“Would you say all people exist on a continuum of pathologies?” He sat there with his knees spread apart, gripping them with his big hands, leaning forward into my questions. I found him there, a big shy Santa in a white physician’s coat with a lush salt-and-pepper beard. Having somehow intuited my subject’s love of hot chocolate, I bought two cups and rode the elevator with them in a paper bag. On the street corner a vendor was selling hot chocolate from a cart. I was still living in New York back then and had been assigned to interview him for a magazine. We met in the winter of 1986, at Simon & Schuster, his publisher, soon after The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat came out. I’d often call him on weekday mornings after a swim. In November, when the water temperature is in the sixties, when I’ve toweled off and put on my bathrobe and started up the leaf-strewn lawn from the dock to my house, that’s when I think: I have to phone Oliver and tell him what a glorious swim I just had. After a swim, that’s when I miss him most.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |