| in america 7 part 1 - 2004 december | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
San Diego December 3rd 2004 This morning while I was doing laundry I bought this new journal and a suitcase. The suitcase is a hard-shelled black thing on four wheels, no zippers, since my zippers always go. It will roll along beside me standing erect if I like, and it won't squash file folders. It's mainly a [college] suitcase. Earlier this morning I sat in my bed and wrote the bookwork intro for my site. Now it's 2:30 and the sun has just passed the window's edge to heat up the head of the couch. The evaluations aren't all done but I can finish them easily one a day while I do other things. It's warmer today. Eliz has left me her house and it's there in beauty whenever I want. House and yard. Meantime my plants are basking and December is standing open. January until the 17th. And then after the res four weeks more, 10 in all. Tomorrow I'll start going to the gym again. "So what is your question," she asks in her beautiful grey black intensity. So language is a medium for releasing a truer non-language inside the self and that implies a different definition of writing. The most wonderful student likes me - that's Juliana. 4th It's raining. It's raining on my plants. There's still a smell in my house. Michael was here talking, talking. We both sat with books in our laps. That's the way to do it. He said resentfully that he sees my eyes glaze over. It was like squabbling with a teenager. He went on about juvenile mountain king snakes and Dr Banta and turtles introduced at Cabo San Lucas and reverse footprint from South America back to Asia and George Washington's genocidal policy toward Indians. He complained that it doesn't do me credit that I'm so judgmental, meaning I hold grudges he thinks over nothing. He knew he was manic. I rode his spin and played, experimentally. He's spring-loaded with information and it whips off the reel like tape spilling. I like hearing about the habitat of the Sonoran lyre snake and how its markings vary through juvenile stages. When a snake is getting ready to shed it's said to opaque, or else blue, because the eyes go greyish. He looks at the pictures in the snake book and complains that this one and that are mislabeled, and shows me how he can tell which are actually dead and artificially coiled. He pats my wrist with his remarkably dirty freckled long hand. He hasn't washed his cargos since he put them on two weeks ago. He's not looking well, puffed around the eyes. Is he speaking that way because he thinks he's dying? He says not. There was a moment when he talked about taking a vow when he was diagnosed with recurrence, that he wouldn't be violent or do harm. When he spoke of it he looked better: firmer, realer. Enough? It's not as cold. 5th I woke at 2 and couldn't sleep. I'd been dreaming about Michael, that he'd written two books, that he was high up on a wire, more I don't remember. When I was drifting I'd as if smell a wiry line of cigarette scent threading toward me. It was very distinct but so fine a thread I was dimly wondering whether it was esoteric, something he was sending me. Tom and I went to the market, to the Sicilian Village for breakfast, to the cinema that's near the Maryland to see Ray. We cuddled in the back row. It was raining and Tom had on a red elf-toque. I was wearing my black Clear Orbit hat. When he showed up early he sat down with my laptop and read the bookwork introduction. Betweentimes, waiting in the jeep for him to come with parking validation, I'd find myself daydreaming uneasily about Michael Duke. It'll pass. Not telling Tom about M gives me a reserve I don't like, but the book says hold out. Where I was when Tom came early, crawling over the gate, was working with the cards to figure out what happened last night. I got imprinted. It said, look for a way to come through in relation to sexual conflict. Does love woman want him? NO it said - your man does, graduate from Ellie's reserve and heartbreak. What exactly does that mean? Candid affection probably. Give it all away. 7th Finished the proof of the semester mag, sent it out, have used it this time to include fac. It occurred to me to credit them with initials [on student pieces]. If they read the pieces it will educate all of them. I should include the Speaking bodies notes. 8th It's wet, 10:30 in the morning. I've already worked on my vol 1 index page, corresponded with a couple of people about the mag proofs, read the Union Tribune and the NY Times at Starbucks, cooked. I'm dopey, holding back. - White freesias. I went to sleep from 10:30 till 12, woke when Michael showed up. He sat studying the butterfly book drinking tea. I cuffed the green brushed-cotton pants. When the sky cleared took him out to get gas, take pictures at Scott's, and then Walter Anderson's. I was costing and looking. He went off and studied the bamboos. After a while when our paths crossed I showed him the cassia artemesioides and he showed me the mosquito fish and snails in the water tanks. I am never quite ready for the pleasure of being shown things that interest me. I'm not expecting it, I don't seize it. Then I bought the cassia, and a small white freesia for December, and took home a cedar branch and a fir branch, which I can smell now. M carried the cassia upstairs for me. I gave him chocolate soy milk and downloaded the photos of Scott's garden while he went through the Wild Gardens of California book. I had put on Eva. Don't think he liked it, which means he is not musical though he thinks he is. Something I liked about his company though he stank. I said he had to wash his hands before he touched the books. Jeanne's thesis isn't good though it is good for her to have done it. It was preliminary I think. The writing I liked in it was my own. She quoted me on creative authority and the marriage with the uncon. Before I go to sleep I'll say that when I imagine a man as I'm fading I start with what he's wearing - a washed teeshirt, old dockers and moccasins on bare feet. He has a black and white brushcut and there is a fainter band on his tanned left wrist. When he's at home he doesn't wear a watch. When he does, it's a black leather strap. 9 A bad thing, phone ringing downstairs, a lot. I was reading the winter of 94-95 this morning, pleasure in the writing. I was alive then, personally, and now am not alive enough to write well here. That is a worry. I write knowing it is not going to be good. Is it because of the teaching? It says no.
10th An Argentinian high school teacher in a beautiful much-washed plaid shirt, teaches economics, social studies, told me about a politics of education group called Rouge Forum. Said high school teaching positions are being filled by ex-military coming into second careers. That was when I was saying high school teachers are on the front lines. He said many of them aren't fighting, they don't have a union, they have a professional association. They're middle class. He and his wife are involved with Chiapas. He'd like to live in Patagonia. Reminded me of Andy Wyman. What did I do today. Finished reading vol 2, divided it into 3 parts. Drafted the 3 language workshop patches. Revised embod reading lists. Went to Henrietta's party - I actually know someone called Henrietta now. Tried to reserve tickets. The second floor with my plants looked nice - plants and chairs - candles. This morning when I got up in the dark there was a sickle moon behind the eucalyptus trees. Midday hot enough to have the door open, turn off the heat. 11 I woke before 5 this morning and was reading part 1 of vol 3, very intense.
It's Saturday afternoon. Concert tonight if Tom gets it together. Garden meeting this morning. Sent Scott an estimate. If he accepts it I'll make about $500 including heavy labour. 12 Tom helped me finish digging the garden. Really that's a SHOUT, I'm happy it's done. It's done! I was still in bed working on the vol 2 and 3 front pages. Showed him. Talked about having to think about how famous to be. I don't want to be, but want my work to be, I said. Right there I was talking straight out of myself to him. - More tomorrow maybe, I don't have the energy now. Jose-Luis at Scott's tomorrow. But it was a good day, a wonderful day. 13 Pulled something in my neck working with the pickaxe. It's dark, before 6. The high-pitched buzz of the computer. My tea water heating. Tom and I went, on Saturday night, to a concert of old rockers, Garth Hudson, keyboardist for The Band, Sneaky Pete of the Burrito Brothers, slide guitar, who wrote Hickory Wind. Three nobodies on stage between them. - Jose-Luis and I finished digging at Scott's. I cleaned up the bougainvillea's twiggy rubbish, opened up woodsy spaces where I could. 14 A month till I leave for Vermont. Yesterday I got vol 4 onto its sheets. Now it is very early Tuesday, black and damp. I went to bed at 8:30 aching here and there. I want to say how strong I've been. On Sunday finishing the digging with Tom I dug and hacked with the pick as strong as ever, untiring, and then yesterday I pruned for 5 hours, up and down, bending, sitting, stretching, running around (while Jose-Luis dug up the shrubs), and then after lunch dug the north bed very fast for 2 hours. 15 I've woken at 3. Still aching dully. Depressed by what I've seen of myself these last days in the windows at Scott's, in the photos Tom took. A thick grey person. I'm looking so strangely thick through the chest, buxom. I want to always look the way I looked in that photo Steven Arthur took. I was a beautiful 50. Now I am a thick grey little 60 - almost - but could be beautiful if I were in life, somehow. - Later. Starbucks in the sun. Office people. Office people on cell phones. She's got the shoes but not the legs. He's looking after her two juicy round bum cheeks. Pancake makeup - why do people think it doesn't look like what it is, a skin of dried-out brown fluid. It's hot. Mike's inside, behind me, reading the sports page. What am I doing today. Talk to Adam if I can. There's the black man without arms, shouting angrily, wearing a dark blue teeshirt with long sleeves dangling, TITANIC in white letters. I should stop reading newspapers. This is better. So now Mike has come outside. I want to talk, he does not. He wants to keep reading his newspaper. I bore him. Those two sparrows, a mated pair he said, perching in the small jacaranda. Garbage truck. Oh he has a beautiful walk. He's gone to look for cigarettes, hunting and gathering. Man in sandals and a cowboy hat. Very old man with bowed legs. Car whose dusty finish is streaked with fine crinkled lines where dew rolled down. Here comes noble-looking him back. I think he must have washed his cargos. He has money today, he's buying the LA Times. There I stop and make a list of what I have. When I get into the work I've done, I think I need an agent. Set up The Golden West and then look for a marketer, maybe through CFMDC or Moving Images or someone they know in NY. Someone who'd book interviews and such. Aggressive enthusiastic smart person who knows the art/academic scene. Ask Nicole. What I'd want is for her to get the work known and find me enough money to be able to quit [the college] and afford my own place and pay for health care and dental and get me a better community. What do I have:
- Juliana sent me a piece of writing about Michael [Deragon], Carolyn and her having a hot week together last June. As a whole piece it often goes wrong but there are lines and paragraphs that come clear and direct and make me think of me and Cheryl and Trudy, and me and Tom. She's so aquiver and wishing to give. There's a line where she says, Will you be our angel, that I think means me, and yes I am that for them individually and in their daring. She makes me feel how I'm crippling myself being faithful and pent. Sexual freedom is the only way to be alive in her way. I'm making myself ugly.
16 Rowen phoned last night. He has a room and Michael is just up the hall. A cell phone. A job installing shelving with two island guys, $11 an hour and overtime. He took his black coat to the dry cleaner. He bought bamboo blinds for his bow window over Union Street, from which he can see the mountains. His cell phone has an alarm ring that can be set so it doesn't go off on weekends. He and Michael find good clothes in secondhand stores. There were bins of books downstairs in one of the stores and he spent two hours digging through one of them. Found all 9 volumes of a series he was looking for. Lise's sister gave him a computer and it's internet-connected. He was happy feeling he has got it together. I said would he like a digital camera for Christmas. Michael is tying rebar. I'm waiting for Raymond to phone from the mushroom farm. It's cold inside, warm on the roof. My small South African gibbaeum dispar is blooming purple like an aster, the faucaria yellow. I'm stressed by waiting, very, always. - Raymond went on about Tom: he's quiet, keeps to himself, runs the council meetings [at the mission], says here are the rules, was the d.j. at a party. "He was on his J.O.B., he was on his job!" Besides that, took 3 hours to get to San Marcos, hesitated when I said could he help me unload, did the wheelbarrowing, then drove his truck out of the driveway and said he was done for the day. Wanted to keep me sitting on and on listening to how he has hepatitis. So Tom sent me someone who isn't able-bodied, and I have to tell Scott sorry the brush isn't taken to the dump, and will have to clean up twice. Apart from that I was glad to be able to stop at 4, put gas in the jeep, transmission fluid, wash the windows, go to Whole Foods and bring home smoked salmon chowder. But I have the phone unplugged because Tom will ask how it went and if I tell him he will feel he didn't do well and then he'll take it out on me. I'm wise. I'll let him hear it from his bunkie. I'll let him rage at himself not me. Maybe tomorrow I'll plug in the phone. Maybe not. And did he do well? He didn't tell me the man has hepatitis, which is infectious. And did Raymond chisel on his hours? Maybe some. I had to work harder for my profit than I wanted - ie it's mostly labour @ $10 rather than real profit. But the compost is down. 17th Luke's birthday. I woke before midnight and made some tea. Am playing the Hyperion Handel L'allegro, il penseroso. Yesterday in an envelope from Mary an invitation to Alberta to a class reunion. A photo of the grade two class.
It's a passage in which the flute and soprano sing as nightingales. There are three sopranos. The one who holds my ear is this one, Lorna Anderson. 1740 Lying in the dark before I decided to give up on sleeping I was remembering the Sunday morning visiting Ed and Mary when I was in my middle thirties. I was going to church with them and put on the green turquoise and gold blouse John Rowley gave me. It was more transparent than I knew, and I wasn't wearing a bra. When Ed saw me in it he grimaced and covered his eyes but he did not refuse to take me and I sat singing hymns in the La Glace MB church with my breasts displayed. I won, I say, and take a breath. I took something back from him and them. Then I remembered Ed crying when he was in the hospital dying, and Grandpa Konrad at the breakfast table. Opa cried because he couldn't control me. I don't know why Ed cried. Maybe it was the same. Because they could not control me I can do what I can do. So now I'm thinking what I will say on the sheet for the reunion booklet. And I'm thinking I'll go. I was already thinking I'd go to the PRC next summer.
- I'm thinking now that I was awake this morning at the time Luke was being born. When I phoned just now Luke's cell rang in the Keg restaurant off Robson where he's having dinner with Kim. He went outside to speak to me. He liked Ned Kelly and has just begun Annie Dunne. - There I go order him some more books on amazon.ca, Coetzee's Age of iron, Richard Holme's Coleridge: early visions, Richard Adams Richards' Nights below Station Street. He said he had had half a cocktail but it sounded like more. He goes soft-headed when he drinks. I speak to him aware that it's not quite him. He did say Roy these days has been 8 years in therapy and is clear, he doesn't have to try, it's light. "Now when he says things I believe him." I said I'd sometimes had a glimpse of that person and that was why I had stayed around. At that point he said he must go back to Kim. I felt quite chopped. He called back. He said, I love you. I said, Oh - I love you too. I said it in quite a complicated moment because I was touched into wet eyes by saying so, but at the same time I was dramatizing the way I said it, because I don't like to say it but couldn't not say it under the circumstances. I was grateful that he'd felt his abruptness and wanted to fix it. What moment did I like best - when his voice got eager as he said he noticed in Annie Dunne that all the characters had done in the first couple of chapters was go to bed and get up but he'd been completely with them. He's going to Kim's family for Christmas. My orphan son. And will go to England for Roy's birthday in June, and said he'd go with me to La Glace for my reunion. Today I went to Starbucks with the Reader and Michael saw me looking at the Services columns and took his opportunity and went and got Anthony. We stomped down the brush and they took it to the dump and got a beautiful load of mulch and we spread it and I paid them $15 an hour plus gas, and sleazy Michael who said he'd do a 10-5 split took advantage of Anthony's decency and split 50-50 so Anthony made 7:50 an hour in spite of it being his truck. But still I enjoyed working at Scott's today, the look of the beautiful hot black stuff under bushes and especially around the pot in its new position under the bougainvillea. He said I can buy new chairs! And move both the sofas. And I liked working with Anthony who looks a bit like Dave Carter I realized, and bossy Michael who is like me in always giving advice and hating to be given it. 19 I went to bed at 8:30. It's now 5:23, black and silent Monday morning. Woke suddenly from a dream. - I stop listening when it's the men singing, but now Lorna Anderson begins and I am caught. She is lying back on her breath, her breath is floating out weightless and precise.
Then looking at the lyrics in the square little CD booklet I discover the passage was in fact about breathing music and airy stream. An air they call the lyric sections that aren't recitative or chorus. As for Mr Milton, this was the best they could do before the Romantics? They had to feel nature through imagined pagan antiquity, ie set about with broken statues. Yesterday we went to the beach. A Santa Ana with big waves. We parked at Torrey Pines State Beach and took the orange blanket up the coast to a spot with a hunk of telephone pole for a backrest, and sat together facing the waves all through the afternoon until the sun set at 5:30. Here's the lovely melody just near the end, the duet, Susan Gritton and the tenor -
"Restoring intellect-u-al day" they sing together, so nicely enunciating the u. It's perfect choral writing, bassoon and oboe, soprano and tenor, nimbly overlaid. As if they couldn't feel nature in their language but could do so superbly in the structure of the music - I guess it's that. Uses of the segregated brain. - We were facing the waves head-on, and they were breaking close to shore, so that we would see them rising till their edge was just in line with the horizon, a long line up and down the coast. Then they would fall forward and in one motion their white rubble would rise as high as they had been. Later in the afternoon, if we looked southwest toward the sun, we would see the wave turquoise as glass where it was stretched thin, and then the wide arc of white spray drawing a half-circle flung over its flattening back. It was a classic day at the winter beach. I sat in my orange singlet with bare feet, sunglasses, white hat. The hair on Tom's arms was glinting silver and copper. It was nine years later. We were comfortable together. He was fretting about sex and I was lightly holding my line. Then he entertained me riffing on everyone who passed. Can I reconstruct any of that? Probably not. It's his gift. Characters passed and we saw them. What I said about sex was that he has always pushed me to attach more than my circumstances warrant. I went along with it because I wanted the ride, but I suffered horrendously of insecurity. I worked with everything there was to work with and I don't need to do that anymore. It wants me to learn to have everything I used to have by means of sex, by other means. What I need him to do is take care of himself. He is very improved but he isn't established. When he was pushing about sex I was feeling a bit sadly that I'd so like a man who's accomplished and has money. I've earned that. It says I'm not going to have it [get it from a man], I will have to be it myself. But I should hold out for it even if I can't have it. It's for my dignity. So is my dignity more important than my vitality, I say plaintively. No, it says. Have vitality too. Alright. It's two hours later. This was a good morning. Pink morning light. Just a few of the teeth on the upper combs of the palm are oscillating. What am I doing this week and this morning - [list] 20 Monday. Woke at 5:30 and worked on Speaking bodies III, ethics of language practice. When we don't like someone's language there's usually a reason. Overheard language. Environmental language. Unbearable language. Delightful language. Linguistic pleasure. Both. And Luke came to be because of linguistic pleasure. Linguistic completion and incompletion. What one has to say, withholding or giving it. TLA and completion. Two-chair dialogue. Journal. Dynamic completion - the therapeutic sequence. Wound up to speak. Knowing who one needs to say it to. Dream completion. Loaded for bear, spring-loaded. 'Resolving.' Allows contact, I've said what I have to say, it's been heard, now we're friends again. 'Articulating.' We know when we've said it. Feeling satisfied. Saying more than one knows. 'Gifted.' 'Paralinguistic.' Writing that walks like a bear. 'Rich language.' Semantic sound. What embodied writing could mean. Motion. Not about but from. Dramatizes a state, drama of state shift. Sensory exactitude. Be it and write it. Deep restructuring, deep flexibility. Being more oneself by being more the other. Power and language. Entitlement. Paralysis of language when one is not heard. Is it a physical transaction? 'Holding a space.' Knowing the quality of a listener by the quality of one's own language. Audience. Practicing. Being shut out. "You can't bear me to exist." Refused linguistic power. Linguistic authority. Conversely, difficulties of listening. What is it I can't bear. Answer: anxiety, manipulation conscious or unconscious, implicit demand, lack of being, falseness. Delightful language, unbearable language. What does it mean to have an ear? Sensitivity to sound. You can hear repetitions, rhythm. In poetry, the natural voice. Ear for accents, voices. Verbal memory. Rhythmic variation and drama. When people are really involved these things come about effortlessly - why? Because of involvement/wholeness of body in making language. Gesture is a sign of it. Muscle involvement, neurotransmitter involvement, sensory-motor, deep rather than shallow simulation. You can use gesture and metaphor and 'image' to see how someone is thinking. 21st Walking into the 7th floor stacks [UCSD] hit by the smell of the stacks in Queen's library. Unnamable. Acrid. Thick. A university library when I first knew one, euphoria with yellow leaves on the boulevard outside. << 1963 I shot up 163 to 805, to the parking lot plazas of Miramar Road, furniture and auto parts warehouses strung across chaparral with no neighbourhoods behind them. I was looking for the Teak Emporium. The vast asphalt was empty until ten, and then a few SUVs docked head first into slots that are nothing but painted lines - they don't drive across a line so they'll be facing out - and someone arrives at each warehouse door carrying keys. At UCSD outside the student's union cafeteria, a strong scent of eucalyptus resin. Almost pine. I was walking on campus sorry I don't belong there, feeling what it would be to be entitled. Filling out the library card I put a circle around Dr. It is and isn't my place, I mean a university. I've been a real scholar but I'm not a real professor. Go to the bookstore and look at the cog sci/linguistics section. Fuster has a 2003 book on wide nets. Came home with shopping bags full of books. Provisioning. I haven't been able to do this for 2 years. DR's letters. [Dorothy Richardson] When I woke this morning at 4 I worked until 7:30 on the index pages for GW and vols 1 and 5. 22nd Starbucks. There's Michael Duke chatting up a female who's buying him food. This morning I worked on volume index pages - design is almost right. Little things. Learning to use crisp for text on the buttons and then changing the red to the reddest, ff0000. Volume index tease text. It's a way of introducing the volume and there's an optimum amount. I liked italics for them but it fuzzes the eyes.
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23rd Last night I started to design 1961. Want to put it and 1962 up at the same time as the first 5 of GW. At 16 I was a very steady writer - I mean I had a light, level energy, technical ease. I was articulate. I go silly in relation to gender mostly. Wish I had written more about my family and places. I'm riveted by the touching, which is the least interesting thing that was happening because it was also the most suppressed. The best thing I did was quote Frank verbatim. He's there. I'll put his letters offside. I'll link through - that stream will be Frank after his life. Would Judy Doerksen like it or hate it? Would Sharon? I'll ask them.
It's Thursday morning in sun, on the street. Michael is next to me in a very pale blue shirt reading the front section of the Union. He's refusing to talk. What a stubborn thing he is. Why would anyone prefer reading the Union to learning all about Ellie Epp. I've just read him this paragraph. He shook his head and said nothing. It shook me to do that but I am not a coward. What next. He won that skirmish, but by resistance not action. Okay, write about something else. What. Fat little sheriff getting into his cruiser with a tall iced tea. Wire-sided elevator sliding up and down a track on the outside of the new condos. Horizontal arm of the crane yellow against the deep deep very subtly fibrous blue sky. The little jacarandas stirring their crocheted plumes. The arm of the crane rotates 40 degrees. It's half a block long. A black and white seagull was rowing a straight line that intersected it. A sheer sheeny black tarp screening two floors at the corner of that building is breathing and rippling like wrinkled silk. What am I doing today. Could transcribe the first part of 1961. It's the beginning of the intercalated days, Saturnalia. Holding off on Scott. Holding off on the last three evaluations. Holding off on embodiment. Holding off on any more labour 'til I'm mended from the last time. Holding off on the language lectures. Holding off on reading stuff students sent me - but get some of that off my desk. Michael looked up when that man, picking a table, said the word 'smoke.' He was assessing for cigarette-bumming purposes. I'm wondering whether I'm less pure in spirit than I was when I was 16, and whether that is why in the last 10 years I've known so many men who are crooks. And if it's that, where I went wrong. 35 years really, wasn't Peter the first one? No, Rasheed was. So it's 40 years - but my theory doesn't hold because there were generous men betweentimes, Greg, Andy. And what did I do to deserve Louie (was honest with Jam and C and T, is what). If that's how it works, I am due for a good one, because I was honest with Tom. But if I'm due for none at all, that means I get to go up a level to something new. Okay, remember that. - In the afternoon Tom knocks with a TV. He cashed his check and went to OB to the pawnshops. It's a nice TV, black, simple. I've never owned a color TV. I showed him my index pages. Something moved him. He pulled me to his chest and stroked my head. What are you thinking, I said. Silence. That you're feminine when you're happy. You're feminine, really. He was happy. He was DJ for the Christmas party at the mission, on his job. Excited. There's a Christmas tree I'm smelling this moment. I said Christmas Eve, tomorrow, I'll cook for him. He said could it be spaghetti. I was looking at my palm tree braids thinking could I put lights and decorations on them. Then after I took Tom home, there next to the slot where I parked on 4th was a noble fir with two pieces of paper stuck to it saying free tree please take. This tree is touching the ceiling and is making it complicated to open the closet door. 24
25 Tom brought his playlist for the dance. I said, all but the Christmas songs. We danced. I would lean over his shoulder and crank up the sound. He was moved by the tree. My plan was to give him what he most wants, a family feeling. Vic and Mac would say, What shall we eat for Christmas, let's have spaghetti. He said he was blissed out all day thinking he was going to be with me Christmas Eve. I was not blissed out. My muscles were very sore. I had pulled something in my shoulder. I was nostalgic for the last time we had a tree together, which was 1997, I think, in the Shangri-la in Bellingham. Tom is nostalgic about the tree farm, but I am nostalgic for being in love with him, being in a bed in a room with him, with the lights of the tree. I was the lit room. << 1997 Louie called from a phone booth in India. Tom went out and sat on the roof in the dark looking at the Mr A's lights, being blissed out. Tom needs and is happy when there is a woman making a home for him. He was never in love the way I was. When I say that my eyes feel sharp with tears. He is learning to earn what he needs. I tried talking to him about La Glace and Frank. He listened but he didn't care, he didn't bring it alive in me, he was waiting to deliver his own speech. And so? Any minute he is arriving. We'll go driving in the hills. Ellie has company but she doesn't have a heart. I'm not all the way alive unless someone is loving me the way my mother did. You have nothing to say about that, do you - it's just the way it is.
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