She could have read his obituary in the paper but she was probably dropping the needle onto a record instead. All those sock hops—a relentless schedule—meant a girl had to practice. Her legs are so swollen now they couldn’t dance if you paid them. While watching her rocket program, she props the knurly white logs on a milk crate. Look, she yells, he’s hanging in the blackness from just that tiny cord and what if it snaps? I say from the next room: It’s made of steel. It won’t. James Agee had a drinking problem. He slept around on all three of his wives. He was a socialist obsessed with Jesus. He criticized the government and other writers and his own failed self. By the time he died—of a stopped heart in a taxi, age forty-five—he was in every sense a stray. And so smart you could hear his brain tick ten blocks away. And so louche you could lick him off the bottom of your shoe. It would be better if I didn’t think about him. But I do. My mother is blattering about grace and bravery.
