In the night room Page 0,51
can hardly remember any of that time now. It was so dark! Was I awful to be with? I’m sure I was. Please, if you can, forgive me for being such a selfish pig.”
He had so astonished me that I hardly knew how to reply. All sorts of internal calibrations had to happen before words that seemed at least reasonably suited to the situation came to me. “Philip, you don’t need my forgiveness, but I find it very moving that you should ask for it. Of course I forgive you, if that’s what you want.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Now say hello to China. Here she is.”
Immediately, a warm alto voice seemed to fill the receiver. “Tim, is that really you? It’s such a pleasure to talk to you! And we’re both so happy that you’ll come to our wedding.”
“Well, I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.
“All your brother needed was for someone to look past the lobster act and find the real person in there,” she continued.
In the background, I could hear Philip shouting, “Hell, I hardly knew I was a real person!”
To which I can only reply, Hell, I hardly knew you were, either. For years and years I’ve been kind of going on faith that something like “a real person” was lurking under Philip’s terrible persona, but that faith had been eroded almost to the point of disappearance. If this China Beech can unearth the happier, more sensitive man I hoped lived within my brother, I’ve been misjudging her ever since the first time I heard her name.
Now to get to the other topic, the one I’ve been avoiding.
I fear I’m on the verge of letting the crazy events in my life leak into my fiction. Jasper Kohle, my sister, Cyrax . . . if I put this stuff into the book no one on earth is going to think it comes straight out of my life; the real challenge is to make it fit in with the material already present. Surely there would be some way to insert WCHWHLLDN and little Alice in Wonderland into my girl’s adventures, especially once she hits the road. Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do!—feed the whole mishmash of e-mail from dead people, along with a pissed-off angel, pissed-off Jasper Kohle (the Dark Man?), and Cyrax into this flight-from-Bluebeard narrative. It wouldn’t be the book I set out to write, but I’ve begun to lose faith in that book anyhow.
When I look again at the chapter I finished last week, its information seems to come out in too great a rush—within a space of fifteen pages, two separate kinds of treachery are revealed. We have to get this information, it sets up her flight from the villain & her discovery of the truth behind what she imagines to have been her life, but I have the unhappy feeling that the download time is too fast here. The fault may lie in the presentation, which consists nearly 100% of conversation. How far can I push the conventions that automatically come into play when you have two people talking alone in a room? That is, how much of the scene has to be about them, and how much of it can it be stretched out to accommodate the information they bring into that room? Drag in too much exterior stuff, and you’ve got a soap opera on your hands.
Or maybe it’s just that the scene is inert, and I’ll have to go back and write the whole thing out in chronological order. The storm, the photos, the bank, the return to the house, the lost hours, and the arrival at the hotel. Then the conversation with Tom—but if we’ve already seen what our heroine has been through, why have the scene at all? The whole point of getting Tom into the hotel room was to set him up for the scene that comes immediately after this one. And there I thought I got things right, for a change.
The elements seemed to fall together in a way that created a lot of emotion, as well as tension, if I say so myself. We’ve established the love between Willy and Tom (and, in fact, for some reason I found myself noticing a little sexual attraction between them, a kind of spark that surprises the two of them only a little more than it surprised me), which I think adds something to Tom in our eyes, so that we are swayed by his opinions—or at least want