inspo/dialogue

The imagery V uses in ordinary speech, loaded with reluctance. ‘I’ll dump you off at work.’ ‘I said I’d cart her round the bookshops.’ ‘We’d better get rid of’ (i.e. eat) ‘those potatoes.’ ‘I suppose I’ll drag m’self into town.’ As if the ideal were stasis.

“Remind me never to be pregnant in the summer,” said the first assistant. The pregnant woman did look quite uncomfortable. She was wearing a black dress.

“You have to make sure you plan it right,” said the second assistant. “The best time to have a baby is in the late fall.”

I was interested to learn that other young women had given this much thought to the then (to me) seemingly abstract ideas of pregnancy and birth. I mean, I suppose I did picture myself as a parent to some unimaginable infant in some ethereal future realm, but five, ten, fifteen years stretched out in front of me like some other kind of eternity.

“I wonder if I’ll ever have a baby,” said the first assistant. “Sometimes I don’t think it will ever happen for me.”

“All I want,” said the second assistant distantly, “is for someone to save me.”

That strange word “believe,” with “lie” in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress, and spun her around, the dress slips over her narrow hips to the floor, and she’s standing in front of him in a little white slip. On the way to the couch they walk hand in hand through the dark corridor, and pause for a moment in front of the large mirror.

Do you suppose a mirror remembers all the people it’s ever reflected?

Maybe, he replies, but you know I — I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.

So will I, she replies.

And they go on.

I didn’t know you would be here, the famous author said when I arrived at the book party. Before he left he put his arm around me for a moment, and I ran my hand down his back like an idiot.

Did you get your Porsche? I asked disdainfully, to punish him for my unmanageable feeling. He’d just received an enormous book advance and wanted to buy himself a vintage 911.

Strong, vibrating shame. I wanted to hit him with a car. I wanted to sit next to him at a dinner that would never happen, his fingers tickling the skin under my knee.

I wrote him the next morning at 7:42 a.m. with clear purpose. I’m sorry I teased you about your Porsche. Please don’t hate me.

Then all I had to do was accept the fact that he wouldn’t write back, and then discreetly masturbate about it for ten years.

But three hours later he wrote back. I didn’t realize you were teasing me until now, so just starting hating you this very minute. Plus, I may get a Jaguar instead and you will want a ride at some point.

“You want to talk about technology. You know how they used to get oil?” Frank was explaining to them animatedly. “The Burmese dug a big ol’ hole. And then they climbed down there and dug some more till they hit sands. They couldn’t stay down there more’n a minute at a time, and then they had to recover for twenty once they got back up top. They had the women stay up top and hoist up the cuttings they dug up. They were catching oil centuries before any Rockefeller ever thought to do it. They had to do it naked, with rags around their mouths, these little brown guys, but by god they did it.” He laughed. “Took two years to dig one hole.” Bunny held her face in her fixed expression of listening.

‘All the fish respond to the manoeuvres of the alpha fish,’ said Fielding, his valved face reflected in the glass. ‘That’s the alpha fish – there, with the black tail.’ He looked at his watch, and straightened. ‘Now today we cast the girl, the stripper.’

‘The dancer?’ I said. ‘What about Butch?’

‘You know Butch is in. I know Butch is in. You know she’s a dancer. I know she’s a dancer. These girls, they don’t know nothing. You read me, Slick? We’re going to have some fun.’

"What are the polls showing?" [...] "Does Arne have a chance?"

"Arne has run the most exemplary campaign the state of Colorado has ever seen," she said. [...]

"So, that's a no?" I said. "The polls aren't looking good?"

12.7 I visited Petr in hospital again. The worst thing about dying, he told me as I sat between his bed and the smudged windows, is that there’s no one to tell about it. What do you mean? I asked. Well, he said, throughout my life I’ve always lived significant events in terms of how I’ll tell people about them. What I mean is that even during these events I would be formulating, in my head, the way that I’d describe them later. Ah, I tried to tell him: that’s a buffering probl … but Petr wasn’t listening. The dying want to impart, not imbibe. When I was eighteen and I found myself in Berlin the day the Wall fell, he went on, as I watched the people streaming over, clambering up on it, hacking it down, I was rehearsing how to recount it all to friends after I got back home. I watched the people sitting on the wall, chipping at it with their chisels, and the guards standing around not knowing what to do … That’s what I was thinking, he said, what was running through my head, right in the moment that I watched them chiseling and chipping. Same as when I saw the shootout in Amsterdam. What shootout? I said. Didn’t I ever tell you about that? he asked. No, I answered. I found myself caught in the middle of a shootout between Russian gangsters as I came out of a restaurant, he explained. They were all firing from behind lamp-posts, dustbins, cars and so on, and I ducked into an alleyway and one of them was right there with me, holding this huge pistol, a gold one, which he balanced on the back of one hand as he shot it with the other. Wow, I said. Yes, Petr nodded—but the point is, that even as I cowered behind this gangster in this alleyway, I was practicing relating the episode when it was over. He had a huge pistol—a gold one, no less! And he balanced it like this … and it recoiled like that … Or: I was just ten feet away from him … I thought that he might turn his gun on me, but he ignored me … Trying out different ways of telling it, you see? Well, now, I’m about to undergo the mother, the big motherfucker, of all episodes—and I won’t be able to dine out on it! Even if there turns out to be a Heaven or whatever, which there won’t—but even if there does, I still won’t be able to, since everyone else there will have lived through the same episode, i.e., dying, and they’ll all go: So what? That’s boring. We know all that shit. So it’s lose-lose. Do you see my quandary? Yes, I said; I see that could be a problem.

I met Bon on the other side of passport control. We had at last stepped foot on la Gaule, as my father had taught me to call France in his parish school. It was fitting, then, that the airport was named after Charles de Gaulle, the greatest of great Frenchmen in recent memory. The hero who had liberated France from the Nazis while continuing to enslave us Vietnamese. Ah, contradiction! The perpetual body odor of humanity! No one was spared, not even the Americans or the Vietnamese, who bathed daily, or the French, who bathed less than daily. No matter our nationality, we all become accustomed to the aroma of our own contradictions.

What’s wrong? he said. Are you crying again?

I’m not crying, I sobbed. I’m just so overcome to be home at last.

"What about Dad, though?" she said. "Did you forget it's his birthday?"

"I lost track of time here."

"I wouldn't push you," Denise said, "except that I was the person who opened your Christmas box."

"Christmas was a bad scene, no question."

"Which package went to whom was pretty much guesswork."