Venus as She Ages: the complete collection of six novels

By Jacqueline Gay Walley

Venus as She Ages takes an unflinching female artist from youth to her late sixties as she grows through love, mistakes, the vicissitudes of life, and commitment to her work.  

The Collection consists of six literary no

• Language: English
• Publisher: IML Publications LLC
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955314190

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

Letter from The author

Dear Reader,

It takes a rare person to purchase a collection. You are a long-term player (reader), as is the writer, and I thank you. These books tell a story. They were not written as a series, but they do follow a woman through her life. They are in different styles, different tones … but always she is looking for more and more truths. I hope you encounter a few as you travel through these.

Jacqueline Gay Walley

New York City, NY

Letter from The Publisher

Dear Reader,

Long before we began our publishing life together, Jacqueline Gay Walley, in her walk-up apartment in New York City, was influencing me through a gentle exchange of edits towards my attempts at penmanship, and through her own personal achievement with the publication of Strings Attached, (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1999).

Yet, I’ll never forget IML’s first humble adventure, under the pen name Gay Walley, her novel The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable: Aphorisms on Love, Art and the Vicissitudes of Life (2007), miraculously was resold to SkyHorse Publishing (2015) and became a movie, The Unattainable Story (2017), from her screenplay. So due to this unusual success, I asked her to send me any book she had hidden in a file on her desktop. What appeared were five, along with Strings Attached, for which she had just attained the rights.

Slowly, slowly with each read what emerged was a feeling that this was then in fact what the French, through the use of the Latin word, describe as a corpus, a 6 novel collection—influenced by the line, Venus as She Ages from the sixth novel, Magnetism—the formation of what you’re beginning today. This grouping is not a traditional series, for each book is written in different styles, which have been developed from each vulnerable, and yet, feisty main character. And whether it’s Charlee, Mira, She or I, you’ll follow the ups and downs and the movements of soul of a woman from thirty-five to sixty-five as Jacqueline Gay herself aged, as she wrote.

Enjoy!

I. Murphy Lewis, Publisher

IML Publications, LLC

Paris, France

Copyright © 2021 by Jacqueline Gay Walley

www.gaywalley.com

Published by IML Publications LLC

www.imlpublications.com

Distributed worldwide by Ingram Content Group

www.ingramcontent.com

Book cover design by Erin Rea

www.erinreadesign.com

Interior layout by Medlar Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd, India

www.medlar.in

Cover Image: Alamy A4JX1R

The Birth of Venus, c1485

Artist, Sandro Botticelli

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written consent of the publisher except for brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

ISBN: 978-1-955314-19-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941528

IML Publications LLC

151 First Avenue

New York City, NY 10003

Table of Contents

Strings Attached

To Any Lengths

Prison Sex

The Bed You Lie In

Write, She Said

Magnetism

Strings Attached

Books by Jacqueline Gay Walley

‘Venus As She Ages’ Collection of Novels:

Strings Attached (Second Edition, Gay Walley)

To Any Lengths

Prison Sex

The Bed You Lie In

Write, She Said

Magnetism

Books by Gay Walley

Novels:

Strings Attached (First Edition)

The Erotic Fire of the Unattainable

Lost in Montreal

Duet

E-Books on Bookboon:

The Smart Guide to Business Writing

How to Write Your First Novel

Save Your One Person Business From Extinction

Amazon Chap-Books:

How to Be Beautiful

How to Keep Calm and Carry On Without Money

Strings Attached

A novel

Gay Walley

Book One of the Venus as She Ages Collection

I have lived many of the places I write about, many of these characters are based on real people, most of them dead, and I occasionally even use real names. Yet this book is a work of fiction, because all the events and places got transmuted into a story that the real people would not even recognize. In addition, just as many of the characters are fictitious, the events are fictitious, perhaps even my analyses in the books are fictitious. That said, it bears repeating that nothing in the novel is intended as a recounting of actual events. Apart from the broad parallels, this is not what actually happened to me, nor to the people I write about.

Copyright © Gay Walley 1999

Second edition, 2021 IML Publications, LLC

First Edition Originally published by University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1999

Published by IML Publications, LLC

www.imlpublications.com

Distributed worldwide by Ingram Content Group

www.ingramcontent.com

Book cover design by Erin Rea

www.erinreadesign.com

Interior layout by Medlar Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd, India

www.medlar.in

Cover Image: Alamy A4JX1R

The Birth of Venus, c1485

Artist, Sandro Botticelli

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written consent of the publisher except for brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles.

ISBN: 978-1-955314-01-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941312

IML Publications LLC

151 First Avenue

New York City, NY 10003

This book was my first book,

on a journey of writing.

I would like to dedicate it to

I. Murphy Lewis, who joined me

so deeply and creatively

on this entire marvelous journey.

Prologue

I want to know why, as I begin this story, I want to call my old lover who does not love me. I want to dial his phone, which he never picks up, he has a whole life separate from me, you know, mysterious and wide as the night, and then I want to go to every bar on the Lower East Side and find him, standing tall and surrounded up at the bar, drinking his beer from the bottle, and I want to drag him out, pull his cotton sleeve from a shirt that I know his aunt gave him, pull at the woolen vest he always wears, I want to pull at him, I don’t care if his clothes rip, I want to use all my force and just drag him out. He’ll go because he’ll think they think poor guy, she’s crazy, and I don’t care, I want to get him out on the street, away from the bar and the glowing people dining together and making promises together and hinting at things together, I want to get him alone in that hot night with just a street lamp lighting us and I want to force him, make him stand there and see there is no choice. He’ll stand there pained and skinny, clenching himself because this time he’s run for good. He’ll close his eyes when he looks at me, why, why won’t she just leave me alone, why doesn’t she just go away, and I want to punch him right then, hard on the nose as he stands there wishing me away, punch him for not loving me, and then push his chest in, as if he’s weak, push him for the way he never moves softly toward me.

1

There’s a boat coming toward us, screamed Charlee in the car.

Maybe her vision was not so good anyway, because she felt a little sick from the cigar smoke’s growing interior fog. It was nighttime. She and her father had been driving all day; they had left Montreal for the back roads of Vermont.

Her father enjoyed going to another country, as he would say, for a drive. He felt sort of powerful, she thought, going through customs, telling the men in their uniforms that he and his daughter were just out for the day. Back that evening. They would be waved through. Her father answered the customs men’s questions with a secret smile, his dark eyes unfocused, as if he had something to hide and he dared them to discover it.

Charlee shuddered, sitting beside him, at this smugness her father drove away from the customs with. As if he had fooled them. She shuddered because she knew he was not hiding anything. The smugness was her father’s imaginary accomplishment.

There were no other cars on the road. The trees slid by, full, white, and heavy with snow. Charlee and her father had watched the sun occasionally slip through the grey sky, only to finally see it fall down the car rear window. The snow hadn’t let up since they left the second stop.

Her father liked to drive and stop in little canteens, have two quick scotches. I don’t have a drinking problem, he said, although at ten she had never thought to ask. As far as she was concerned he was a nearly perfect man, difficult and selfish as probably all people must be, but big and capable of such original things as going to another country for the afternoon, and of having people from all walks of life, in gas stations, bars, customs, businesses, think he was someone special. This solitary man who was above, really, joining in crowds. You never see me sit, he explained, like an American, for hours in a bar. I have two scotches and then leave.

Years later, she knew his pattern only served a compulsion never to be known, and years later she added up those stops to twenty-six scotches a day.

They’d stopped six times today. She’d had Cokes, admittedly, but she was the one seeing an ocean liner on the road coming toward them. She cracked the window a bit for air.

I don’t hear any foghorns, her father said, and sort of harrumphed to himself. He brought the cigar back to his mouth and puffed so the sides of his mouth stayed open. Like a fish with gills.

Daddy, I feel sick.

All those Shirley Temples, Cokes, and cherries. It’ll be a damn sight better when you start drinking real drinks.

Daddy, I really do feel sick. She put her head back on the seat, her hair felt damp and limp, and her shirt was starting to get wet. Some barmaid, a long time ago, when she had eaten too many oysters and sipped too many pink ladies, had told her to put her head down. She put her head down.

The boat is passing, he said.

And she slowly raised her head up, opened the window full throttle to help with the clamminess, and fearfully, who cares what happens next, looked out the front windshield.

Oh, I see, she said, it’s a snow plow.

The large blades make it look like a boat, he laughed.

She felt that type of dizziness that makes other people’s words sound a long muffled way away. She didn’t want to hear him. He could, you know, get annoyed at her asking what blades did he mean, weren’t they right in front of their bloody eyes? He might tell her she’s the one with a drinking problem—what with seeing boats in the middle of the road. He might use it to elaborate his theory that women have no damn hope of logic, honesty, or common sense. He might forget that she asked and sit in what seemed like pouting silence. He might even drive onto the curb as he explained what the blades do, watching her carefully to see if she understood, as he would say, what the hell he was talking about.

Yeah. She lay back exhausted. They were silent in the snowy night for what seemed a long time, she lying back on the seat, putting her small face up against the coolness of the car window, he driving confidently and surely on the snowy back roads. Daddy? Daddy, would you mind putting the cigar out?

And here’s where it always confused her. Here’s where she could never trust herself.

She turned to him and he was silently, happily even, stubbing his cigar out.

Slowly she began to feel good again. The dizziness passed. Why don’t you go to sleep if you’re tired? he said.

Don’t you want company while you’re driving?

You can sleep. I’m used to going for long drives alone.

When?

I used to do it between marriages. To make myself less lonely. Get in the car and drive somewhere. Talk to the people in the pubs.

Marriages. Charlee couldn’t stand his current wife. As far as Charlee could make out, her father couldn’t stand her either. My advice, Charlee said, is to take long drives while you are married. Right now.

What do you think we’re doing? he said.

She sank back into the seat, a private sneaky feeling of warmth quickly flooding and just as quickly leaving her, that he had chosen her to go driving with her, rather than his wife. Their team was stronger than the other team.

She lay back, content in the car. He would get them back to their house. His thin, brisk, chain-smoking wife would be annoyed they were so late. He would sit down in the living room and drop cigar ash onto the old couch. Charlee would go to her room, without a word to his wife. His wives, for some deck of cards she didn’t deal, were never her friends. Barmaids were, a little bit. Nobody really of the grown-up sector. He had the big job. Generally, he was pretty good at it.

And her eyes closed, she had eaten too many cherries, her head fell back onto the car seat, and she dreamed of a big man in a jacket, a man who never took off his jacket, a big man who followed her everywhere, always watching her, sometimes smiling, sometimes just roaming by wherever she was, and he wouldn’t go away.

2

Now, I too, love to drive alone. I am great company to myself when I drive this way. Old friends come to realizations, the dead return as bards on lawn chairs, lovers find each other, and me, with movie-like conviction, all this happens just as the sun is setting, a red sky, and I take my hands off the steering wheel and clap in delight, so positive am I that love and mystery will come to me. I feel young, beautiful, the world is promising and the feeling is so strong that people passing by in their red or black Camaros and Monte Carlos smile at me as if they, too, are sure it will all come to me.

So it was on one of those Sunday evening drives, one of my casual five-hour drives, when I’m moving along, pretty secure in my encapsuled world, that I reached to the back of the car and pulled the picture out of the bag and brought it to the front seat. I propped it up against the passenger door.

It is a child’s drawing in charcoal. I found it yesterday in one of my suitcases. I am so impressed with it. My ex-lover drew it when he was a child. It’s of his father who scares him. The lines are strong. I brought the picture with me for company, to keep what was between us alive.

Later I put the drawing into a grey envelope and sent it by messenger to my ex-lover’s apartment. I wrote a note that said, I love this drawing. But you should have it. I framed it so it will last. I love you, etc.

I called him and said, I’m sending you your birthday present. Are you going to be home?

Is it alive? he asked. He sounded truly frightened. He knows I would never do anything purposefully cruel. I winced at this thought because I have done so many things unpurposefully cruel. Is it an elephant? he asked.

Yes. So you better clean up your studio. Have lots of peanuts. They can eat you out of house and home.

What is it? I love to hear the child’s play in his voice.

Wait and see, I said. And then Peter’s excitement made me sad. After all, it’s not a splendid gift. It’s a memento, and we are split up. Well, it’s not much really. Just something you should have. Call me when you get it.

I call him before he calls me. I want him to know that I am not playing with him. That I am attentive. But the impulse to call is not attentiveness; even I know that it’s panic.

Did you get it?

Yes.

You’re not offended I returned it to you? I ask.

No, he says. Where’s my signature?

On the back. You can take it out of the frame, if you want to. I change the subject. What did you do on your birthday?

I worked fourteen hours. Then I went to a restaurant alone and had dinner. It was awful.

I had driven out of town that night on purpose so I would be far away, far from my silent phone. Why didn’t you call me?

Scared.

Of what?

The hurricane.

I say nothing. I am silenced. It is true. I feel my body slump in defeat. Doesn’t he know I don’t want to make hurricanes, that they are my own special combustion? I am capable, like anyone else, of making beauty and peace and love. I am not a bearer of ill winds.

Well, maybe we’ll have a coffee sometime, he says.

I am confused. This is the first time he has said that.

Did you hear what I said? Would you like to? Have a coffee sometime? he asks.

I become meek, insensible. Yes, I squeak out. Not because I am humbled or so grateful for this slight opening of the door. But because he took control. For a second, I do not have the concrete activity of twisting, prostrating myself outside his closed door.

Yeah, okay, I say, all fogged up. I hang up.

I get a little fire, a slight erotic tingle, when I think to myself, Oh, he didn’t mean it. He said it to get off the phone. I don’t know what I will do if he, this man I have longed so painfully for, should call me and ask me out for a coffee.

II

I need my allowance, Charlee said to her father. She was sitting next to him at the bar. There were just four stools, it was a bar in a motel, they went there all the time.

What on earth for?

I just do. She knew he would give it to her. He reached into his trousers and gave her a dollar.

She climbed down off the stool and sort of rolled from side to side when she walked, as her father did, into the check-in area where they sold cigarettes, chocolates, and postcards. The concierge could hardly see her; she did not quite reach up to the counter.

What kind of cigars do you have? her little voice said.

He was a humorless, small man. He listed them off.

What is the best one? she asked.

The White Owl panatela.

Two, please, and she pushed her money through the grate. She was short by ten cents, but the man knew at this point the cigars were getting stale. He pushed the cigars through.

She ran back in and climbed up onto her stool. Her father was big, a lumbering elephant, facing his drink, looking straight ahead. His eyes were focused far off and seemed dark, although their color was a watery blue.

Daddy, guess what I got?

He was looking off into space.

Daddy, guess what I got? she said emphatically.

He turned slowly toward her, just his face, not his body. What? he said, slightly annoyed.

And she pulled from behind her back the two cigars. For you.

Oh—and he mustered the strength to come right back there to the bar—thank you very much indeed. His watery eyes went blue, not dark, and she gurgled to herself in excitement. You see, she felt nobody could love him more than she did. She would think up hundreds of ways to show him.

Daddy, Daddy, do you think we’ll go soon?

Aren’t you having a nice time?

That is how she never learned to know herself. She never heard a question answered. She only heard a question repeated back. She learned this language of deflection, as with any language, by the sound. The language of never thinking out what your answer might be. But, at this age, she tried.

Kind of. But I don’t think so, she said.

Why not?

But as he said that, he motioned to the barmaid for another drink, which settled the question. She signed. What can I do? she whined.

Take a walk around the motel, he said.

She didn’t like leaving him. It was lonelier. So, she sat there, and studied the barmaid. The barmaid was in a black skirt and black stockings and a white blouse tucked neatly into her skirt. She had dark makeup around her eyes, and her black hair was cut tight around her face. She looked like a barmaid.

Why do you think my mother left?

I have no idea. She’s selfish. Has no interest in children.

Charlee was silent.

"Why do you think she really left?"

I just told you. He titled the glass up high in the air and Charlee already took for granted the sound of the ice cubes knocking against the empty glass.

No, you didn’t.

He looked over at her. Do you realize you keep asking that question? Forget it. She’s no good. You didn’t like her when she was there. You said she was a witch.

I know, Charlee said petulantly, angry at her secret that that small dark woman didn’t seem to like her, "but I still want to know why she wanted to leave us."

She met a boyfriend. And that’s that. End of story. Forget it. She won’t come back because I won’t have her. And you’ll be better off without her.

Charlee was silent, thinking again. He hasn’t told her the real reason, she is sure of it. It has to be something very understandable that even she could understand. It’s not a boyfriend or something. Mothers don’t leave for that. It’s something gigantic.

She started to speak. He was lighting his cigar. Don’t ask me again, he said quickly.

Charlee looked furious. Why couldn’t she?

This is a very lovely cigar, darling, he said.

Do you think it’s because she didn’t like us?

She doesn’t like anybody who doesn’t think she’s bloody wonderful. Do you see what I mean?

Charlee didn’t. Explain it to me, Charlee said. Really explain it to me. She wanted him to go on talking, long past the time they were supposed to go home together alone.

I mean, Charlee said, I am glad she is gone, you know. I’m only wondering.

The barmaid put another Coke in front of her. Do you want some peanuts? said her father.

Yes. She was hungry. She was always hungry. Especially in the long hours at the bar.

My advice, he said, is not to think about it. We are going to be just fine. We’re wonderful pals. We can do what the hell we like. I’ll take you to interesting places. You’ll have friends. I’ll eventually meet someone else who can take care of you—

No.

—and it will be very nice. Your mother doesn’t like children. So what good is it? Let’s enjoy ourselves. We’ll take trips. You can tell me things. We’ll have each other and you’ll see the whole thing will be very good.

Charlee sat there listening, desperate to be carried on a wave of trust, but somehow feeling that the words he was saying weren’t enough. She wanted it to be better than this. Yes, she would have her father to herself, she did like that part, but then again, it’s lonely when she felt it, Yes, Daddy, I think you’re right. It’ll be great just being us two.

Heavily, she took a swallow of her Coke.

There’s a good girl, he said, have a swig of your drink.

They sat in long silence. You know, he said, when you were just a fraction of a thing, you used to love to dance on the bar tables. Now, at the ripe old age of five, you’re always saying you want to leave. You see how quickly things change? He was joking, it seemed, trying to get her to laugh, but she did not see what was funny.

3

Charlee and her father both loved the ocean. It was as if the ocean reflected back their own moving selves. They felt umbilically tied to the waves breaking, rushing into the inlets between the rocks and then slithering out as if guilty, only to pound back in, into the stillness of the granite formations. Their love for the ocean was perhaps their most peaceful bond, and years later, Charlee believed it was perhaps the only steadiness, constant and inviting, frightening and beautiful, that the two allowed themselves.

They took trips to the sea together, both of them playing hooky. He would write notes to her school saying she was sick, and she didn’t know what he told his boss. But he never cared about literal things, such as keeping up a house, buckling under at a job, saving for the future. He believed that every day was to be lived for itself. He had the condemned man’s sense of freedom.

Their room was in the only motel open in this rough seaside town, a town of Italian and Portuguese fishing boats, a town where nondrinking hard-faced Swedes and Finns worked the granite quarries, a town where the nights were darker than anywhere else, the sunsets redder, and wide, soft beaches could come up as gentle mirages at any curve in the road. A town of confident dogs, rosebush breezes, coves, the silence for dreams.

It was too early in the season, only March, for the other motels to be open. Charlee and her father stood out on the small concrete porch off their room, and silently smoked cigarettes, squinting at the wintery sun, staring off at the sea, and neither of them knew that their lives were dedicated to various forms of re-creating the pull, the involuntary drag of what they were looking at.

Charlee held onto her sweater in the cold air. Her father looked off to the side.

She was fourteen.

At about noon, they went to their regular bar. Her father had his own key. He and the owner were friends, as friendly as two men can be who think they have outrun an emotional life. They applauded each other’s false cynicisms—how difficult marriage was, how women constantly complained and yet were a kind of minefield these two men kept falling into, even searched for, regardless of their experiences. They did like the tough, smart women who came into the bar, the blonde, flashy ones who could drink along with them, who had big white convertibles and wore tight white pants, who had their own gold lighters and loud, brassy voices, who knew the value of having their own money, and who did not try and hurt them.

But those weren’t the women Paul and her father married. They married women who seemed more serious, quiet, polite. Women who usually didn’t drink. And these were the women who sooner or later were left behind. (Except the one scorching mistake, her mother, she left him behind.) It was as if these men liked the still life of a family, house, and home, but would always return to the only canvas that drove them.

That morning, Paul’s seventy-five-year-old Irish mother, would, yes, join Paul, Gerald, and Charlee in some champagne. She’d only have one glass, and Paul’s watery eyes would twinkle on cue, as if he were an old vaudeville performer, when he teased her about not getting all wild there, Mother. Mother liked managing the bar. She carefully checked the register to see if the cash deposit matched the drinks sold, if any one of those boys had been stealing.

Paul would mix himself a quick scotch before the champagne was uncorked, and everyone would pay absolutely no attention to the sound of his choked, emphysemic breathing as he wrestled with the champagne bottle necks.

Do you want to check the booths for lost money? asked her father.

No, Charlee said, I am not a child.

She had things to think about. The bar would open at one o’clock, when the truckers, fish cutters, policemen, and old men streamed in. Charlee was preparing herself. She would be the only woman.

She was always the only woman those afternoons with her father.

So she let her hair fall down her back, wore lipstick, went braless and often wore short skirts. Her father, she noticed, never said anything. This always surprised her. She decided to see how far she could go with him. Sometimes, when they were alone, he would wait for her to come out of the bathroom, and he would look up from the bed to see her in an evening dress, a low-cut velvet dress reaching the floor.

We’re only going to Paul’s, he’d say. That’s a bit much.

Don’t you like the dress?

I don’t know. But I think it’s a bit mad going out in broad daylight in an evening gown.

Who cares? she’d say. And, in those years, she liked him for the fact he didn’t care. I don’t care, he’d say, if you want to look like a goddamn fool.

So, there they’d be in the long dark bar seated with all ages of men in duckbill caps signifying their place of work, or in white T-shirts if they just got off cutting the fish, and one half-woman, half-child in an evening dress.

But this morning, the morning of the four of them knocking back champagne, she had on a short, colored halter dress. It didn’t matter to anyone that it was March. No one noticed.

The bar bottles hid the oblong mirror above Mother. The doors were locked shut. Paul was wheezing as he went about with a rag, rubbing down the plastic booths. Mother took a chance on leaving the register, a compliment to Gerald and Charlee, to wipe down the tables.

Can I switch to squirt? Charlee said to her father. The champagne was beginning to give her a headache.

Mother walked slowly back to the bar and quietly mixed a Tom Collins for Charlee, and poured it into a frosted glass that hid its contents. Squirt was their code for Tom Collins. It was getting near one o’clock.

The rest of them drank their champagne. Charlee drank her Tom Collins. Mother, have another one, her father would say.

No, no, Gerald, Mother said, you guys go ahead.

Her father kept refilling his glass.

Paul was walking around the bar, unlocking the three entrances.

Charlee pulled one of the closed yellow curtains from the window and could see the daylight. It was bright and fresh outside.

Hey, Paul, three guys said, as they walked in. They sat down at the bar. Usual, Mother.

They nodded to her father; they looked at Charlee; then they looked at each other. She looked over at them to see what their expressions were saying. One of them smiled at her. He had nice hair and was probably only about twenty-three. She looked over at her father.

He was annoyed at something.

She looked back at the three men, and now the older one, more confident, tipped his cap to her. He was scruffier, had grey in his beard, but his eyes were challenging—the type who would come up behind you when you were putting money in the jukebox and say, Ooh, you’re going to be trouble. She looked back to her father. He was staring out the window.

She kept sipping her drink. Of all things to happen now, the room was beginning to swirl. She hated when this happened. Just one drink too many and everything was ruined. I’ll be right back, she said to her father. She searolled to the ladies’ room and sat down on the toilet. She felt hot, sweaty. She decided to lie down on the tile floor. She shouldn’t have had oysters to impress her father at breakfast.

Mother came into the ladies’ room. You okay?

In a minute, Charlee said, and then Mother left. The bathroom had a pressing silence, like an empty cavern.

After lying there for a bit, she had the strength to be sick. Afterwards, she rested on the tile floor, and then gingerly walked out to the bar, pale and tired.

Her father looked at her. I’ve told you over and over not to mix drinks, he said.

I thought that this mix would work. She still felt queasy. I think I still feel faint, she said. Maybe I’ll go sit outside on the steps for awhile.

In the cold?

Well, where else am I going to go?

I don’t care. Do what you like.

She left the bar, and sat down on the steps. It was cold. The bright sun was deceptive. How would her father know it was a cold day, anyway? He was a permanent indoor fixture. She would rest for a little bit. He would be in there for an hour or two. He would think she could manage. So she opened a car door, some American car, maybe it was their rental car, later she would get up and look to see if it was, and she lay down on the back seat.

They’d wake her up in time.

She curled herself into a fetal position on the gold-colored seat. This was perfect, she could fall asleep.

II

Fifteen years later, at almost thirty years of age, she lit a cigarette and decided this was, indeed, her favorite bar in the whole world. After thirty years of being in bars, didn’t she have the right to celebrate that kind of designation? She ran her fingers through the back of her hair; she always forgot to comb the back. What she didn’t see, she supposed, wasn’t seen. She never looked at her back in mirrors. What was head-on was important. Or maybe it was enough to handle. Here was safe, though. This was the kind of place where you could stare at anyone without their taking offense. Perhaps they weren’t looking to be looked at. She sipped her drink. She had learned to be careful of what she looked at. Angry men turned angrier. Frightened women became more frightened. Oh, well. The amazing thing, however, about drinking she said to herself happily that night on her third manhattan, some things, irrelevant things, like people you never will see again, their hair, their eyes, take on a meaning of intense vividness, while something important, like yourself, is distorted. A thought about yourself or someone you care about comes in, then just as unobtrusively goes away.

She sipped her drink and turned her attention back to the waitresses, to this day maternal beings to her, with their heavy-hipped bodies in black pants rustling by, carrying large trays overflowing with french fries, fried clams, Cokes.

She sipped her drink and remembered that this had been her father’s favorite bar by the sea. He had keys to this bar when it had been owned by Mother. Now it was upgraded, a light wood paneling had replaced the chipped paint, there were more tables, the space used efficiently, planned out, unlike the decaying carelessness of before. Now it housed a long shiny snake-like bar, seated not with the fish and trucking men of her father’s day, but with town regulars, tanned men in button-down shirts, hangovers of trust funds and yacht clubs, looking down at their drinks, hoping to meet someone that way.

Outside it was dark, but she decided that her walk home would be pure theatre, what with the strong smell of the sea, the humid summer air cooling off, and the manhattans in her. She would rant and rave, mute, inside her head.

But this was an auspicious night, because tonight, for the first time, she fell inlove. She didn’t actually speak to him. He was seated at another table, across the room, by himself, reading magazines. He was very tall, with slender shoulders, his thick dark hair full over an evasive stunned face. His eyes were too close together, his nose too large to be handsome, but he had a presence, a bending dancer-like movement, strong, the ability to be alone. A work of art himself.

Mary, the waitress said, You know who he is?

No. Why does falling inlove in small towns have to be a public business.

That’s the poet’s son. Yes. He’s building a house here.

Oh.

Peter looked up, uncurled his body from its fetal position over the magazine, said, Fine, just fine to a question that was never asked, gave Mary a dazed smile, the smile though a generous man, he’d taken the trouble, and looked back down to his magazine.

What was disappointing about all this was that Mary was standing right next to Charlee. And Peter didn’t even see her. Well, that is what you get for a ruined life. You get passed by, unequivocally. You get to not be seen.

Peter got up and Charlee was stunned at his long-legged quietness. What was it that had her mesmerized? A self-containment? He wasn’t loud, like other men in bars. He wasn’t trying to strike up conversations; his movements were graceful, patient, plodding, like those of a work animal. Movements to be trusted. He was an orphan, the story went, his mother died when he was eight, the poet father died when Peter was thirteen.

It showed on him. He was only in his early thirties, but his face was lined, careworn, his mouth drawn, almost lopsided, a sensitive lack of symmetry giving him both a gentle and rough expression. He must fight throwing himself away.

Then Peter got up and walked over to Mary, holding his bill, and Mary said, Have you met Charlee? She’s a solitaire like you.

And Peter looked down at Charlee, she mustering all the unfamiliar femininity she could dredge up from too many years alone, and he said, Hi, not seeing her, and turned back to Mary. He made an effusive fuss over the bill, creating an apologetic and prolonged intimacy with down-to-earth Mary, and what it was, what Charlee saw, was that he was completely drunk.

Who is motherless? Charlee lectured silently, to the boats lapping in agreement along the harbor. Who is really motherless, fatherless? She trudged along unsteadily, answered by a long, husky call from a foghorn. I am motherless, fatherless, loverless. I am alone with this night air, and fuck them, I will bump into myself, somewhere here, fastened as figurehead to these broken-down dories, let me float as they do, crouch on the rocks, my own soul next to me. Let me run from the pursuing jangle of belt buckles with tigers’ heads on them. Whatever that means. Whoever he is, let him be as mad as this sea town and this wildness that I cannot give words to, but will profoundly, in all the best manners, and with all the best intentions, destroy myself on.

The poet’s son. That’s what I am, the poet’s son, who can’t talk. Judging from the stamped seriousness of it, how can he pass me up, me of the same history?

4

It is an awful thing to fall inlove with a man who drinks. Never mind the obvious. But the courtship, the courtship is askew.

On the good side, you know where he can be found.

II

Peter always sat, gently, compactly alone, hunched over a book or newspaper. He ordered soup and beer, and he would say hello to her, as people in small towns do, in summer towns where the air is intimate, the lapping of the water provocative, the bar doors open, banging into the wild sea roses, dogs waiting patiently outside for scraps, the foghorn part of one’s own rhythm, and so she could not actually say that he was courting her with this hello. On the other hand, alcoholic men have two ways of courting. One is intense madness, proposals on the first night, a feverish pitch . . . or there is inertia, profound, passive inertia.

Which is the most deadly, because the woman’s imagination does all the work. The man is the recipient of her passions, which can be the most passionate. You are involved with yourself, the worst kind of love affair, and the hardest to recover from. But no matter, alcoholic men are, always, frightened.

So are alcoholic women, she said to herself, blushing as she murmured, Hi back, and hoped to God the next time they met, someone would talk.

III

Charlee sat through dinner, feeling a sharp knife stuck in her side. It was looking at her mother.

It’s peculiar, her mother said, that a young woman wants to live in a seaside town. It’s as if you retired. And here I am—the one with the career. She dragged on her cigarette.

Charlee could think of nothing to say. She was fascinated by this orange-and-green bejeweled talking koala bear that was her mother. She’s related to me, Charlee kept telling herself, and when Charlee looked at her mother’s spotlessly manicured red fingernails, she blinked her eyes to send away the confusing image of razor blades.

Her mother had said she wanted to visit.

Why did you want to come? Charlee asked.

What do you mean, darling? To see you. But her mother wasn’t looking at her. And, of course, I wanted to show Alvin this place. I came here, you know, many many years ago with your father.

Alvin, the man across the table, smiled at Charlee, benignly. A fifty-year-old screenwriter with not one grey hair. Do even the writers in Hollywood need hair coloring and face lifts, also?

Doesn’t he look like a dog? her mother said.

And Charlee hated to admit it, but that wide handsome smile was a bit like a dog’s.

So you came here with Gerald? Charlee said.

Oh, yes, she said, and now she turned to Alvin. Her father is very stupid, you know—his ideas make Queen Victoria seem avant garde—but you know he came from an aristocratic family, never could adjust to American ways.

He is not from an aristocratic family, Charlee said.

Oh, yes—her mother turned to her—we both are.

Charlee could entertain that her failed father with his rich accent and mellifluous ways around a restaurant might be a lost aristocrat, so lost and so aristocratic that he neglected to mention it, but she could not believe that anyone whose hair was orange and who wore that much costume jewelry was a Hapsburg.

Her mother turned her face to an offstage camera in the restaurant, and said, Precisely, Charlee, what do you want to do with yourself?

Charlee reached for her drink. I don’t know. Although she had millions of plans—diplomat, writer, actress herself—but the last person to know would be this mother whose disinterest had been a continual stabbing.

Just what I thought. You must consider yourself a winner, she said. I am a winner. You know I have a very successful career as a producer. Your father would be too jealous to mention this.

She was wrong. Charlee’s father had mentioned that she was successful, successful at sleeping her way to the top, he said.

But Charlee thought that her father undersold her mother. Her mother seemed bright enough. Anyway, her father was wrong about almost everything. It was something she could bank on, his clouded or blind vision.

So, her mother said, Alvin and I are wondering what you want for yourself. Do you have a boyfriend?

Yes. But it’s a secret.

What?

I can’t talk about it. He’s rather well known.

Is he a Kennedy? her mother said.

No, Charlee said, but at that minute she decided she was having an affair with the mayor of Boston. He’s in politics though.

Be careful of bridges, piped in Alvin, and her mother roared with laughter.

Charlee sipped her drink, her face getting more flushed. She was wearing a midi-skirt hand-me-down of her mother’s, a gift of this trip, which was loose around her waist and so rode her hips. She had tied her blouse under her breasts to give the effect of a belly dancer or gypsy.

Charlee smiled at Alvin knowingly, a look that said, yes, we are the two who must cope here, this difficult razorblade woman who will give us nothing. You have your scripts and probably women, Charlee thought, but I have my men, my political men.

The bill came, and Charlee reached for it. It’s true Charlee is a waitress but this winning woman was not to win anything from her.

I’ll pay, Charlee said, and this winning woman lifted her creamed hand, jewels gleaming and handed the bill over to Charlee.

Yes, thank you, she said. It was delightful, wasn’t it, Alvin? You are a lovely girl.

Yes, Charlee said, lovely, going through her handbag wondering if she had enough money, would ever have enough money.

You are a fighter in your kind of abashed way. Of course, you can’t escape genes.

At that Charlee jumped. Let me just pay, she said.

I hope you get your politician to yourself. I am assuming this secrecy is because he is married. All my husbands, even your father, were married when I met them. They left for me. So don’t believe these women’s magazines. Married men do leave.

I don’t want another man’s woman, Charlee said.

She stopped. No, I don’t mean that, Charlee said, although when she looked up from her purse, her mother was fumbling with a shawl, not listening, she did not want that either, Charlee decided. And I certainly don’t want another woman’s man, she said, putting the money down and pocketing the matches.

Are you talking to yourself? her mother said. Charlee was silent for a minute. This was going to cost her her life.

I was saying that living with Gerald has not been easy.

You think I don’t know that? Why do you think I left? And she turned around and walked to the car, where Alvin was waiting for her.

They must have said good-byes after dinner, it’s true she had drunk a lot of wine, but when she went and sat on a bench overlooking the sea, the pleasure was in, the rich, sensual pleasure was in timing sobs to the ocean cracking on the shore.

IV

Her chest hurt. Exhausted, she went through her handbag for the keys to the car, walked chastened to the car, for the night was immensely wide, gaping and ready to receive her, started it up and suddenly curved into the parking lot of a bar where there was dancing. She pushed her way through the crowds to the bar, ordered a stinger, and stood at the edge of the dance floor. She drank her stinger very fast.

She began to smile.

She told the circulating waitress, another stinger. She began to feel fired up at the same time she felt eased.

A fisherman, she had seen him round town, tall and dark, with a beard, flipped his hand toward her to come dance.

She went toward the middle of the dance floor. He pulled her roughly to him but quick, he was letting it go for the night, moving wildly all over the floor, must have had a big catch, she laughed to herself, and he started twirling her and she naturally moved quickly anyway, as if it all could fuel this dance. She would dance till they all, herself, hurt and he twirled her round again, and they both were circling each other round the floor, the other dancers moved away to watch, she wasn’t even sure what the other people were doing, she had lost her inhibition, all she knew was that she was going to give over to this long-time pounding, as finely as acutely as to the pain of knowing her mother, finally, and she swung round and he picked her up from her waist and held her high above him, on his flat palms. People were clapping. Charlee thought she saw her father in the crowd watching, and then she was back down on the ground twirling and moving along. The climax had been reached, she was still dancing though, she didn’t want to lose the energy. She thought about getting a razor and cutting her skirt so her legs could be free, and she wondered if this was happiness as she danced, at whatever time, with whatever person, confident and energetic on the dance floor, and years later, she knew it wasn’t.

V

The next morning Charlee saunters down her dirt road for her usual, an English muffin and coffee. Peter is standing up at the counter ordering a coffee, himself. This time he gives her a big hello, and she decides to stay there, and somehow he ends up sitting with her at her booth. She feels all of a sudden large, like a predatory bird, and uncoordinated. Can she sip her coffee in front of him?

Their awkwardness with each other is riveting.

How’s your house going? she says.

You seen it?

No. But I’m sure it’s beautiful. Why does she think that? She suddenly feels she knows everything that will happen. She hears the boat rafters split open.

She also notices that time has stopped in the coffee shop. Everybody else fades into the background.

My house is on Dog Hill, he says. I’m jacking it up over the harbor.

She listens. She knows nothing of curtains, pillows, or containers for storing food. She is embarrassed because she thinks he can see that. He manages to look directly at her. It’s his house.

And what are you building? he asks.

She pushes her teeth together. I wake up with that question all the time.

But their romance has already begun, because she can see he doesn’t believe her. He thinks she is building something which makes her wonder if she is building something.

And she is sure he is building something.

You should come see my house, he says.

I will.

You know where it is? And once again she is listening to a man give her overly detailed directions to where he lives.

What she first notices is that she is not happy, gay, walking back up the dirt road to her own apartment, after their breakfast together. That’s strange. She feels a heaviness, an incomprehension, a sense of being pushed along a conveyor belt of feelings that are locked, compelling. He is not what she is thinking about, the conveyor belt is. He gives very little of himself.

The only relief is total consummation.

She dials the phone to California. Daddy?

What?

Yes, what? she says, teasingly.

What are you talking about? he says. I hope you’re calling to say you’re leaving that stupid town.

No, she says, I’m not. I’m calling to ask you a question.

Go ahead.

What do you think about love?

I think it’s very good. Find somebody decent and marry him.

Really? Have you ever been interested in anyone decent?

Of course I have. What do you expect? Someone would think you’ve been drinking.

That’s because, she says, I spent my childhood talking to drunks, therefore, no matter how sober or drunk, I sound drunk. Get it?

Don’t be ridiculous. You had a wonderful childhood. Are you calling for money?

I think I met someone very interesting.

What’s he do?

I don’t know. He’s building a house.

In that stupid town?

Yes. I don’t know much else.

He must be a very brilliant conversationalist.

I wasn’t much better, she said.

That has nothing to do with the quality of his conversation.

Well, you’re quite the Dr. Freud this morning.

He was silent.

Get out of that town. You’re going nowhere.

I will eventually, Daddy, I will.

That’s all I have to say about love, since you asked.

She laughed. The code was for them to laugh it off, then put down the phone feeling incredibly let down.

She said good-bye. She studied the greyness outside. A grey sky, which dulled the sea, which flattened the rocks. It began to rain. She did feel excited, confused about Peter. Not totally unhappy. She felt like she was about to be absorbed. She felt the expectant flutter, the possible purging, one feels before an operation.

5

I have no illusions. But I very much want to. So I have many delusions. It’s sad not to have illusions. You need illusions to participate in the rites of life. Which means new things happen.

Maybe they don’t and that’s an illusion.

II

I often think that the truth was that my father sold me at a card game. He was losing, indeed, he lost everything. The men are all sitting around the bar, and this card game is a secret all-consuming vice of my father’s, he will do anything to keep in the game. And he says, Okay, I’ve got nothing except my daughter. When she’s eighteen, you can have her. You can take her and do whatever the hell you like.

The nameless man, fortunately he’s rather attractive and Clark Gable-ish about the whole thing, puffs on his cigar, pulls on his white, ruffled shirtsleeves. His hands are immaculate. My father, on the other hand, has cigarette holes all over his clothes, but the wonderful arrogance of not needing to try. Both men have hairy wrists. Rhett Butler contemplates this barter slowly, and then graciously accepts.

My father loses me. There’s never any doubt about that.

Rhett Butler lets me grow up, keeps distant tabs on me, he’s got his own mistresses anyway, and he has informants update him on my anguishes, passions, mistakes, separations, and repetitions, and then when I’ve got it down, when I’ve reached a stage of some balance and turned into a woman who could possibly care for someone, I am no longer strangled by caring for myself, when I’m, in other words, in the balance, he comes up one day, casually at a street corner, he hasn’t aged a bit in these twenty-five years, and he says, Well, you know you belong to me. Your father sold you to me in a card game.

There is, of course, the ethical question of fulfilling an ancient contract. And then there is a tributary of runaway possibilities. The refusal to go back. But, I regret to say, feelings of nostalgia flutter dully and loudly over me, and I lose some vigilance. I factor in that Rhett Butler is patient, kind with me, although I am well aware he would have maimed my father without this surety, and so out of some strange deference to my father, or laziness, some closing of the circle, I think okay, and go off into this man’s world of danger, indifference, and incredible possessiveness.

Sometimes I stay there and I can see that the whole thing is ghastly, I am trapped again, and then I tear myself apart and aside to run, run fast. I must always, though, keep a part of me, that part hidden.

I suppose this story puts everything in a child’s language, big symbols in strong black letters. Because, let’s face it, my own isn’t that different. There just wasn’t a card game.

III

I’m just a child; doesn’t he know that he shouldn’t tell me that he dreamed he’d slept with me? Charlee was talking to herself as she got dressed, carelessly, as a child does, as she was to do for years, fast and roughly. She sat on the edge of the unmade double bed that they had shared, waiting, waiting the long while for him to shave, for him to walk from the bathroom to where his clothes were, for him to put them on. She sat there kicking her legs. The room had all the curtains closed. It had no decoration. A television. She sat there, listening to him. Odd, isn’t it? he repeated. She was trying to remember the chain of events that got them into this motel room. Was there a snowstorm last night and he couldn’t drive? There was nothing wrong, she said to herself, in a father and daughter sleeping in the same bed.

She looked down at her body and it seemed very small to her, very small and naked, even though she had her clothes on. Did her father want to sleep with her? Why not? She was very nice company. Everybody remarked on that. Dreams come in many forms. She herself dreams that the Nazis capture her and torture her father, not her. She has to watch. That’s the worst torture they can give her. She pulled up her ankle socks, elastics never last, you can’t blame him, anybody can dream anything.

If you’re so nervous, he said, you can drink something.

He knows how she sips his drinks to soothe her nerves. Right now? she asks.

Whenever you want. I don’t think this place has room service. We can go to the motel bar after breakfast.

She rolled around what he had said. She didn’t know the words to ask him about the dream. She didn’t know the words for that. Men want only one thing, he always told her. She didn’t believe him.

What are you thinking about? he asked from the bathroom. You’re very silent.

She got up, walked into the bathroom, sat down on the rim of the bath, and watched him shave. She’s always with him. Do you want to sleep with me? She wasn’t quite sure she knew what she was asking.

Of course not, he said.

She rubbed her nose, back and forth. All of her was itchy.

Stop playing with your face, he said.

What are we doing today?

I could take you to the zoo, he said.

She scratched her face. Do you want to go?

Yes, I love zoos. Stop picking at yourself. You’ll ruin it.

She was silent.

We’ll have a nice lunch and then go to the zoo.

She liked restaurants, she could look at other people, restaurants were safe, maître d’s were nice to her. Her father seemed important in restaurants.

Aren’t you going to work? she said.

No. The hell with them. He looked down at her. What are you so depressed about?

Remember when I was little and I went to the hospital for bad dreams?

You did not.

Yes, I did. I had bad dreams. You said it was because of stomach trouble.

You’re making that up. What’s wrong with you?

Her throat began to ache. Everything was horrible. Was she crazy? She was sure that happened. She didn’t imagine it. She hated being here. It was too dark. Her throat was excruciatingly sore. He wasn’t going to make her cry. Oh, no. She was not going to cry. He wasn’t going to make her. She left the bathroom, sat on a chair in the bedroom, and forbade the tears to come, all the while tears unfairly pouring down her face.

Stop whining, he said. I can’t stand it. You’ve woken up like it’s the bloody end of the world.

I’m going outside to wait.

No, he said, "don’t. Stay here and just keep quiet. I’ll be ready in a few minutes. Don’t go running off where