portland this, Portland that. Portland’s as good a place as any. It’s all the same.”
    “Donna,” I said, “I’d better go.”
    I started to let myself out. I cracked the door, and the overhead light came on.
    “For Christ’s sake, turn off that light!”
    I got out in a hurry. “ ’Night, Donna,” I said.
    I left her staring at the dashboard. I started up my car and turned on the lights. I slipped it in gear and fed it the gas.
    I poured Scotch, drank some of it, and took the glass into the bathroom. I brushed my teeth. Then I pulled open a drawer. Patti yelled something from the bedroom. She opened the bathroom door. She was still dressed. She’d been sleeping with her clothes on, I guess.
    “What time is it?” she screamed. “I’ve overslept! Jesus, oh my God! You’ve let me oversleep, goddamn you!”
    She was wild. She stood in the doorway with her clothes on. She could have been fixing to go to work. But there was no sample case, no vitamins. She was having a bad dream, is all. She began shaking her head from side to side.
    I couldn’t take any more tonight. “Go back to sleep, honey. I’m looking for something,” I said. I knocked some stuff out of the medicine chest. Things rolled into the sink. “Where’s the aspirin?” I said. I knocked down some more things. I didn’t care. Things kept falling.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
I
    WHEN HE WAS EIGHTEEN and was leaving home for the first time, Ralph Wyman was counseled by his father, principal of Jefferson Elementary School and trumpet soloist in the Weaverville Elks Club Auxiliary Band, that life was a very serious matter, an enterprise insisting on strength and purpose in a young person just setting out, an arduous undertaking, everyone knew that, but nevertheless a rewarding one, Ralph Wyman’s father believed and said.
    But in college Ralph’s goals were hazy. He thought he wanted to be a doctor and he thought he wanted to be a lawyer, and he took pre-medical courses and courses in the history of jurisprudence and business law before he decided he had neither the emotional detachment necessary for medicine nor the ability for sustained reading required in law, especially as such reading might concern property and inheritance. Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in business, Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came. It was during this time – his lowest ebb, as he referred to it later – that Ralph believed he almost had a breakdown; he was in a fraternity and he got drunk every night. He drank so much that he acquired a reputation and was called “Jackson,” after the bartender at The Keg.
    Then, in his third year, Ralph came under the influence ofa particularly persuasive teacher. Dr. Maxwell was his name; Ralph would never forget him. He was a handsome, graceful man in his early forties, with exquisite manners and with just the trace of the South in his voice. He had been educated at Vanderbilt, had studied in Europe, and had later had something to do with one or two literary magazines back East. Almost overnight, Ralph would later say, he decided on teaching as a career. He stopped drinking quite so much, began to bear down on his studies, and within a year was elected to Omega Psi, the national journalism fraternity; he became a member of the English Club; was invited to come with his cello, which he hadn’t played in three years, and join in a student chamber-music group just forming; and he even ran successfully for secretary of the senior class. It was then that he met Marian Ross – a handsomely pale and slender girl who took a seat beside him in a Chaucer class.
    Marian Ross