Let me try to paint for you a picture of that enchanting Glynnscape. Imagine their bed, an improvised four-poster that the romantic and resourceful sisters had created by pushing their child-size twin beds together and screwing tall poles to the corners. Across the tops of the poles they had lashed wooden slats, and from the slats they’d hung gauze. Gauze curtained the windows, too, and panels of it hung from the ceiling wherever the girls had felt that a hanging panel of gauze was needed. Their room was never lit by a lamp, only by the stars and the moon. The dim light softened the effect of the stone walls, and the gauze, like an artificial fog, made everything in the room seem soft and vague, not quite what it really was. That gauzy fog must have been what kept me so blissfully mystified for all the time I was in the twins’ stone-walled seraglio.
The first time I climbed into their room, I didn’t notice the way they’d decorated it, though I felt its effect, as I was meant to. I didn’t appreciate the fact that everything in the room, from all that gauze down to the tiny leather-bound volume of Persian poems and the moonlight, was for me, to attract me, to seduce me. It worked. I went willingly into the arms of those little enchantresses, and I have never had occasion to regret it.
(Girls, girls, how I loved you, how I love you still. There are times in the night, usually a crisp fall night, of course, when I remember each of you in your turn, and both of you together, and curse my memory for not being good enough to bring you right back to me, slip you into bed beside me, twine your limber arms and legs about me—and so on. I can imagine you reading these words, and I think I can almost hear you giggling.)
My dalliance with the Glynns: I know exactly when it began. It was the night we went to the movies—
Wait a minute, indulgent reader. A wave of uncertainty has swept over me. Do I know exactly when it began? I’m not so sure.
Whenever this uncertainty comes over me, I have to admit that I’ve brought it on myself. I’m no longer sure what I know about my past and what I’ve made up. Imagine, please, a child staring out a window, bored, on a rainy day when there are no distracting friends to lift him out of his own thoughts. Without thinking, he has picked up two tiny bits of modeling clay, one blue, one yellow. While he stands watching the rain and musing, he’s been absentmindedly manipulating the bits of clay, rolling them together between his fingers, until now he has a single lump about the size of a pea, which he continues rolling for the simple sensual pleasure of it. Well, there you are. I began with bits of memory and imagination, but I’ve been manipulating the two for so long now that, like the bored child’s lump of clay, what began as two colors—the factual and the fictional—has become a single lump, blended in swirly confusion, that I go on massaging for the pleasure of it.
[to be continued]
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