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Show -232 from him and stared across the valley; the smoke from American Can was being bent back down on itself by a freak of atmosphere-it looked like a cosmic question mark. I felt bitter and miserable. "I fucked mine worse," I said. "Is that supposed to make me happy?" "No. But you asked." I prodded a flat stone with my toe and turned it over; sowbugs and iridescent black beetles scurried away, panicked by the sudden sun. "I think you're thirty-five years old and you've always been married to the same woman and you've always been a lawyer. And now you don't feel good about it, and you're mad at me for telling you that what you suspect is right: you fucked it, for all practical purposes. So did I." "I'm not as quick as you or Carlo," Jacob said, "but I'm not a fool. I know more about people than either one of you-real people, I mean, not Skinners. So don't treat me like the family joke because I went to law school and made something of myself." He was really angry now. "Wait a minute--" I said. He got up. "You've always looked down on me because I wasn't sensitive like Adam and didn't want to be a great artist or die, like him. The same way you looked down on him for being those things but not having enough talent to keep from being ridiculous, which I'll agree with you he |
