Flirt: The Interviews
ward?
    â€”Yes.
    â€”So they pumped my stomach and stitched my wrists –
    â€”What was in the stomach?
    â€”Turpentine. Champagne.
    â€”I wonder if that kind of corrosion would permanently damage a stomach?
    â€”I wonder, too. The doctor said, “We don’t want a woman who carves and poisons herself living in our community. Come back when you’re ready to be part of the community.” And the next morning they flew me down to Comox in a little Cessna 180.
    â€”Seems like a hypocritical thing for a doctor to say. After all, I’m sure there were worse than you in the seventies in a place like that.
    â€”Tough love?
    â€”Nonsense.
    â€”It was a good time to leave. I remember not much.
    â€”Memory is a very interesting organ. I bet if you started to write a story
    â€“ not autobiographical, but personal – about that time, I bet you’d begin to recover details and feelings and events. They’d be suspect in their accuracy, of course, but you’d have them.
    â€”Not yet. I’m not hungry for those details yet. And the story seems sort of bewildering and pathetic. I was wrong about everything.
    â€”Oh, the story could work around that. Give that young woman a little more power, blonder hair and a head scarf, or maybe set it in the sixties, and really work out the landscape so the story’s also about that, and I think you’d have an interesting moment to play with. But these things take time, you’re right. A story can’t always be squeezed out of history. With me, writing has something to do with the fight against death, the feeling that we lose everything every day, and writing is a way of convincing yourself
perhaps that you’re doing something about this. You’re not really, because the writing itself does not last much longer than you do; but I would say it’s partly the feeling that I can’t stand to have things go . . . Speaking of hungry. There’s a Dutchman down the way who makes divine sausage and bakes his own sourdough buns. He usually has a bottle of Kenyan beer tucked in a cooler under his tailgate.
    â€”It seems to me your stories are getting sexier.
    â€”Well, you may be right. Hello Harry! He’s handsome, don’t you think? His wife’s arms jiggle and she talks about her sons’ PhDs too much. Still.
    â€”Most of them begin with a paragraph loaded with female desire, female want, some naughty language. And later that desire is mocked, then refused and finally satisfied in some way.
    â€”What story are you thinking of?
    â€”“Floating Bridge.”
    â€”Of course. You would like that story, given the lives you’ve led.
    â€”I love that story.
    â€”I do, too. But tell me why.
    â€”For all the right crafty reasons: the invisibly-stitched physical description of characters; the ambiguous relationship between the cancerous woman, Jinny, and her asshole husband, Neal; the plottiness that has become a bit of a pattern in your later work whereby a caregiver or nurse – a third party – is introduced into an existing relationship; the class-conscious settings of paradise and its opposites; your weaving of present and past. I love it for your skill, is what I’m saying, and how you manage to dance so much so fast, without your tights getting saggy.
    â€”I’m not sure that metaphor quite works. But add it to the list.
    â€”And because I’m getting older and because men . . . I, but they, we – well, the ending.
    â€”Ricky’s kiss on the bridge pleases you, doesn’t it.
    â€”It really really does. When the boy drives poor Jinny home – they’ve only just met – and he stops and they look at the stars on the bridge. She’s forgotten her hat in the corn field and she has only a nob of a head. He
touches her waist and kisses her. He says “oh.” I asked my friend Johnny why Ricky kisses her.
    â€”Oh, I’d like to hear a

Similar Books

Moscardino

Enrico Pea

Guarded Heart

Jennifer Blake

Kickoff for Love

Amelia Whitmore

After River

Donna Milner

Different Seasons

Stephen King

Killer Gourmet

G.A. McKevett

Darkover: First Contact

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Christmas Moon

Sadie Hart