the last book I ever read (Jim Harrison's The River Swimmer, excerpt one)

from The River Swimmer: Novellas (The Land of Unlikeness) by Jim Harrison:

Sabrina threw down two one-hundred-dollar bills, a habit of her mother’s, this throwing money. He had missed her Wellesley graduation because he had been near Saint-Rémy, France, appraising the collection of an American man on the verge of divorce. The man was itching to have a couple of Matisses declared bogus to save settlement money. Sabrina had gone out the door leaving her veal chop untouched and his ensuing letters and phone calls were unanswered. He had taken the veal chop home to the apartment. Sabrina had visited her grandmother a couple of times a year, staying in this very room he thought.

Maybe it was all about delusions of integrity. In his own twenties he had thought overmuch about not compromising when no one was asking him to compromise. At that age a specific rigidity seemed necessary to isolate yourself from your own confusion and to invent the person you were to become. Sabrina and her grandmother had always had an open level of communication based on their mutual obsession with the natural world. He had nothing of the kind with either of them since they both were singularly disinterested in his own passion for art.