(It's strange. While I'm typing this I'm imagining you sitting there, Tes, reading it, hearing my voice in your head.) She could; she could hear it loud and clear.
I tried to write once, when Ifirst got the bad news. I'm not sure it was ever going to be a book, but I did try and put down a few memories, to see how they looked on the page. And you know what? they were clich@s, all of them. What I remembered was real enough-the feel of my mother's cheek, the smell of my dad's cigars; summers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; a couple of Christmases in Maine with my grandmother-but there was nothing that you couldn't find in a million autobiographies.
It didn't make the memories any less meaningful to me, but it did make the idea of writing them down redundant.
So I thought.- Okay, maybe I'll write about the things that happened in the Grove. Not just what went on at Coney Eye, but about Ellen (I think of her a lot these days) and her kid, Philip (I don't remember if you met him or not), and Fletcher in the mall But that plan went to shit just as quickly. I'd be writing away and some report would come in from Buttfuck, Ohio, about angels or UFOs or skunks speaking in tongues, and when I got back to what I'd been writing the words were like week-old cold cuts. they just lay there, stale and tasteless and gray.
I was so pissed with myself. Here was me, the wordsmith, writing about something that had actually happened in the real world, and I couldn't make it sing; not the way these crazies who were putting down whatever wild shit came into their heads could do it.
Then I began to see why Tesla leaned forward at this juncture, as if she and Grillo were debating over a couple of glasses of vodka, and now he was getting to the crux of his argument.
"Tell me, Grillo," she murmured to the screen, "tell me why."
I wouldn't let the truth go. I wanted to describe things just the way they'd happened (no, that's not right,- the way I remembered them happening), so I killed what I was doing trying to be precise, instead of letting itfly, letting it sing. Letting it be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.
What really happened in Palomo Grove doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the stories people tell about it.
I'm thinking while I'm writing this: None of it makes much sense, it's justfragments. Maybe you can connect it up for me, Tes.
That's part of it, isn't it? Connecting everything.
I know if I couldjust let my mother's skin and Christmas in Maine and Ellen and Fletcher and the talking skunks and every damn thing I everfelt or saw be part of the same story and called that story me, instead of always looking for something separate from the things I've fel@ or seen, it wouldn't matter that I was going to die soon, because I'd be part of what was going on and on. Connecting and connecting.
The way I see it now, the story doesn't give a ihit if you're real or not, alive or not. All the story wants is to be told. And I guess in the end, that's what I want too.
Will you do thatfor me, Tes?
Will you make me part of what you tell? Always?
She wiped the tears from her eyes, smiling at the screen, as though Grillo was leaning back in his chair, sipping his vodka, waiting for her to reply.
"You've got it, Grillo," she said, reaching out to touch the glass. "So she added, "what happens next?" The age-old question.
There was a breathless moment while the glass trembled beneath her fingers. Then she knew.
September had been a month of recuperation for Harry. He'd made a project of tidying his tiny office on Forty-fifth Street; touched base with friends he hadn't seen all summer; even attempted to reignite a few amorous fuses around town. In this last he was completely unsuccessfuclass="underline" Only one of the women for whom he left messages returned his call, and only to remind him that he'd borrowed fifty bucks.
He was not unhappy then, to find a girl in her late teens at his apartment door that Tuesday night in early October. She had a ring through her left nostril, a black dress too short for her health, and a package.
"Are you Harry?" she said.
I 11
'Yep.
"I'm Sabina. I got something for you." The parcel was cylindrical, four feet long, and wrapped in brown paper. "You want to take it from me?" she said.
"What is it?"
"I'm going to drop it-2' the girl said, and let the thing go. Harry caught it before it hit the floor. "It's a present."
"Who from?"
"Could I maybe get a Coke or something?" the girl said, looking past Harry into the apartment.
The word sure was barely out of Harry's mouth and Sabina was pushing past him. What she lacked in manners she made up for in curves, he thought, watching her head on down the hall. He could live with that.
"the kitchen's on your right," he told her, but she headed straight past it into the living room.
"Got anything stronger?" she said. "There's probably some beers in the fridge," he replied, slamming the front door with his foot and following her into the living room.
"Beer gives me gas," she said.
Harry dropped the package in the middle of the floor. "I've got some rum, I think."
"Okay," she shrugged, as though Harry had been the one to suggest it and she really wasn't that interested.
He ducked into the kitchen to find the liquor, digging through the cupboard for an uncracked glass.
"You're not as weird as I thought you'd be," Sabina said to him meanwhile. "This place is nothing special."
"What were you expecting?"
"Something more crazy, you know. I heard you get into some pretty sick stuff."
"Who told you that?"
'Fed."
"You knew Ted?"
"I more than knew him," she said, appearing at the kitchen door. She was trying to look sultry, but her face, despite the kohl and the rouge and the blood-red lip gloss was too round and childlike to carry it off.
"When was this?" Harry asked her. "Oh... three years ago. I was fourteen when I met him." "That sounds like Ted."
"We never did anything I didn't want to do," she said, accepting the glass of rum from Harry. "He was always real nice to me, even when he was going through lousy times."
"He was one of the good guys," Harry said.
"We should drink to him," Sabina replied.
"Sure." they tapped glasses. "Here's to Ted."
"Wherever he is," Sabina added. "Now, are you going to open your present?"
It was a painting. Ted's great work, in fact, DAmour in Wyckoff Street, taken from its frame, stripped off its support and somewhat ignominiously tied up with a piece of frayed string.
"He wanted you to have it," Sabina explained, as Harry pulled back the sofa to unroll the painting fully. The canvas was as powerful as Harry remembered. The seething color field in which the street was painted, the impasto from which his features had been carved, and of course that detail Ted had been so proud to point out to Harry in the gallery: the foot, the heel, the snake writhing as it was trodden lifeless. "I guess maybe if somebody had offered him ten grand for it," Sabina was saying,
"he would have given you something else. But nobody bought it, so I thought I'd come and give it to YOU."
"And the gallery didn't mind?"
"they don't know it's gone," Sabina said. "they put it in storage with all the other pictures they couldn't sell. I guess they figured they'd find buyers sooner or later, but people don't want pictures like Ted's on their walls. they want stupid stuff." She had come to Harry's shoulder as she spoke. He could smell a light honey-scent off her. "If you like," she said, "I could come back and make a new support for the canvas. Then you could hang it over your bed-" she slid him a sly look,