Walking Papers

Sandra Hochman

Description

- ARC distributed to influencers and various trade publications
- Social Media campaign on Facebook and Twitter
- Email marketing campaign to over 90,000 Turner Publishing subscribers
- Free Book Friday giveaway offered by Turner Publishing
- Website marketing on TurnerPublishing.com
- Activist, socialite, and artist: Hochman has a wide network of well-known and culturally-important artists, writers, journalist, producers, and many more. She has collaborated with Gloria Steinem on The Year of the Woman (re-released recently by Huffington Films), a film that showcases one of the most pivotal times for feminism in the 1970s. Amongst her friends were Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Andy Warhol, and Jack Kerouac. Her first husband was world-famous violinist Ivry Gitlis and she once had a torrid love affair with poet Robert Lowell. Her network extends to some of pop culture's greatest names.
- Beloved title in Hochman collection - Walking Papers continues to be one of Hochman's most remembered and treasured titles, a novel that Kirkus said had, "the clear sparkle of chipped ice."
- Award-winning author: Sandra Hochman has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition Award, and is also the recipient of 1st Metropolitan Museum Award of Merit

Sujets

• Literary
• Sandra Hochman
• Walking Papers
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781683365150
• Langue: English

Extrait

walking papers
other books in the sandra hochman collection from turner publishing:
Streams
Endangered Species
Happiness Is Too Much Trouble
Jogging
Playing Tahoe
for children:
The Magic Convention
sandra hochman
walking
papers
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
New York, New York
www.turnerpublishing.com
Walking Papers
Copyright 2017, 1971, 1968, 1966 by Sandra Hochman.
All rights reserved.
First published in 1971 by The Viking Press, Inc.
Portions of this book, in different form, appeared in Ambit, Harper s Bazaar , and Holiday .
This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design: Maddie Cothren
Book design: Glen Edelstein
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hochman, Sandra, author.
Title: Walking papers / Sandra Hochman.
Description: New York, New York : Turner, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017002638 | ISBN 9781683365136 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3558.O34 W35 2017 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017002638
9781683365136
Printed in the United States of America
16 17 18 19 20 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Alexandra Emmet
contents
preface: the weekend papers
flashback: jason
haig s voice
partners
divorces
the blind
lament for my head
the lobster house
1001 lessons in feminine hygiene
the millionaires
the blues of fallen angels
not wanted
shadow boxing, or, the politics of peacefulness
haig
solitude and nerves
paris
philipe
beth
birth
mister dog
first-person present
animal life
bareback riding to divorceland
ACROBATS
I too am Limbering. Like you I defy the air-and twist into Unheard-of positions-performing the Wrisly-hand to foot-foot to foot-destined, like you, To have dreaming feet-to have hands pungent As oranges-the holy hush of the twist in midair Which lands you nowhere. We zombie fools
Whose dreams amaze us and make us light as angels.
preface
the weekend papers
My name is Diana Balooka. I ve been married three times. My first husband, a hypnotist, is now the head of the Reinforcement Center with offices in Los Angeles and New York. Although we are annulled, we still encounter each other at Roseland, as we are both avid social dancers. My career as a tap dancer in summer stock and on Broadway was permanently interrupted when I fell in love with my beloved second husband, a handsome lawyer in the diplomatic service who was appointed Consul General to Burma. There, we both became Pali priests and participated in the rituals of the candlelight service. You can imagine my shock when my beloved priest, husband, master, and gentle soul mate slipped in a pagoda and died in the lotus position. A famous man, known for his kindness and wisdom and quite an Asian celebrity, his name often appears in international crossword puzzles. I had no heart for tapping after this tragic moment and returned to America, where I studied the psychological effects of divorce on children. Naturally, my third marriage was meant to last eternally. My third husband, a bushy, red-haired Israeli in love with the bushmen of Africa-an anthropologist who had participated in the famous studies of human behavior in Port-au-Prince-lost his arm in a crocodile shoot and returned to his original love, ecology-environment-population studies, becoming a specialist in population biology. To supplement his interests in the dimensions of the AIR, FOOD, WATER, BIRTH-CONTROL, DEATH-CONTOL, AND TOTAL-ENVIRONMENT CRISIS he went into industry and before long wound up in the fertilizer business. I would ask him, How does it feel, Jason, to be listed in Who s Who as the outstanding authority on manure? He would scratch his red beard, laugh, and say in his thick Middle Eastern accent, When the shit hits the fan at least it will be mine. That was in the days when we were still laughing.
walking papers
flashback:
jason
Love is hello and good-by. Life is hello and good-by.
I ask myself, what went wrong with Jason?
And me? It s hard to explain. Suddenly there was no more sweetness. No more kindness. The talking stopped. And the love-making. No talk. No touch. How else do people reach out? By eyes. By the eyes. But he never looked at my eyes. I kept searching his eyes for looks that would mean something to me. And nothing was there. The man with the shaded eyes. One day he made up his mind to go on a business trip. Fertilizer Business. I knew that I had spent all those months without making love. I didn t want to be left alone. I had the nurse who would take care of my four sons.
Take me with you, Jason. Eyes downcast.
I can t.
I wanted to scream-
Look at me. Recognize me. I felt like the Republic of Cuba. Do you mind recognizing me?
Yes.
Finally I didn t want to be recognized. I drove Jason to the airport.
Take care of yourself, he said. I thought then, Do you have any idea of the self you want me to take care of?
I received some letters from him while he was on the trip. They were not letters. Instructions. Take my clothes to the cleaner. Renew the insurance policy. How are the boys? Are you taking them to the doctor? A letter-list without soul. Just solubles. The fertilizer was being tossed on my head. I felt buried. Woman killed in Pyramid of Shit. I was being wrapped in bandages. Nothing to look forward to but my mummification. Haig.
Haig. He unraveled the rags. Took me out of my casement. Brought the mummy back to life. Slowly my liquids dissolved. The woman-asleep in the tomb of nontouch nonlook nonfeeling-came alive. The Life Giver. Haig, the giver of life. The sun king. The man-doctor-lover who took off my body rags, breathed into my eyes. Me. Sleeping Beauty. Asleep for six married years. Now awake. And alive.
A day in the life of an orange. This summer s bad joke. Quogue. Famous for seafaring fishermen and housewives building their pyramids of complaints among the ruins of person-to-person collect and credit-call cards. The long piece of land called Long Island, shaped like a lobster s claw stretching into the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean and Quogue, at the beginning of the claw, are in some bizarre way, responsible for my tempest-tossed soul-my beginning and my end. My bad humor.
Last night I heard the story of the oranges. I went out to dinner with Micah-a religious French Jew whose parents were Cabalists. Micah now lives facing the ocean, her sea-great eyes filled with the waves. At dinner she turned to me and said, I want to tell you about a dream. We were all together in a garden-my family, my friends, all of the painters who live in East Hampton. We were each given an orange and told to study it. At the end of half an hour we were all told to take our oranges and throw them into a pile. And then? We were all to pick up our own orange from the pile and identify it. Because each orange is different from every other orange. Just as each life is different from another life. And yet all the oranges are similar. All the same. So our lives, Diana, are as different as oranges. And our lives-all the same.
What a joke. My orange-juice life. The juice squeezed out of me. My garden of oranges. My grove of grievances and life-juice. My flowing juices from a life of round navel-mother-orange pit. It s harder and harder to recognize my orange from the others. The peel. The thick layer of orange skin. I slice open my life.
What happened to me that summer? There I was getting my first divorce. One death, one annulment. And now a divorce, worse than death. My lawyer sits in New York behind a desk made out of walnut. In his office are his degrees, his photographs of his children, his papers, his scrolls showing the ups and downs of the marital world. He-the King of Maritals, the small King Solomon of the bad-temper noncompatability world-decides each day who shall be separated, who shall have custody, who shall get the furniture, who shall pay Blue Cross and Blue Shield. His armed visions are set down in legal vernaculars by legal secretaries. But he is untangling our lives.
I sit by the ocean talking to my lawyer, telephone calls which might as well be charged to the Society of the Deaf and Dumb. No matter how much I plead for a quick decision there is always the same answer.
Jason will not sign the agreement or Mr. Eyrenstein is having trouble finding Jason or Mr. Eyrenstein has left for Florida and is not available.
Tell me something new. In September we will all have to go to court. I might as well begin my courtship of another life. To court love is to court disaster. The truth has court up with you. Give me some courtisone, I ve been stung by a red-haired one-armed Israeli Wasp-Jason!
haig s voice
I hear the sound. It is mostly
The sound of the sea whining and weeping and suddenly
It is deafening. I cannot get it out
Of my ears, my nostrils, my belly, my long hair .
It is clear as crystals growing
In a jar. It is the sound of dandelions going
To seed and blowing in the wind like huge great
Shadows which must disappear .
The architecture of hello and good-by: wonder bridges falling down. It begins: the fight against years. Against the grammar of loneliness.
Are you home? May I come in? Are you there? Bonsoir . What words? I wear a peaked cap and climb the steps of the Wheeler-Dealer Steak House. On top of the fires I am going to see Haig, the one-per-cent two-per-cent three-per-cent interest of my life-one hundred per cent-one hundred and ten per cent. The wonder of numbers. My body: a host for the hundred-per-cent, hundred-and-twelve-per-cent feeling. Each stair that I climb in the building brings me closer-closer-I knock on the door. It s open, he screams from the television divan. He is lying without words. TV balks and oh