Chapter 38
October 17
A Technical Question
You slip between the sheets, you turn out the light, you close your eyes. Now is the time when dream-women, too quickly undressed, crowd in around you.
Georges Perec, A Man Asleep
WE WERE STILL POWERLESS by mid-morning, when Ms. Fletcher-Hackford’s seventh-grade English class from the Babbington Central Upper Middle School arrived. Their visit had been planned some time ago, and I had forgotten all about it, which meant, of course, that I had forgotten to prepare anything for it. The eager kids constructed a colorful display of fiber-filled coats in a heap at the back of the entrance hall and then created a colorful display of limber body parts on the furniture, rugs, floors, and along the bar in the lounge. They flung themselves about in such a way that the pieces of them seemed not necessarily still to be attached to the kids who had brought them. Louise and Miranda arrived bearing platters of tiny sandwiches and pitchers of colorful juices, and under the influence of this stimulus the body parts reassembled themselves, snapping back into position with remarkable rapidity, as if they were attached by elastic bands, and the kids became whole kids again, quick, agile, hungry kids, who emptied the platters and pitchers before I could say, “Welcome to Small’s Hotel.” Then, satisfied for the moment, they resumed their places, flung their arms and legs every which way as they had before, and turned their attention to Ms. Fletcher-Hackford, who introduced me by reminding her charges how fascinating it was going to be to get the straight poop on memoir writing from “a living author,” and then I stepped forward, the author, live and unprepared.
“While I was thinking about what I might say to you today,” I lied, “I came to the conclusion that what matters most is not what I think I might want to teach you, but what you think you would like to learn from me, so what I’ve decided to do is read to you an episode from the installment of my memoirs that I’m working on now, just to give you an idea of what I’m up to, and then go right into the question-and-answer period. Okay?”
The responses to my “Okay?” — which I had intended as a merely rhetorical question, since I was going to go right ahead and do what I wanted to do whether they thought it was okay or not — were highly individual, ranging from a solemn murmur of endorsement to a ripping imitation of a fart, which seemed to me a comforting indication that, however much the times might have changed, humor, at least at the seventh-grade level, remained an essentially immutable cultural constant.
A girl sitting on a sofa directly in front of me answered only with a smile, but a knowing smile, a smile that made me decide that she had seen through me. It said something along the lines of “Why, you old fraud. You haven’t prepared any sort of lecture or seminar at all, have you? You’re just going to wing it and hope for the best.” I winked at her, so that if she actually had intended her smile to say something along those lines she might join me as a co-conspirator in my fraud, and she winked back. She was tall and slender, with dark hair and budding breasts, and I’m sure she must have been Ms. Fletcher-Hackford’s star pupil. She was a child, of course, probably twelve, but she was a desirable child, and I was elated by her wink, as buoyed and hopeful as I would have been if the wink had come from an eligible and available woman.
The inmates slipped quietly into the back of the room, and I began reading episode thirty-eight of Dead Air, “A Technical Question.” As I read, I played to the entire house, as a good reader should, but whenever I came to one of the bits that I thought most effective — not the punch lines, but the throwaway phrases that make the punch lines work and carry the import of the piece, the subtle bits — I turned my eyes to that pretty pupil sitting on the sofa and for a moment slipped out of character, by which I mean that I slipped out of the character of the benign old man reading his reminiscences and into the closest approximation I could manage without practice of the dream lover of a pubescent virgin, the experienced man, a writer (every girl’s dream), who could initiate her into the delights of love and help her write her memoirs — even at the same time, if you count providing those all-important initial sexual experiences as part of the writing process — everything a young girl could want in one package, a little worn around the edges but, after all, still living.
[to be continued]
Subscribe to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
Share The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy
Watch Well, What Now? This series of short videos continues The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy in the present.
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 can buy hardcover and paperback editions of all the books at Lulu.
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