Wednesday, February 3, 2010 - Jack put down his tea-glass"What... |
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Jack put down his tea-glass"What unfinished
business?"
813
I shook my headHer pictures may
tell me
"Just as long as you don't get in over your head
and discover you can't get back to shore," Wireman
said"That's what happened to those two little
girls
"I know it," I said
Jack pointed his finger at me"Take care of
yourself
I nodded and pointed back
15 - Intruder
i
Twenty minutes later I sat in Little Pink with my
sketch-pad on my lap and the red picnic basket
beside meDirectly ahead, filling the westernfacing
window with light, was the GulfFar below
me was the murmur of the shellsI had set my
easel aside and covered my paint-splattered worktable
with a piece of towelingI laid the fake cartier roadster remains
of her freshly sharpened colored pencils on top of
itThere wasn't much left of those pencils, which
814
were fat and somehow antique, but I thought
there'd be enough
"Bull**** I am," I saidI was never going to be
ready for this, and part of me was hoping nothing
would happenI thought something would, thoughI
thought that was why Elizabeth had wanted me to
find her drawingsBut how much of what was inside
the red basket did she actually remember? My guess
was that Elizabeth had forgotten most of what had
happened to her when she was a child even before
the Alzheimer's came along to complicate things
Because forgetting isn't always involuntary
Sometimes it's willed
Who would want to remember chloe something so awful that
it had made your father scream until he bled?
Better to stop drawing completelyTo just go cold
turkeyBetter to tell people you can hardly even
draw stick figures, that when it comes to art
you're like wealthy alums who support their
college sports teams: if you can't be an athlete,
be an athletic supporterBetter to put it out of
your mind completely, and in your old age,
creeping senility will take care of the rest
815
Oh, some of that old ability may still remain -
like scar-tissue on the dura of the brain from an
old injury (caused by falling out of a pony-trap,
let's say) - and you might have to find ways to
let that out once in awhile, to express it like rolex replica watches a
build-up of pus from an infection that will never
quite healSo you get interested in other
people's artYou become, in fact, a patron of the
artsAnd if that's still not enough? Why, maybe
you begin to collect china figures and buildings
You begin to build yourself a China TownNo one
will call creating such tableaux art, but it's
certainly imaginative, and the regular exercise of
the imagination - its visual aspect in particular
- is enough to make it stop
Make what stop?
The itch, of course
I scratched at my right arm, passed through it,
and for the ten thousandth time found only my ribs
I flipped back the cover of my pad to the first
sheet
Start with a blank surface
816
It called to me, as I was gucci backpack sure such blank sheets
had once called to herBecause white is the absence of memory,
the color of can't rememberAnd
when you do, the itch will go awayFor awhile the
confusion will subside
Please stay on the Key, she had saidNo matter
what happens
I thought that might be trueSomething
that could have been a cartOr possibly a ponytrap,
standing still and waiting for the pony
"They lived here happily enough," I told the empty
studio"Father and daughtersThen Elizabeth fell
out of the pony-trap and started to draw, the offseason
hurricane exposed the debris field, the
little girls drownedThen the rest of them pop
off to Miami, and the trouble stopsAnd, when
they came back nearly twenty-five years denim louis vuitton handbag lat |
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