The Tall Boy: A Memoir by Jess Gregg

Author:Jess Gregg [Gregg, Jess]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781504023986
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2015-11-23T13:00:00+00:00

13

WHAT CAN I TELL YOU, HON?

Everyone who met Marion was instantly on first-name terms with her. Several years into our friendship, however, I took to calling her Mrs. Cole in a last-ditch effort to ease some dignity back into her increasingly outrageous life.

My own life had seemed relatively simple at the time we met. I had come to the Hamptons for the summer, not to play, but to finish up some work, and was looking for an unpretentious little house, quiet, inexpensive. By the third day of my search, I was used to the laughter these specifications set off, and was ready to modify them: a room. Anywhere. “You might try Marion Cole down the block,” the check-out girl at the supermarket said. “If you’re broadminded, that is. Some of her friends are rumored to fly.”

It sounded wonderful, and I went to the address at once—a shingled saltbox with a sagging screen door. No one answered the bell, so I poked my head inside. The front room had apparently been abandoned at a moment of cataclysm, like those villas in Pompeii with the table all set, and a knife in the loaf. Here, the artifacts were somehow less poignant. A convertible sofa had not quite made it back together again. A pink plastic curler shared a dish with a quarter pound of soft butter, and Scrabble tiles were scattered over the floor. The only visible movement anywhere was a silently spinning turntable, long since at the end of its tune.

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