Read Online Lying with the Dead by Michael Mewshaw - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Michael Mewshaw
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Humorous, Fiction - General, Psychological, Psychological fiction, Family Life, Domestic Fiction, Black humor (Literature), Adult children of dysfunctional families
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she can track down any quote I’d care to use in my memoirs. I promise to keep her services in mind.
“ Non serviam . That’s from Joyce, too, and it’s what you should have told the priest. I will not serve,” she says. “But I’ll work for you if you need me.”
“Oh, I do.”
Stepping out of Toast, we stumble into a rainstorm that slashes down like drill bits. What a shame, I say, that Tamzin has to catch a bus to her bedsit in Kentish Town when my house is close by. “Wouldn’t you like to spend the night?” I pose the question in a voice that hovers between that of a jolly uncle and a patently bogus gallant.
Tamzin bats her lashes in theatrical bafflement. “Why would I do that?”
Why, indeed? I might say, So that I can wake in the morning to worship your green eyes . But it’s tiresome to keep talking in italics. “Quite right. Let’s find you a cab.”
In the following days, her question persists. Why would she do that? She’s at least fifteen years younger. Not an embarrassing age difference, but one that gives me pause when combined with her corduroys and schoolgirl jumper. Still, I arrange for us to have coffee. Then the next night we split a bottle of wine. Then we have dinner at a ghastly gastro-pub and go back to my place and end the evening with a kiss and a call for a taxi to take her home.
I like her spirit, her sassiness, and while I assume she’s more attracted to my persona than to my corporal presence, she’s no pushover intellectually or in other respects. To impress her with my intellectual gravitas, I tell her about the Oresteia and BBC despite my superstition that it’s wrong to mention a deal before I have a contract and a cashable check. Then I invite her to fly to Venice for the weekend. Since it’s during the film festival, I camouflage the trip as business and urge her on by saying she can keep my quotes straight.
What she infers from all this I have difficulty reading. The young are from a different country with their own dialect. That I’m American, rich, and in her eyes famous exaggerates the differences. Or so I suspect.
Still, my hopes rise when she climbs into the taxi to the airport wearing a dress, a nice one that shows off her legs. On the aliscafo over to the Lido, Tamzin says she has a gift for me. Hair swirling in the wind, sturdy legs bracing her against the lagoon’s rough chop, she gropes in her shoulder bag and brings out a copy of Clifford Odets, American Playwright .
At the hotel, I’ve booked us separate rooms. I go to mine and browse through the biography. Tamzin has underlined a passage from a journal where Odets noted about his mother, “She wanted to be consoled. So did I. She was lonely, distressed, aggrieved. So was I. As a child, I expected to be petted, brought in (not cast out), consoled and comforted; and she begrudgingly would do none of these things for me; she was after all a child herself.”
Has Tamzin somehow been channeling my sessions with Dr. Rokoko? How does she know about Mom? I don’t need this. I put down the biography and pick up the Oresteia . Then I put it down too and go to the bar and begin drinking.
By the time Tamzin joins me for dinner, I’m still drinking. I suggest we skip tonight’s films and eat at the hotel, far from the festival’s frenzy. In the all but empty dining room I continue drinking and to my surprise and shame commence babbling about my sad-assed childhood. Clifford Odets and the Oresteia have opened the floodgates and I feed for fear of not being fed. Not that I’m a depressing raconteur. Unreliable, yes, but never dreary. My monologue, I’m confident, sparkles with poignant reminiscences and self-deprecating wit.
But Tamzin seems subdued and picks at her food, pushing a seared fish around her plate. Then she shoves it aside and sits back, and I wish I’d shut up. I natter on as a cat sidles out of the darkness over to our table. After rubbing against her legs, it leaps onto Tamzin’s
“ Non serviam . That’s from Joyce, too, and it’s what you should have told the priest. I will not serve,” she says. “But I’ll work for you if you need me.”
“Oh, I do.”
Stepping out of Toast, we stumble into a rainstorm that slashes down like drill bits. What a shame, I say, that Tamzin has to catch a bus to her bedsit in Kentish Town when my house is close by. “Wouldn’t you like to spend the night?” I pose the question in a voice that hovers between that of a jolly uncle and a patently bogus gallant.
Tamzin bats her lashes in theatrical bafflement. “Why would I do that?”
Why, indeed? I might say, So that I can wake in the morning to worship your green eyes . But it’s tiresome to keep talking in italics. “Quite right. Let’s find you a cab.”
In the following days, her question persists. Why would she do that? She’s at least fifteen years younger. Not an embarrassing age difference, but one that gives me pause when combined with her corduroys and schoolgirl jumper. Still, I arrange for us to have coffee. Then the next night we split a bottle of wine. Then we have dinner at a ghastly gastro-pub and go back to my place and end the evening with a kiss and a call for a taxi to take her home.
I like her spirit, her sassiness, and while I assume she’s more attracted to my persona than to my corporal presence, she’s no pushover intellectually or in other respects. To impress her with my intellectual gravitas, I tell her about the Oresteia and BBC despite my superstition that it’s wrong to mention a deal before I have a contract and a cashable check. Then I invite her to fly to Venice for the weekend. Since it’s during the film festival, I camouflage the trip as business and urge her on by saying she can keep my quotes straight.
What she infers from all this I have difficulty reading. The young are from a different country with their own dialect. That I’m American, rich, and in her eyes famous exaggerates the differences. Or so I suspect.
Still, my hopes rise when she climbs into the taxi to the airport wearing a dress, a nice one that shows off her legs. On the aliscafo over to the Lido, Tamzin says she has a gift for me. Hair swirling in the wind, sturdy legs bracing her against the lagoon’s rough chop, she gropes in her shoulder bag and brings out a copy of Clifford Odets, American Playwright .
At the hotel, I’ve booked us separate rooms. I go to mine and browse through the biography. Tamzin has underlined a passage from a journal where Odets noted about his mother, “She wanted to be consoled. So did I. She was lonely, distressed, aggrieved. So was I. As a child, I expected to be petted, brought in (not cast out), consoled and comforted; and she begrudgingly would do none of these things for me; she was after all a child herself.”
Has Tamzin somehow been channeling my sessions with Dr. Rokoko? How does she know about Mom? I don’t need this. I put down the biography and pick up the Oresteia . Then I put it down too and go to the bar and begin drinking.
By the time Tamzin joins me for dinner, I’m still drinking. I suggest we skip tonight’s films and eat at the hotel, far from the festival’s frenzy. In the all but empty dining room I continue drinking and to my surprise and shame commence babbling about my sad-assed childhood. Clifford Odets and the Oresteia have opened the floodgates and I feed for fear of not being fed. Not that I’m a depressing raconteur. Unreliable, yes, but never dreary. My monologue, I’m confident, sparkles with poignant reminiscences and self-deprecating wit.
But Tamzin seems subdued and picks at her food, pushing a seared fish around her plate. Then she shoves it aside and sits back, and I wish I’d shut up. I natter on as a cat sidles out of the darkness over to our table. After rubbing against her legs, it leaps onto Tamzin’s
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