THERE WAS APPLAUSE. It was Friday night, and the crowd — oh, let’s call it a crowd even if it was a very small crowd — was in a Friday-night mood. Lou was kept busy behind the bar. He didn’t know how to make very many drinks, but he was eager to learn, and he was happy to pay for any drink that his customers weren’t satisfied with.
“You know,” he said to one of those customers, a short brunette perched on a bar stool, “for me, a cocktail shaker is a kind of black box.”
“A black box?” she said, knitting her brows and poking her lower lip out fetchingly.
“Yeah,” said Lou. “Like a tape recorder. Like the tape recorder in the story Peter read?”
She looked at him and shrugged. “I guess I missed that part,” she said.
“Yeah, I guess so,” said Lou. “The point is that I don’t really know how the thing works.” He held the cocktail shaker up and looked at it as if it were a technologically sophisticated device. “I put in what I think is supposed to go in, shake it up, cross my fingers, and hope that what comes out is what you wanted.” He shook the shaker, uncapped it, filled a cocktail glass, and set it in front of the dark-haired woman. “There you go,” he said. “Maybe.”
She took a taste of the drink and winced. “This was supposed to be a mai-tai,” she said.
“Isn’t it?” asked Lou.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It tastes funny.”
“Funny?”
“Funny peculiar.”
“I guess my mai-tai isn’t your cup of tea. That one’s on me. The next one, too, if you’ll give me another shot at it. You’re not driving, are you?”
“We came by boat.”
“Uh-huh. You know, I’m sorry that we don’t have any of those little umbrellas. I think a mai-tai is supposed to have a little umbrella in it. I’ll get some in for tomorrow night. You come by tomorrow, and I’ll give you two umbrellas with every drink.”
“I just might take you up on that.”
“You know, if you don’t have to go home with the guy what brung you — ”
“My sister and her husband brought me.”
“Then why not stay for the weekend? This is a great place for a weekend getaway, and we’ve got special rates during the readings.”
She looked around, apparently appraising Small’s as a place for a weekend getaway, then turned to Lou again and said, “There are going to be more readings?”
I decided to call it a night.
IN BED, after we had turned the lights out, found our comfortable positions, and had awaited sleep in silence for a while, Albertine asked me something that I didn’t quite catch.
“Hm?” I said.
“Sorry. Were you asleep?”
“No,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I was thinking about Mrs. Jerrold.”
“Lucky you.”
“Hm?”
“You get into bed and you go — away. I can’t do that. I can’t manage it. It’s part of my problem. You use the past, or your version of the past, as a place to go. You use it to get away from here. I have no place to go to get away from here.”
“Manhattan,” I suggested.
“What?”
“Think about Manhattan.”
“Manhattan,” she said.
“Just try it.”
Again we lay in our separate silences, but after a while Albertine asked, “Was there a Mrs. Jerrold in your life?”
“You’re supposed to be thinking about Manhattan,” I said.
“Was there a Mrs. Jerrold in your life?” she repeated.
“‘In my life,’” I said. “What do you mean by that, exactly? Do you include my mental life, or do you merely mean my material life?”
“In this particular case, I want to know whether there was a Mrs. Jerrold in your material life. It is quite obvious that there was — that there is — a Mrs. Jerrold in your mental life.”
“Well,” I said, “there were certain ingredients that could be made into Mrs. Jerrold, that I have made into Mrs. Jerrold: a woman who lived across the street, another on the next block, and another around the corner, certain events that occurred to someone else entirely — a man, in fact — and many things that I discovered when I was investigating my memories of all of those people, following where my curiosity led me.”
“I see,” she said. She rolled over.
“Want to know where she lives now?”
“What?” She rolled back toward me.
“She lives just around the corner or across the street or down the block in that part of a boy’s mind where he keeps all the girls and women who are the objects of his desires — ”
“A boy’s mind?”
“Well — my mind.”
“So you keep a little place around the corner — ”
“Around the corner, across the street, down the block, in that shadowy part of my mind where all those ladies live, spending their days in lingerie, whiling away the hours, waiting for my nocturnal visits.”
“And am I there when you go there?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, my darling. You are there in all your ages and stages, even the little you from before I met you, which took some doing, let me tell you.”
“And are you there now, in that corner of your mind?”
“No. I’m here, talking to you.”
“But couldn’t you be talking to me there?”
“You mean — ”
“Yeah.”
Then she slid to my side of the bed and taught me how sweet life is when dreams come true.
[to be continued]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide. The Substack serialization of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed. The Substack podcast reading of Little Follies begins here; Herb ’n’ Lorna begins here; Reservations Recommended begins here; Where Do You Stop? begins here; What a Piece of Work I Am begins here; At Home with the Glynns begins here; Leaving Small’s Hotel begins here.
You can listen to “My Mother Takes a Tumble” and “Do Clams Bite?” complete and uninterrupted as audiobooks through YouTube.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of Little Follies, Herb ’n’ Lorna, Reservations Recommended, Where Do You Stop?, What a Piece of Work I Am, and At Home with the Glynns.
You’ll find overviews of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy (a pdf document), The Origin Story (here on substack), Between the Lines (a video, here on Substack), and at Encyclopedia.com.
Share this post