I sat there, brooding in the smoke and honky-tonk roar, the din of all those chattering voices and laughter, and Amanda was sitting on the other end of the sofa from me. She said she knew who I was, that she’d read The Ark of Poseidonand, what’s more, she hadn’t really liked it. And nothing gets me wet like literary rejection. And, too, I probably hadn’t been laid in the last six months. She was wearing this skimpy wifebeater A-shirt and jeans, and there was nothing the least bit artificial about her breasts. Though, honest to fucking god, it was the talk that got me, at least at the start. I mean, she just sat down and started telling me how I’d screwed up that novel, like I’d asked her opinion or something. She was smoking clove cigarettes and drinking Jack and Coke, and it amazes me now that I can remember either of those details, given it’s been two years, and I was very, very drunk at the time.
“I wouldn’t go so far to say that it’s overwritten,” she said. Well, no. I don’t remember precisely whatshe said, but that was the sentiment. “But it could have been a lot less wordy.” I do recall that she said wordy,and that she laughed afterwards.
“Is that a fact?” I might have asked, and maybe she nodded and took a drag off her cigarette.
“Also,” she said, “the shell in Titian’s Venus Anadyomeneis most emphatically not an oyster shell, but a scallop. And the painting was owned by John Sutherland Egerton, who was the 6th Duke of Sutherland, not by the 5th Duke of Sutherland.” And no, that’s not really what she said. I have no idea what she really said, but it was exactly that pedantic and irrelevant to both the theme and plot of the novel.
“Yeah? So, sue the copy editor,” I replied, and she laughed again.
“You ever even been to Greece?” she may have asked next, and I may have replied, “You’re an audacious little cunt, aren’t you?”
“Audacity,” she said (or let’s say she did). “Yeah, I am audacious. But, as Cocteau said, ‘Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.’ ”
“I think I must have missed the tact.”“Then you aren’t paying attention.”
I finished a bottle of Michelob and set the empty on the table beside the sofa. And she just sat there, smoking and watching me with those fucking gray-green eyes of hers, eyes like lichen clinging to boulders on Rocky Mountain tundra or alpine meadows, like something unpleasant growing in the back of the fridge, eyes that were cold and hard, but very much alive.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “I’m drunk. Drunk and confronted with tactless audacity.”
And then she smiled at me and said, “In every artist there is a touch of audacity, without which no talent is conceivable.”
“Oh, so you’re an artist?”
“Depends.”
“On what? On what does it depend?”
“On how one chooses to define art.”
I glanced towards the bar, wanting another beer, but lacking the requisite motivation to walk that far. Besides, she might leave if I got up.
“Who the hell said that, anyway?” I asked her. “ ‘In every artist there is a touch of audacity,’ I mean.”
“Disraeli,” she replied. “But you still haven’t answered my question, Miss Crowe.”
“Do notcall me Miss Crowe. Jesus, I’m not thatmuch older than you, am I?” Only later would I learn that I was (get this) thirteen years older than Amanda, and that we shared the same birthday.
“Have you ever been to Greece?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Two years before I wrote the book,” and then I began ticking off what I could recall of Greek geography on my fingers. “Athens, Lamia, Crete, Pelo ponnese, Thessaly. did the whole tour. I never write about a place unless I’ve spent time there. And you know what I recall the most — I mean besides the ouzo and legal prostitution?”
She said that she didn’t, of course, and by this point I’d forgotten all about wanting another beer and was in full-on tall-tale mode.
“I was out walking on a beach one morning, and don’t ask me where because I don’t remember exactly. Maybe Thessaloniki. Maybe Kavala. But I was out walking off a bull bitch of a hangover, and I came across this enormous dead sea turtle on the sand. It had this awful gash in its shell, and I figured that was probably from a propeller blade. Figured that’s what killed the poor fucker.”
“You went to Greece, and what you remember most is a dead turtle?” she asked, and those gray-green eyes flashed skeptically. “Besides the ouzo and the whores, that is.”
“Yes,” I said, jabbing a finger at her for emphasis. “Yes, that’s what I remember most. That poor, dead fucking sea turtle, spread out there on the beach. It was big, like something from dinosaur times, bigger than any turtle I’d ever seen. It was, I learned later on, a loggerhead, an endangered species. And there it was, fucking murdered by some asshole’s outboard motor, and I just sat down in the sand beside it and cried.”
I stopped talking, and she sat staring at me a moment. I stared back, mostly at her breasts. And then she said, “So, Sarah, you went all the way to Greece, and then you wrote a book about it. But you left out that thing that made the greatest impression upon you?”
“Irony,” I replied, without missing a beat. “Besides, I thought putting the turtle in the book would cheapen it. The novel, I mean. Not the sea turtle. Matter of fact, hell, I’ve never told anyone but you that story.”
“See where audacity gets you?” she asked. “Anyway, the novel you wrote before that one, it was much better.”
“A Long Way To Morning?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. I remember now, because it sounds like an Ernest Hemingway title.” And then she asked if I wanted anything else from the bar, because she’d just finished her Jack and Coke and was sucking on an ice cube.
“I can go,” I offered. “I’m not so drunk I can’t walk.”
“No, I’ll go,” and she glanced at the bottle on the table. “Michelob?”
“Michelob Amber Bock,” I said, and she nodded, standing up, vanishing into the crowd, all those hipster idiots in cowboy boots and rhinestone-studded shirts. I thought sure that was that, all she wrote, and I’d never see her again. But, still, I did congratulate myself on the improvised sea-turtle yarn, thinking it might make a halfway decent short story one day. But she did come back, maybe ten minutes later. I was sitting there peeling the label off my empty bottle, trying to decide if I’d endured enough of the party that it wouldn’t look too bad if I left. There were tattered scraps of foil all over the floor at my feet, on my shoes, a few on the table. I set the empty down and accepted the fresh bottle when she held it out to me.
“Thanks,” I said, and Amanda Tyrell just smiled and shrugged and sat down again, but this time she sat down quite a bit closer to me than before. And then I broached The Question, because, even sober, I’d made The Embarrassing Mistake too many times in the past. Never assume. Never, ever fucking assume.
“You area lesbian,” I said, and that earned more laughter.
“Is that an inquiry or a command?”
“That’s a question,” I said, sipping my beer, “because I think I’m getting signals here, and I don’t want to make a goddamn fool out of myself if you’re straight.”
She stared at me a moment, just long enough, I think, that she knew I’d be getting nervous. And then she nodded.
“Guilty as charged,” she told me. “A lesbian is what I am. Last time I screwed a guy — first and last time, by the way — I was fourteen.”
“Well, then, that’s a relief,” and I laughed, probably for the first time since we’d begun talking.
“But, I have a confession to make,” Amanda continued, so I’m thinking, yeah, here comes the other shoe. She’s in a relationship. Or she’s celibate, or I’m just not her fucking type. Something of the sort surely, but then she says, “I haven’t actually read The Ark of Poseidon. Or anything else you’ve ever written.”