LITMIR.BIZ

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the family. But it’ll be about the Gearys too.”

      Now she fell silent and stared out of the window at the place where I sit with the birds. It took her fully a minute to bring herself to speak again. “If you write about the Gearys, then I’m having nothing to do with the fucking thing.”

      “How can I write—”

      “Or indeed you.”

      “Let me finish, will you? How can I write about this family—particularly the recent history of this family—and not write about the Gearys?”

      “They’re scum, Eddie. Human scum. And vicious. Every one of them.”

      “That’s not true, Marietta. And even if it were, I say again: what kind of bowdlerized account would this damn book be if I didn’t include them?”

      “All right. So just mention them in passing.”

      “They’re part of our lives.”

      “They’re not part of mine,” she said fiercely. Her gaze came back in my direction and I saw that she wasn’t so much enraged as sorrowful. I was revealing myself as a traitor with my desire to tell the story this way. She measured her next words with great care, like a lawyer making a pivotal argument.

      “You realize, don’t you, that this may be the only way people out there get to know about our family?” she snapped, showing me a glimpse of her temper.

      “All the more—”

      “Now you let me finish. When I came in here suggesting you write this fucking book, it was because I had this feeling—I have this feeling—that we haven’t got very long. And my instincts are rarely wrong.”

      “I realize that,” I said quietly. Marietta has prophetic talents, no question. She gets them from her mother.

      “Maybe that’s why she’s looking so haggard these days,” Marietta said.

      “She’s feeling what you’re feeling?”

      She nodded. “Poor bitch,” she said softly. “And that’s another thing to consider. Cesaria. She hates the Gearys even more than I do. They took her beloved Galilee.”

      I snorted at this nonsense. “That’s one sentimental myth I intend to lay to rest, for a start,” I said.

      “So you don’t believe he was taken?”

      “Absolutely not. I know what happened the night he left better than anyone living. And I intend to tell what I know.”

      “Of course, nobody may give a damn,” Marietta observed.

      “At least I’ll have set the record straight. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

      “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking,” Marietta replied, her distaste at what I had proposed now resurfacing. “I’m beginning to wish I’d never suggested a fucking book.”

      “Well, it’s too late now. It’s begun.”

      “You began already?”

      This was not entirely true. I hadn’t yet laid pen to paper. But I knew where I was going to begin: with the house, and Cesaria and Thomas Jefferson. The work was as good as started.

      “Well don’t let me delay you,” Marietta said, going to the door. “But I’m not guaranteeing you my help.”

      “That’s fine. I’m not asking for it.”

      “Not now you’re not. But you will. You’ll have to. There’s a lot of pieces of information I’ve got that you’ll need. Then we’ll see what your integrity’s worth.”

      So saying, she left me to my gin. I didn’t doubt the significance of this last remark: she intended to make some kind of bargain. A section of my book she didn’t approve of excised in return for a piece of information I needed. I was absolutely determined she wasn’t going to get a single word removed however. What I’d told her was true. There was no way to tell the story of the Barbarossas without telling that of the Gearys, and thus also the story of Rachel Pallenberg, the one name I do not ever expect to hear crossing Marietta’s lips. I had deliberately not mentioned the Pallenberg woman myself, because I was certain as soon as I did so Marietta would be screaming inventive obscenities at me. Needless to say, I intend to devote a substantial portion of this story to the vices and virtues of Rachel Pallenberg.

      That said, this narrative will be somewhat impoverished if I don’t get Marietta’s help; so I intend to be selective in the way I talk about what I’m doing. She’ll come round; if only because she’s an egotist, and the idea of not having her ideas in the book is going to be far more painful to her than my talking about the Gearys. Besides, she knows very well there are so many matters that I’m going to trust to my instinct on, matters that cannot be strictly verified. Matters of the spirit, matters of the bedroom, matters of the grave. These are the truly important elements. The rest is just geography and dates.

      iii

      Later that day, I saw Marietta escorting from the house the woman I’d heard her talking to Zabrina about. She was, like almost all of Marietta’s lovers, blonde, petite and probably no more than twenty years old. By the look of the clothes, I’d guess she was a tourist, perhaps a hitchhiker, rather than a local woman.

      Zabrina had plainly done as Marietta had requested, and relieved the poor woman of her panic (along with any memory of the experience that had induced that panic). I watched them from my balcony through my binoculars. The blank expression on the girl’s face disturbed me. Was this really the only way human beings could deal with the appearance of the miraculous: panic rising to insanity; or, if they were lucky, a healing excision of the memory, which left them like this woman, calm but impoverished? What pitiful options they were. (Which thought brought me back to the book. Was it too grand an ambition to hope that in these pages I might somehow prepare the way for such revelations, so that when they came the human mind didn’t simply crack like a mirror too frail to reflect the wonders before it?) I felt a kind of sadness for the visitor, who had been washed, for her own good, of the very experience that might have made her life worth the living. What would she be after this, I wondered. Had Zabrina left deep inside her a seed of the memory, which, like the irritant mote in an oyster’s flesh might with time become something rare and wonderful? I would have to ask.

      Meanwhile, under the cover of the trees, Marietta had halted with her companion, and was saying a more than fond goodbye. Having promised to tell the truth, however unpalatable, I can scarcely remain silent on what I saw: she bared the woman’s breasts while I watched; she teased the woman’s nipples and kissed her lips, while I watched, and then, while I watched, she whispered something, and the woman went down on to her knees, unbuckled and unbuttoned Marietta’s pants, and put her tongue into Marietta, flicking it so cunningly I heard Marietta’s yelps from my balcony. Lord knows I’m grateful for whatever pleasures come my way, and I’m not about to pretend that I’m deeply ashamed of watching them make love. It was perfectly wonderful to watch, and when they were finished, and Marietta escorted the woman to the path that winds away from L’Enfant and back into the real world, I felt—though this may seem absurd—a pang of loneliness.

       IV

      Though Marietta had mocked my belief that the house is a kind of listening device, which brings news from all its rooms to the ears of one soul in particular, that very night I had that belief confirmed.

      I do not sleep well; never have, never will. It doesn’t matter how weary I am, as soon as I put my head on my pillow all manner of thoughts, most of them utterly without merit, circle in my skull. So it was last night; fragments of my conversation with Marietta, all rearranged so as to be nonsensical, and punctuated with

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