Face at the Window by Dennis McFarland

Author:Dennis McFarland [McFarland, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6505-3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-12-18T00:04:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

ODDLY ENOUGH, ONCE I got started with The Strange Business at the Hotel Willerton, it came fluently—I told about the piano music in the elevator, about my meeting with the young girl in the sitting room, about the inexplicable changes in the flat, the teakettle, the bearded drunk in the bed, and finally about James; I made no mention of my comatose sleeping, of sex or blood or garlic arrangements in the kitchen sink—and no matter how much I tried to shape it into the form of a confession, no matter how many opportunities I took along the way to point out my extreme defects of character, my obsessive nature, my shameless secrecy, all anyone cared about was the story itself; they weren’t the least bit interested in me. This of course is what every storyteller ultimately wants, to be upstaged by his material, yet I couldn’t help but feel a little slighted. As perverse consolation, my agile mind provided, stuffed into every breath and pause, a recurring intrusion for my private enjoyment, snatches of a kind of fretful cabaret ballad, full of wishes: I wished I’d been born to physically attractive, educated parents who lived someplace like Philadelphia or Georgetown, who read books and went to plays and gave dinner parties; I wished my father had been, instead of a farmer and a murderer, a college professor and a civil rights worker, and that my mother, instead of crawling around on all fours in a farmhouse bathroom, scrubbing out the tub and the toilet with Ajax, groaning with the pain of her arthritic hips and shoulders, had played the violin and cultivated roses; I wished we’d had a summer place on a lake, and a boathouse; I wished that as an adolescent I could have come in from the fields with my butterfly net over my shoulder without feeling I was a foolish disappointment to my whole family; I wished I hadn’t got drunk before the senior play (Death Takes a Holiday) and performed my role (Eric) from start to finish in a total blackout; I wished I hadn’t thrown up in my brother’s borrowed Camaro on the way home. These, I understand, were not the wishes of a child but the wishes of an adult man who had failed in some significant way to grow out of childishness. To what degree this wistful theme affected the tone of my account at the breakfast table I can’t say for sure. I do recall looking repeatedly to Pascal, for his encouraging loyalty, and I recall one pathetic bit near the end, which went something like: “I know you’re probably all thinking I’m crazy, that I need to see a doctor, that there’s something unhealthy and even unsavory about everything I’m telling you here, but you couldn’t possibly think anything about me I haven’t already thought about myself.”

To which Mrs. Sho-pan blinked her eyes slowly, patiently, and said, “Did the girl actually tell you her name?”

My proper focus of course would have been Ellen.

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