Beautiful?  Other people had called Delphine beautiful for as long as she could remember.  Yes, she was slim and black-haired, with the high cheekbones, large eyes, and finely chiseled profile beloved by photographers, but she’d learned as a child to disregard, even scorn, these features that turned heads and provoked jealousy. 

On the other hand, she didn’t doubt that she was more intelligent than most people she knew.  Either  way, she considered it stupid to be either proud or ashamed of being either a winner or a loser in the genetic lottery.  She’d picked up this sensible attitude from her parents and was grateful to them for it.  

Sure, her brilliant father drank.  Her talented mother consumed pills at odd hours of the day and night.  They could be self-centered and obtuse.  She understood their imperfections, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love and admire them.  Maybe someday she’d find something she wanted to do as passionately as her father studied human characteristics and habits or as single-mindedly as her mother reworked musical forms to capture the astonishing sounds that reverberated in her handsome head. 

From her scientist  father, she learned analysis of facts and information, the importance of details, and to not come too soon to any conclusion.  From her composer mother, she learned precision, discipline, the pursuit of perfection.  From both of them she acquired an attitude that sometimes appeared to others as overly cerebral.  One medical student who pursued her for a while said, just before he walked away forever, that her emotions were anesthetized.  She thought this was nonsense. 

 Even as child and adolescent, Delphine felt deeply and was angry at the cruelty and injustice she saw in the world.  When she glimpsed the homeless huddled in doorways with newspapers and ragged blankets, when she read about struggling immigrants, when she saw television reports of men and women losing their retirement and families their homes, fury rattled inside her skull, as if her brain had turned into a grenade.  It's their own fault, some people said, serves 'em right, but she didn't believe that so many people could've screwed up so badly to deserve what they were getting.  When she read of famines in Africa, wars in Asia, bombings in the Middle East, she was sad and perplexed.  None of this made sense.  Why were human beings so stupid? 

Other people generally were a mystery to Delphine, but she believed that she understood herself.  She knew that she was impeerfect, but felt that basically she was a good person.  If other people didn't understand her, this was their problem.... 

...When Delphine was nineteen, she fled to San Francisco, leaving behind the academic world, her all-too-clever and talented parents, the random so-called friends she had collected, and everyone else's expectations and plans for her.  She found a tiny apartment and the most boring job she could locate.  She wasn't sure why this was so important.  Maybe she just needed time off from struggling to achieve or be perfect.  Her parents told her they hoped she knew what she was doing and went back to their own labors.  At least, she told them and herself, she wasn't harming anyone else.... 

...Then, as she was smoking and wading through Simone de Beauvoir's dense prose in the St. Francis Hotel's high-ceilinged Powell Street lobby during a lunch break, a silver-haired, tanned man in a dark suit approached her chair.  She felt him standing nearby, but kept her eyes focused on her book.  As usual during that period of her life, she was dressed entirely in black, legs in black tights, feet in narrow black boots.  Finally, the man bent over and introduced himself, holding out a manicured hand dotted with silver hairs.  She ignored it.

He smiled and asked if she'd ever thought of becoming a model.

"You should give it a try," he said.  "You could be very successful."

She took in his too sharp profile, too broad shoulders, and too expensive suit, quietly told him to fuck off, then went back to The Second Sex.  She'd just started the section on "The Job and the Vote." 

...For a while, Delphine was involved with Dennis -- tall, blond, very handsome, and very rich....  At thirty-five, he'd already risen to the top in some corporation she had vaguely heard of, bailed out while he could, made a second fortune in his own business, sold that, and now [told other people] how to be "successful" -- assuming, of course, that this meant collecting vast amounts of money....

"I can't love anyone who believes making money is a holy calling," she told him one afternoon....

He had no idea, he said, what she was talking about, and kept pursuing her, trying to make her tell him what he'd really done to offend her....

...She never did understand if he really cared for her or if he simply liked the idea of the two of them together.  For all she knew, he was incapable of loving anyone or anything, except possibly his own reflection.  And his investment portfolio. 

 Excerpts from DELPHINE by Bruce Douglas Reeves, winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Competition, published by Texas Review Press, available from University Press Books-Berkeley (800-676-8722), Amazon, Texas A & M University Press Consortium, Barnes & Noble, and by order from your local book store.     

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