Butterfly Stories

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With all due respect, his wife was saying, maybe even because you're so smart, I don't know — they say there's a fine line — you've definitely got problems. (The journalist had just told her that maybe, just maybe, they should consider a divorce.) You need analysis, his wife said. You've got something to work out. You always say my family's screwed up — well! I'm telling you, your family's screwed up. Really screwed up. Actually the rest of them aren't so bad. It's you. Everyone thinks you're a freak. All the neighbors think you're a freak, even if they're too nice to say it directly to me. I'm normal; I'm tired of being married to a freak.

I see that, he said.

All your friends are freaks. Either society's rejected them or else they've rejected society. They're the lowest of the low. You've spent years building up a crew of freaks.

I wouldn't necessarily call them freaks, he said.

Tears were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks which all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him — why not be conscientious and say that those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault? They shone now with recognition of his guilt; they overflowed until her whole face, sodden with snot and tears, reminded him of a beach where something flickers pitifully alive in every wet sand-bubble when the waves retreat.

And that photographer you hang out with, she said, it doesn't do your character any good to be with someone so irreverent -

Hearing that, no matter how sorry for her he was, he could not prevent a happy brutal smile from worming to his lips, twisting his whole face; he could hardly wait to tell the photographer what she'd said and listen to him laughing. .