+ Please answer. Need company.
Leslie Verdugo answered the door. She did not speak but smiled in his general direction, ether seeing.
“Hello,” Richard said. “Is Madame in?”
“It’s show and tell,” she said softly. “Everybody’s here but Nadine. Are you alone?” She looked behind him with wide eyes as if expecting a crowd of Selectors.
“Alone,” Richard affirmed.
Madame’s voice drifted from within. “Is that Richard? Richard, do come in. I’ve been worried.”
Time went white and empty until he found himself reading the manuscript aloud. In a circle facing Madame de Roche familiar faces all around listening to him read. Coming to himself with a start Richard surmised he had spoken to a few people or perhaps only to Madame de Roche and had expressed his perhaps less than convinced joy that he was again writing. Conveyed his qualms about what he wrote. General sense of unease. Someone probably Raymond Cathcart had said something significant and he tried to remember it as he read + Possession by Goldsmith literary possession.
They fed him a delayed lunch midway, the whole group standing around making small talk and waiting for the rest. + More attention than I’ve gotten in years.
Richard felt stronger and more human. His memory became steady and his bowels as well. “I’d like to finish this now,” he said, handing his tray to Leslie Verdugo. Madame de Roche, sitting in her broad padded wicker chair, flame colored dress the color center of the throng, nodded. “We’re ready,” she said.
He read on. Twilight came to the canyon and the house lights came on startling him a little though he did not break stride; he had appreciated the deepening shadows the grayness of the large living room. Here was a kind of low stimulus heaven his colleagues his friends his companions all sitting and standing around him listening to these fresh words, quiet as if in awe. He might die now and happily stay frozen here forever a museum specimen.
“I still haven’t worked out the conclusion yet,” he warned as he switched to the text recorded in the slate. “It’s very rough.”
“Go on,” urged Siobhan Edumbraga, hooded eyes focused on him alone enthralled by the gore.
He revised as he read frowning at the crudeness yet feeling the power, knowing he communicated his emotions better than he had ever done before. At times he could not keep tears from his eyes and a tremor from his voice.
“Don’t stop,” Madame de Roche said as he paused to recover from a particularly affecting sentence.
Sadness and a sense of loss beyond the manuscript’s melancholy horror came upon him as he finished the last few paragraphs. He had written and written well and had become the center of this circle of people he now seemed to admire and look up to, people who meant a great deal to him. They were the last real link he had with social life and he would soon surrender their complete attention. This moment would pass and it might be the finest moment of his recent life the finest moment since he had watched his daughter being born—
He fumbled the last sentence backed up read it again lowered the slate but did not raise his eyes, long fingers trembling.
Madame sighed deeply. “Alas,” she said. He raised his eyes just enough to see her shaking her head. Her own eyes were closed, her face pruned into a mask of sadness. “He was of us,” she continued. “He was one of us and we could not know, only Richard could know what he was going through.”
Raymond Cathcart stepped forward blocking his view of Leslie Verdugo, who was not smiling. “My God, Fettle. You actually believe that’s why he killed them all?”
Richard nodded.
“That’s bizarre. You’re saying he did it for his art?”
Siobhan Edumbraga brayed whether laughter or weeping Fettle could not tell, for her face was fixed as a mask eyes hooded fingers clumped beneath her chin.
“I’ve tried not to put it so baldly,” Richard said.
“No. Hide confusion behind confusion, I always say.” Cathcart circled him. “Madame de Roche, do you believe this…writing of Fettle’s?”
“I can see this need,” she said, “this desire to so change one’s circumstance or to be stifled…I’ve felt it myself. From what I know of Emanuel, Richard has it correctly.”
Madame did more than tolerate differing opinions; she encouraged them, and she particularly encouraged them from Cathcart, a poet Richard did not admire though he had written some worthwhile pieces. Richard felt as if he were being stalked.
Cathcart shrugged off Madame de Roche’s support. “I don’t believe it. It’s all horrible cliche, Fettle.”
“I don’t believe it either,” Edumbraga said decisively, unclumping her fingers. Thorn Engles, a newcomer to the group, moved in now and squatted on his haunches before Richard.
“It’s an insult,” he said. “It’s not even well written. Pure stream of consciousness melodrama. Goldsmith is a poet, a human being, a character as complex as you or I. To kill just to regain some poetic insight or shake loose the bonds of society still means to kill, and that requires a tremendous change in a human being, unless we’ve all misjudged Goldsmith…We may have, but I’m sorry. You haven’t convinced me.”
Richard looked up with wounded eyes and realized he was behaving like a victim again, also realized he was not about to defend himself. The work must stand alone; so he had always said, so he had always believed.
He had not seen Nadine come in but now she stood at the rear of the group. She tried to speak up for him and he was darkly grateful but Cathcart beat her back with a cruel witticism. Three printers of broadsides offered halfhearted objections to Cathcart’s criticism, then gave helpful criticisms of their own that were if anything more devastating; suggestions to reduce the visceral enhance the salutary. Madame let them speak.
+ She does not know what they are killing.
After a time Richard stood up, papers and slate clutched in one long fingered hand, nodded to each of them and thanked the group, took Madame’s hand and shook it and walked from the room. Nadine followed.
“Why did you read it to them?” she asked, hanging on his long arm. “It’s not ready yet. You know that.”
Confusion. Why indeed? Immediate gratification; despite what he had told them he had felt it was a masterpiece already complete and final. Why be disappointed? “I have to go now,” he said quietly.
“Are you all right, Richard?” Nadine asked. He looked at her, wounded eagle, nodded. Left her in the house, passing the macaw.
“Do come again,” the macaw screeched, finding in its corroded innards a chance spark of motion.
He hadn’t called an autobus. He walked with a small stagger left right down the road and two kilometers out of the canyon into a shade retail zone.
In an old corner shopping center resided an Ancient Psyche Arts parlor for those who found true therapy threatening but felt they needed outside help; a store that rented booths containing sexually capable arbeiters called fappers or prosthetutes; an automated convenience store with small delivery carts rumbling in and out of the slaved commercial traffic lanes. On the corner before this angle of common life, Richard caught an autobus on a whim stop.
He needed a second opinion though he feared going to the wine ranch or the Pacific Arts Lit Parlor was the same as killing his manuscript once and for all. + Little sympathy or understanding either place. All I deserve.
He knew he had been a prize fool. A monk emerging from cloisters after many years of celibacy embarking on a new love clumsy sausage-fingered brute writing away at an insolvable theme daring to attempt to imagine Emanuel Goldsmith’s inner thoughts during that greatest of mysteries—a man when he is evil.
He held up the clumped disarrayed papers and considered throwing them to the bus floor and forgetting them, brushed his finger along a few leaves spread them read again found here and there a gleam of success in the mud of ineptitude.