This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “Planets Apart” Down in the Dirt (v133) (the November/December 2015 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book the Intersection the Down in the Dirt July - Dec. 2015 collection book		get the 318 page July - Dec. 2015 Down in the Dirt issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

þÿFriends and Judges

Dennis Vannatta

<center><talbe width=90%><TR><TD>    And however agonizing the sacrifice, would we not sometimes forbear to keep those we have loved as friends after their deaths, for fear of also having them as judges?        —Proust, The Fugitive</TD></TR></TABLE></center>

    In this crepuscular hour of my sixtieth birthday, among the slanting shadows of the sweetgums and southern pine looming above my back deck, James has given me two gifts, the first well-meaning but inconsequential, the second such a one as could only be forthcoming from a friend of many years who knows what lies in my heart of hearts. He has given me Albertine.
    Albertine Bontemps, he called her. But of course Mme. Bontemps, with whom she was living at the time of her death, was her aunt. “Albertine Simonet,” I corrected, and for a moment James seemed nonplussed enough to lose the thread of his narrative. But then he shook his head. “No, my father distinctly called her Albertine Bontemps. Maybe at that point she’d assumed her aunt’s name.” Could be. Albertine had always been, after all, so great a liar.
    But let me go back to the beginning. Fiction may play hopscotch with time, but for reality, taking it straight is best, especially when the aim is clarity and not effect. I know what James said, what he did, what his father said and did, but what did it mean—as James obviously meant for me to consider—for me? Faulkner, Joyce, Nabokov, all those great, formidable modernists and postmodernists, are easy; trying to fathom the meaning of any one moment of our own lives is what plagues us.
    Say our moment began at around seven of this cool April evening, James and I huddled close to the chiminea on my back deck, sipping the fair-to-middling Jordan Cabernet James had brought to help us celebrate my birthday. We were enjoying the wine, the fire, the blessed relief of another department meeting (earlier that day) behind us. Even the Voight couple next door inconsiderately coming out on their deck, starting up the old gas grill, soon to be joined by another couple cum children—beer drunk, laughter, the old Nerf football tossed around—even this was no more than a minor irritant.
    “Married folks, lawdy, I hates ‘em,” James said, dropping into his best local color idiom (American, although he was a nineteenth-century Brit specialist). “T’weren’t us’ns lucky to have dodged all that mess?”
    “Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it,” I said to James, a lifelong bachelor only a few months older than I. (I don’t recall what we did on his sixtieth.)
    “Well, old friend, you tried it two or three times. How’d that work out for you?”
    “Only once. Don’t exaggerate. That thing with Margaret Powell, remember, she left me standing at the altar. So number two never happened.”
    “That’s because you were standing at the altar in Memphis while she’d been led to believe that the altar was at that quaint little church in Colliersville.”
    Well, the contretemps that led to my aborted second wedding were not quite so sitcomish, but they did the trick. I felt bad for Margaret. We’d been almost forced upon one another by the near-unanimous opinion in the English department, decades ago when I was a new assistant professor and she an ABD instructor, that we were perfect for each other. The only dissenters were James and, unfortunately for Margaret, I. I’d like to think that Margaret, who fled the scene of her humiliation immediately afterward, was better off in the long run. There might be some alternate universe where she’d at last finish her dissertation, but none in which she’d publish enough to get tenure. She’d have been doomed forever to teach four courses of comp a semester, plus helping out with the Christmas potluck. Better to do that someplace other than the University of Memphis, then as now a tough place for “part-timers,” as we still call those people.
    “I think of ol’ Margaret often,” I said, and James said, “No, you don’t.”
    The affair left me with the reputation around the department as something of a rake (or cad or bounder; James, big on Austen, would know). Not necessarily a bad thing. Among my fellow English professors, a paranoid, pusillanimous lot, I became thought of as not just a scapegrace but someone not to be messed with. I came up for tenure early, got it on first vote; I think they were afraid of turning me down. And don’t forget the co-eds. For them I was mad, bad, and dangerous to be around. I bedded a few—or perhaps I should say they bedded me. Hey, there’s no law against it—unless it’s sex-for-grades, but U. Memphis co-eds, alas, tend to be remarkably uninterested in grades. After a few flings, I discovered I was remarkably uninterested in them. There followed a few affairs of varying duration and intensity, none much more than pro forma, and then all that sort of thing—romance, even just sex—was over for me.
    It was easy enough to give up. Not Margaret Powell, not the co-eds, not the participants in my aborted affairs—the great love of my life has been Albertine Simonet. And Gilberte Swann. Her mother, Odette, too. Even Mme. Guermantes, who would of course never have deigned to acknowledge my hoi polloi presence. An English teacher? Mon dieu, one might as well be in trade. Add her husband and her brother-in-law, the deliciously reptilian Baron du Charlus. And Robert de Saint-Loup. Oh yes, my heart of hearts is capacious enough to enfold each and every character residing within those seven glorious volumes. How can one love a novel? First of all, answer the greater mystery—how can one love—and only then complete the sentence with the direct object of your choice.
    For me: Proust, In Search of Lost Time.
    James interrupted my reverie: “Where are you now?”
    For a moment I assumed he meant, where have your thoughts taken you? But then I realized, no, he knew me too well.
    “You mean in Proust?”
    He didn’t even bother answering.
    “Finished it this afternoon at Starbucks’s. I needed to reward myself for enduring that department-meeting bloodletting.”
    He set his wine glass down beside his lawn chair—I’ve never gotten around to getting decent deck furniture—and cleared his throat.
    How many times now?, I expected him to ask—i.e., how many times had I read In Search of Lost Time from beginning to end—because the subject seems to amuse him, and I began the process of calculating the number when instead he said, “Well, this seems like an appropriate time for me to give you your present.”
    I thought he was joking until he reached under his chair and came up with a rectangular object. It was wrapped in rough brown paper that looked suspiciously like a Kroger shopping bag, the tape the cheap stuff that we all filch from the department supply closet. Affixed to the middle, though, was a rather fetching purple bow. I was touched.
    “But we’ve never exchanged presents,” I protested.
    “This is a big one, though—your sixtieth.”
    “Yeah, but I never got you anything for your sixtieth.”
    “Well, it’s always one giving and one receiving in a relationship, isn’t it?”
    I smiled. “So we have a relationship? Better not let that get out into the department.”
    “Shut up and open your present.”
    I knew it was a book by the shape and heft. What else would it be, one English prof to another?
     I tore off the paper. A hardback, The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton. I gave the front a long, appreciative look, turned it over and pretended to study the back.
    “This looks fascinating,” I enthused.
    “So the reviews all say. It was this year’s Booker Prize winner, and not the stale old Barbara Pym stuff the Brits tend to dote over.”
    “Hey, I like Barbara Pym,” I said, pressing my hands to my chest, feigning hurt.
    “Yeah, I know you do. I do, too, but then she’s more my speed. You’re supposedly a contemporary lit specialist, after all. There’s a whole new world out there. Time for you to get you some of it, pal.”
    “’Time for you to get you some of it’—elegantly said for an English professor, pal. Besides, for a nineteenth-century Brit person to—“
    “Oh I almost forgot,” he said, interrupting me, for which I was grateful. We hadn’t had enough wine for these professorish exchanges to be entertaining. He reached under his chair again. Had he stuck a case of curiosities down there when I wasn’t looking? He came out with another book, paperback this time, sans wrapping.
    “This isn’t a birthday present. I found this at the used book sale at the library, just finished reading it myself.”
    I gave the front and back covers the abbreviated version of my long, appreciative look. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, by Dai Sijie.
    “It’s set in China during the Cultural Revolution. It’s about two friends, both in love with the same girl. At the end, she takes off and leaves them, and they’re left with just themselves—and literature. It’s hard to tell which they love the most.”
    “This does sound interesting, Mr. Bones,” I said. “That’s from John Berryman, by the way—Mr. Bones.”
    I’m actually a modernist, which in English departments tends to mean the first half of the twentieth century, but since Tom Van Zandt, our contemporary lit specialist, died, I’ve been wearing two hats. James calls it “contemptible literature.” Not to worry, I get my kicks in on the subject of James’s dissertation, ol’ Nancy Boy Swinburne, who says absolutely nothing so beautifully.
    “Berryman, yes, I seem to remember stumbling across him in a bad dream,” James smirked.
    Yeah, nothing like two English profs in an intellectual bitch-slapping contest. Before it could get even more disgusting, a yodel rang out from the Voights’ back deck across the way. The male friend was holding up his young son (I suppose) by the ankles. The boy was waving his arms and pleading to be let down.
    “Somebody should call the SCAN people,” I said, but James said, “Naw. Look. The kid’s loving it.”
    I looked again. Yes, the boy was screaming in delighted terror.
    “Give a dollar to see him drop the little bastard on his head,” I said.
    “He won’t,” James said, then turned back to me. “So, which book are you going to read next?”
    I hefted a book in each hand. “Well, by rights I should read the birthday present first, shouldn’t I?”
    “I didn’t ask you which of the two you’d read first. I asked you which book you’d read next.”
    “But—“
    Oh, of course. I got it. What I didn’t get is why it apparently mattered so much, mattered at all, to James. What happened was, a half a dozen years ago I taught Swann’s Way in my Modern European Novel seminar. Didn’t the students just love that? Hoo, boy! A few even stayed awake long enough to ask a question or two about what happens in the six remaining volumes of the novel, which I realized I remembered in only the broadest, vaguest terms. It occurred to me that I should reread it for my own edification (it being too late to do any good that semester). It’d been thirty years since my first and only complete reading of Remembrance of Things Past, as it was then called in the Moncrieff translation. I was a different person back then, in rut for tenure and les femmes. I remember it was a real slog, but I gritted my teeth and trudged on through it like a desperate man through a blizzard. Never again, I said. But then, six years ago, a different world, different me, something happened. Maybe it was the translation: the D. J. Enright revision of the Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation. It was as if the ghost of Proust threw a switch and said, Let there be light. Suddenly, all was light, effortless, graceful, witty, moving, not a slog but a headlong fall into something like love. As I approached the end of that final volume, Time Regained, I felt something happening to me, a feeling I couldn’t identify. Only when I turned the page to the last lines—

<center><talbe width=90%><TR><TD>    . . . like giants plunged into the stars, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time</TD></TR></TABLE></center>

    —did it hit me with very nearly the force of a blow: an almost irresistible urge to immediately, that instant, turn back to page 1 of Swann’s Way and begin again. Indeed, why bother resisting, I asked myself. What was I saving myself, saving my time for?
    I slipped Time Regained into the slot in the bookshelf waiting patiently for it, traced my finger right to left across the spines of its brothers, and extracted, as one would extract the most precious of jewels from its velvet bag, Swann’s Way.
    For a time, I would go to bed early.
    Oh, I was hooked, I was lost. I was Brett Ashley telling poor, desolated Jake Barnes, “I’m a goner,” when she fell hopelessly headlong for her young bullfighter, with the difference that both she and Jake knew that fire burned so hot because it was doomed to burn only for a season, and then they’d all have ashes in their mouths. Six years later I’m still reading In Search of Lost Time, and the fire still burns as fiercely. I think James is afraid that that fire has burned everything else. He may be right, but a goner can’t do anything but go on. I go on.
    Oh, I read the newspaper, once in a while a magazine. I have not quite reached that shameless point in the classroom where I do no more than teach old books from old notes grown brittle with the years. I do some reading and re-reading for my classes. Grading papers—does that count as reading? Only when those papers count as writing. Other than that, though, it’s Proust, nothing but Proust, over and over and over.
    How many times all the way through over these last six years? One can’t speed-read Proust. Deduct from the time available that other reading, teaching classes, committee meetings, the occasional, though more and more rare, cocktail party or dinner invitation, some TV watching, household chores, shopping, etc., I think in the beginning it was taking me about six months to read the seven volumes. Now it’s down to about three months. Since Bravo, A&E, and too many other channels capitulated to the dark side (reality TV), I hardly ever watch television anymore. Movies? Couldn’t tell you when I last went to one. I canceled my Netflix membership long ago. I’m never been the sporting type and so don’t have golf and the like to distract me. I used to enjoy a long walk or two a day, but that has gone, too, with the advent of the heel pain. An operation might correct the problem, I’m told, but ain’t nobody cuttin’ on this boy.
    So I have a fair amount of time on my hands and use it almost exclusively now on Proust and will continue to until somebody convinces me there’s a better choice. Does James really think it’s Dai Sijie?
    I gave James an apologetic smile. “Well, I could tell you I’m going to read this next,” I said, gesturing with my birthday gift, “but we’ve been friends too long to start lying now.”
    I thought he’d smile back ironically or resignedly, but he shocked me by lurching up out of his chair, seizing the book, and flinging it over the side of the deck, where it fluttered to the ground like a wounded duck (I suppose; I’ve never hunted).
    I stared at him, dumbfounded, then said the first thing that came to mind: “You throw like a girl.”
    A chorus of laughter erupted from the Voights’ back yard. I didn’t look over to see if it was directed at us.

    He sat back down, picked up his glass, and took a sip as if nothing had happened—or so someone who didn’t know him so well as I might have thought. I knew he was in the grips of some emotion I couldn’t quite recognize, but it was powerful. Then he looked up at me, and I could sense he’d come to a decision.
    “All right, I guess I might as well tell you,” he said. “Consider it another birthday present. You’ll love it, I’m afraid.”
    “Afraid?”
    He shrugged off the question and continued. “It’s a story my father told me a couple of years ago, just before he died. He was in the hospital, in fact. Why he waited so long to tell me, I’m not sure, because it happened in 1968. In fact, I’m not sure why he told me at all. The story didn’t have any real importance for him and not much more for me. Maybe he was just trying to fill in the blanks about his life for me. He and my mother divorced when I was five, you know, and I didn’t see much of him for many years, not until he moved back to my hometown in the ‘90s. Maybe that was it, or maybe he was just trying to pass the time while waiting to die. But you’re the one he should have told it to.”
    “Me?”
    The ‘60s—drugs, free love, drop out, get laid way back—his father decided he wanted that a lot more than he wanted the responsibilities of a wife and child. So he split, did whatever, wandered wherever. San Francisco, Mexico, Tangiers, and then in the summer of 1968, Paris. He thought it would be a lot of fun, but one day he got caught in the middle of an especially violent student demonstration, a street full of smoke and screaming, rocks thrown and now a Molotov cocktail and then gunfire, and he wanted to be anywhere but there. Hey, man, make love, not war. He ducked into a little bistro, and no sooner in than the front window exploded and terrified young people were spilling in and he went right back out through the opening where the window had been, then fought his way down the street until he found another shop to duck into where a tall, gray-haired woman locked the door after him and pulled the shade down, as if that would stop them.
    She put a forefinger to her lips. Shhh.
    She led him through another door at the rear of the shop, closed it after them. They were in a storeroom. Only then, seeing the boxes and shelves stocked with soccer balls, tennis rackets, skis, and the like did he realize the shop was a sporting goods store. Then he saw that another woman about the same age as the first but shorter and less robust was sitting on a little stool in the corner, looking like a mouse with a cat scratching at the door.
    The first woman began to talk to him, her English impeccable. Who he was? Where was he from? Why was he in Paris? Then she began to tell him about herself. At first he thought that her interest in him was odd, but then he understood: she wasn’t talking to him so much as talking for the other woman, speaking calmly, soothingly, as if this were just another day, just another customer albeit, one with an interesting story to tell and they all should listen, all tell their stories and ignore the chaos just outside the front door.
    Her name was Albertine Bontemps. When I objected, James said, “No, my father distinctly called her Albertine Bontemps. Maybe at that point she’d assumed her aunt’s name.”
    “It’s quite possible,” I admitted. “Albertine always was such a little liar.”
    But then something occurred to me. “Wait,” I said. How did the name—Albertine Bontemps or Simonet or whatever—make any impression at all on James’s father? James had told me that his father had been a dispatcher for Yellow Cab before he ducked out on them. After that he’d worked on Mississippi River barges, an oil tanker, for a few years on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean, other odd jobs. Was this man a Proust aficionado who’d recognize the name of poor Marcel’s la belle dame sans merci? And even in that extremely unlikely event, why bother on his deathbed to tell his son, who didn’t give a hang for anything later than Arnold Bennett? It didn’t make sense. But then, before I found voice for my questions, they were silenced by a greater certainty: I simply did not care. I wanted to hear the story, tale, concoction, whatever it was; I wanted it as I wanted Albertine clothed in lies as she’d inevitably come. Because when Albertine comes, thence comes Marcel and that whole glorious world.
    “So Albertine wasn’t killed in a riding accident,” I said.
    “Obviously not. You said she was a liar. In this case it was a fiction to cover up her marriage, to keep it from Marcel. She thought the news might kill him—or perhaps he would kill her. She was always a little afraid of him, she said.”
    “Who was the lucky guy?” I asked.
    “I don’t remember his name. Some worthless fellow—she said that herself.”
    “’I’m a washout’!”
    “What?”
    “’I’m a washout’—that’s what he always said about himself. Marcel used that phrase for his name, essentially. He was the Verdurins’ nephew.”
    “He died in the 1914 War. That’s what the French call it. Albertine felt freed, she said.”
    “Then?”
    “She spent some time in Balbec, but it wasn’t the same as when she was young with her gang. Then it was back to Touraine and her aunt’s. But that was a sort of death, so she went to Paris, no plans, no prospects, and would soon have been on the streets if her aunt hadn’t had the good sense to die and leave her a tidy sum. She thought about opening a bookshop but decided after all she’d only pretended to like literature for Marcel’s sake. What she really liked was tennis, biking, swimming—the outdoors. So she opened a sporting goods store, of all things. And who walked into it one day? The person she’d loved all along. Not that simpering fool Marcel but . . . ta-da! . . . Andrée.”
    “Andrée!”
    “Yes. She was the other woman in the storeroom with my father.”
    “Andrée. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t think Marcel would have been surprised, either. But wait. Doesn’t she have a husband in Time Regained? I guess that doesn’t mean anything, though. Go on. What happened next?”
    “Next? Nothing. The mob outside had dispersed or gone on down the street, and my father left. Albertine and Andrée would both be long dead by now, of course.”
    “Of course. But what about Marcel? Did Albertine ever see him again?”
    “Yes, once. Very late at night in a little café in Paris. I’d like to think it was that night that Proust met Joyce, and the two great men talked about their indigestion. But that was later, I think, Proust on his last legs. She thought he looked very lonely. But the saddest thing was that before she could make her escape she was positive he looked up and recognized her, but . . . and this was the sad thing . . . he didn’t care. The great love of his life, and he could hardly bother to give her a second look.”
    “Well, that was sad for her, maybe. A woman’s vanity and all that.”
     “No!”
    He fairly shouted it. I almost spilled my wine. The Voights, over on their deck, turned and looked.
    “You don’t understand the issue here. I don’t think for all your reading and reading and reading you’ve ever really, truly understood Marcel. He never did love Albertine, you see. Nor Gilberte, either. Marcel only had one true love in his life, and that was In Search of Lost Time. And that’s why he was such a sad case.”
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “I think you’re getting a little confused here, my friend. Are we talking about Proust or the Marcel in the novel? Marcel is a character, after all, although—“
    “Yes, yes, yes!”
    James jumped up and did a little dance around his chair. I glanced over to see if the Voights had taken notice of this madman’s latest antics, but, by a strange coincidence, they, too, were dancing, holding each other close and swaying slowly, sensuously to some melody that, at this distance, I could not hear.
    James hollered “Yes!” once more and then laughed in triumph. “Finally we’re getting there. Yes, Marcel is a character. But damn it all, man, Albertine is a character, too. And Andrée and the Verdurins and their nephew. They’re fictions, man, fictions.”
    I tut-tutted him. “I don’t expect a nineteenth-century specialist to buy into the post-modernist blurring of the actual and the virtual, but—“
    “But there is a difference. There is a difference between a book and by God life. And what a tragedy to live your life for a book.”
    “Ah, we come to it. We come to me. That’s what this has all been about, your one-man intervention to save pathetic ol’ me from myself. What a joke. Go on, tell somebody with a real problem that you’re worried about your friend who reads a certain book too much.”
    He started to say something, but I cut him off. “You want to hear the real joke, though? It’s you. How funny that you’re so worried about me in my advancing years wasting myself on a book I love—me, a man with one marriage, almost another, and more affairs than I care to remember—when you have never had anything but books. Never. No wife, no affairs, hell, as far as I know you’ve never even had a date. You’ve never loved, James, you’ve never loved. All you have is literature. I mean, Jesus, how long did it take you to concoct this ridiculous Albertine and Andrée story, whose point I’m still not sure I get, by the way?”
    I’d tacked that last question on at the end because I realized I’d gone too far—not saying anything untrue but too true, hurtfully true, throwing it in his face that he’d never loved or been loved.
    I had already been in the English department for a year when James was hired. We were the same age, he single and me a recent divorcé, and we hit it off immediately. We were the “new kids” doing battle with the department troglodytes. Well, now we were the troglodytes, but not much else had changed except James apparently felt close enough to me to tell me how to live my life. That was a minor irritant, though, not reason enough for me to go for the jugular with that “you’ve never loved” crack.
    He didn’t respond to my question but just stared at me a moment and then gazed off into the darkness. I looked across the way, but the Voights had gone back inside and turned off the lights to their deck area. We had it all to ourselves now.
    Then without turning to me, almost as if he were addressing the night shadows, James murmured, “Who said I’ve never loved?”
    “Well, have you?” I said too quickly. It sounded snide and challenging, I was afraid, and I didn’t want that. I said it again, softly, gently this time, a friend communing with a friend.
    He gave me a look of weariness but also, it seemed to me, impatience, even disgust, and I felt my hackles rising again. I was trying, after all, I was trying, but he wasn’t meeting me half way.
    This time I demanded: “Well, have you?”
    Then it struck me. “Oh. You have, haven’t you? Yes yes, you can’t hide it from me, I can see it on your face. You have loved. Goddamn it, James, I mean goddamn it, man, I’ve felt closer to you than any other human being for over thirty years, and unless I’ve misread the situation, you’ve felt close to me, and yet you never told me? I mean, come on, I’ve told you about every affair I’ve ever had, so just out of fair play . . .”
    He gave me that look again—weariness, impatience, disgust—but now it seemed as if at the same time he was trying not to smile, as if the whole thing was so absurd all one could do was laugh.
    “What—?” I started to say, but then it hit me. Oh, Jesus. How could I have been so dense? Anyone could have seen it. Probably everyone but me had seen it all along and had been laughing up their sleeves at us. Or maybe just at me, blind.
    “So now you know,” he said, then shrugged. “Sorry.”
    “There’s nothing to apologize for, James. I just feel sorry for you. Not that I pity you, that’s not what I mean. I mean I’m sorry that there was never a hope for you since, well, I mean, me being straight and all.”
    “That’s not important to me—the physical side. Sex. I’m not sure it was ever very important to me. I don’t want to embarrass you any more than I no doubt already have, but since we’ve gone this far, I might as well say it. Love is all that matters to me. Not sex. I guess that’s a nineteenth-century sort of thing to say.”
    “So sex doesn’t count? The human contact, so to speak, doesn’t count. It’s just what you love, what you feel, that’s all. Is that what you’re telling me?”
    “Yes!” he said eagerly, leaning toward me, eyes gleaming with, I suppose, hope.
    “In that case,” I said, “I can in all good conscience return to Proust.”
    James looked stricken.
    I offered him a sop. “You know, at the end of The Fugitive, it’s not Albertine whom Marcel weeps for. It’s Robert de Saint-Loup.”
    But that didn’t seem to bring him any comfort.

<center>*</center>

    You will expect me to say that with each rereading I find something new, something fresh. That’s what we tell our students about the great writers, isn’t it?
    But Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is not about discovering the new but resurrecting the old. His search is never futile; he always finds. And what he finds is the familiar. He and I take comfort from that. His Combray is my Combray, his Paris mine. I can take the Méséglise way or the Guermantes way with equal facility; I would never, now, lose my way. Gilberte is mine, Albertine mine; never will I be tortured, ravaged by jealousy because they will come to me at my bidding, as long as I have strength to turn the page.
    Indeed, I’m the luckiest of mortals. I have Marcel’s world without his suffering.
    After tonight, of course, I will no longer have James, but I have something better: his story. He made it just for me, after all, which, it occurs to me, would have required him to, first of all, read the novel, all of it, and how that must have been torture for him. And I am so grateful. I think I’ll insert it as a sort of divertissement between The Fugitive and Time Regained. Or perhaps as a coda following my next full reading.
    My next re-reading! I fluff the pillows behind my head, pull the blanket up just so. The remains of the Jordan cabernet are in a glass on my nightstand. (No tea for me at bedtime, and certainly no madeleine; the cholesterol, you see.) And now, oh yes, once again, come to me. Ah, love, come to me once more!
    For a long time, I would go to bed early. Sometimes . . .

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...