FIRE SALE
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piece of hashish, and we can smoke and talk or sleep if we want,
and never mind the heroes we have to be, yes, change your life with
someone else more important, let's just have a morning together for
the sake of our curious friendship.
- I don't believe you have any hashish.
- God
damn you!
I
took one hand from her body and shot the other at the
ignition key which
I
buried in the fist
I
waved between our faces.
- This
is
going up to my room. I'll give it to you up there or
you can stay right here and push the car to wherever you want to go.
- Let me park at least.
-No.
- The morning is not going to please you.
- As
far as I'm concerned it can't get any worse.
I climbed out, she set the emergency brake, gathered her shoes,
sat
In
the open car door to put them on, and then we climbed the
three flights up to the room which contained all the evidence with
which I urgently needed to assail her disbelief.
I don't remember what her body was like. That four o'clock
morning was two years ago, and the price I've paid for this story
is
to
no longer believe that it happened, that I ever undressed her in the
same careful manner with which she dressed, just as we keep the
cotton that a jewel comes in, hanging her clothes over the back of
the solitary chair, praising her at every stage. Certain sweet and minor
plots of the memory should never be violated for they shrivel like
picked poppies, but it is two years later today and I am trying to
write
myself out of another very sunny beach, trying to place these
events in some expensive magazine.
As
she entered the room she drew off her white gloves and
folded them into a tight ball as if to expose as little of their surface
as
possible to the brown rotogravure light.
- These are my books, this and this, actual published books.
- I'm too lazy to read English. Nothing
is
going to change in
this
room, that I promise you.
- Are
you too lazy to smoke some very fine Lebanese hashish?
She did not answer me and I thought I detected an instant of
charity
in
her expression. We were standing too close in the tiny floor
r
space, like two people trying to hear the same conversation in a
e
telephone booth, and what we were listening to was another way
