My Aunt Emily’s Blue Rolls Royce and Her Amazing one Hundred Years Of Love

My Aunt Emily’s Blue Rolls Royce and Her Amazing one Hundred Years Of Love

 

 

Preface

 

 

Writing a memoir for the benefit of characters that you knew scarcely is not easy. The past comes back in small chunks. You have to mix them with fragments of letters, journals or dialogs that you may have harvested or witnessed, and create a coherent story out of them. Though you may seem to know what those past events meant they’re buried under foggy assumptions.

You’ll do yourself a favor by doubting what you think they meant. Of course, there are major and dramatic events that you may unwrap. They will dash through your mind-window all the time.

Those events are milestones. They’d dwell in your memory forever. You’ll get caught in their midstream and you’ll freak. As you meditate on them there are no doubts that they’d keep rummaging in your mind for a while.

People search for recollections until the present takes over. The past is like a mask behind which the powerless events from memory would shout back asking to be recognized and accepted. Your love for Aunt Emily, for instance, a love that never went away, and that out of decency never had a response!

Then you’d have to keep searching the truth about any other people involved and avoid considering your life as an example of some significant drama.

Let’s be serious. The most painful tragedy for you was to lose your sweetheart when she fell in love with another boy. That love for her would be the only reason to write Aunt Emily’s story.

For Aunt Emily, though, the most difficult moments in her life was when her dad and mom died in a car accident. When your parents die the time seizes you, and asks you to tremble and cry. You cannot let those events just go through your head and then vanish away. “There is a moment after your parents die, a short moment, when you suddenly feel that you don’t know anymore who you are and you become aware that you got disconnected from the cosmic realm” Aunt Emily wrote.

“You identify so much with your parents that you feel that you lose your own self when they are not there anymore”.

You could see other hundred of small events from Aunt Emily’s life, hungry to be cracked up, like walnuts, as Aunt Emily used to say. There are all yours. Grab them; they’re not going to hurt you as much as they used to hurt Aunt Emily. And then, they are past.

You as well as Aunt Emily cannot feel them anymore. Beat them up. Say something about them to relieve yourself from pain. They don’t have any strength to harm you; unwrap them, turn them inside out, and look at them openly.

It’s like you see yourself and Aunt Emily while talking, a few feet away from each other. You can hear what other people are talking about, you can point to the feelings you felt about them. They are gone now under a pile of mental shadows.

What’s sure thing is that you’re here and there is nothing and nobody that could deny that.

The farm I used to live in was built on a hill next to Aunt Emily’s farm. When she was very young she was soft spoken because she had a lisp.

I’ll tell you everything about her farm a little bit later. Her dad was a good dairy farmer and he also owned two shops, in the fashionable part of the small town from vicinity, which sold milk and milk products like cherry and pumpkin cheese, which were his patented products.

The other shop sold musical instruments like guitars, drums and trombones.

The farms in which Aunt Emily and I grew up were situated near Hudson River. Aunt Emily’s mom and two hired workers took care of the farm business while her father was doing mainly commerce and bullfight training.

Aunt Emily’s mom, Misses Rosebud, would wake up early morning when the sky was still dark and inspect the stables to see if everything was in order. “During winter nights the herd would often get disturbed by wolves.

When the wolves came there was no way one could hear the turmoil. The dogs that were supposed to guard the goats would bark in chorus and then coward in a corner of the pen - voiceless yelping - while letting the wolves steal one or two goats at their discretion.

In the morning when mom would open the gate the dogs would run out of the goat pen barking gaily to her face as if nothing happened. Usually mom would find half a goat unconsumed and prepare for us goat with spinach and cabbage in tomato and garlic sauce – her specialty dish – that left its smell float around the house for days.

After each night mom would do an inventory. She would say that she knew by heart who’s who among the goats though for Aunt Emily all of them seemed the same. Aunt Emily cared about what would happen to them if a tornado approached the farm since she saw on TV images of other tornados in which cows are flying and also a lot of other objects like roofs and cars and UFOs.

During the normal rainy storms when the Hudson River would overflow you would hear people talking about sheep and goats that perished. With buffaloes things were easier to manage. No bull about that.

Nothing went to waste. The buffalo shit would be gathered and spread to be dried by sun. I remember the burning and steamy smell of buffalo shit and also its golden color. The idea was not to step on it.

One of our workers complained that he has headaches when he gets inside the pen so mom bought for him a smoke mask. The other worker liked the smell of buffalo shit.

Isn’t it strange that our life mirrors the reality? In this mirroring people prove to be different. Dad said that whenever he had to clean the stable during Mexican holidays when the two workers were gone to see their families, he had hang over. Also he felt like in need to laugh. Then he read an article that said that the methane emitted by manure is a dozen times stronger than the methane emitted by a ground rich in natural gas.

Mom would always come home and wash herself of the waste and then ask us every half an hour or so: “Do I still smell?”

If one works in a farm she has to surrender to different tasks and needs. If you step in manure every day your heels skin gets thicker, hoarse and dry.

Mom would ask dad to recondition her heel skin so they’d get in the bath tub together and dad would get naughty and mom’s head would get lighter and they’d forget why they went there in the first place. Mom would come out of the bathroom and I would ask her how her heels were and mom would tell me that dad didn’t even touch her heels which I couldn’t understand.

Mom would have to roll her heels in butter for days while reading her preferred stories in The New Yorker like “Sparkle events from the lives of the famous and the defamed” or the women column “Everything you’d like to know about mirroring and applying lipstick”.

Buffalo milk is sweeter and thicker than cow’s milk. Also it has more fat. If you ever saw a plastic bucket used for buffalo milk you’d see butter gathered around each ring or crack. If we wanted to reduce the milk and sell low fat milk we had to centrifuge it.

With the milk we harvested from buffaloes we could get eight pounds of butter per week”.

I remember Aunt Emily from one of her videos. She was in the stable laying down on her back with her mouth open ready to catch the drops of milk from the udder milked by her mom. They were both laughing like nuts. Aunt Emily would motion toward the udder and her mom would splash milk all over her face and both of them would laugh.

Now Aunt Emily’s mom is memory. I think Aunt Emily is living with Phelps in Podunk Town, but I am not sure. Life seems to me disgustingly short.

I am trying to figure things out from Aunt Emily’s journals and videos, her mom holding her belly before Aunt Emily was born, this is in the first video, and Aunt Emily’s dad touching her mom’s belly and saying “This is going to be the child that took advantage of me and Rosebud when we made love; I am going to tell him – they thought that they were going to have a boy – that  there was a kinky love and he wasn’t supposed to get cover under Rosebud’s skin”.

The whole family, her dad and her mom, and also Aunt Emily herself, were a bunch of nuts. They were acting as if their lives would never near an end. Before they died they thought that they did with their lives whatever they wanted.

Did they know that we are all determined to do what our Karma is allowing us to do?

When Emily’s mom got pregnant she wanted a boy. Mammy’s boy proved to be daddy’s daughter. Aunt Emily’s mom picked the name Emil if the baby was going to be a boy so that as the baby proved to be a girl they named the baby Emily.

In the hospital when everybody was still waiting for the baby to show up Aunt Emily’s mom said something that people thought she shouldn’t have said:  

“If she is going to be a girl she is going to suffer from man’s egocentric greediness. Richard is such a greedy darling. His needs come always first. He is cocky like a dog but clean like a pussy. When I bug him to do kinky stuff he can’t sleep the whole night. It is his background. He is gentle and sparkling like a peeled hard egg”.

I would never forget how Aunt Emily used to describe her farm at spring time: She called the spring an irresponsible teenager love, her own metaphor, just so that she could give to the spring a weird character. Spring was for her like a sleepwalker that wakes up while walking and sees the amazing change that happened while she was asleep.

“What really struck me those times was the rice field makeover, the miniature channels that carried water from the Hudson River to the rice field. No heavy stuff that you see elsewhere. The little channels made out of clean plastic bars with irrigating holes that look like little trumpets in a mix of high technical marvel and art.

When the rice grows big enough and get one inch through the tube holes, the network of communication vessels disappear under the fresh green rice spades. Aunt Emily would ask me to give her a hand, stop on her walk to contemplate it, meanwhile she would smile, and heading towards the rice field, she’d look back at me, so that I could understand that the rice field was for her like magic. All because of that color and her thought that, that image of the field in flower would not last.

The quality of life, she told me, is just one’s capacity to look and see how things evolve. For some reason I didn’t understand what she was saying or why she was telling me that. Probably the reason was that I didn’t want to take from her so much passion and warmth and love for things that didn’t mean much to me.

For some reason my mind would get icy when I heard her saying things so beautiful, that she called “her spring epiphanies”. It was jealousy and envy.

We always decline things that are for us too deep and wide to grasp.          

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

People asked me all the time how was Aunt Emily Wagner in reality. They think that the story I put together using her diaries and my memory would come out as a total charade. I confess that I don’t know everything about Aunt Emily’s family. The way I describe her in this story is how I saw her.

I began seeing her more often after her family moved and lived on a farm next to ours.

Her family owned a hell of a crowd of animals. Her dad was a very complex and complicated character. He wanted to be called “bull breaker”. He hated when people called him “dairy farmer”.

He didn’t have a farm for the fun of it, like producing milk. This was the soft side of his business. The hard side of it was raising and training fighting bulls. He invented the term “bull breaker” copying it from what “horse breaker” meant. He would export bulls to Spain and Mexico.

He knew when a bull was ready to fight by measuring his blood pressure. 

One day he paid a visit to King Carlos of Spain. He told His Majesty to use a bull fight scene as a logo stamped on the Spain National Flag. The king responded that a bull in a cage would be more appropriate on a Spanish flag in view of the Spanish men love to be bullish.

When Aunt Emily’s dad died and the Estate lawyer opened his living will, they found that he’d like to have a sculptor to write on his marble tomb stone “Richard Wagner, bull breaker”. By that time it was too late for the stone tomb was already there and read: “Richard Wagner, dairy farmer”.

Aunt Emily was funny. She would show me how bulls behave like telling me not to pull a bull’s tail and then she’d show me what could happen if I touched a bull’s tail and she’d touch it and pull it until she’d get some reaction from him. That day she almost got hit when the bull motioned his two hinder legs into the air. She’d laugh and put her arms around my shoulders and kiss me.

“Did you see? He almost got me”.

She was too skinny to care for buffaloes. So she decided to lay down a plan to get fatter. She had two workers to help her, with whom she got along well.

Among buffaloes, there was one that was very special. Her skin was completely white, like a coconut sorbet. Aunt Emily named her Genevieve. When Aunt Emily and Genevieve would get together the buffalo’s eyes would get wet.

I’d give anything to see that scene again. The chubby cheeks of the buffalo moving – as if she wanted to talk – and her tail moving in rounds which Aunt Emily explained happens when the buffalo gets excited, and then how Genevieve would bellow, very loud, touching with her muzzle Aunt Emily’s tits in a very intimate and naughty motion.

“I wish she could talk” Aunt Emily told me one day.

When I think of Aunt Emily there are four hypostases that are very distinctive and irreconcilable. Right now I remember only one of them.

First, when she was fifteen (I was seven at that time), her beauty was like a “peach flower whispering to a spring breeze”.

I found the last quotation in a “How to impress a young lady with versatile poetry”. First I thought that versatile was the name of a poet. Her beauty, Aunt Emily’s, made me feel happy and also uncomfortable. I’d stand next to her and pinch her arm. I was in love with her, nobody would doubt that.

Then when she was seventeen and married that bustard Joel, Monparnasse, who was supposed to be her protector, I endured for her a lot. Aunt Emily’s parents were both alive when Joel was not in the picture.

You could listen to what they told Aunt Emily about Joel: “Aren’t you hearing the way he talks about God? You had been raised as a proper Baptist. This man is clueless who and what God is. Aren’t you seeing that he doesn’t respect us? Remember what he said about our buffaloes? You should stop talking to him. And he has such an elongated head. People are saying that he is using a spray to keep his hair down, like that pile of fresh straw that Elvis used to wear”.

“You have to look at him with God’s eyes. Do you think that anybody’s love for a young man that keeps a pile of straw on his head would last? People are saying that he also takes drugs to be cured of his head movements. He can keep his head still only if he takes the medicine. Otherwise he is anguished. I am sure that the effort to keep his head from moving strains his heart. I am not telling you anything that you don’t know already. But I saw him looking at you. I hope you know what follows when a man looks at a girl. He yanks around our gate. People think that he is not a genuine male. Don’t ever think that you’d let him throw his arms around you”.

Men, Aunt Emily learned from her mom, are auxiliary to women. She didn’t like to listen to her mom’s lecture. After her mom died she married Joel anyway. Instead of taking care of her, Joel drank half of her wealth and damaged her reputation to such extent that some stores in the nearby town would refuse to buy milk with her signature on.

I always wanted to sneak through the fence to see how she was. Two times I slipped between two laths in the fence and I spied on her. Joel was not around. The dogs barked for a while then they stopped. They knew me. Aunt Emily was sitting alone at the table in the living room. Her preferred dog, Hugh, was rolling all over the rug. After my eyes got used to the dim light inside I saw that she was not wearing pants. My heart was pounding. I thought that it was pretty normal that she wasn’t wearing pants for she was in her own house. If she knew that I was there she’d never forgive me.

The second time I saw her I practically fainted. She was almost naked and, figure, I was madly in love with her at that time.

Aunt Emily was really a character that could fill an encyclopedia about strength of character and duty.

I should say that first of all she was the kindest woman on Earth. She never defended herself when affronted. She’d take everything you’d throw at her and say nothing in her defense. You could name her names, insult her, tear her pride off, maybe even touch her in some way to show your anger or whatever, she’d look at you with a frozen smile and say nothing.

You had also understood that Aunt Emily was a real Lady. If you addressed her as a gentleman she would answer to you. She would tell you that modern society has no use for her, that she preferred to live on a farm because of its natural landscape and because it keeps your union with God at high esteem.

A modern city – and she’d convince you that she knows what she meant – is just a place where people get consumed, like slaves used to be. “In a farm you feel what your true self is and also you feel what lives around you”.

Anyway, a farm shows you the way back to honesty of living; as you leave the house the front door open to sound, light and animals and you feel that God flies around you.

As I said before Aunt Emily was a good and kind woman. A pure heart that got surrounded by scheming males – like her first husband – and also by her second husband that walked in her life and then out of it. When they finally reconciled she complained that she felt that all those years when they lived apart she was asleep.

Aunt Emily’s house didn’t have enough heat during heavy winters. I remember that her toes would turn pink those days, which gave to her lonesome dog the idea to take her toes in his mouth to warm them up.

That day when she came back home after she divorced her second husband I went to visit her and I found her naked in bed, wailing, with her back to the door and a pillow on her face. I covered her with my heavy coat. That’s when I saw her pink toes.

She was so upset that she wouldn’t give a damn that I saw her naked. She called her ex-husband a jerk-off-jerk. A man who lacked strength: “I should have known. A man who doesn’t work a man’s work cannot be trusted. Writers – her ex-husband was writer – they come and they learn from you what life is and then they leave. They don’t have a clue about love, what love is. When you give them love everything is fine. Then you see them acting in bed and they start turning you upside down and they hold you in their hands though they lost the real interest in you, and they act as external entities when they get in…”

I remember that I asked Aunt Emily what entity is and she didn’t want to answer. She just said that entity is something people use to get along in life.

I also told you already that her first husband was a scatterbrain and that his name was Joel. He was a drunkard. One day, Aunt Emily thought that it is going to be her turn to treat him the way he deserved it. That’s what she thought.

Then she saw Phelps who was a passionate birdwatcher at that time, climbing up one of the trees in her orchard. She thought that she’d have to talk to that man very cautiously and ask him how he got this idea to climb a peach tree in her orchard.

“Happenings don’t get their meaning just from what we see or interpret. Different people are bearer of different meanings”.

That’s why, unexpectedly, Aunt Emily sensed that that man made her heart tremble. She just had to close her eyes and kiss him. With women such an act has profound meanings and matters a lot. Whenever women close their eyes and kiss their desires get extremely grandiose.

That’s how the second phase of Aunt Emily’s life began. She sold all her belongings, “the whole damn thing - her farm – including her harmonica, and her motorcycle and went to marry Phelps who turned out to be a famous writer of romance novels.

After she married Phelps she kept reading his books and she felt all worked up while reading so that before he came home from the newspaper he used to work for as he opened the door she’d knock him out in bed with her passion and her screams and her drooling kisses that he called “her romantic appetite for farm-sex”.

Marrying such a woman any man would have been happy for life. At those beginnings Phelps thought that Aunt Emily was a naïve girl, a little Red Hood that got trapped in his skilful arms. He thought that Aunt Emily was somehow his property on which he could put his hands whenever he wanted.

But he noticed her gradual transformation into a city lady. When Aunt Emily began designing dresses and succeeded to sell some of her designs to Yves Saint Laurent, Armani and others Phelps realized that she may achieve fame and money and with it independence. He was afraid of Aunt Emily’s independence.

“You are the one who gave me this opportunity”, she’d say. “I have to thank your for that”.

Phelps thought, as any insecure man would, that Aunt Emily had something in her head when she married him. And his paranoia began striking again when she graduated and became a “fashion designer literati”. He got the impression that she was not listening to him anymore.

His jealousy turned around their whole life. She was bouncing around the house, she was happy and her success seemed that would never end.

Phelps couldn’t swallow her happiness easily. How could he fathom her happiness? Was it real?

To me when she left the farm and went to live in New York with Phelps, her transformation from a farm lady into a city lady smelled like black magic. There is a proverb that says that misfortunes that follow other misfortunes are improving themselves, they are becoming more vicious and more noxious than those that passed.

The saddest story to be told is what happened to Aunt Emily after she divorced Phelps and bought her farm back. I would talk about those days in measured terms, since she returned home with a broken heart and then she fought her loneliness and to balance it she brought in her house a pack of punk people that damaged her house and almost destroyed her life.

I was already a grown up that time and mom wouldn’t let me go to see her for religious reasons. Mom told me that she saw her leaving the house dressed in a weird black dress like a night shirt with no shoulders and that she was so worn out and devoured by vices that she looked like a ninety years old woman. She was thirty five at that time.

“You see what drinking and drugs and vices could do to you?” mom interjected. “Life must be for her now a foggy mess. To sin once is ok. Multiple sins are like those devilish octopuses that you could watch on the science channel”. . 

 

&

 

Recently I remembered with sorrowfulness that day when Aunt Emily sold her farm and went to New York to live with that famous writer, Phelps Durham.

I don’t think they got married right away. She had money and she was entitled to live her life as she pleased. However, while it can be said that mom wasn’t against what Aunt Emily decided to do, it also can be said that the way Aunt Emily broke up with her first husband Joel and forced him out of the house was not morally correct or immorally ok.

In people’s opinion she turned out to be cruel and the way she would parade Phelps around also proved that she was in her profundity a snub and though she put a big smile on her face when she left the farm to go to New York I know that she was sad.

So, while what she did was in her mind a good thing, if she didn’t do it or find another way to deal with her problems, because Joel was a pig anyway, this might have been a better decision: like refusing to go to bed with Joel for a while, then getting separated and forcing (with the law in her hand) the lousy bastard Joel to move out, etcetera.

Not the way she did it as if she was in a kind of a big rush, to knock him out with the help of that 6:10 ft. tattooed Yankee, Phelps, who couldn’t fit in a normal door frame, or in a rolling door, and who could start a storm with his deep breath and crush a brick without utensils, with his bare hands or feet, if you gave him the idea that he could do it.

His head was like an egg decorated with a fresh crew haircut. Every two weeks he’d go to cut his hair which Aunt Emily thought was reminiscence from his years with the marines. He looked funny when Aunt Emily, who was 5.7 feet, was around. But they both liked how the other one looked like.

Aunt Emily was docile, she would listen and make concessions, while Phelps was one of those men that thought that only his opinion was right and who could convince anybody in a couple of seconds that whatever he was saying was true.

He would use masterly a succession of “It’s true! Believe me! If it wasn’t true I wouldn’t have told you; I wouldn’t lie to you; who is going to confirm that it is true or not when I am the only one…” and he’d go after you like a nut to prevent your mind from escaping his argument.

He was a heavy character, Phelps, I think, though at the time he left the scene of this story he wasn’t anymore that intense personality but rather became like anybody else at his age, a weepy, grumpy, and petulant tall guy.

He published seven novels or so (“The town of depravity”, “Facing a fight with a Happy Birthday joystick”, “Morning haze and other fuzzy events”,  “On his last foot”, “The untainted love of her Excellence Mme de Steal”, “Of fish and foxes”, “ Remembering Sheila: a life wide gap!”) and he painted thousand of canvases (???), etc.

The time when Aunt Emily moved to New York with Phelps might seem unclear since I cannot describe exactly her life there. I can imagine how things were from what Aunt Emily told me but I never had enough information to put what she said in writing.

Also Aunt Emily stopped writing extensively in her diaries, first of all because she felt awkward to write while living with a famous writer that Phelps was and also because life in New York was damn boring, incredibly equal, and uniform as she wrote in one of her letters addressed to my mom: “…life keeps running away; you separate a moment of your life from another when there is so much to do? That’s what happens when you live in a big metropolis. You run back and forth to do as many chores as you can and forget to live”.

For me, as I said already, Aunt Emily’s life in New York was fuzzy. She had her life and all mixed up with Phelps’ life. Whenever I try to describe the New York scene it’s like I bump against a thick wall. Why? It is because my lack of knowledge of New York society or because living in such a big city doesn’t appeal to me as a good idea to make up a good story.

 The city sweeps your life away. Though you’d have to acknowledge that in the third chapter I described in credible and long paragraphs Aunt Emily’s transformation from a farm girl into a city woman of “interest” and her struggle to give Phelps as much love and happiness as he needed without mentioning her apprehension, though she understood immediately what kind of faked and full of pretense were those intellectuals, when they talked about politics and the words got so fluid as if a thing would lead to another, and everybody would show off and forget all about her presence until Phelps would turn towards her and say:

“Do you like the talk darling? Very intelligent people, all Howard and Princeton guys” and she would tell him “I love you” humbled and humiliated by what she heard, “a distressing talk among men who couldn’t wait to lay their hands on their women and talk about everything they perceived dirty in the holly book to clean their mind of politics”.

Then unexpectedly, as she wanted to prove that she was not that “farm girl” she found herself climbing up the upper layer of the society, Phelps’ world, a good place to live if you could be accepted as an equal, and when it happened she wasn’t different than who she was before and she found out that only circumstances have changed.

She could see them now, face to face, those envious scholars, jealous, competitive, “intellectually rampant” boys, pretty funny show-off-grown-up teenagers, some of them showing their short and incapacitated breath while getting deepen in their emotions.

Phelps was dominating the crowd with his nasty jokes which she thought was the only time when he felt good and perfectly at home, since this was Phelps’ style, to poop on everything that was taken seriously, like the snobbish talk about art and philosophy, not to mention paranormal psychology, I mean discoveries like seeing at the distance of miles – some people that are stupefied in an accident could hear sounds that go around the globe and come back, when again she could hear Phelps putting on the breaks and stopping the shit on the tracks.

That weird behavior came from Phelps’ abhorrence to waist time, though when he took over a serious discussion he’d build his talk on the same crap.

Indeed, he didn’t waste his time and he seemed to live on a lap of a wonderful fate - happily married twice, accomplished – until that morning when he woke up and felt that the devil was working in his head telling him that he has to stop working, that is enough and even too much what he accomplished and that he should return to Podunk Town – his place of birth, and live there as a free man doing nothing and also die there of boredom with resignation and peace of mind.

The only regret he had was to go too far from Aunt Emily. What his friends would think about his decision?

The Aunt Emily would cheat on him out of anger for being left to live as an appendage to his books. After Phelps divorced her she went back to Rough Land.

Now that Aunt Emily went back to farming Phelps wouldn’t go out to see his friends very often. They all maintained kind of a phone relationship.

Same was his relationship with Aunt Emily. If one would listen to their conversation which was full of declarations of love and cheerful make-believe stories one would think of some romance or fondness.

On the phone people don’t see the distance between them. After divorcing Aunt Emily, Phelps’ life took a different turn than hers. Phelps hated farming. Aunt Emily felt that a farm was for her like water is to fish, or like fresh ploughed soil is to earthworms.

First, Aunt Emily wanted to raise mares on her farm. “Mares look like horses that are not going to do any harm to a Christian Woman”, she told Phelps. He laughed at her joke which he called “sexist” and “prejudicial to horses”.

After he divorced Aunt Emily he began immediately to look for a new woman. He wasn’t in a hurry though. What he needed was to replace in his mind Aunt Emily’s image.

I met him a couple of times and I tried all those times to be discreet and stay away and as far as I could from his private life. “Where did you get this idea to write a book about Aunt Emily? What Aunt Emily, the one who did fashion design or Aunt Emily, the farmer girl?” he asked me a couple of times.

“To begin your story with my life?” he’d ask. “My life is none of your business and also doesn’t deserve to become a story” he’d insist.

Everybody wanted privacy, especially Phelps who was already famous. He never thought that Aunt Emily could be the subject of a story.

“You can’t make an interesting story with normal people, like you and I. Or with Aunt Emily for that matter… To give you an example, I am writing now a story about that French guy, Marmot De Chateaubriand, that is, somebody gave me this idea that schizophrenics could see their insights, their internal organs, and I asked this doctor, I forgot what his name was, anyway, if you recall the beginning of my story about exotic birds getting organized to migrate like any other birds do, and I found out that Marmot thought that his lungs were blue and clean like the clear sky and that under his command he could get air in and out his lungs, and that his spitting was kind of getting rid of clouds, that is why I make him wear a straw hat, that he is wearing it day in and day out, so that he could get the spit organized in formations, and then get rid of it out of his lung trap, and that’s how you make an interesting story. For a reader to make him look at real life, when a reader is already hurt by his own, is like saying that there is no other way to amuse him but hurting him twice, and that by writing it you don’t intend to be funny but cynical. Or, what’s so interesting writing about Aunt Emily, like saying that she bought two pairs of shoes and that one of the pairs wouldn’t fit and she got sore skin and returned them. What is interesting in such a story? And who is interested to read that? Anyway, my life with your Aunt Emily could be described as you would describe empty potato sacs. Why would you, I compromise now, think that I make a concession to you when I say that you can’t make a rosy and sweet story out of our pickled sour love”.

He made a little pause and breathed deeply.

“Women make mistakes, they betray and get betrayed, especially that species of women that have this propensity to be unfaithful to men. My mistake was that I looked at my life with her as a night-after-night sexual affair, nothing but a sexual act, that’s the reality. Sex, my friend, just sex, now aches, nobody served me as well as your Aunt Emily did, and this ended somewhere in the middle – Middle Sex, got it? -  some people are like me, they want to be with a woman because they need sex, every night, certainly there is some romance there, you know, I hope you understand, we are all humans, but the only thought I had after she left me is that special way of her to love, the way she stripped and say that she had some surprise stuff in store, oh boy, for me the way she loved me and the way she shinned in bed after sex like a dark wild flower”.

At her age, thirty plus, Aunt Emily was still a beautiful woman. I read an article in Medical Alignment Radix that affirmed that it is the excitement or boredom that was responsible for a woman’s aging. For men it was the lack of success and achievements.

 

 

Chapter 1

 

Manhattan, first of January, 1981

 

 

In a crowded place people seem locked up in their bodies. There is nothing visible that seem being filtering out. You look around and you see a weird world, a multitude of city faces, inexpressible, uncommunicative, concerned, and stressed out, like holding their bowel movement after they swallowed a laxative that worked faster than they expected.

 

Some of those faces are speaking, others are watching, listening. Nobody speaks the same body language though. From the way people talk and from their body language you could build the anthropomorphic portrait of that animal species, the city creatures.

In this noisy city when people talk they sound like barking. The surface, the thin surface of humanity is based on the use of language.

There are also statues that talk about history. As far as daily life goes there are grocery stores, stores that sell clothes, pharmacies and cleaning shops. Nothing else is needed.

Though, from birth to death, people go to banks, insurers, web providers, and so on. A certain individual thinks that he can recognize himself as unique through all the stages that could be called “his life”. “This is how I looked when I was two years old, this is how I looked when I got the first communion, certainly this is how I was after I graduated from the high school, I must have been very bad that time, since I had been expelled four times, once while being caught kissing Viviane on the hallway, this is my wedding with Maggie, and such recollection would never stop.

Did it all happened or it is just a dream?” If you close your eyes it looks like it really happened. If you open your eyes you can’t see yourself anywhere in that past. You’d have to explain to us why you think that you really lived those moments and not just watched those moments rolling in front of your eyes as a chimera.

“While we sleep we live” This is a real African proverb. How about dreaming while living? Your body is still coated with maternal belly water and you look happy and you’d like to tell everybody about your happiness and you start writing about it.

“The most important thing”, you begin, “is that God engineered life in such a way that when you figure out that you lived your whole life without knowing it you start loving everything, and get an echo to your love from every single thing that exists around.

And as moment after moment of your life is dripping away you realize that nothing and nobody is around you to say good bye to: that’s natural.

We quoted extensively from Phelps’ first book. Phelps’ books that followed this first one were received with indifference. That is usually what happens to each author. First book creates excitement: a new writer, a new way of thinking and creating stories.

Then underneath the new style critics discover influences, and they look into the biographical details and find where the author is coming from, like they did with Phelps when they discovered that he was a lawyer and that he was born in a small town of fishermen called Podunk Town and they began to trivialize his portrait:

“He ought to be one of those Southerners that move their feet slowly, at a rate of one yard per minute, slowly, one feet at a time (how else?), and this is why his writing is so slow and his dialog so peaceful as if his characters would refrain to make any noise while talking!”

Once a bad review comes up the news spread quickly. One can’t have many of them until he is forgotten. Phelps though was a good writer. Some writers are good for as long as they live. They don’t have any problems becoming famous. Phelps also was not only a good writer but an authentic man as well, except for that period of time when he became member of that strange club of bird watchers.

Phelps thought that authentic people are those living in small apartments and driving regular cars.

When you see an open car, like a cabriolet, you know that the person driving that car is not authentic.

It is also true that for strategic reasons authentic people don’t buy their food from gourmet shops.

People commuting by train, also, are very authentic people. Phelps was this kind of individual. He respected his profession, write exquisite articles and books. In secret he believed that he was entitled to some national recognition though most of the time he was content with what he had already, since he had what he needed, an apartment to live in and a fairly comfortable life.

Nobody around him, that is, his acquaintances and neighbors, got more. They all lived on the edge between middle class and the wealthy layer. Plus, Phelps could legitimately say that there are people on the street that recognize him, they stop him and say: “Damn it! I know you! You are Phelps Durham. How are you dude?”

Phelps didn’t like when somebody called him “dude”. Like when he went to see a play and there was this gentleman that turned around at the intermission and addressed him:

“I don’t think that anybody told you yet dude that your last novel just sucks”.

People around sighted indignant.

“I was busting your chaps, dude, your novel is great”.

After intermission the guy didn’t show up to his seat.

How was it possible that Phelps who was 6.10ft and strong like a bull could have inspired this kind of disrespectful attitude from people of all kind of statures. He put those attacks on sort of conspiracy.

 His friends told him that it was his kind face, his soft features that inspired aggression from people. City people are savage.

John Updike would be more specific: ”I don’t think the guy had anything to do with you. He had problems with himself. I am sure he is angrier with himself than with anybody else. Also, I am sure he didn’t read your last book, otherwise he’d have insisted that it is nothing else but crap”.

 

&

 

It is snowing for days. The gusts of wind are battling the building windows by day, filling up the parapets with a feathery layer of smoky snow. The entrance to 101 W. 55th street is totally blocked by the yesterday’s accumulation of rain and melted snow. Yesterday the temperature was around 48 which proved at this time of the year that global warming acts well in the large cities.

Then all of a sudden it got colder and colder, it snowed and rained at the same time.

Phelps Durham lives here, on seventh floor, apartment 7D (D from dog).

On the first day of the year, as always, Phelps tries to reason about his life, how he spent it in the previous year and if it made sense if any. Phelps likes “meanings”. For him a meaningless life is a practical illusion. He’d have to give one dollar to every man working in the building and five dollars to the super and tell to each of them his boring joke: “Play lotto. Maybe you win. We’ll split fifty-fifty”.

Phelps such behavior is not stupid. He is just an awkward individual. They know him that well that they don’t bother answering back:

“What’s a dollar?” the doorman asked him one day. “Not money anymore”.

The bottom line is that Phelps is a successful reporter and painter. He writes well and paints above average. Nobody can say how much he amassed selling his small editorials or his paintings. Kind of sharpens his stare if you ask him anything about his fortune.

He tells you: “Look clown, you didn’t learn yet that those are private information?” He is a tenant in this building paying a modest $4,000 monthly rent. People think that he is loaded. He isn’t. As far as monies go, people talk to others a different dialect without even knowing it.

Today Phelps would have to go and see an old woman friend, a painter, given that Phelps is not yet old at his age of forty nine, and there is no sign on his face that he aged too much. You’d rather think that he was in his late thirties. So he can look straight in a woman’s eyes and tell her that he was thirty eight years old. After visiting his old friend he has to go to the fish market and buy fresh cod. In the afternoon he’d have to sign two applications to merge together his banks accounts at Chase bank. He is convinced that his decision is business wise good. It will save him $134 dollars in fees and printed checks. He thinks that all the banks are waiting for people like him to make small financial mistakes and have their little revenue sucked to the bone.

I forgot to tell you that Phelps is paranoiac. He couldn’t have been a good reporter otherwise. He made it in the world of letters and he made it well. His concern is that what seems to be good today could look bad tomorrow. That’s why he got rid of his stocks. With the current unstable market there is no time to think it over.  “Market doesn’t know you” used to say a well known Wall Street punk.

“You have to know the market”. Lots of people got locked in stocks that plummeted to zero value. Phelps kept walking the solid tracks, where one has plenty of room to sell or buy as desired.

He’d get dressed today in his blue suit and wear an embroidered tie that makes him stand out in the crowd, especially the thin crowd that goes out after a New Year’s eve night celebration. He feels ready to roll full steam this year. No more timidity or hesitation. The confidence is back. He will hook up all the loose ends of his multifaceted art business endeavors and attempt to market himself anew.

 That’s exactly how he thinks every year, because he never changed his approach to life: “This is my style”, he’d say.

 

Those New Year thoughts never materialized and he’d have to go back to his old routines all over again. But this year he feels good. He is indefatigable and he’d stay ahead of bad news, escaping unscathed from any trap that fate may throw on his way.

Some women from single clubs showed interest in his intellectual abilities. That interest though didn’t materialize as love. A biology book would describe Phelps as a sentimental, melancholic and sexually active male. He couldn’t learn that fine gentlemanly way to capture a woman’s attention by offering first to her his friendship. When he meets a woman he likes he just dashes forward, excited like a child that cannot wait while asking in a breathless manner for that candy.

Women get frightened by this unreserved approach. One of the women that were asked to be his lover called his style “a somersault sexual assault”. He doesn’t care. For Phelps any attempt to get a woman’s attention gives him such a joy that eventually he doesn’t care if it materializes as a relationship or not.

He is always in love with the whole world. He hopes that a woman would be there to understand him and accept him as he is.

His ex-wife Maggie was one of them. She met Phelps at the fish market, down town, not an ideal place to listen to a declaration of love. Maggie would say latter that God acts in mysterious ways when it packages fish and love together.

When you go to the fish market it makes a difference if you came there to buy fish or to eat fish. If you ate there you would think that they’d serve you the freshest catch. Slightly true… But if you bought the fish you knew that it could have been frozen for one hundred years. You couldn’t know or say.

Fish doesn’t smell when frozen or it smells just like a dead fish that was kept wrapped in ice for years in a row.

Anyway, the smell in the fish-market was always hair-raising.

 If you ever went there you surely remember that cement tables chipped by time and weather, the scratches on the windowless walls that could tell you about how many lives of fishes have been sold there, numbers written all over the place, dollar amounts, nothing really is telling you anything about the date or time, just fish market history in numbers and additions and amounts, graffiti at a small scale, as Phelps used to say, if you see it you still have to have ears to listen, time to think about, and smell about what each stone of the pavement has to say.

In the winter the only thing which is not abundant are people coming to the fish market to buy fish. No more need for ice to keep fish fresh. The busloads of fish are scarce also.

Phelps met Maggie there. Without warning he told her: “I know why you buy fish!” Maggie glanced amused at him and a little bit puzzled and probably annoyed and decided to ask him why.

“Because they stare at you! In social situations you’ll not let anybody to do that”. Maggie laughed.

“Am I supposed to take what are you saying as a proposal?”

Phelps rushed to answer back: “Yes, yes, exactly. You are a very intelligent woman”.

“Let me think. I sense that you stare at me like a fish also. Give me your business card. I only call in the evening. I don’t like to talk on the phone during the daylight hours”. 

Doubtful rule, Phelps thought. That evening Maggie called. She told Phelps that she’d like to apologize, especially for comparing him with a fish, though she continued, what he said about fish was troubling to her. Then she asked Phelps to meet her in a coffee shop uptown.

And this was it. Some people are like that. They meet, they use their intuition and then they get naked and as anybody knows, love is all there.

Nowadays women are always searching for a faultless man. Women think that today man’s world is totally crazy, full of perverts or imagined perverts that get out of a relationship before it even begins.

Maggie was different. She understood that she could share with Phelps the common law love right away. She didn’t need to wait until she could get convinced of Phelps’ honesty and “innocence”.

Maggie used to say that it could be troubling when an innocent man cannot take off his pants as fast as needed. Their love-make-rendezvous took place in Maggie’s place. Phelps brought flowers and told her that he has another surprise for her; He asked her to close her eyes and keep them closed until he says “ok”.

She knew him just a little bit and she had this thought that she cannot trust him on their first date with her eyes closed. When she was allowed to open her eyes Phelps was naked. She began immediately to have hiccups. She told him that this is happening whenever she sees a naked man. “It may take a while, usually a couple of minutes”, she told him.

“Damn Catholic girls” he said. “With all due respect” madam, Phelps said, “I came to make love to you”.

He took her in his arms and looked in her eyes. “Keep going” she said. They got into her bedroom okay. Phelps was bouncing around the bed to undress her and he got his hands first under her skirt when he assumed he’d find her panties:

“I never wear panties” she told him while having another hiccup mixed with laughter.

He began kissing her naked belly. “You are a real gentleman” she said. “I wanted to inform you that I am a noble lady and that this is the first time I do this with a gentleman that I see for the first time. Never, never! I am a clean lady. But I respect gentlemen like you that go with their business flat suddenly, ah! Some men are doomed if they have to wait. Nobody is, oh!”

At the end she told him simply “It seems to me that you didn’t come here for nothing as you said”.

That night she knew that Phelps was the one she was looking for. So she moved to live with him the very next morning.

Maggie was a type of a woman who didn’t need to say a lot. Like, if she wanted to say something she’d start with “Listen!” as if she knew that nobody would listen to her otherwise. Sometimes she’d grab Phelps and she’d start a long speech without pausing and gulping air as if she had breathing problems.

But she was intelligent. She’d pretend that she wasn’t interested in what she was saying like she’d dump a sentence or two and then withdraw.

Phelps write about her: “I couldn’t wait to see her the first time we met. She was wearing a very heavy makeup; her eyelids were painted blue while her eyebrows were surrounded by black lines, very heavy lines that I could see, like she did her make up in a rage, like Van Gogh would do it, by creating a mask of herself and adjusting it by increasing the shadow around the drawn lines”.

“She reminded me of a paragraph that “I underlined when I was in the high school”. The book was “The Biography of Rasputin”. It read: “The only indignity one could perform is by trying to express himself freely in a world that has rules and laws. You’d have to put some mask over your face”.

“When I saw her that day she had her mask well done. I still could hear her voice when she said: “Men have to be sent back to Hell to learn manners”. Then she laughed. If one followed the discussion they had about that first night it would be clear to this day that they had a consensual sex and what was a lot more than sex was also consensual, including what Maggie whispered on the phone and her smack between her smiling lips she had when she concluded her conversation.

Such consensual acts are not worth of a prenuptial agreement. She couldn’t picture herself doing what people of low character do but she got a chance to ask for it. Instead, they both agreed to respect a very strange marriage law: “Being free of any responsibility in bed for the other” which meant that they could choose to sleep with whomever they wanted.

She though was good as wife and as friend. She would stimulate his ambitions until she saw him succeeding to put his writing on a sure and meaningful road.

When Phelps thinks of his commercial success he knows that without Maggie he wouldn’t have made it. Gradually though his commercial success made him feel tired. He couldn’t realize that he practically stopped living with Maggie, and then he stopped listening to her voice when she was around.

Then gradually Maggie changed. She refused to have sex and began resembling a Bible-woman, a religious nonsense. Was it Phelps’ fault?

She got very vocal and began to criticize Phelps’ drama ridden books as being nonrealistic and empty of truth. “You don’t have a clue of women’s sufferings” she used to say. “You think you are an amazing writer and you come up with themes in which you miss the most important fact, women’s suffering, their unhappiness and crisis while serving men. You’re bubbling about people that live ahead of their times, chocked by a society that doesn’t understand them. I wondered why none of your heroines suffer a real drama, like stumbling around, falling, like a sick rabbit, and crying and getting pissed and knocking down her man, put his man-jerk-ass-hole down and then squish him turning him in a turtle and smacking him. That’s what you should write about”.

Then she’d burst into tears. “What’s wrong with you? Try to get back to your senses. You refused to have sex with me and you made me beg you for a kiss – did you forget, you’d say, “no more foreplay” and that time I thought you’re involved with somebody else, that man Coriolanus, I felt tore apart, even now I feel sick all over again when I recall how he’d call you and how you’d laugh and laugh, I felt like I was a phony dog to you, a target of your frigidity and that you’d allow this to happen in order to destroy me, and then you asked me to let you do whatever you wanted, and I tried my best to put up with your moods and whatever else from that fat ugly and stiff feminist cow, Marla, that tried to attract my stares by opening her crutches to show me that like you do she wouldn’t wear panties though as opposed to you she labeled her body as unavailable” Phelps replied.

“Ok, ok, I got the point”, Maggie interrupted. Phelps long talk brought tears in her eyes. And then again, how was it possible for Maggie who needed so much to be in love, to ask for love and give love to make such a gross mistake?

Some people are carried away by stinginess. They are stingy to give or get love. After Maggie lost her appetite for love she got suspicious about Phelps’ life, what he was doing all the day long out there and she would interrogate him for hours when he would come home late.

Nobody could have had more patience than Phelps. Maggie struggled with her feelings and found that in reality she didn’t have anything to complain about. It was no use to tell Phelps what she thought, that she didn’t trust him anymore, especially because she always thought that whatever he always did was fair.

After a while when Maggie kept complaining of fatigue, rubbing her eyes and theatrically yawning, or when she would lock herself in the bathroom and cry, Phelps knew already that there was something queer going on, like on that Saturday when she left home in the morning and returned home late at night, and she asked him not to comment on it, and then there was that strange “claim” of hers that she stopped having sex because she tried to find God, though she kept reading porno stuff and she’d get so nervous when she had to go to bed.

“Even a piece of furniture would be warmer in bed than you” Phelps told her one night.

Maggie didn’t know what to say. A divorce in her opinion was not an option. Then she’d surrender to Phelps’ repeated appeals and say: “Ok, let’s get it done. The faster, the better!”

This morning she told him that a woman of her age is freeing herself of her need to have sex. “You’re only thirty nine years old, for God’s sake” he told her. “If sex is not of interest to you maybe I shall find another woman”.

“Do me a favor; don’t talk to me about that. Do whatever you want”.

That’s how, day after day, their marriage got shattered. The sick part of the whole process was that Maggie didn’t know what happened to her. She had been through thinking about it may times. She wanted to know why it happened to her. There were some reasons for such punishment, she thought. She wanted to make sure that there was nothing organic. Finally she went to a gynecologist who told her that everything was normal and advised her to go to a psychologist.

“It is a common warning sign for women that are approaching forty years of age” the psychologist said. “The truth remains hidden in each of us. It’s a transformation”.

One day Phelps came home and found out that Maggie was gone. Everything else was there. The only thing, if you could call it a thing, which was not there, was Maggie.

She moved with the winter breeze out, leaving a thin flicker of perfume in the bedroom.

Phelps didn’t miss her much that night, the first night when he slept alone. The next night though he slept with her pillows under his head sniffing her smell and trying to control his tears as he slept through the night.

Slowly he realized that without Maggie he lost his true personality which he became acquainted with, made out of fragments that she put together as she helped him carry on. Each of those fragments was hurting him now. None of those fragments helped him understand why this rift happened.

He felt like unable to take a thin cold breath out of the frosty air that surrounded him.

Divorces are always difficult to bear. Also, they are nasty stories. When it comes to splitting a fortune it is even worse. Phelps didn’t have any petty reasons to complain about it. Maggie asked for $50,000 and she got it.

When she got the signed and sealed divorce paper she called Phelps, crying. “Just two months ago we used to be so happy together” she mumbled. Phelps wanted to keep his dignity in check so he replied in a cold fashion: “I am sure you will understand one day why?” “Why what?” she asked desperately. “I love you Phelps, really!”

“Then you’ll understand why we used to be happy…”

“Bull, that is bull Phelps, and you know it. I don’t even know you, that guy I used to be happy with. You ignored me. Sometimes we didn’t have a kiss for weeks. That wasn’t love. We just had sometimes a good time together. If I had a thought that I was the cause of your estrangement I would have done something. You just didn’t want to deal with our problems like a man”.

“You don’t know what you are talking about” replied Phelps. “What you did, leaving me without a warning was an impropriety, an ugly thing that you seem not to be aware of. You’re calling me after the divorce is finalized. You are telling me things that you never wanted to talk about before. Sometimes you didn’t care about if I was home or not. You’d come home after three days spent with your feminist girl friend, wearing the same shirt you were wearing when you left. You smelled like a sponge filled with manure juice and you’d smile and say “jokingly” that what you did could not be defended in a court of law. Even today, when I remember your smile I feel sick. One day you asked me if I am kind to bring you a drink. You wanted to drink while taking a bath. I brought you a scotch. You were naked in the bath tub. You asked me if you could be of any assistance and then you laughed saying that if I wanted to make love your body had been already used and was not available until tomorrow. What wife would say that? This was really horrible”.

“I know”, Maggie responded, “This was very bad”.

“Of course it was bad”.

After saying that, Phelps hanged up. Maggie called back though Phelps never picked up to answer.

After divorce Maggie was not the same woman anymore. Phelps knew though that in a couple of months she will get back on her feet. She called Phelps and told him that she found strength by looking within, listening to her inner voice.

“If you’d have listened to your inner voice you’d have not been divorced” Phelps replied.

“There is a good time and a bad time in everything that is happening to us”, Maggie replied.

 

&

 

When Phelps married Maggie he was still practicing law. He already collected thousands of books about law, justice practices around the world, crimes and the severity of the punishment relative to the type of crime, anomalies in the world of justice and law enforcement, etcetera.

Phelps was fascinated while reading that kind of crap. One book seemed more interesting than the other. “As far as law is concerned” he used to say, “It comes down to knowing what is unlawful”.

It’s like saying that as far as love is concerned it comes down to know what love is not. People would call him from everywhere to know his opinion about their case. Some of them wanted just to clarify something about a potential conflict of interest with the business they were doing. If they were wealthy Phelps would invite them for a consultation in his office and charge them dearly for a simple question.

That’s how he amassed enough money to stop practicing law and become a freelance writer. Phelps liked money. He wouldn’t have liked to have anything else in his life but money and women, an unlimited number of both. As a writer though he asked himself one day where his life was leading into. Monies daze you and women overwhelm you but they don’t give you a real purpose to live for.

That is how Phelps discovered his alter ego, which wanted fame. After he wrote a couple of short stories he couldn’t live without writing every day. Then he began painting, not cans of soup, like other painters were doing; real paintings like first of his paintings which was sort of a primitive style painting with lily flowers, fruits, a loaf of bread and a cat caught exactly as she jumped to catch a moth. You could see half of the marmalade jar on the right side of the painting that read onto two parallel lines: “tish/melade” (British Marmalade, just in case you didn’t get it).

What a happy event for him when he had his first exhibition. People would look at his paintings and they knew the deep substance Phelps was made of. One didn’t need to wear a pair of earphones that they use now in museums to explain what those abstract works were supposed to represent.

Some of Phelps paintings were blurred, like Monet’s paintings are. It took him sometimes two weeks to find the right color of the beach sand: “This will do it!” Maggie didn’t like Phelps’ transformation from a famous lawyer into a writer/artist.

Phelps though, didn’t have any doubt that he was going to succeed and be famous.

His first book “The cursed Court” was a story about a crooked judge. The plot was built up gradually and the arguments between judge and lawyers worked so well that one could not predict how the story might evolve until the very ending. When at the end the judge is handcuffed and a policeman announces that the defendant would be “released and the charges against him dismissed when the court opens tomorrow morning. The popular court becomes mayhem”.

This last part of the story is so optimistic that the book sold thousands copies only because of this last page. The last page reads: “The next day the court was packed. On both sides of the court people were waiting in silence. The new judge sat at his bench. He would glance now and then over the documents arranged in two piles in front of him. As he stood up the crowd followed. Then the judge smiled and said: “Case dismissed”.

The reporters began rioting running the stairs. There was one person victory against the whole judicial system”. The scene in which the lawyer hands out a cigar to the defendant and the defendant says “Thank you, I don’t smoke. I would also advise you not to do it. Some of the global warming is caused by cigars”, is one of the most memorable moments of the story.

The other memorable moment was when the lawyer intervenes and advises that ex-judge not to point his finger towards the defendant:

”Your Honor” the lawyer says, “there are provinces in this country where pointing a finger can put you in a lot of trouble”. “Amazing, very inspiring, indeed!”

Critics called Phelps’ first book “an improved version of “Judge this, if you can!” written by the amazing prankish Robert McNamara.

Once Phelps had this success he thought that he knew where he was going. After months of struggle and confusion Phelps came back with another book ready to be published. The book was barely noticed. Maggie’s objections to Phelps’ new directions in life diminished.

After Phelps’ failure his social life got richer. There are a lot of mediocre people that want to embrace you when you fall out of grace.

What Phelps noticed was that people who live a normal life look all the same.

“The artists are all different. In a manner of speaking the artists are all a bunch of paranoiacs that keep their worrisome mind hidden behind curtains of theatrical talk and deceiving gestures”.

Among them Phelps looked like an ordinary people. One day he was wondering while glancing at those twisted characters around him – some would stare at you other would squint at you – what they have special when they try to be part of a separate member only club in that crowd.

Phelps felt that everybody around him was a suspicious mental wreck. One of the writers – Marvin Webmaster – was a restless compulsory character, very frail, like a vertical noodle; he’d always start a new conversation before saying anything meaningful to his subject with: “So what do you think?” This was a sign that he wanted to say something.

There was a funny girl there, Lydia Khrushchev, a Russian artist who couldn’t stand Marvin’s way to introduce himself. “What do you think?’ she would repeat as she’d press her blouse down showing her tits. “What do you think about that?”

She thought that Marvin was mentally retarded and that he’d read and memorize some text in the morning in order to deliver it at the Irish pub table.

Maggie used to like Marvin. You wouldn’t wait too long to hear her strident laugh while sitting down next to Marvin and have their mysterious private dialog. Maggie thought that Marvin has everything a man needs to be a fantastic writer, though he never wrote a single line.

“With his imagination, my God, going back and forth in a story, it is just that his avant-garde style of speaking is going to some extreme, and he needs in my opinion a coauthor to rebuild the story from the top down and an editor to put the story in some logical order, to make the reading pleasurable. He starts and goes on with his story for a while and then he turns back, like trying to be closer to his subject, now that you knew something about it, and then as he goes back he talks without hesitation about his characters in a totally divisive way.

“He surely could talk faster than he could write” Maggie would say. “Which, I mean, he should dictate his story”. Then Marvin tells her that a computer or a secretary would both be intimidating to him.

“If he could talk in sleep a secretary would write it down, that’s the trick”. His story with those clouds that take the shapes of the letters of the alphabet in the mind of a blind drug addict until he stands up to greet the letters and he realizes that he cannot spell anymore anything like he feels spell-less or spell-bound and then how he goes out, hungry and tries to separate the seeds from manure, to eat something, because the only senses left to him untouched is his smell, that smell that helps animals to find food, and his hearing…

Then - Marvin’s story goes - he hits with his white cane a homeless who pushes him away and then throwshim on the stair well and as he falls he recovers his eyesight and he runs after the homeless man who doesn’t understand how a blind man can run so fast and tries to escape climbing up the same stairwell and falls and dies.

He wants to call the story “Karma Dharma”. If it is Karma why a good deed is paid so badly? The homeless man helped the guy to get back his sight, didn’t he?” Maggie liked that story.

After a couple of weeks of clowning nobody saw Marvin for a while then everybody knew somehow that he was in the hospital for a while and died after a bad blood transfusion.

People would gossip about what that transfusion was for.

Maggie couldn’t recover from her depression for weeks. Then short after that, another depression followed. The stock market crashed and Phelps lost all the money he invested except the money spent on mutual bonds which he decided to sold immediately for a slight amount of $100,000. His relative wealth was like it never existed.

Maggie wouldn’t care. After divorce Maggie’s life was like broken in two lives. One still connected to her past the other that came to her from a curse she believed in. She got Alzheimer like her mom. Again it shows that it is true that fortune and sickness runs in the family.

She’d ask herself the same question again and again: “How could this happen to her?” There is this proverb that an illness is going to find you when you err. The illness says: “I found you” and then it never goes away. The beginning is here. The end is not in sight.

The first time Phelps heard about it was when he went to his doctor for a check up. Maggie would never complain about anything.

He went to see her without phoning her first. Her hands were trembling so much that she barely could drink her favorite green tea. She wasn’t brave at all. That’s where her strength was, in her will to live. She told Phelps that she was scared. He tried to console her, telling her that there are plenty of medicines now to cure such an ailment. She told him that she was grateful to him. “You’ll do me a favor” she said, “if you leave me alone now”. She didn’t seem being in control. He helped her going to bed and covered her with a blanket before saying good bye.

 

&

 

Phelps thought that one cannot observe reality by getting involved in it. The least you know is when you are in a close relationship with people. To be observant is like being an object, like being a piece of furniture, a lit lamp watching the surroundings. The slightest movement would spoil the image.

“This is the reason you cannot trust your memory, or whatever you think you knew. Those nanosecond photographs registered in your memory were taken in motion. This is the reason the real knowledge comes when one is able to break the motion, be it corporeal or mental. Only the heart

Imprint

Publisher: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Publication Date: 11-25-2011
ISBN: 978-3-7309-2019-0

All Rights Reserved