“So what’s wrong with matricide?”she asked. “Killed by a Princeton graduate!” he said. The Princeton program was very strong back then, the best in the country, but it wasn’t the sort of thing your father could get too worked up about. I needed to temper his enthusiasm a bit, and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide. You had to play it down, which wasn’t easy when your dad was out there, reading your acceptance letter into a bullhorn. “And we’d say, “Umm, Princeton?”-as if it were an oral exam, and we weren’t quite sure that this was the correct answer. “So where do you sort of think you went?”
Inflection was everything, and it took the foreign students forever to master it. To anyone holding a tool or a weapon, we were trained to respond: “What? Me go to college? Whoever gave you that idea?” If, on the other hand, the character held a degree, you were allowed to say, ”Sort of,” or, sometimes, “I think so”.Īnd it was the next bit that you had to get just right. Did you attend a university of higher learning?”
In my time it took the form of a role-playing exercise, my classmates and I pretending to be graduates, and the teacher assuming the part of an average citizen: the soldier, the bloodletter, the whore with a heart of gold. The “modesty seminar” for freshmen has echoes of faux Oxbridge self-deprecation: “What I learned” evokes his imaginary days at Princeton. His stories are even more trenchant if you’ve heard him reading them on BBC Radio 4.
If forced to, I can live with the word "pussy," but "fucky-fuck" was making me carsick.
I have a wife and another girl for the weekend. "I work, and then I go home, and then I work some more." I was trying to set a good example, trying to be the person I'd imagined him to be, but it was a lost cause. "David," he said, "David, listen to me when I am talking to you. Is that it?" I brought the paper close to my face, and he stuck his arm through the little window and slapped the back of his seat. I took the New York Times from my carry-on bag and pretended to read, an act that apparently explained it all. “Sex," the driver said, "Has no one ever told you about it?"
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