Seeing in her something of a country girl—though most especially when she tells me candidly that life is not sane living simply with our memories—I look past the salient superficialities of her social associations, an act by which I look quite deeply into the very social associations from which I wish to have her separated. Conversely, that I emphasize that I see in her the quaintness and fortitude characteristic of the country girl suggests that I might see in her little else. Whether this is of any consequence is chiefly beyond any of my immediate concerns, unless, of course, there is uncontested evidence that I actually do see little else in her apart from her vaguely traditional Southern qualities, which I by all means do intend to conflate with country-like qualities mentioned above, if only to satiate the palate of the general reader whom it is likely would not even have noticed the leap from “country” to “traditional Southern.” However, considering her social context—unfortunately—does not suffice to eclipse the subject of her filial context. It follows then that her Southernness is unquestionably unquestionable, albeit uniquely and rightly beside the point: Seeing in her something of a country girl bears no consequence unless I, like a sort of graceless literary Private I, attempt to understand her history, the majority from which I had the grave unluck of being, quite simply, removed.

While to this day I have not met her mother, I twice met her father: once, oddly, on my twentieth birthday; again on another occasion shortly thereafter. If not to Appease her by meeting her father and stepmother (and their new daughter, whom they adopted from Cambodia—who now seems even more peripheral than she did on my twentieth birthday, so much so I had to chalk out another one of my endless yet predictable parentheticals just to have enough dramatic room for her), I can’t quite remember anymore what exactly compelled me to drive out to the edge of Fulton county on my twentieth birthday (which, for me, marked a sort of expulsion into adulthood, an escape from the placenta-warmth of family life, the purpose of which currently consumes—menacingly—my mind’s mechanisms, despite its essentially tacit knowledge that all such explorations are and will always be arbitrarily (juvenilely, facetiously) Lacanian... please pardon the digression). What I had heard up to that point about her father and her family’s history had not seemed to me especially enticing or warm (two characteristics which I would later realize I had taken for granted in my own family, a misfortune which is likely attributable to my propensity of looking into the relations within the families of others without keeping in mind my own predispositions), especially when I, as we neared Milton¹ , mentally underscored those facts (in an exhausting and unrelenting type of way), and thoughtlessly forgot what was bringing me there in the first damn place. I should add that up to that point I had never been to Milton, and that the way she spoke about it made it seem to me a place for which I needed to foster some superficial type of fondness, as if her having descended from the affluent suburb supplemented her archetypal Southern qualities. To advance that notion, the way she spoke about nearly everything (besides, of course, sorority life) seemed to germinate within me—inexplicably—new fondnesses.

Her father was a short oafish man with a tastefully painful-to-watch smile. I suppose his eyes, which were the only physical characteristic he shared with her, were all that made the smile tolerable. During our first handshake, I can remember, I looked down on him: literally, given that I stand, obtusely hunched, around six feet tall; and emotionally, for my contempt for this man was writhing, pulsing with anarchic youthfulness... You see, reader, I cannot quite entirely divulge what I learned of her father before I met him. It would be in a fit of Real infidelity that I made public the things she confided in me and thus in herself. Of course, though, my reader, you are here for something to read, and so I will give it to you: After I met him, and after I had moved away (for good), I learned that her father had—quite ceremoniously—excommunicated her from his life, backwardly citing the stepmother and new-daughter as ample replacements for the daughter he never deserved to begin with. In truth, dear reader, I often imagine him, fake-smiling, making that phone call to his daughter just to cast her into utter estrangement, all the while intendedly oblivious to the replacement family he keeps around, like a musician with old manuscripts.

His old manuscripts, fresh flesh though they may be, sit idly now in his new life, in which they are merely pawns (and this, by his standards, is generous) to the end of his meaningless morose; in which they have become faceless fixations of his malevolent malaise, subject indefinitely to his pitiful and infantile whims; in which their fleeting use was used ultimately without Use. Having a humanist heart, I weep for them as I cheer for her, now that she is one step nearer her own expulsion into adulthood, the conclusivity of which I can only speculate as having nearly achieved full extrication from that eyeful of oaf, her father.

Here we experience an epiphanous ésprit de l’escalier ² which—if I may backhandedly though most assuredly momentarily offend my readers by making my best decision concerning the defalcation of that other short end of what Buddy Glass claimed was the tendency of the writer “to give the reader, whom we’ve never met, either the short end or the benefit of the doubt—the short end when we don’t credit him with knowing as much about men and mores as we do, the benefit when we prefer not to believe that he has the same kind of petty, sophisticated data at his fingertips that we have”³—an epiphanous ésprit de l’escalier which is indeed naturally epiphanous in several ways, though this claim might force one to think contrarily, to consider that perhaps an experience of l’ésprit de l’escalier does not occur strictly to l’homme sensible,⁴ but to all humans, those creatures overwhelmed not by the arguments leveled against them, but rather by their own leveling against existence, against finitude, and against temporality

—Trust me, friend, when I say that I loathe speaking in analogical and allegorical terms. At first I was rather immune to bringing up, for example, Plato, but recently I realized that the circumstances at his deathbed were repeated in those of “Papa” Monzano’s.⁵ And, perhaps, when I bring this up it is not to speak in analogical terms (since, after all, I’m not here to relegate a fantastical connection between Vonnegut’s politico-prosaic prowess and Plato’s intentionally (thoughtfully) ironic wishes), but, much more than that, to emphasize the inevitable bouts of l’ésprit de l’escalier which we all too often take for granted as simply missed opportunities (missed chances, missed glances), and which her father will never exploit so as to gain remission of his sins.