Today’s Story

Wow!  The dawn of a new decade brings with it a sudden realization!  It’s been almost a year since I gave a reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe!

That drought will end on January 25th and I invite everyone within the reach of my blog to spend the time between 6 and 7:30 pm at Cornelia on that Monday.  The entry fee is still only seven bucks, and you also get a free glass of wine, so how can you lose?  In addition to me, there’ll be two delightful poets whose work you’ll be able to sample for the same modest fee!

Despite what the pundits are saying about the toll of the last decade (the first ten years of a century are often painful), it’s actually been a good time for me.  True, the novel, Wounded by History, has yet to be published after the crash-and-burn of my previous publisher, but it’s now being looked at by another small publisher and I remain hopeful.  Moreover, I achieved a trifecta in the waning days of 2009:  three stories published at almost the same time in three different literary journals.  “Love and Other Terminal Diseases” came out a few months ago in Confrontation, followed by “Shampoo” in BigCityLit.com (an online journal – if you click on it, you can read it right now!), and – slightly held up – “Chasing the Condor” should be out any moment now in The Same.

What I’ll be reading from on Monday, January 25th, however, is all new.  I’m tacking back and forth between two novels these days, with an occasional foray into a short story.  One novel, The Shotgun, ranges over two generations of a family’s history, tracking them through Arkansas, Oklahoma, California, New York and even Italy, and explores the question:  what changes and what stays the same in the fates of a father and a son?  The other covers even more ground.  It’s a picaresque novel I call Problems of Translation, which records a fictional trek across several continents and almost a dozen countries by a writer curious to see what distortions arise when a short story gets shoehorned into one language after another before being returned to English.  But it’s not just about what happens to the story; it’s also about what happens to him!

As a reminder, the Cornelia Street Cafe, on the street by that name, is just west of Sixth Avenue between Bleecker and West 4th.  Bring your cold weather gear, your thirst (possibly even your appetite!) and, most of all, your yen for a yarn.

Please come!  I hope you’ll enjoy the evening as much as I will.

Happy 2010!

Shortly after the Second World War a young European arrives in New York City.  His English is pretty imperfect, but he needs a job.  After employment agencies turn him down, a friend helps him compose two ads for the New York Times.

The ads identify, with minimal fanfare, a “nineteen-year old Frenchman looking for work.”  Despite his hopes for a deluge of mail, our lad receives only two letters – one for each ad, and both from the same person.  The letterhead reads “Authors and Publishers Representative.”

While one invites him to call for an appointment, the other suggests he come for an interview on a particular day.  Suspecting his English may be too shaky to manage a phone call, he decides to show up in person.

So at the appointed hour he finds himself ushered into the office of the head of the company, a lady who had traveled widely and spoke several languages.  Wanting to practice her French, she engages him in that language.  Once the interview is concluded, she says: “I think I’ll probably offer you the job, but I wrote to one other person from whom I haven’t heard yet.”  Whereupon our hero pulls out the second letter.  “I’m that other person,” he says.  And that’s how he got the job.

I leave for you to decide whether serendipity, persistence, or cleverness played the largest role in that initial success, but this nineteen-year old lad was George Borchardt, literary agent to the best of the best for fifty-plus years and counting.  Although in those early days, he confessed himself often astonished to be in a job where he was paid to read books, he eventually became the literary agent for an enormous array of first-rate talent.  First came the Europeans: Samuel Beckett, Elie Wiesel, Margueurite Duras, Eugene Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Ian McEwan, among others.  American novelists like T.C. Boyle, Robert Coover, Claire Messud, and Susan Minot were added to his list, as well as poets like John Ashbery, Robert Bly, and Philip Schultz.  Non-fiction writers like Stanley Crouch, Tracy Kidder and Kate Millett came aboard as well and, oh, yes, the estates of Hannah Arendt, John Gardner, Aldous Huxley, and Tennessee Williams.  Plus – of course – the aforementioned Samuel Beckett.  Clearly, Borchardt has nursed the careers of some of the past half-century’s most brilliant writers.

His interview in a recent issue of Poets & Writers, from which this information comes (Sept/Oct, 2009), is actually quite inspiring.   Cognizant as Borchardt certainly is of how things have changed in publishing since those early days – and in particular how difficult it is now for authors – he also suggests that plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.  The writer’s path has never been smooth, he insists, any more than it has for painters, dancers, actors, or other artists.  He cites the difficulties he had in placing Beckett at first, his early inquiries yielding responses like, “Pale imitator of Joyce” or “Unreadable prose.”  And he mentions as well that Cezanne’s first paintings were laughed at and Van Gogh sold only one canvas in his lifetime.

Apparently George Borchardt, once he’s impressed with your talent, is an easy man to like.  T. C. Boyle, one of his current authors, once called him “the most wonderful man who ever lived on this earth.”  Exaggeration maybe, but hey!  Not bad for a kid from a war-ravaged continent, who barely spoke the language.

I only just now read Everyman by Philip Roth.  I finished it about half an hour ago, laid it down, picked it up again and began reading once more from the beginning – the graveside scene – finally sighing and laying it aside once more at the point where the older brother of the deceased – the brother who was never sick a day in his life – begins talking endlessly about his younger, now dead, sibling.  This character, Howie, begins his graveside comments, in fact, with an aside to his wife:  “My kid brother.  It makes no sense.”

And it doesn’t, of course.  And, of course, it does.  How many novels do you know that begin with the ending?  Where everything in between the first word and the final page will consist of stages and pages of a plot whose outcome you already know?  Reports begin that way, perhaps:  here is the executive summary, now let’s see what we do with what we know.  But this is not a report.  And there’s nothing to do, nothing at all.  It’s over.  But you knew that from the beginning, right?  So what kept you reading?

You read on because it’s Philip Roth and he can’t write a bad or an uninteresting sentence.  But as you read, it becomes something more.  Deeply absorbing, even profound.  You’ve heard the climax, Roth seems to be saying, Now get set for the longest denouement in literary history.  And what a denouement it is!  How he ties up loose ends that weren’t even loose at the beginning!  And keeps you reading.  How he fills in a life that was a very ordinary life, the life of a man who was neither steadfast nor exemplary, nor incredibly talented, who had no great adventures, but the events of whose days you are willing to hear about and sympathize with and, despite individual differences between that character and yourself, you identify with because the fate to which he tends is your fate as well.  Absolutely.  We die.  We all die.  And how would your life be summed up?  Not very differently, certainly not fundamentally different – whether or not you had Philip Roth to write about it.

So the rather simple plot of the protagonist’s life unfolds – a lifetime job as an art director for an ad agency, a mild passion for painting, three wives, a few affairs on the side (the discovery of one sets the stage for the rather overwhelming isolation he suffers at the end), a devoted daughter, two bitter, neglected and unforgiving sons – an unremarkable life in almost every respect.  And the last years are full of sickness, decline, decay, and fear of the outcome that you already know has been accomplished.  “That undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” as Shakespeare reminds us.

Yet there is more tenderness in this book, I believe, than is to be found by adding together all the other books Roth wrote.  This is not satire, nor comedy, nor clever plot-twists, nor the smorgasbord of other characteristics we have come to expect from a Roth novel.  Yes, there is a barely muffled rage, a barrage of cris de coeur, but they are our cries as well as his and his character’s cries.  The last few years, as described, are seen as a kind of half-life in which our hero witnesses friends, colleagues and family dying of cancer, having strokes, entering hospitals as suicidal depressives, and where our hero himself undergoes procedure after procedure to fix this or that rancorous and dangerous ailment.  His life has begun to seem mostly about being operated on.  That and watching friends die, and recounting one’s errors.  And a few – very few – memories of the good times.  Yet in these pages you feel you have seen the real thing, and an inescapable sad empathy blossoms, not only for him – poor wretch, poor jerk! — but for the whole, baffling, patched-together mess of the human condition, with its utterly final, ineluctable outcome.  Death isn’t just a battle, Roth says at one point.  It’s a massacre.

And yet.  Here we the living still are, for a few brief moments more, trying to remember a vigorous swim across the bay, or a fond poem, or a tennis match we won against seemingly impossible odds, or a tender handclasp and a sweet embrace.

No wonder he called it Everyman.

I came across a marvelous burst of wisdom today, penned by the photographer Dorothea Lange.  These words were used as the touchstone for an impressive poem called “Aperture” by David Moolten:

The camera . . . teaches people

how to see without a camera.

What that simple sentence made me remember was how I had learned to see the beauty of certain buildings through the paintings of Edward Hopper.  I came to Hopper’s paintings quite late in life, house sitting for a friend while she taught poetry at various colleges around the country.  Getting acquainted with my new surroundings, I stumbled across a book of his reproductions on the coffee table in her living room.

Hopper mesmerized me immediately.  And the word is not too strong.  Shortly afterwards I rounded a corner of the Guggenheim and was literally rooted to the spot for several minutes by one of his paintings.  But what I thought about today was that, several years after spying that coffee table book in Cobble Hill – by which time I’d moved to Park Slope, Brooklyn – I found myself gazing at the pink, brown and ocher facades of the brownstones in late afternoon sunlight and muttering, “I learned how beautiful these are from Edward Hopper.”

So it’s true of the artist’s brush as well:  it can teach one to see without it.  To use a more popular metaphor, the impact remains long after Elvis has left the building.

Moolten’s poem, as I suggested, was adroit and accomplished, distilling from Lange’s photograph of a Japanese-American boy in an internment camp both the honor of its subject and the dishonor of his situation.  As well as the government’s rather self-defeating folly in asking an artist like Dorothea Lange to take on that particular assignment.

“Aperture” appears in the current issue of Southwest Review, which informs me that Mr. Moolten’s first book, Plums & Ashes, won the 1994 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and that his next, Especially Then, was published in 2005.

I came across an old poem of mine recently while trying to decide what books to give up and what to keep, and rather liked it, so I thought I would share it with you.  It’s rare enough to be this pleased with older work.  The most interesting thing to me was that when my beloved Jill heard it for the first time (as I read it to her) she remarked, “Not only is it a poem, but it’s also a short story.”  I was pleased to have my future direction as a writer of narrative fiction foreshadowed and confirmed.

I did make small changes from the text as published, but only back to the version I had originally sent to the magazine, which the editor, for reasons known only to him, had altered.

In any event, the poem was published in a Jamaican litmag (yes!  Jamaican!) called Now, back in 1973, and refers to a summer I spent in Mexico even earlier, in 1959, when I accompanied my then wife, an anthropologist, to her field work among a Russian community of “Spiritual Christians” in Mexico.  (She knew neither Russian nor Spanish; I could struggle along in both.)  The sect we lived among that summer, in our little Airstream housetrailer, was called the Molokans or, to give it its official title, Bratskii Soiuz Dukovnykh Khristian Molokan-Prigunov, which means “Brotherly Union of Spiritual Christians - Milk-drinkers and Jumpers.”  Don’t ask.

Though I can’t remember now what my errand was, I was obviously bound for somewhere deeper into Mexico than the small valley of Colonia Guadalupe in Baja California where the Russians lived, when the scene described in this poem took place.

A MEXICAN BUSRIDE

It is like an airplane.
It groans and drones,
It is very like an airplane.
Not like a modern plane
But a roaring, sputtering monster
From World War One
That used to dust the cotton fields
When I was a boy.

I remember how –
Terrifed,
Paralyzed,
But terribly drawn
To the hideous thrust of power
And the noise –
I would lie on my back
Among the cotton stalks
In the very row
On which the plane bore down.
I did not mind the poison fumes
That trailed beneath its pregnant belly.
I bathed in them,
Gasping, coughing,
Terrified,
And enjoying my secret terror.

Here in the Mexican bus,
Inherited from Greyhound,
Or wherever,
It is very like an airplane
From World War One –
Roaring, gasping, sputtering.
And recalling again
That special fear.

The driver seems not to notice it.
It is an art, not noticing.
He plays his part as classically
As Moliere would have him do
While the airplane-engined

Ancient Greyhound,
Or school-bus,
Or whatever,
Tries to climb
The twisted Mexican pass
From one desert to another.

Precisely at the point
Of beginning helplessness
Where the engine has begun
To demonstrate that it too
Is human
(or mechanical)
He begins to take off his shirt,
This stoic driver,
And never rests his wad of gum.

Both hands absent from the steering wheel,
Even as the motor bucks
And kicks
And protests –
Invited to more endurance
Than World War One technology
And many years of trial
Could justify –
Does the driver
Finish his disrobing.

Then,
At the last gasp
Of remembered power,
Of forgotten awesomeness,
The motor groans forgiveness
As, hands free at last,
The driver tries a lower gear.
The engine, the airplane
Responds with gratitude.

I look over the steep
Cliffside the wheels were crumbling
When the shift occurred.
The stones from the mountainside
Are still wheeling wildly
Into space,
As we almost were,
As perhaps
Some secret death wish
Or some hidden longing
To regain its wings
Made the engine want,
Briefly,
Also.

The driver listens
To the haunting roar,
Steers with one hand,
Casual,
And, like me in the cotton patch
I guess
– Half art, all artifice –
And enjoying the secret terror,
Never ceases to chew his gum.

A character in Roberto Bolaño’s book, 2666 (Book Three, “The Part About Fate”), says the following:

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.  And you, who are so kind, now you must be asking:  what did you read, Barry?  I read everything.  But I especially remember a certain book I read at one of the most desperate moments of my life and it brought me peace again.  What book do I mean?  What book do I mean?  Well, it was a book called An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire, and I promise you that is one useful book, or at least it was of great use to me.”

My first reaction on reading this was:  What a quirky choice as an inspirational work!  From this aging Black Panther named Barry Seaman, who spent most of his life in jail and who is speaking to a gathering in a church, you might have expected . . . The New Testament, perhaps?  The Koran?  Milton? Shakespeare?  Something by W.E. B. Dubois?  Richard Wright?  And my second reaction was:  Which work of Voltaire was so compelling for him?  Not the whole thing, surely?  Was it Candide?  Diccionnaire Philosophique?  Something historical, perhaps?  On Louis XIV?  Charlemagne?  Peter the Great?  Was it one of the man’s fifty or sixty plays?  And, finally my thought was:  Good for him!  And good for Voltaire!  And, sitting at the table where I was reading, I leaned back in my chair and began to ponder what a wonderful thing writing was!  For, there it was, wasn’t it?  Here, in 2009, in Bolaño’s book, is a reference to a Frenchman who wrote almost 300 years ago and whose work is still influencing someone.  It doesn’t really matter which work of Voltaire – which particular passage it was – that so marked the life of Bolaño’s character.  It doesn’t matter that Bolaño’s character is fictional.  It doesn’t matter whether that character actually read Voltaire.  It doesn’t even matter whether Bolaño ever read Voltaire (though one may be sure he did; he was apparently as voracious a reader as you’ll find).  It’s there!  He lives!  And – whatever passage it was that struck Bolaño’s character’s mind as important, crucial – life-affirming even – here am I, 300 years later, reading a passage in Bolaño’s book and thinking about it, dwelling on it, musing on it, trying to absorb it into my being.

Could anyone have predicted this, some three hundred years ago?  Could Voltaire?  Of course not!  One never knows what will come of one’s writing.  Maybe nothing; maybe something very nice indeed.  What I felt at that moment was a sense of the profound continuity of thought and ideas and the way they become available to us because someone had the good sense to write them down.

Come one!  Come all!  I hereby invite anyone within the sound of my voice or the range of my words to hear me read pieces selected just for Valentine’s Day!  Well, the reading won’t take place exactly on Valentine’s day — five days earlier, actually, on Feb. 9 — but still! Consult your calendar immediately; that’s this coming Monday.

The place — as if you didn’t know — is the Cornelia Street Cafe, a familiar haunt to me, comfortable as an old shoe, both from the several readings I’ve given there in the past, and the many programs by others I’ve attended, as well.

So come on out at 6 pm on Monday.  The address — for those of you who are newbies — is 29 Cornelia Street, one block west of Sixth Avenue and just north of Bleecker Street.  There is a $7 tab, but you get a free glass of wine with that, so it’s more than worth it.  (Or maybe the stories I’m reading are free and the wine costs $7?  Whichever.)

I’m so proud these days — publishing issues aside at the moment — to be a practitioner of the word.  Perhaps because I was reminded recently — in that wonderful tribute to George Carlin at the Kennedy Center — of Mark Twain’s observation:  “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.”

So join us for, hopefully, a lot of the right words on Monday.  At least you’ll be hearing people who are trying to get it right.  And bring the love of your life,  or your squeeze of the moment, to help celebrate the presence in your life of love.  What?  No love in your life at the moment?  Come anyway!  You may get lucky!

What is it with Jhumpa Lahiri?

Her language does not bristle with style, never calls attention to itself.  She writes with a quiet clarity, her language supple yet unaffected, her tales mostly revolving around the mundane, ordinary facts of daily existence, of mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers – relationships which may have been arranged by others as well as those unfolding from chance encounters.  There’s no razzle-dazzle here, not a lot of action.  She describes in meticulous detail the accouterments of daily living – houses, food, clothes, jewelry, places visited and witnessed and stored up in our memories for later, perhaps unexpected recall.  Yet her prose is never boring, never.  Each sentence unfolds and draws you forward into the next one, which you read avidly, greedily, always wanting to know more.

So, how does she manage to achieve her extraordinary effects?  (Moving you to joy or sadness or any other station along the emotional railway.)  When you finish each story, you realize that every detail she has chosen is relevant.  It’s not densely packed.  There is light an air in it, there is room to breathe (in fact, you might say the prose comes to life and breathes on its own!)  Yet there’s always something unexpected, isn’t there?  A new fact careers around the bend and whops you in the face!  It may be a gentle slap or a hard right cross, but it’s there.  And when that happens, you don’t feel cheated, or manipulated.  You feel that life has simply happened, the way it does, not waiting for your approval.

Take, for example, that last story in the collection I just finished, Unaccustomed Earth.  When Kaushik met up with Hema again, in Italy, the phrase “Storybook Romance” popped into my mind.  Then I smiled at myself and said, “Well, you’ve known this from the beginning, right?  Why else is it called Hema and Kaushik?  Why is one story written from Hema’s point of view, directed at Kaushik, while another is written from Kaushik’s point of view and directed at Hema?  Of course it’s a storybook romance, stupid!  These are stories!  This is a book!  This is a romance!”   But then . . . what happened happened.  After the last three pages I was left with a sudden, desolate, wrenching sadness.  And at the same time with such gratitude that she had written it and that I, either through luck or good sense, had read it.

Is it magic, then?  Well, of course not!  She doesn’t flourish a wand or toss brightly-colored powders into the fire; I’m sure she works as hard as the rest of us to achieve her effects.  In fact, I can share with you something which may offer a clue.  Some years ago I attended an event where she and a few others were reading.  Her text was a short story that would come to be included in Unaccustomed Earth.  And – I had never witnessed this before – she interrupted herself in mid-sentence, frowned, unscrewed the cap from a ballpoint pen and executed a change, right there on the podium.  I remember being mildly annoyed at the time but, however disturbing it may have been to the flow of her performance, clearly nothing gets said until it’s perfect.

In that way (maybe this comes from my background as a Russian historian) Lahiri strikes me as Pushkinian.  What got said about Alexander Pushkin can be said equally of her:  it’s impossible to imagine any other word being substituted for those she has finally put on the page.  Beyond that, I might as well admit I haven’t a clue as to how she does it.

Okay, then.  It’s magic.

Well, I haven’t blogged in months!

My silence was due to a touch of melancholy, no doubt, and what drove that melancholy was most certainly a decision to reverse itself by the small press which had contracted to bring out my novel Wounded by History. And the melancholy was, let’s face it, driven in turn by grit-your-teeth anger. It’s not an easy blow to recover from – especially after all the fanfare and scheduled target dates, the wonderful blurbs from writers one admires, the barely suppressed elation, the buoyant confidence that knowledge of impending publication inspires – so much so that one forgets others have suffered the same dismal experience, particularly in this era of belt-tightening and wary second-guessing by publishers everywhere.  So my novel is now being shopped around to literary agents in the hope that one may be found who enjoys reading Wounded as much as my early reviewers did, and thinks he or she can find the right market. We’ll see, we’ll see.

But what has peeled back the scales from my eyes, gotten my juices flowing again is, as you might guess, an encounter with another wonderful book, this one a twenty-year old small novel by Andre Dubus called Voices from the Moon.It’s out of print, but available in second-hand bookstores or online. Crown Publishers. The binding cracks easily, but no matter.

Consider this passage. Richie is a young man of twelve who feels things keenly and wants to be a priest. He is grateful to an older brother, Larry, for teaching him to ride (horses) and to cross-country ski, sports through which he can at once embrace solitude and appreciate the physical world. As he rides through the woods one summer day, we see the following:

“A small college was near his house, and the college owned the athletic field and woods, and the trails were marked for the students; so he saw them sometimes, skiied around them or waited while they skiied around him, but they did not disturb him any more than chipmunks running across the trail did here, or the male cardinal he saw leaving its perch, or the blue jay, or the two doves. In riding and skiing he had found an answer to one of his deepest needs, without even knowing he had the need, and so without even seeking an answer. He had learned to make his spiritual solitude physical and, through his flesh, to do this in communion with the snow and evergreens, and the naked trees that showed him the bright sky of winter; and with the body of a horse, and the earth its hooves pounded, the air it breasted, and this woods and his glimpses through leaves of the hot blue sky.”

A feeling of communion with nature and one’s body – the sense of a “spiritual” bond with the world beyond one’s own flesh but that is deeply related to, even rooted in that corporeality – the sense of being in the world and of it at the same time– is more common to youngsters of twelve or so than it is to their elders, perhaps, but it’s still a feeling that’s deeply experienced and deeply remembered. We jaded adults, with our pock-marked, battle-scarred and fractionated consciousnesses, often surround “spiritual” with quotation marks, you’ll notice, as if to apologize for the notion, or shy away from it, suspicious that it might not stand the test of critical thinking. Nevertheless, I remember such feelings, and cherish them when they recur.

And as far as this book goes, Dubus’s observations are the kind of stuff one looks to Tolstoy for, or Melville perhaps, or Proust. Sentences that shimmer and grow in the mind because they manage to choose exactly the right detail, detail that not only captures a feeling but causes it to resonate in another mind. Voices from the Moon is a splendid book. Dubus tracks the innermost thoughts of six different characters here, often surprising and, in one case, shocking, but always convincing, their reactions over the course of one day splintering off from a single, signal event. Richly imagined and adroitly executed. Thank you, Andre.

I have a new hero. Heroine, I suppose. Her name is Nina Berberova.

An artist friend of mine knows an architect who studied at Princeton. Over lunch together — the three of us — he learned both that I’m a writer and that, some years back, my field of teaching in college had been Russian history. He wondered if I knew Nina, or of her. I said, truthfully, that I’d heard the name but in what connection I couldn’t recall. She had taught Russian at Princeton for many years, he informed me, but had also written some novels, which he felt were quite good.

Six months later, needing to clear my shelves, I carted a load of books over to Housing Works, my local non-profit, second-hand book store. Having discarded, I sought to purchase something new and got as far as “B” in the alphabetical listing when there it was: six short novels by Berberova. (A fine old Vintage International paperback from 1990, translated by Marian Schwarz. The title of the collection is The Tattered Cloak.) It seemed like Kismet, so I bought it.

And was I pleased! Berberova is a master. The novels (actually novellas, or long short stories, ranging from 30 to 70 pages) are set in the Paris to which she and other Russians had suffered exile in the twenties (think Nabokov, Diaghiliev, Tatlin), and they are truly amazing. You sense the surrounding City, you share the same rooms her characters inhabit. You crawl around inside the very souls of these characters, even when it’s not a pleasant fit. She sets things up with a tart economy one moment and, in the next, immerses you in a scene until you drown. She traverses vast steppes of time without any sense that you’ve lost something between one scene and the next.

She can make you smile with a sentence like: “His breath was a blend of strong coffee and Swiss mouthwash.” (from “Astashev in Paris). Or she can bowl you over with an (earned) epiphany like the following:

“I can’t explain how or when it came back. I no longer have my old ability to perceive with the unerring perspicacity of a child, the flair I once had. But I know that in our gloomy life, as I get duller and weaker, I am picking it up once again with a special strength, special fervor. What is it that is being revived in the face of everything (as it was twenty years ago) inside me might – very approximately and clumsily – be called a search for grandeur, a thirst for wisdom, love and truth, although all those words are just part of one infinite thing that I seem to skirt without actually seeing. . . .

“But where will Samoilov be then, and how exactly will he give me the signal?” (The Tattered Cloak.)

Berberova. Check her out.