To Any Lengths: Book 2 of the Venus as She Ages Collection

By Jacqueline Gay Walley

The "I" is a woman who is deliberating getting married to her boyfriend and is frightened. Her childhood has made her distrust union. She has a friend who has just gone to jail for growing marijuana. He has been a war hero, an artist, is good looking, a womanizer. She begins to visit him, because he is tr

• Language: English
• Publisher: IML Publications LLC
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955314053

Jacqueline Gay Walley

British born, Montreal raised, New York City honed, Jacqueline Gay Walley, under the pen name Gay Walley, has been publishing short stories since 1988 and published her first novel, Strings Attached, with U Press of Mississippi (1999), which was a Finalist for the Pirates Alley/Faulkner Award and earned a Writer's Voice Capricorn Award and the Paris Book Festival Award. the erotic fire of the unattainable: aphorisms on love, art and the vicissitudes of life was published by IML Publications, in 2007 and was reissued by Skyhorse Publishing 2015. This book, the erotic fire of the unattainable was a finalist for the Paris Book Festival Award and from this, she wrote a screenplay for the film, The Unattainable Story (2016) with actor, Harry Hamlin, which premiered at the Mostra Film Festival in Sao Paolo, Brazil. From this same book, Walley adapted a screenplay for director Frank Vitale's docufiction feature film, Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Longing to be Found (2020), which was featured in Brooklyn Film Festival, Sarasota Film Festival, Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival in San Jose, ReadingFilmFest, American Fringe in Paris. Her novel, Lost in Montreal (2013) was published by Incanto Press, along with the novel, Duet, which was written with Kurt Haber. Walley's e-books, How to Write Your First Novel, Save Your One Person Business from Extinction, and The Smart Guide to Business Writing are featured on Bookboon, as well, How to Keep Calm and Carry on without Money and How to be Beautiful with amazon.com. In 2013, her play Love, Genius and a Walk opened in the Midtown Festival, New York, and was nominated for 6 awards including best playwright, in 2018, it also played in London at The Etcetera Theatre above The Oxford Arms pub as well as at three other pub theatres. It is scheduled to open September 2021 at Theatro Techni in London. October 2021, Jacqueline Gay Walley's 6 novel Venus as She Ages Collection: Strings Attached (second edition, under her pen name, Gay Walley), To Any Lengths, Prison Sex, The Bed You Lie In, Write She Said, and Magnetism is being launched worldwide through IML Publications, distributed by Ingram.

Book preview

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

David tells me there’s a whole group of men who read my stories. They like them, he says, and then they ask him, What’s this broad look like? He shows them my pictures. They like your neck, he continues after he stops mid-sentence during our visit and looks down the cavern of my black velvet smock to the peak of my black lace bra. Then his eyes travel back up again and holds onto my neck for a moment and then he says, Don’t send Polaroids because the prison guards tear off the backs to look for hidden drugs so the two Polaroids you sent are kind of bad.

David tells me that my stories won’t sell unless I give them a story. They’re heady and psychological and he loves that, Don’t get me wrong, he says, but he doesn’t know if he would continue reading if he wasn’t reading them here. The guys and he prefer the stories with sex in them. And I make a point of sending the ones with sex in them; I know those are the ones they will read.You have the hard part down, he says, the psychological stuff. You just need a story. There are some amazing stories here, he says looking round.

See that guy? He was in the Oliver North case. He’s brilliant, a linguist. He gave a class in Shakespeare. Only 3 men, myself included, stuck it out.

I look at an older man with wire rim glasses in neat beige prison khakis. Mister Chips.

A dark haired guy with missing teeth and a big smile slaps David on the back as he walks by and then sits diagonally across from us with his smiling wife.

That guy’s a stand up guy, David says to me. Took me aside the first day and said here’s how you do time. David laughs to himself. He’s done 6 years now, goes to the hole quite a bit. Doesn’t take any nonsense.

The dark haired guy is talking to his wife but his eyes look over at us.

You’re short now, aren’t you? David yells to him for my benefit.

Only 37 months, the man says. Nothing to it.

David likes to laugh. Then he leans forward, This place has to affect you, he says worriedly, so I don’t concentrate on the outside. Guys go crazy on the phone when they’re trying to keep a woman or a business going on the outside. You can’t if you’re in for more than two years. You have to focus on doing the thing here. That way you have a chance.

It flashes through my mind that’s the way you have a chance with anything but I don’t say it.

He points to a new inmate whom he is fathering, he says, although they are the same age. The guy is having a hard time. He’s already had his jaw broken once. I look over at this sandy haired man, with a neat beard and short ponytail. Close cropped curly hair, a man I find myself strangely attracted to. He is so intent on his conversation. It cons me into thinking he has untold stories. He is wearing the orange overalls of men who have not been assigned a permanent prison yet. David says he never stops talking about his case. He plea-bargained for twenty years and he will have to serve eighteen. David says he can’t make the adjustment yet. He made a huge amount of money as a marijuana smuggler but David says the feds take everything. David mentions the Shah of Iran or someone as his client but I am not that big for name-dropping, at least not in prison. The man dressed in orange overalls never smiles as he talks to the floor while his friend listens but sometimes he looks up and catches my eye. This is what used to happen in bars when I was young. He was the kind of man I would end up with—the one who, covertly, across the room, caught my eye. I would misinterpret his worried intensity as the intensity with which he would love me. Usually it turned out the guy simply had a lot of problems.

David, on the other hand, is tall and handsome with eyes that never look at you unless he is working you. He has a way of making you feel as if you are being manhandled but very, very gently. He always had 3-4 girlfriends at once on the outside. I wouldn’t put it past him having them now. His first wife was a famous rock star. He put his second wife through law school.

He says he wonders why we never got together on the outside, except for one night when we drank too much.

I don’t remember the sex that night, and he doesn’t either because he often turns to me and asks, Tell me, did we do it?

Must have been incredibly memorable for you, I say.

I must have been drunk is what it is.

I must have been closed down is what it was, for I knew he was a kid even then. We had gone dancing, and when we left the nightclub David smashed into several cars as he roared and lurched out of the parking lot, his tires screeching. He never stopped to reckon with the damage. That’s when I decided not to fall in love with him. I could never trust someone so casual about his wake.

I look round the prison visiting room and notice that all these men look like kids. They’re clean-shaven, smiling naughty boys who get caught.

These guys have a lot of spirit, David says. They’re the ones who break the rules. You should hear the things they think they’re going to do when they get out of here.

They’re surprisingly fresh looking, I notice. They seem to preen themselves. Except David. He looks disheveled, hunted, being here.

You shouldn’t have had partners. That’s what gets people caught, I say leaning in slightly toward him. Partners.

The operation was too big, I had to.

I was too serious for you when we were young, I say, changing the subject. Maybe not now. I look appraisingly at the tension in his eyes.

Earlier, while I was waiting for David, one of the inmates’ mothers came over and began talking to me. Her son, she said, was the target of a sting. He’s not guilty. And another mother touched my sleeve and said her son was just loaning out his garage. He had found the Bible here so that was something. She had been a Witness herself for 30 years.

Boys. The mothers visit vigilantly.

You can die in a Federal prison. Pick up the pool cue in anger because you booked the table to play and the men before you won’t stop playing their game. There’s not much else to do, maybe even for the next 7 or 100 years, so you just pick up a pool cue.

David and I share an ice cream and popcorn sitting on the locked down chairs.I already bought him plastic covered ravioli from the vending machine. He has to stand to the side of the vending machines and watch me press C2 or F6 for potato chips or Coca-Cola. They’re not allowed to touch the vending machines, not allowed to handle money, these men, most of whom have touched more money than I probably ever will.

I love your looks. I’ve never seen anyone who looks like you, he says. Last time I visited him he sent me a photo of Michelangelo’s Venus (where did he get it, it must have been one of his treasures) and said it reminded him of me. No one says that to me on the outside.

It’s not only you’re beautiful, he says, but you have a spirit inside you that glows.

My boyfriend says, how can you spend money you don’t have visiting him? Is that your priority? You don’t need to write in story form. Look at where you’re getting your advice. You’re taking literary criticism from prisoners for Christ’s sake, and Jesus, there’s a whole literary tradition around prisoners but that’s another matter and usually a French one, and David and I think up a story during our visit where a prisoner steals a man’s girlfriend solely by his wits. He can’t offer her anything but his impeccable timing in his letters, phone calls, in guarded visits. In our story, his thievery of her affection goes as smoothly as a first time razor. She drops the boyfriend and falls in love with the prisoner. I am hoping our romantic convict dies in prison because does she really want to deal with him on the outside?

Well why doesn’t he like you visiting me? David asks me.

He says I can’t afford it right now. I should be working.

It’ll come back to you, David says.

I know.

Anyway, I have some ideas, he says, on how you could make money.

David, I say, I wouldn’t be good as a criminal.

Yeah you’re right, he says. You wouldn’t.

Oh? I say offended. Why not?

You always have more than one thing going on in your head at the same time. You’re right there when you’re with someone, I was explaining that to one of the guys. But other times, you’re—I don’t know—spacey. He laughs affectionately; after all he is a man who knows how to focus. Meanwhile I’m spacey and I’m the one renting a car to visit him HERE? He moves forward in his chair. I don’t want to say it, he says.

Say what?

You know, about your boyfriend. It’s not right.

There’s nothing you can say that hasn’t been said before. Believe me.

Well, you don’t need someone constraining you. He’s frightened of your freedom. You need encouragement. A writer needs encouragement.

I am sunning myself in those words, a blue and silver dolphin breaking the surface, encouragement that’s what I need, when the guard calls out Three o’clock. I look around and there is plenty of French kissing going on and daughters climbing up and cleaving desperately to their fathers’ chests and shoulders while the guards get anxious to lock the prisoners, as they say, down. David walks me to the door of the visiting room. Kisses me but I don’t respond passionately. That’s for stories and not the kind I write. He says, What if I make you my obsession?

Well getting through my defenses is harder than breaking out of here.

His eyes light up. Really?

I knew they would.

Oh yes, I say.

Then I twirl my big coat round my legs and know he is, as always, watching me as the guards lock us visitors in one room while waiting to unlock the doors to the next room where we wait while they unlock the doors of the next room till finally they herd us down a walkway, woman, child, mother and stool pigeon till we are free and luscious in the grey afternoon of the crowded parking lot.

CHAPTER 2

It’s very thick and I can tell he’s poured his heart out to me and I open the envelope ravenously while I run steaming water into the tub. I skim the letter while the water’s pouring, throw it on the floor, save it for later, and answer another letter (on a wooden board that my boyfriend made so I can write in the tub) from a woman I don’t even like, and then wet I rush to my bed—to an imaginary vision of my