The Old Priest

The Unexamined Life

T h e O l d P r i e s t 123 The Unexamined Life J ACK HAD THE FURNITURE PULLED INTO THE center of his bedroom and covered with a canvas tarp. He puttherollerdrippingwithblackpaintintothetraywhen he realized that Miles and Claire were standing just outside the open doorway. “I’ve decided to redecorate,” Jack said, leaning his elbow against an aluminum stepladder. “What do you think?” “We can’t leave you for five minutes,” Claire said. “That’s what I think.” “It’s my room, right?” Jack asked. “I mean, am I right or am I right?”Hewaswearingwhiterunningshortsandapairofblack Doc Martens laced to the ankles, a bony kid with Claire’s fine blond hair and blue-white skin, matte-black paint splotched on his face and hands. “How about an explanation?” Miles said. “It’s like the Rolling Stones,” Jack said. “They said to paint it black, so I did!” “This goes back,” Claire said. “This paint job definitely goes in reverse. Meanwhile, you can sit here and look at it.” Miles and Claire sat in the kitchen, having coffee. It was a large country kitchen and Claire had decorated it and the rest of the house in country colonial, gingham curtains and copper pots, a 123 A n t h o n y Wa l l a c e 124 butter churn on the hearth, on the wall above the butcher-block table a brass sconce with a snowy scene of General Washington at Valley Forge painted on it. It was a good house—built in the twenties with wide-planked floors, high ceilings, and spacious rooms—left to Claire by a maiden aunt, photographs of whom she was beginning to resemble. The house sat tilted sideways on a piece of land that was once part of a blueberry farm; the lot was narrow across the front but went back a hundred yards into the pines.Lateafternoonsunlightcametricklingthroughthegreenhousewindowsthat looked out onthe ruinedblueberryfield. “What are we going to do?” Claire wanted to know. She was smoking a cigarette and tapping her toes. She was wearing a faded pea-green summer shift and she seemed as if at any moment she might rocket out of it and land, stark naked, in the center of the room. “We can wallpaper,” Miles said. “I’m serious, Miles. This is like demonology or something.” “It’snotsobad,Claire,”Milessaid.“It’snottheendoftheworld as we knowit. I’llget somewallpaperandwe’ll wallpaper. It’ll be good for him to learn how to wallpaper. We can redecorate his room the way he wants it. The three of us can do it together.” “Annie Roos has this kid they adopted from Korea,” Claire said. “He’s sixteen now and telling them he’s going to set fire to them in their sleep. He has bad memories from Korea that nobody knew about. Now Annie and Mark have to sleep with their bedroom door locked. Is that the road you want to go down, Miles?” “I’ll take him fishing,” Miles said. “Just the two of us.” Miles Dell worked as a craps dealer at the Circus Maximus Hotel-Casino. His dealer’s uniform was a pair of plain black 125 T h e Un e x a m i n e d L i f e trousers and a white shirt embroidered at the collar and cuffs with golden Roman numerals and various arcane-looking and probably ersatz symbols. The cocktail waitresses wore white togas trimmed with the same pattern, and actors dressed as Caesar and Cleopatra strolled the casino floor reciting Shakespeare . The pit boss, a man from West Texas with overlarge ears, claimed to be dating Cleopatra. “She’s got stretch marks down to here,” the pit boss said. “Then why are you dating her?” the floorman asked. “Because,” the pit boss laughed, “the stretch marks are attached to the tits that are also down to here.” He held out both hands and twirled the ends of his fingers. “Strong,” the floorman said. “Double strong,” the pit boss said. At that moment the actress who played Cleopatra strolled by. She said, “I am dying, Egypt.” “Dying for some acting lessons,” the floorman said. The floorman, whose name was Guy Slater, was one of the few people Miles knew who actually seemed to have fun at this job;heapproachedtheideaofbeingacompletelyuselessmember of society with tremendous gusto. He spent five days a week standing behind a craps table and talking to...