For Kings and Planets: A Novel - Rilegato

Canin, Ethan

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0679419632 ISBN 13: 9780679419631

Casa editrice: Random House Inc, 1998

Riassunto

The author of Emperor of the Air offers a perceptive novel about two young men from very different backgrounds--Orno Tarcher, from a small Missouri town, and worldly New Yorker Marshall Emerson--who meet at Columbia University as they pursue their own goals, lives, women, and careers. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Ethan Canin is the author of Emperor of the Air, Blue River, and The Palace Thief.  A physician, he is also on the faculty of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  He divides his time between California and Iowa.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

ONE

I

Years later, Orno Tarcher would think of his days in New York as a seduction. A seduction and a near miss, a time when his memory of the world around him--the shining stone stairwells, the taxicabs, the sea of nighttime lights--was glinting and of heroic proportion. Like a dream. He had almost been taken away from himself. That was the feeling he had, looking back. Smells and sounds: the roll and thunder of the number 1 train; the wind like a flute through the deck rafters of the Empire State Building; the waft of dope in the halls. Different girls, their lives coming back to him: hallways and slants of light. Daphne and Anne-Marie and especially Sofia. He remembered meeting Marshall Emerson on his second day at college, at dawn on the curb of 116th Street and Broadway, the air touched with a memory of heat that lingered in the barest rain. It had reminded him of home.

New York: he'd driven with his parents, arriving in three days from Cook's Grange, Missouri, cabs honking and speeding by them as at last they pulled onto the West Side Highway late in the afternoon on the first day of September, 1974; the cornices of midtown skyscrapers ablaze in sunlight above his father's homburg as he inched along in the right lane. Hugging the wheel of the Chrysler like a man on a tractor. Orno was in the backseat, coming to Columbia University, the first in his family to go east for an education. He remembered his father, driving like a farmer. His mother in her flowered dress.

He himself was in corduroy pants and a tie, upright in his seat with hopes of deeds and glory. That evening, after his parents left him, he wandered downstairs and sat on the dormitory steps in the warm air, eager to offer aid to anyone moving in. But three days remained before the start of registration and nobody appeared for him to help. He went for a walk in the direction of the Hudson instead, coming out at last onto the high bluffs. They reminded him of the Mississippi until at sunset the lights began to come on across the water. Streams of red and yellow on the throughways. Buildings clumped like stars. He returned to the dormitory again, still not having spoken to anyone and suddenly remembering that he was not to walk out alone after dark; he went upstairs to his room, where he read Look Homeward, Angel until he became used to the sounds of traffic and slept. Fear entered him and replaced his hope of glory, fear that he had erred badly. He remembered thinking: I am no longer among my own.

The next morning he woke early, a habit from Missouri. He showered before dawn, left his hair wet, and walked down to the west gate of campus. On the park bench the guard dozed and a young boy sat unbundling newspapers. A misty rain was settling, no more than a touch of cool on his skin. In the distance he heard a garbage truck shrieking and clanging as it came to intersections, muffled when it moved behind the apartments. Then he was aware that someone was saying his name: another student, possibly his own age, in a smoking jacket. Friendly in a sly way. "Well," he said. "Did I get it?"

"My name?" said Orno. "Yes you did. How'd you know?"
"The book of pictures they gave us. The face book."
"You're a freshman, too?"
"Yes, I'm embarrassed to say." He put out his hand. "Marshall Emerson."
"Orno Tarcher."
"As I said."
"As you did."
"You're up early, too," said Orno.
Marshall smiled. "Hardly." He rubbed his hands. "We're in the same hall, you know. Four hundred of us hungry dogs. I think you're right downstairs from me. You're in 318. I'm in 418."
"How'd you know all this?"
"I told you. It was in the face book."
"There are hundreds of pictures in that book."
"Well, I was right, wasn't I?"
"I guess so," said Orno, holding out his hand. "Let me see your picture."
"I tossed the thing weeks ago. Sorry. But I'm from here," he said. "Manhattan." He pointed up around him. "And I didn't let them have my picture anyway. I sent them a drawing. But they didn't use it. Now you know my name, anyway."
Orno smiled.

"You know what I love?" Marshall said. "I love the way at this hour you could be anywhere on earth. Before it wakes, the world is the same everywhere. In Istanbul now you would be hearing the first call to prayer. This rain reminds me of it." He put his hand to his mouth and made a chanting noise. "Allahu Akbar. Ashadu an la ilaha ill Allah. The muezzin." He smiled. "In the minarets."
"I've never been," said Orno. "Have you spent much time there?"
"In a way. A beautiful and mysterious city. I once saw a man there feed a house cat to his snake. Ashadu anna Muhammadur rasul Allah. It means, God Is Great. In practice it means, get out of bed."
Orno laughed. His whole life he would remember this moment: the world opening. "I'm glad to see you wake up at this hour, too," he said. "Where I'm from, everybody does, but around here nobody seems to."
Marshall stared at him. "Oh, you're really not kidding, are you?"
Orno looked back, smiling unsteadily.
"I'm not waking up," said Marshall. "I'm getting home."
"They make these like this so we can't jump out of them,"
Marshall said, trying to force open Orno's window. It was later that day, early afternoon sunlight bouncing in from the gray stone walls. "You can't open them wider than your hand, you know."
Orno walked over and pushed. "I'll be darned."

There was a flatness to the light off the granite, like heat.
Marshall had come downstairs to visit, knocked once on his door and then opened it. That and the fact of New York out his window: he could see the cornice of a prewar building across the street, green copper thirty stories up, maybe a roof garden. It was thrilling. There was still almost nobody else in the dorm, though now through the window he could see them starting to arrive. Cabs at the curb. Boxes. All day his mood had risen and fallen wildly. At Clarkson College, where his father and uncles had gone, the windows were huge, wood-paned rectangles that spun on pivot hinges: dusty sunlight and prairie wind and yellow jackets in the high corners of the rooms. Just as quickly fear rose in him. He touched the glass again. "My folks are out to drop me off," he said. "We're going to lunch."

Marshall kept looking out the window.
"I mean, if you want to come."
"What are your folks like?"
He had no answer for that. It was odd. "I mean," he said, "I doubt it will be fancy or anything." He thought of his father. "But still."
"Out from where?"
"We're from the Midwest."
"Where in the Midwest?"
"St. Louis." He was looking down at Broadway, knowing his father would pull past in the yellow Chrysler.
"The face book says Cook's Grange."
"I thought you threw out the face book."
"I did. Where's Cook's Grange?"
"Two hours from St. Louis."
On the street the Chrysler drove by: Orno glimpsed his mother's hat, red flowers at the brim, the camera on her shoulder. "You probably have better things to do."
"No," said Marshall. "I'd love to come along."
They walked outside into the glancing light. Getting into the car Marshall said, "I've never been in a private car in Manhattan in my life."
"Is that right?" asked his mother. "Where does your family reside?"
"East Sixties."
She smiled blankly.
"The Upper East Side of Manhattan," said his father. "Across the park."
Orno said, "Mother, Father, this is Marshall Emerson."
His father lifted his hat, a country gesture. "Drake Tarcher," he said. It could have been the opening of a crop-insurance pitch.
"How do you do?" Marshall answered, a phrase Orno himself had never used. He made a note of it.
His mother smiled.

They went to lunch on Broadway at a place Marshall knew: plate-glass windows opening on to a scene of rush--streams of taxis, roofers next door hauling tar pots up a rickety ladder, women in heels, a policeman clomping midstreet on a rebelling mare. The menu made his mother laugh: sandwiches named The Brooklyn Bridge (Wanna Buy It?), The President Nixon (We Can Explain Everything), The Big Apple (But I Wouldn't Want To Live There). The waiter introduced himself, and his mother asked him where he was from, while somehow his father and Marshall continued a discussion of World War II that they must have started on the street. Orno's father had seen action in the Philippines and Marshall seemed to know about all the battles there: Corregidor, the China Sea. Orno had heard of them too, but he'd never paid attention. He felt envy, his father talking this way.

His mother said, "My, you certainly seem to know a great deal. What does your father do?"
"Both my parents are professors."
She raised her brows. "Both of them?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"What does your father teach?"
"Vertebrate biology."
"And what is that exactly?"
"Fish mostly, in his case. He studies a genus of Teleostei, at Woods Hole. That's where we go in the summer. But in general the field is any animal with a backbone. For some reason it's a distinction biologists make." He smiled thinly. "Ironically enough."
"And Mrs. Emerson?"
"Anthropology." He nodded. "She uses her own name, by the way. She goes by Pelham, not Emerson."
"Oh dear," said his mother.

His father taught at Columbia itself, it turned out, a fact Marshall seemed to admit with the same unease ...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Random House Inc
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679419632
• ISBN 13: 9780679419631
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 335