Marietta had emerged with a fresh bottle of gin, and, unscrewing the top, poured herself an ample measure.
"Why do you keep all those clothes in the closet?" she said, knocking back a mouthful. "You're never going to wear most of them."
"I presume that means you have your eye on something."
"The smoking jacket."
"Take it."
She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. "I've underrated you all these years," she said, and went back into the bedroom to fetch the jacket in case I changed my mind.
"I've decided to write the book," I told her when she emerged.
She tossed the jacket at Nicodemus's chair and fairly danced with excitement. "That's so wonderful," she said. "Oh my God, Eddie, we're going to have such fun."
"We?"
"Yes, we. I mean, you'll be writing it most of the time, but I'll be helping. There's a lot you don't know. Dirt about Cesaria that she told me when I was little."
"Maybe you should keep your voice down."
"She can't hear me. She's always in her chambers these days."
"We don't know what she can hear," I said. There was a story that she'd had Jefferson design the house so that it funneled sounds to her chambers (which I've never entered, by the way; nor has Marietta). The story may be apocryphal, but I wonder. Though it's many, many months since I caught sight of the woman I don't have difficulty believing she sits there in her boudoir listening to her children, and her husband's children, conniving and weeping and slowly losing their minds. She probably enjoys it.
"Well if she can hear me, so what? She should be happy we're going to all this trouble. I mean, it's going to be a history of the Barbarossas. It'll make her immortal."
"If she isn't already."
"Oh no… she's getting old. Zabrina sees her all the time and she says the old bitch is failing."
"I find that hard to imagine."
"It was her saying that which started me thinking about our book."
"It's not our book," I insisted. "If I'm going to do it, it's going to be done my way. Which means it's not going to simply be a history of the Barbarossas."
She emptied her glass. "I see," she said, with a little chill in her voice. "So what's it going to be?"
"Oh, it'll be about the family. But it'll be about the Gearys too."
Now she fell silent and stared out of the window at the place where I sit with the birds. It took her fully a minute to bring herself to speak again. "If you write about the Gearys, then I'm having nothing to do with the fucking thing."
"How can I write-"
"Or indeed you."
"Let me finish, will you? How can I write about this family-particularly the recent history of this family-and not write about the Gearys?"
"They're scum, Eddie. Human scum. And vicious. Every one of them."
"That's not true. Marietta. And even if it were, I say again: what kind of bowdlerized account would this damn book be if I didn't include them?"
"All right. So just mention them in passing."
"They're part of our lives."
"They're not part of mine," she said fiercely. Her gaze came back in my direction and I saw that she wasn't so much enraged as sorrowful. I was revealing myself as a traitor with my desire to tell the story this way. She measured her next words with great care, like a lawyer making a pivotal argument.
"You realize, don't you, that this may be the only way people out there get to know about our family?" she snapped, showing me a glimpse of her temper.
"All the more-"
"Now you let me finish. When I came in here suggesting you write this fucking book, it was because I had this feeling-I have this feeling-that we haven't got very long. And my instincts are rarely wrong."
"I realize that," I said quietly. Marietta has prophetic talents, no question. She gets them from her mother.
"Maybe that's why she's looking so haggard these days," Marietta said.
"She's feeling what you're feeling?"
She nodded. "Poor bitch," she said softly. "And that's another thing to consider. Cesaria. She hates the Gearys even more than I do. They took her beloved Galilee."
I snorted at this nonsense. "That's one sentimental myth I intend to lay to rest, for a start," I said.
"So you don't believe he was taken?"
"Absolutely not. I know what happened the night he left better than anyone living. And I intend to tell what I know."
"Of course, nobody may give a damn," Marietta observed.
"At least I'll have set the record straight. Isn't that what you wanted?"
"I don't know what the hell I was thinking," Marietta replied, her distaste at what I had proposed now resurfacing. "I'm beginning to wish I'd never suggested a fucking book."
"Well, it's too late now. It's begun."
"You began already?"
This was not entirely true. I hadn't yet laid pen to paper. But I knew where I was going to begin: with the house, and Cesaria and Thomas Jefferson. The work was as good as started.
"Well don't let me delay you," Marietta said, going to the door. "But I'm not guaranteeing you my help."
"That's fine. I'm not asking for it."
"Not now you're not. But you will. You'll have to. There's a lot of pieces of information I've got that you'll need. Then we'll see what your integrity's worth."
So saying, she left me to my gin. I didn't doubt the significance of this last remark: she intended to make some kind of bargain. A section of my book she didn't approve of excised in return for a piece of information I needed. I was absolutely determined she wasn't going to get a single word removed however. What I'd told her was true. There was no way to tell the story of the Barbarossas without telling that of the Gearys, and thus also the story of Rachel Pallenberg, the one name I do not ever expect to hear crossing Marietta's lips. I had deliberately, not mentioned the Pallenberg woman myself, because I was certain as soon as I did so Marietta would be screaming inventive obscenities at me. Needless to say, I intend to devote a substantial portion of this story to the vices and virtues of Rachel Pallenberg.
That said, this narrative will be somewhat impoverished if I don't get Marietta's help; so I intend to be selective in the way I talk about what I'm doing. She'll come round; if only because she's an egotist, and the idea of not having her ideas in the book is going to be far more painful to her than my talking about the Gearys. Besides, she knows very well there are so many matters that I'm going to trust to my instinct on, matters that cannot be strictly verified. Matters of the spirit, matters of the bedroom, matters of the grave. These are the truly important elements. The rest is just geography and dates.
Later that day, I saw Marietta escorting from the house the woman I'd heard her talking to Zabrina about. She was, like almost all of Marietta's lovers, blonde, petite and probably no more than twenty years old. By the look of the clothes, I'd guess she was a tourist, perhaps a hitchhiker, rather than a local woman.
Zabrina had plainly done as Marietta had requested, and relieved the poor woman of her panic (along with any memory of the experience that had induced that panic). I watched them from my balcony through my binoculars. The blank expression on the girl's face disturbed me. Was this really the only way human beings could deal with the appearance of the miraculous: panic rising to insanity; or, if they were lucky, a healing excision of the memory, which left them like this woman, calm but impoverished? What pitiful options they were. (Which thought brought me back to the book. Was it too grand an ambition to hope that in these pages I might somehow prepare the way for such revelations, so that when they came the human mind didn't simply crack like a mirror too frail to reflect the wonders before it?) I felt a kind of sadness for the visitor, who had been washed, for her own good, of the very experience that might have made her life worth the living. What would she be after this, I wondered. Had Zabrina left deep inside her a seed of the memory, which, like the irritant mote in an oyster's flesh might with time become something rare and wonderful? I would have to ask.