Word: mistressful
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What the reader learns is this: six boys are born in the same summer in a village in the American Southwest. One dies young; five live to manhood. They separate, though bound together by their origin and by a mistress shared serially. No one is named. Each is referred to by his profession: the actor, the poet, the musician, the painter. That is four; the last, the curator of these memories, is a teacher of English...
Various clues-the single mistress, the lack of names and characterization, the fact that each of the four artists withers or dies after reaching renown-suggest what the author is up to. Goatish carnality is occasionally his medium, but he is writing about the mysterious web of past-present, the great arcs of possibility that bemuse a boy and, broken, haunt a man. His six characters are the mislaid and scattered pieces of one, the teacher who dreamed of painting, wrote a little, had a talent for music...
...servants in Shakespearean plays. With much of Iago's ability for skillful management of others (but with none of his strange twist of heart) she soothes Desdemona and chaperones her to bed with the kind of understated stage-presence that suggests a well-concealed understanding of how her mistress is to be handled. And Marie Kohler's Desdemona is more dutifully opposed than passively resigned to Othello's creeping suspicion--a refreshing variation on the usually-wilting Desdemona...
...phase of Picasso's life, he made a disastrous marriage to one of Diaghilev's dancers, a Russian girl named Olga Koklova. Picasso, as several of "his" women have made clear, was never an easy man to live with. As he put it bluntly to his later mistress Françoise Gilot, women are for him "either goddesses or doormats." (Picasso, not Mailer, is the century's monument of narcissism and male chauvinism...
Though Wodehouse is currently considering a trip back to England, his first since 1939, he seems a bit afraid of destroying fine memories, perhaps of ringing the doorbell of a stately home and being greeted by the mistress in curlers and the master in his undershirt. "Has it changed much?" he asks in a worried voice. He looks both pleased and relieved when the answer is no, not all that much...