Vampire.doc

Ancient file on my hard drive, a 1500-word excerpt from Emily, an unpublished short story (c. 1993) about a somewhat sleazy and desperate commercial art dealer's attempt to hustle a young female painter into bed. Turns out she's One of Them. Predictable and tragic results. I'm currently reading Keith Maillard's novels Cutting Through (1982) and Running (2006) side-by-side, out of interest in the rewriting process that brought the new book and its sequels to life out of the old one. So, just for fun, I picked a random, long, and not too badly written paragraph from vampire.doc, and spent a half hour revising line-by-line:

"There's a funny break in my memory here. Here we are on the way home from North Vancouver. We're in a cab, both of us in the back seat as we cross the bridge in the rain. My car must be back at the restaurant; I don't know why this is, only that I haven't been this drunk in a long time. Instead of heading straight downtown the cabbie takes Park Drive, following a laborious counterclockwise path around the park. Emily talks quietly to him; I can't make out what she's saying. The radio is playing light hits -- Jennifer Warnes or Carly Simon -- and the cab's headlights make tunnels through the dark, wet night, the shadows of the overarching trees and the tangled growth at the side of the road. Underlying this is the smell of the tree-shaped deodorizer hanging from the cab's mirror. A heavy, cloying, smell, like fruit punch, and beneath that a bitterness, like car exhaust, or copper. Memory comes and goes, and I’m throwing up in a deserted parking lot in the rain, half-leaning out of the cab while Emily holds me by one arm. Another break, and I'm almost home, the West End's apartments rising reassuringly around us. My building's elevator. Emily somehow holding me up, even though I'm limp and heavy in her arms. Lying down on my living room couch. She covers me with my coat. It smells of the cab, that half-fruity, half-bitter scent. Her lips on my cheek. And then everything blurs and runs together, and the next thing I know it's morning. I'm lying on the couch in the cold apartment, and Emily is gone. My head aches and throbs. I half-stand, half-roll off the couch, and stumble past the stereo and coffee table to the bathroom, where I throw up in the sink, then stand there, gripping its sides, while I shake and shake and shake. In the mirror my eyes are dark and watery, my face pale, pocked with stubble and red inflammation. I throw up again and crawl back to bed, and the next thing I know the phone is ringing. I snatch it up. 'Hello?' The voice on the other end isn't Emily's, but Mike Connaught’s, the Vancouver Sun's arts critic. 'I hear I missed a party,' he says by way of greeting. He doesn't like the gallery, doesn't like the commercial concessions he claims I make routinely. 'I'll be reviewing the show,' he tells me with the faint undertone of condescension that I always detect in his voice, 'and I'd like to get in to see it. Today, in fact.'"

(E. Munch painting that got me thinking about all this ancient history above)

- posted by cjb @ 11:25 PM