Adria

You should create your own MySpace Layouts like me by using nUCLEArcENTURy .COM's MySpace Profile Editor !Indeed. Anyway....... Here is a little bit from me next book. The Lady who Loved Lightning..........A story that ends with a death, in this case, also begins with one. For it was death that set us on our way to Ramsdale to begin with. Quilty’s mother had passed on a few months earlier and her only child, her bouncing baby boy, was left with the burden of handling her estate. He had gone to the funeral alone, beside himself with grief, but only stayed in Ramsdale long enough to see her put in the ground then it was back to New York for the world premier of his latest play, The Lady Who Loved Lightning, of which I was head designer. He muscled through, having not yet embraced the concepts of timelessness, and when the play was over and the thick humidity of summer firmly descended upon Greenwich Village, he placed the company on hiatus and announced a summer long trip back to the town of his youth to, “dig up my mother and have her stuffed.” Quilty would say things like that all the time. It was his hobby to belittle the sacred. Anything that caused pain for himself or for others was exactly where he would begin. It’s like he would shimmy through the crack and blow it wide opened and reveal it for what it was. He had a lot of enemies, but he was also a fantastic playwright. He had made it as far as the George Washington Bridge when he decided that the trip would be far more interesting if he had a travel companion. So he turned back and started waking people up. I was the fourth person he assaulted. Had I known this I might not have agreed to go, but he was wickedly persuasive. He broke into my apartment via the fire escape at around four in the morning and climbed into bed with me. He had lit a few candles on my vanity table and wrote the words, “Ran away with Claire Quilty, the love of my life. –Vivian,” in lipstick. He’d already started packing for me. My suitcase was open on the floor and filled with all black clothes. I assumed it was out of mourning for his mother, but he would reveal later that this was only part of the reason. He was costuming me for my role as his shadow. Earlier that week, I had put in an application to work with a theatre I knew of in Soho. They were doing their summer existentialism series, and I was pretty sure I got the job. I was only twenty-two at the time, but after the reviews for Lightning, I’d become a hot commodity within or tiny circle. For despite the well-placed warning signs, my work with strobe lights gave three separate audience members epileptic fits, people, mind you, with no history of the disease. Quilty thought it was downright remarkable and elevated me to the position of company exorcist. Of course he was joking, but his instincts were spot on, once again grabbing straws from the ether, as our relationship in its totality would most resemble that of priest and confessor. I imagine it was this instinct, in part, that prompted him to abduct me in the middle of the night and go off with him to Ramsdale. “Viv. Viv,” he said in my ear, “I have the craziest idea and it involves you, Viv.” It was horribly romantic, the whole gesture, and the fact that I didn’t throw him out the way the previous three ladies had, was a testament to my affection for him, or to my naiveté, or to both. For the longest time I couldn’t quite figure out why he liked me so. I was terribly shy in those days, unable to make eye contact with people without blushing. I would wear a virtual mask of white face powder just to hide my rosy cheeks that would light up for the smallest of reasons. Quilty tried to put me at ease when we were at the theatre, but I suppose I avoided him, the way I did most people, and unlike most people, this inflamed his interest in me to an almost obsessive extreme, or so he would tell me later. Through no fault of mine, I embodied a sort of ideal for him. My mother was Polish and my father Russian. Cultures, which held a certain mystery and danger in those days, and made me far more exotic than the scores of Italian, Irish and German stock from which he and many of his friends came. As I mentioned, I was also rather quiet, preferring to listen and observe, my English not all it could be having only lived in America for the duration of my schooling, but where most of this fan-boy admiration was concerned, I was completely ignorant. On the night in question I didn’t for a moment believe that he had come to take me away with him. I thought he wanted to make love to me and that this was perhaps, just his artistic way of going about it. After the initial shock of finding him there, we fumbled through a very awkward grope session that left the both of us winded and mutually unsatisfied. When it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen, we fell asleep, and the next morning I awoke to coffee brewing on the stove and a good portion of my wardrobe, the black, packed up in my small suitcase and the what didn’t fit stuffed randomly into many of my handbags. Quilty was on the fire escape smoking wearing my pink silk robe, getting whistled at by people passing on the street. I remember him yelling back, “What’s the matter, you’ve never seen a transvestite enjoy a smoke before?” He was cross-legged, and if memory serves, wearing one of my nicer hats. I went about my morning as if he wasn’t there. I made the bed, dressed, and tidied up, ignoring the bags of clothes and toiletries he had set aside, and not knowing what to do, I sat in the living room and waited. I put on a record--the cha-cha. It was unbelievable to me that he had stayed. I remember intense feelings of humiliation, thinking his performance on the fire escape a kind of twisted punishment for such a disappointing evening. But when he finally came in, wearing my slippers, and found me stoically perched on my ratty sofa all he could say was, “Good morning, Sunshine. You ready for adventure,” and he asked me to dance. I think it was only then that I realized how serious he was about taking me with him. Dumbstruck and dizzy, I let him make love to me again, this time with a bit more success, and afterwards we spent a half-an-hour loading his trunk with every handbag I owned. I was a silly little maniac for trusting him, never once did I question him or what he had packed. The only thing I did insist on bringing was my portable tape recorder--state of the art--that I had bought myself on a whim with the money I earned from the play. And by nine a.m., we were off. He paid my landlord in cash for my next two months rent and on that hot summer morning we navigated the steamy streets of Manhattan all the way up to the George Washington Bridge, a mirage over the Hudson that seemed to swell with the promise of cool breezes, decongestion and all out unpredictability.//////THE LADY WHO LOVED LIGHTNING...2...