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A difference in the contact glance—the father’s a hard squinting challenge, the son’s sidelong and measuring.
A week earlier the luxury-real-estate-rental mogul Rodrig Cushion had sent Arwen to Reykjavík to examine and make a judgment on a rare nineteenth-century whaling captain’s house perched above a fjord with a view of dripping icebergs. Now, as he stands in the boarding line, he checks the snapshots on his phone. The most recent shows the interior entryway of that house; an umbrella jar holds several walking sticks and two ancient Inuit harpoons with whale-bone barbs; on the wall above them hangs a gleaming nineteenth-century harpoon gun. It is, Arwen thinks, whaling history in a nutshell. Such details, he knows, are priceless to Cushion. He looks at the steel gleam of the harpoons, cruel instruments. The owner is a taciturn old woman who didn’t like the sound of Cushion’s deal and pushed the door open, inviting Arwen out but not before he took that quick shot of the harpoons.
When Acme-Air’s loudspeakers rattle out the information that boarding for his flight is under way, it is 3:20 a.m. and the Icelandic sun is coming up. He calls Carolla, who takes eight rings to answer.
“So, where are you? Do you know what time it is? Are you in Boston? Will you be home soon?”
“No, I’m still in Reykjavík. We’re just boarding. Sorry, babe, I forgot the time difference. I thought I was headed home, but I have to go to New York first. Via Chicago.”
“What, Iceland to Chicago to New York?”
“Cushion’s plan. He popped it on me out of the blue. He’s in Chicago this week. Look, I’ll call from there or New York. I don’t know what he wants.”
“Well—don’t call at midnight. And as long as he pays for the travel he can do that, right? You get to go to marvellous places—golden sands of Araby and all that.”
この記事は The New Yorker の July 08, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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この記事は The New Yorker の July 08, 2024 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
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SUBJECT AND OBJECT
What happened when Lillian Ross profiled Ernest Hemingway.
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ROYAL FLUSH
The fall of red.
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Roz Chast on George Booth's Cartoons
There's almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze.
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CHUKA
I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being. Sometimes we live for years with yearnings that we cannot name.
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Rachel Aviv on Janet Malcolm's "Trouble in the Archives"
As Janet Malcolm worked on \"Trouble in the Archives,\" a two-part piece about prominent psychoanalysts who disagreed about Freud, she began a correspondence with Kurt Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
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PERSONAL HISTORY - A VISIT TO MADAM BEDI
I was estranged from my own mother, so a friend tried to lend me his.
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AMERICAN CHRONICLES - WAR OF WORDS
Editors, writers, and the making of a magazine.
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LIVE FROM NEW YORK
A new docuseries commemorates fifty years of \"Saturday Night Live.\"
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TANGLED WEB
An arachnophobe pays homage to the spider.
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TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Mike White's mischievous morality plays.