Bill Brandtford, Stage Designer
BILLY BRANDTFORD'S FRIENDS in the industry--he had
many, hell, he was a stage designer respected far and wide--were unanimously haunted, so
he needed to think, by a single
worry: Was he finally going to don the robes of authority, vocationally speaking, conferred
by lifelong struggle rather than simply
go on confirming its street meaning for ill-wishing onlookers,
namely, that he had been eminently deserving all along of all his
aches and pains owing to an inherent worthlessness.
Bill, said Frinzie Makomber, a colleague from way back,
when are you going to stop trying to get your neck broken yet
again and start living off the cash cow of past mishap. He
thought, but did not stoop to say: The inexhaustible fertility of
smashed hopes. Sweetie, you've just got to know when to throw
in the towel as far as suffering is concerned. To go on and on and
on forever on the voracious lookout for another raw deal is the
way not to regeneration but to suicide. In short, don't be greedy.
Bill sat her down by the fireplace built from scratch on
weekends with his own bare hands and, ogling an andiron which
was the belated heartwarming donation of a director-acquaintance, charged not quite full
speed ahead. You know that citystreet sequence in the new Nick de Cusa three-act? Or is it four?
Well, all I'm on the lookout for right now, voracious or other-
wise, is the right right-as-rain effect. As a matter of fact, Frinz, if
I've been on the lookout for anything in this wretchedness of
ours, I mean, of mine, mine, all mine, it's been nothing more precisely than puddles
reflecting columns of bluish sky defined by
the quoins of--and infinitely more sturdy and perduring than--
mighty skyscrapers. Oh, I'm not asking for stanchions (of vapor)
wide as major thoroughfares, massive and garish slabs such as are
known to live high on the hog over on Thirty-fourth and Third,
say, or Fifty-seventh and Sixth, just a little flutelike contraption at
the beginning of some sidestreet in the mid-twenties, west. In
any event, whenever I bear down on one of those puddly heart's
desires, rimmed with dead gingko leaves, its depth sounded by a neck- (or alighted on by a
diseased pigeon: wrist-) like streetlamp, I never fail to mistake what it withholds in solution for
some bulwark of urban filigree about to be hacked to extinction
by this or that contractor in the name of screwing the poor and
feathering his nest a wee bit more cozylike. Only nowadays, from
no matter what direction I'm bearing down, as I put it, I'm forever looking backward. No
more pious, trembling upsurges of
expectation that if only I manage to work hard enough, gritting
my teeth hard enough in the process, then .. . then ... I'm smart
enough to know for the likes of me all bets are off, and every
windfall--every wind-egg even--is fossilized under exhumation-resistant mullioned
plexiglass.
On that note of resignation before--prolonged by a few
voluptuously futile toasts to--life's labours lost, they proceeded
to do what they'd planned on the set of "John Gabriel Borkman"
some hours before: make their way to the hospital bed of stricken
producer Hank Buffers. Prostrate he bellowed up to the diminutive TV opposite: This
should happen to my worst enemies. Get a nurse, Bill, doublequick, Frinzie cried. Within seconds
she was
way ahead of him in the corridor, unapologetically fridge-white,
nervously swinging her shoulder bag as if it were a censer. He's
horrible, isn't he. No, no, no, Bill insisted, keeping an eye out for
anything resembling a name-tag. I envy the arrogance that
underwrites this upgush of bile, even if I'm prime target, which
in this case I very well may not be. Hank always knew how to
milk his misery, real or imagined, for all it was worth. When, oh
when, will I be able to rise to the same tocsin-like and princely
pitch of killjoy innuendo. At that point I dare say I wouldn't have
to eat the shit of the world's Hanks, that's for sure.
Having at last cornered a medico, whom he pointed towards
the room in question, he was mildly surprised to note that a crowd
of familiar-faced actors were busy forcing their way in, only
Frinzie was far busier shooing them out, doubtless employing her
celebrated funny-face tact for their grumblings were generously
peppered with guffaws. When he got back following a brief
stopover at the toilet (Staff Only, but he was desperate: sight of the
tribe had reminded him he had still to create two or three more
sets worthy of their fjord-blasting self-interrogations) Frinzie was
leaning her back against the door to the room, eyes
closed.
Everything okay?
The nurse is with him now, she said, still unseeing. Out of
the blue she suggested a bite down on the Bowery. Several of her
favorite haunts or joints (he didn't catch the word, this bothered
him somehow), especially around Chrystie Street, now served
pizza et al. He looked so thin, didn't he, Billy? so unlike the Hank
we know and loathe; then deciding that to unwrap the breadstick
in her hand was too much trouble she proclaimed: What I really
need is a stiff drink.
He, Frinzie Makomber's pal for more than twenty-three
years, couldn't help undergoing the proclamation as a calculated,
altogether uncharacteristic provocation to his tolerance. For him
(and up until this moment he would have assumed for her as
well), I could use a stiff drink was a trap to be sidestepped; but
clearly it was now the conduit to where things happened the way
Hollywood had countless times proved they should. He'd liked it,
though, for embodying a momentary bypass of everything that
came before even if he also disliked it for not having, strictly
speaking, come by its bypass honestly--as a deducible outcome
allowing thereby for a retroactive new slant from--there
would've been the unprecedented wonder of it!--deep within
the unshirked unshakable context of that before.
No way to tell her. This made him sad, even sadder that one
day, in a haunted joint just like this one, somebody, but a somebody
far less kindly disposed, a Hank, say, would notice, exactly as he
had, just such a mere nothing as she would be sure to have overlooked yet again. And this
datum would become her enemy's prize
weapon. Or rather, given its easy availability, how could her companion of the moment be
expected to renounce tormentorship?
Maybe this was why she had never risen in the theater business like--like--(he wanted to
puke a cackle at the bald, boldfaced absurdity of the construction, irresistible to its maker for
that very reason)--like . . . he had! Too many Hank Buffets (sic)
holding something over her head, having caught her just too
many times in the act of simply not having caught herself in time.
His only recourse under the circumstances--his sort always
under never soaring beyond--was to get gnomic. Whatever we
overlook, dear girl, is enemy-fodder.
Who's the enemy she asked distraitly intent as she was on
catching their waiter's eye. Bill couldn't remember what he
looked like beyond his having been (at least at the moment of
proffering breadsticks and water) tall, gangly, with post-acne
scimitars and fosses borne--in so far as he was grimly proleptically almost challengingly
aware of their probable effect on every
flawless customer-mug--with intriguing stoicism, even
nobility.
The ones who make everything look as it should the better
to electrocute us out of an unwarranted sense of security. The
perfect definition, in fact, of stage designers. They assure us everything's in the right place.
Too late do we discover they meant:
everything except us. "Only the inmate does not correspond."
My heart's in the right place, she said, unfortunately for me.
Seeing Hank stretched out as if at a coffin-fitting session almost
broke it. I've always loved him madly you see.
He didn't think he'd ever find the strength to speak again;
however: I don't--quite. In any event, as I was saying: Everything
we overlook about ourselves goes towards constructing us as a
target. You should know that! he added (gratuitously, therefore
scolding-scaldingly). To miss ourselves, to miss catching ourselves in the act of being
ourselves--worse, trying to be other
than ourselves through such lame contraptions as I could use a stiff
drink--is to go the dreary way of making and remaking those
selves in the image of sitting ducks: bloated with dates, raisins,
corn mush, even an exotic kumquat or two, and slated for family picnic target practice
(somewhere in the vicinity of Elizabeth,
New Jersey) on the fourth of July.
Completely shifted away (it's true the booked saxophonist,
now dominating the podium from literally out of the blue, could
be considered something of a heartthrob give or take a few orts of unprepossessingness, so
why shouldn't Frinzie be ransomed to
his writhing trunk?), she held a table napkin to her right eye and
murmured, Hank never invited me to a single picnic, neither on
July fourth nor at any other time.
But the more aware we are become (he knew he was whining because far more intent on
(re?)capturing her attention than
explaining--the more we rarefy ourselves away to blessed unpinpointability. Don't you want
that kind of freedom, Frinzie? Don't
you need it now more than ever? He wasn't quite sure why he
had to go and drag in now more than ever, yet once dragged in it was
nothing less than thrillingly appropriate, wildly inventive even,
tags (he duly noted) putrefactive media hacks were always loath--
when you came right down to it--to affix to his own
efforts.
She didn't answer. Neither did she sneer. What's so good
about that kind of freedom? I just want Hank back. Then again,
Frinzie never sneered: she was every inch the bluestocking, all the
more so as battleground of contortion-prone grief and
lust.
OUR CHARACTER 1S PRECISELY WHAT--AS OTHERS
SNEER-FODDER--WE MISS ABOUT OURSELVES.
Frinzie took his hand, a weather eye still on the music man.
After announcing that he'd never in his life played it, he proceeded to embroider
magisterially on what Brandtford recognized as his favorite Arlen ballad: "The Man that Got
Away" It
was being put across so well he didn't for a minute miss, as he
almost always did when it was rendered otherwise than in A Star
is Born, Garland and Cukor and Mason. Up until this minute, I
never realized what a lonely life you lead. Or rather, by what a
lonely life you let yourself be led to the scaffold of obsession.
The only conceivable rejoinders being A mere scaffolding
my dear, not a scaffold, and I don't need people the way some
people need people, he tried to put the temptation they represented behind him by seceding
fingerwise and humming haphazardly along. He could, however, note: When I get sick and
Tired of that old bugbear companionless characterlessness I simply
rustle up my . . . suppressed versions: imagine myself living out
the rest of my days and then some with the loathed old pop, or is
it mom?--ofcourse, it's mom--I've not quite left behind, or as a
henpecked, tyke-ridden, promotion-shy meat-packing-plant
accounting clerk just outside Pensacola. In either case, a dutiful,
disdained dishrag singularly skillful at provoking, and at the
slightest deviation from home martial law, this or that baleful
repercussion of a commensal's toothless ire. Or, when I need a
real live-wire of an escape I make it my business to volatilize into
the most assiduous sucker-upper you ever did see: debase myself
thus before the very coqueluche rivals I'm otherwise especially
vociferous about righteously "exposing" yet whose ever-widening celebrity triggers my
most shamefully unavowable and therefore most unsquelchably persistent inclination to asslick.
It's horrifying, I know, but when you're thinking your abasement why
stint, why not go the limit?
Oh Bill, she whispered, not quite mistress of her mimicry of
a hammy actress they'd both worked with not too long before (in
a putative spoof of the buddy-buddy musical), can you ever for-
give me?
How forgive or not forgive. I'm too busy being the simple
sum of all my repudiations of the rat I might have become to see
about acquiring a forgiving . . . character-armor.Who the hell do
you think I am, pussycat? Lionel Barrymore? Edward Everett
Horton? Maria Ouspenskaya?
Funny, she mused, once again eyeing the breadstick wrap. He
refused to play prompter. That having wanted nothing more all
along than to wake up every morning beside Hank I find myself
nothing less than rapturously relieved to be waking up to the fact
that he's--that he's--that he's--that I'm to be spared at least one
sneer-worthy . . . version of self.
She was shrugging him off, and not just because of the
breadstick or the podium torso (Harold had never sounded so
plangent), so he felt it behooved him to say, But just because I've
shed all my shit doesn't mean I haven't been all along reacquiring
it as a positive force-field. Don't you understand: true character is
a continuous repudiation and remastering of the contingential
tics most slobs mistake for character. She gently snapped away as
the saxophone man began the beguine (I never played this before
in my life, honest: but what better time than the present to
inform you folks it reminds me of unleashed fire hydrants, tenement stoops, washboards
rusting beneath the kitchen sink or
clogging the tub), seeking a posture that would read as supremely
attentive. Licking her lips, smoothing down the pleats of her
frock (a subdued print), Frinzie at last looked as if she'd managed
it. So he was more than surprised when she half-turned to him
and said, I don't understand a thing. Seeing Hank in that cage and
now ... him (nodding in the musician's direction). Don't know
where I am. All I these details (glance at the breadstick) are just
being wasted on the likes of me. Because at this moment I don't
feel like--what do they call me in the playbill (that is, when there
is one)?--a lighting designer. And I'll tell you something else
(was he imagining she was beginning to blubber): I haven't felt
like one since the night they rushed him to the emergency room:
that dive. Yet if only I could manage to--feel like one, I mean--I
might blend in with the details and get through all this in one
piece. You can't imagine how badly I want to realize I'm with my
very best friend, Billy boy, in a really hip little hangout downtown no less and they're
playing what from this moment on I
decree to be Our Song. Sought after by its details as their only conceivable center of
gravity; I want to uphold the sanctity of
this, Our Moment. But I'm, what's the term, unpinpointable now
that Hank's dead. Or better yet, I'm all oozed away Diffuse as a smelly pudding. The waiter,
a little to their right, extended his
neck in sign of a discreet willingness to purvey either food or
drink, or smokes: At least this was Bill's take on the twitch. For
where none saw movement, Bill always made it a point to discern
gesture. Frinzie nodded gracelessly at nothing and everything. He
was beginning to understand all that shooing off and away of the
actor tribe in front of the sick man's door, and at the same time
already regretting the brief spell during which having gotten it
completely wrong reigned supreme and made for the closest his
sort (what sort was that?) ever came to contentment. As if on cue,
she repeated: I don't understand a thing. So he told her just like
that--the key was precisely to husband all the details before they
got themselves understood and not try to fight one's way out of
that old gift-horse paper bag: savorful ambiguity. To wit, is that
sunny smell dogshit gone amuck among brick-shaped oak leaves
or down-home cooking from soup to nuts in the last bungalow
on our left. Look, he added for good measure, be tickled pink
you're not in a position to so make heavy weather of too surefooted an identity, be it
lighting designer or foxfire extinguisher.
as to frighten them away--them being the details--for good.
Live in their unknown, the way you--we--want the audience to
live long after the curtain goes down. Details are our true home,
especially weather-resistant when we're not quite sure of their
chemical make-up.
She retorted (not letting her Beat it look meant for the waiter
break her rhythm): This isn't some half-assed three-act being taken
in here and let out there like a pair of thrift-shop pantaloons
doomed out of the blue for presentation on the Broadway fall
rack. All I want--wanted--was to draw them--the details--what
am I saying?--hirn--Hank--tosvards me by implanting the conviction only they--he--could
complete me. Only Hank's a beast.
Was. So how can you expect me to have an identity however
minimal, for this, the meticulously detailed moment currently
under discussion when I've been miming identitylessness for so
long in the hope he'd alight at last among its boughs in celebration of our own-moment, that
is. I just wanted to be one with
Hank and the two of us one with the surrounding flora and
fauna. Forgive me, but there simply isn't any room in all this
grief--grief!--for my own special brand of catching myself in the
act of perpetrating atrocious contingencies for the sake of perpetuating that mealy-mouthed
character disorder known to the general public as little old me. Oddly (or not so oddly if he took
her
trembling at face value), she did not simper on little old
me.
She watched the other man jump the podium and went on
watching long after he'd downed his first Scotch between two barstools. Bill, on the other
hand, had eyes only for the trio in an
adjacent booth who, he now realized, had actually been devouring late supper, and in
several courses, all through the performance. The male member, thinnest of the three, was most
unremitting, though always decorous, in his wielding of knife,
fork, cup and, on occasion, soup spoon. Subsisting in another
time zone, he'd been carelessly spliced into this (compliments of
central casting) whose two female inhabitants, though equally
committed (one adjacent, one across) to gorging themselves over
the medium term, nonetheless found the time to be busy chat-
ting. Now that he was done he amiably put a proprietary arm
around the one adjacent who was instantaneously transformed--
Bill had seen it all and would be the first albeit grudgingly to testify accordingly--into the
woman at his side.
Frinzie glanced quickly at the object of his attention and
murmured, He reminds me of Hank. (But who was he?) Then,
disregarding the remark as if it had been he who'd made it, and
tactlessly at that, in a statelier and more matter-of-fact register she
intoned, Do you happen to remember when I asked you to
please leave the room and check with the nurse about Buffers's
last feeding?
He nodded, though hadn't she asked him to go check about
something else? It didn't matter: he wasn't thinking of the Hank, nor of the event per se, his
going out of the room, that is, but
rather of its earning him, here and now, this uttered disinterring
of a shared memory, however disfigured. The eye of her utterance
on him, he was once again leaving the sickroom and entering the
corridor in search of a nurse's station, and to hell with the reason.
Her seeing flooded him with . . . joy So why did Hank and his
verbose dying have to intrude? And, more to the point, how go
back to the old poverty once Hank, living, dying or dead, succeeded in ruining it, namely,
the being so flooded.
A strange thing happened, she said.
When, he asked, though he knew when.
I was all alone with Hank--the Hank, as you call hi--so
unlike his old self. He even smiled up at me and said, You're doing
all right. Can you imagine? He was actually in awe of the robustness he had the gall to be
inventing there and then for my habitation. How meet this need--for robustness, I mean--when I
was
completely done in by the construction, that is, by a misconstruction so flagrant born of
indifference and the bedridden's headlong
envy of the mobile. She took a deep breath: He never knew me as
I really am. I'd never had anything because nothing with--from--
Hank. I was flooded with memories of all the ways he'd managed
to keep me at arm's length: bold-faced dispatches I'd somehow
construed as sure signs of ever-growing ardor on the prowl. There
was no going back to the old life of misconstruings.
But surely, despite its poverty (she winced: as she would have hearing any other word
denoting the same thing? any word--no
matter what it denoted--at such a juncture?), there are satisfactions, rhythms, rituals. You're
selling it short.
(Obtuseness, thy name is man!) Nothing to sell, short or otherwise. I had to hear him
invent my robustness to realize I'd come
to the end of all those makeshift treks through time elapsing in
anticipation of our next encounter. Our was spoken so caressively
there was just no hearing it as meaning to include him in its
embrace. I just wasn't made to live alone, Billy boy, like you. In
any event, you can't imagine what it was like, sitting there. A
cabin in the woods it was, hundreds of miles from the nearest
truckstop bodega. If only somebody--anybody--had entered
brandishing the whiplash of a salutary reminder that I was being
just plain remiss in my duty as comforter. That would have
arrested my exploration of--more like a raid on--Hank's criminal exploitation over the years.
Any old impersonal rebuke--
some helpful hint about the seemly thing to do in such a situation be it via bedpans or
bedsores or bedbugs--would have
immediately dissipated my uncontrollable horror at the infinite
possibilities for vengeance lying at hand.
But you were all so damned slow getting back to
barracks.
The saxophonist put down his shot glass, lit a cigarette,
turned around with elbows behind him on the bar, surveyed his
public. I can understand your fascination, Bill said, nodding in his
direction. He doesn't rehearse. He conies in, out of the hot and
cold, and before you know it he's put on his trombone, or what-
ever the hell it is, as just another plausible skin through which to
exhale his dread before drinking it back in detoxified. "The bird
flies into the tree and becomes a leaf." Outraged at having come
up with effective press for his rival, no less, and for free he
quickly returned to the subject at hand: Didn't you try to just get
up and go away? The musician smiled at him: something in the
play of muscles indicating there were times when you just had to
be brutal to be kind must have struck a chord of sensuous fellow-feeling in the lonely
artist.
Of course I did, she said, matching him for what she had
taken to be mere exasperation. But the moment was so . . . still. At
any other time I would have been doing my damnest to burrow
my way out. Tonight I wanted to enjoy snowing myself in.
Stopped time could no longer raze me to the ground because I
was uncoupled from Hank and always it'd only been my relation
to him, not me myself, that was lacerable by contingencies as the
more or less probable signs of his coming to love me at long last. Now--then--I was simply
. . . I. Uncoupled, I could step right
up and smother the bastard.
Mounting the podium, the musician said he'd do one last
number: an extemporization on Porter's "I Concentrate on You."
He'd never had the least to do either with theme or with variation, until this pregnant
moment. He wasn't even sure he'd ever
heard the ballad through. Frinzie seemed to be resenting the
attention Billy was according Mr. Mike (the saxophonist's name,
picked up via the waiter's meaningful-glance-punctuated kibbitzing with the barkeep [a
frustrated jazzman?]). Or had he heard
it passing the lips of the guttlers at the table adjacent who, singlemindedly dedicated to
getting their money's worth out of the
floor show such as it was, were now all comfortably ensconced at
last in the same time zone. Grabbing at his upper sleeve: At that
point, Billy--Billy! listen to me--I adjusted the lamps--there
were three of them in the room, I think--in such a way as
expertly (if I do say so myself) to give his face a sleepy--an
almost rapturously blooming--rosiness. More life-affirming, that
look, than anything life itself could have concocted. As I stood at
the door (I knew that cantankerous horde of hams was but footsteps away) coldly
appraising my handiwork (you know how self-critical I can be)--my very life-work, as it were--
he--it--almost
had me fooled. For once, the features--puffy, ill-formed as they
had so often been in the round: I can admit all that now--were
purged of every trace of their bearer's blustering old signature
compulsion to be always revenging himself on this plaguey world
by subduing it to paroxysmic envy of all he had and all he was
still to have. In a word, there, in death, he lay yet at the very furthest remove from its
dominion than he'd ever been.
She removed her hand, was about to grab the breadstick then
backed down, said: I'll kill myself, but it's got to be quick, perfect.
Only I can't help wondering what's going to happen--
--to your cats.
She wasn't offended, liked the gallows levity To my cats, yes,
but more to the point, to the in fact final vision of our life
together that I brought with me into the hospital room. What's
going to happen to that swarming detritus of a craved
futurity?
With a truculence he hadn't intended, Billy said: What happens to anybody's vision of
his destination (a spiral jetty; say) after
it is ousted by the real thing?
I would like it to be part somehow of the . . . ending. I put
the biggest part of myself into it.
Mr. Mike was done but refused to bow at this, the end of his
gig, wasn't that what they called it. He made his way back to the
bar, almost swaggering, but more, Bill saw, from timidity than
from anything approaching complacency. To steady himself as he
discreetly picked up the tab, he said, pretending to be recomputing the total, So somehow you've
got to get this vision of "life
with Hank" into the act of slitting your pretty throat, is that it, Frinzie, my girl?
Because you've thrown your whole . . . character
into it. Because you've mastered its every tic, its every contingency. In the greased tone
of a saleslady: Let's face it, doll, that
vision is you. For the likes of him, however (embryonic nod in
the direction of the vacant podium), there's no percentage in
shoving predigested details into the maw of the work at hand.
For him, the work is the arena of getting to know--mastering--the blessed unknown.
All that is nor Mr Mike or (in your case) Ms.
Frinzie. He's aware that nobody will shell out for the doily-perfect putting back
together of some Humpty-Dumptyjigsaw puzzle devised who knows where, who knows when.
His life up there (the podium was getting darker by the minute) can never
be made to correspond one-to-one with what he's been forced
to live out here, among our sort.
But he couldn't go on pimping for the saxophone because
he kept seeing--as through a scrim of swarming wasps and their
mates--Hank laid out flat in all his robust splendor thanks to the
tastefully synergistic cross-fire in which--under a lucky star to
the bitter end--he'd succeeded in getting himself caught. In spite of (unbeknownst to?)
himself, Bill couldn't help wondering if he
mightn't discreetly feed off all that swarming robustness in the
course of his own quest for the right right-as-rain sets for the
Nick de Cusa three-act. He just didn't have the heart--Frinzie or
no Frinzie--to waste such vivid imaginings.
But in fishing for the right mix of coins and bills, he noted
that she was far ahead of him, almost at the door where the
cashier, staring hard at her off-white fingernails so as not to be
staring hard elsewhere, was chitchatting with a cop. All he could
think about as he paid up was whether she'd already seen the second one and, wait, the
third, both standing outside (the much
thinner of the two by the window, blocking as if by design what
had to be the obligatory glossy head shot of Mr. Mike) and was
therefore at this very moment steeling herself to stroll coolly past
every last agent of the law.
Having paid and exited, Bill saw immediately they were
expecting him to get in beside Frinzie, her appropriately enigmatic profile facing straight
ahead. One of them, though occupying a jump seat (was this standard procedure once the jig was
up?), had nonetheless turned discreetly away from her impermeability. Clutching his upper
arm almost at the armpit and clearly
intending not to ease her grip, much less let go, all the way to
what he assumed would be headquarters, was her way of making
him understand she'd decided to choose their unforeseeable,
alien element-resistant . . . ending, or maybe she just needed to
hold on to something familiar.
Being roundly scuttled right, left and sideways, the treetops,
when instantaneously poised against streetcorner (not major
thoroughfare) rations of still-glowing horizon, proved far more
black than bluish green. He happily took note. Encountered right side up for a change and
even a bit enhanced thereby, every
ration to a man, from this moment on all without exception to
be known as Bill Brandtfond's very own (dammit, things were
taking a turn for the better) unpuddled columns of city-scape
sky, regretted to inform him (alas, this day too had its dog) that
they--more to the point their newly sealed connection with his
projected design for the new de Cusa--would never--never! (so
get to the point: he knew how to take the good with the bad)--be the subject of a fireside
chat between him and one Frinzie
Makomber.
At any rate, he'd have understood without the clutching
(now localizable below his armpit, somewhere in the vicinity of
his watchband wrist). For what she'd been looking forward to as
Her Own Ending would only have been deferred again and
again and again through its massive insistence on working everything in--all the bits and
pieces of blighted craving, to have
flashed forth as blessed event within the life to come. No, not life.
What was her term for so unscalable a heap of one-track, one-note
visions?
It was on the very tip of his Detritus.
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