Leicester City!

  Leicester City!  

Uncle Albert was up early this morning, knocking at my door: Was I going to watch the Leicester City - Liverpool match?
     “I was thinking I would,” I said.
     “I was thinking I would, too. But I need you to help me down the stairs.”

 

So, I got up, pulled a pair of wool pants over my pajama bottoms and a hooded sweatshirt over my pajama top. I walked Uncle A down the stairs and into his chair. “Yes,” he exasperated to my question. “Yes, I’ve been to the john.” I went into the kitchen and made toast and jam and cups of tea, while he tuned the match in. “What’s it on?” he called. “I don’t know,” I said. But he found it.

 

0-0 at the half.

     “So, you’re reading Iris Murdoch again?” he asked. Out of nowhere.
     “Yes,” I said. “Why is everybody* interested?”
     “I met her once,” he said. “Well, more than once. She was formidable.”
     “I imagine.”
     “Why?” Uncle Albert asked after he’d asked me to mute Rebecca and Robbie and Danny. (“Damn they like to talk,” he said: “Except she likes to yell.” “I rather like her,” I said. “Well, she doesn’t care for you,” he said. Then, I said:)
     “Why what?”

     “Do you keep reading Iris Murdoch?” Uncle Albert said.
     “It’s not that I keep reading her, but I do keep coming back to her,” I said. Uncle Albert didn’t say anything. I said, “Gaspar Stephens asked me the same thing? He was reading The Bell. The only other one he’d read was Henry and Cato. He asked me, too, about the homosexual characters in both. What was she doing, given when she was writing, was she exploring ‘identity and alienation,’ I think were his words, and ‘institutions’? ‘It wouldn’t be like today, would it?’ he asked, ‘where the inclusion of LGBTQers might well only be marking how inclusive the writer was?’” I took a breath. It was an ad. Maybe the game was starting again.
     “Mmm?” Uncle Albert said.
     “I said something like that homosexuality, or homosexual characters, played important roles in almost all the books I remembered. Of the ones I’d read lately, I said, they’d play predominant roles in three of the four. Incest was the titillating investigation in the fourth.”

Uncle Albert and Auntie Iris

There was a pause. “Titillating what?”
     “‘Titillating investigation’ – that was the term I used. Unfair – it might be unfair – I said, but it wasn’t entirely wrong. I said: Murdoch wants to both lure the reader in and (then) push the envelope she's lured him into. She is intensely interested in how love works and how it doesn't work, how it can save us and how it can curse us, and how in the meanwhile it is pulling us this way and that way and this way again. The more varieties of love she can put on offer – or investigate – the more she can think about love for us and with us. I said.
     “‘And that’s why I kept reading her’ is what I told Gaspar Stephens.”

“I met her once,” Uncle Albert said.
     “Yes,” I said.
     “Well, more than once,” he said. He motioned at the TV. The second half had begun.

02.13.21

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  * Dramatis personae: GasparStephens, Uncle Albert. “Everybody.”