Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Here is an excerpt from another story from Bluebeard’s Egg: Stories
Excerpt from another story from Bluebeard’s Egg: Stories
You may think from what I’ve said that Emma is a sort of tomboy, willing to exchange cigarettes and backslaps with men, but otherwise impervious to them. On the contrary, Emma, although tall, is always falling in love, a venture that for her seems to be a lot like skydiving: you leap impulsively into thin air, and trust that your parachute will open.
The men she falls in love with are usually married, and awful as well, or this is what Emma’s friends think. We try to produce nice men for her, men with whom she could settle down, as she keeps saying with what may be fake wistfulness that she would like to do. But these kindly or courteous or even solvent men don’t interest Emma. She wants exceptional men, she says, men she can look up to, and so she adores, one after another, men who have excelled in their fields, frequently through ruthless egoism, back-stabbing and what Emma calls dedication, which often means that when the chips are down they have no real time for anyone else, including Emma. Why she can’t spot this kind of man a mile off, especially after all that practice, I don’t know. But as I’ve said, she’s fearless. The rest of us have more self-protection.
At this time of her life – the world-travel time – Emma was in love with Robbie, who had been her professor at college. Robbie was twenty years older than Emma, a stocky red-bearded Scot whose grumpiness was legendary. Emma mistook it for shyness. She thought he was more spiritually mature than she was, and therefore difficult to understand. She also thought that Robbie, sooner or later, would realize that Emma, and not his wife of fifteen years, mother of his two sons, was his true soul mate. This was towards the beginning of Emma’s career. Later she dropped the marriage motif, or at least did not say so much about it. But the men did not become any less awful.
Robbie was a leading man in his field, which was not large. He was an archaeologist, specializing in burials. In fact he was writing a book on comparative tombs, which took him here and there about the world. This was convenient for Emma. Robbie was never averse to having her join him, as long as she paid her own way. Among Robbie’s other sins, the rest of us felt, was his exploitation of the liberated woman theme. He was always lecturing Emma about how she could be more liberated. But Emma loved him despite this.
