Beauty & Cunning

by Mia Funk

The fire is what changed me forever and gave me, what you might call for lack of a better word, my beauty. I’d never thought of myself as beautiful––it’s strange when you read about yourself, the way other people see you, making all these judgments though you’ve never met. I still feel like they’re talking about another person.

Before the accident––I got lucky, had a good doctor who managed to peel most of the scarring away––I did not have this face. He really did a good job, leaving only the slight creping along the edges and a certain hard-edged look, a cruelty. It’s poise, I think, a certain inability to have no more than a few fixed facial expressions that some find attractive, but I don’t know. All I know is that before I was pretty and after the fire people no longer called me that. I became unapproachable.

I was only seventeen, but it was like overnight I’d become a woman. The scarring tightened my skin and seemed to add ten years to my face. Ten years of experience, of late nights, of cigarette smoke, though I’d never smoked. The scars pulled at my hairline, but did not, as others imagine, cause the slight catlike tilt of the eyes. My Chinese mother is to blame for that, my mixed look. La Meticcia, the locals call me here, unable to pronounce my name.

Vaughn. And that’s all I really know of my father, and a few details gleamed from photographs. The psychiatrists said I blocked it out, but I’m glad not to know. He left when I was young, sometime after the first fire. For there had been an earlier one, the prosecutor made much of that fact. Till the other side uncovered it, I’d almost forgotten. I rarely think of that as a real fire. It was only practice, and besides, since I didn’t set it, I can’t be held responsible for that.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, I’ve always been fascinated by the life of a flame. I used to like to watch candles burning down to the quick. Liked the image of a house reduced to ashes. I didn’t have many toys growing up, instead I played with fire.

Mother and me didn’t have a fireplace and besides, in San Francisco, there was little need for one. We lived above her teahouse in Japantown. Though we were Chinese we were part of the community. I became best friends with Kenji Matsumoto. I liked him, he was without ego, no false pretence. Mother never liked him, said he was too old for me, he was devious. I scaled the roofs with him sometimes. He was skilful, taught me how to slip through windows and walk in shadows, but he never made me steal.

Truth was, I was much more devious that Kenji would ever be. I was the kind of cunning, fresh-faced and curious, you don’t see coming. Certainly Henry and Abbey did not see me coming, and that was the trouble, they thought they were smarter than everyone.

I never think of them anymore, it’s only because you asked that I’m telling you now. I believe in living in the present, the future. A book reviewer noticed that once. He said, “all her books take place in the present tense”––and then proceeded to write a tabloid piece in which he talked exclusively about events from my life which took place over twenty years ago. I don’t even think of your father that much anymore, and I was with him longer than I was ever with Henry and Abbey. And I’m sorry I never told you more about him––it’s just that when your husband is a well-known poet and when everything written about you contains the speculation that you are a pseudonym for him, that he wrote all the books you toiled over, that you gave up your life for––it’s just I had mixed feelings about him for years. I never tried to be mysterious about my past, but you know I still don’t speak perfect Sicilian and I speak even worse Italian, and as a consequence I rarely give interviews. Still, people imagine they know you, create stories to satisfy their curiosity. Whatever I say to try to correct them, it does no good.

I call him your father, but of course he wasn’t, Henry was. But how can someone who’s never seen your face, never read you bedtime stories, be called a your father? No, Josef was my first love and he is your father. The first one who loved me for me and not for my youth, saw me and not some panacea for his approaching middle age.

II

Abbey:   I knew this would not end well. She’s pitted us against each other. 

Henry:    I know. You were right. I should have...

Abbey:   Never mind. Too late for that now. We have to act calmly.

Henry:     I agree. 

Abbey:     How far is she gone?

Henry:     Two months, she says.

Abbey:     Good. We still have time. What she saying?

Henry:     She professing exhaustion. Not eating enough. You know her. It’s hard to tell.

Abbey:    Has she confided in anyone?

Henry:     I don’t think so. I never know what to expect from her. What if she has a panic attack and tells?

Abbey:    She’s sixteen. Right now we have to sterilize her emotions, otherwise this can destroy you. Your career. Everything. You could end up in prison.

Henry:     I know, I know. I feel I have a bull’s-eye painted on my back.

Abbey:    Best let me deal with her.

Henry:     Thank you. I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you. Please forgive me.

– He placed a gentle hand on her arm. The weakness of his touch made her wince.

Abbey:     I have to see  her tonight

Problem with Henry was he wasn’t an asshole. Not to strangers, not to people in need. He had enormous empathy––maybe that’s why he so easily fell in love.

Practically once a year he met another amazing woman he wanted to spend his life with. This was the first time it had ever happened with a girl.

Abbey’s words stunned his mind. A girl, Henry. But she’s only a girl! It wasn’t fair what he kept doing to Abbey. Wasn’t until the previous year that he realised the real reason she didn’t mind.

In his defence, it wasn’t his fault their social and community projects attracted so many amazing (slightly crazy) women. More amazing was how practical and level-headed (indifferent) Abbey was about it all, even if she was a lesbian (Was she? he wondered, or was it just she didn’t like sex? Or didn’t like him? Her real passion: paint.) She still had every right to be mad at him.

Not entirely his fault he was so fucked up. He’d been raised on a commune, his parents living in a “fully-committed” open marriage. Whatever that means. Seen beside their low standards, his own lifestyle was actually quite conservative. After all, he and Abbey lived in a monogamous marriage nearly half the time (for some reason Henry had absolutely no desire to play the field off-season: winter was reserved for writing books) and he rarely fooled around with more than one woman a year. Problem with that was they were likely to get attached, and Abbey often had to play the role of letting them down gently.

Were they good people? I guess, they were. All the charities and community projects they launched. Even with all the affairs he’d had I was amazed no one came forward. That must have cost his father a lot to keep them silenced, a full-time job just making sure none of them testified. I suppose I should feel sorry for the Winters, but then, perhaps it’s what they wanted. I didn’t make them come to me. I’m not even sure what they wanted. Maybe just...something just came back to me, something Abbey said that I overheard that day, standing in their rosebushes, watching them through their window like Kenji had taught me. ‘But, Henry, she’s only a child!’

I can only think they wanted a child and that perhaps that’s something to do with it.

I am not a maternal person, but there was this belief in me, I don’t know where this strange idea came from, that if I did not give birth to my son, to you, I would die. I really believed that and still do.

And yet there was an incredible amount of pressure put on me to get rid of the child, from Henry, Abbey, especially my mother. When they realised they were wasting their time and I wouldn’t do it, they came up with another solution. I was to move in with the Winters where Henry and Abbey would look after me. The idea was sort of to hide me away until I gave birth, although they didn’t describe their plans to me that way. It was presented as an opportunity, which in a way it was. What they wanted to do, what they told my mother they were doing was adopting me. Of course the paperwork never went through, that would have been too strange, but they didn’t want me going to school where my teachers would notice the pregnancy and perhaps report it. They decided that my grades and aptitude were good enough that I could skip a year and go right to university. Winter knew several professors who gave me recommendations and arranged it all so I wouldn't have to pay any fees. My mother thought this was an extremely generous offer and overlooked the improprieties. Age gaps were nothing new for her, her own father had been twenty years old than her mother. Since she’d never finished her degree, she was in awe of anyone who wrote books. That’s how we’d come to know Henry, we’d responded to a notice in SF Weekly looking for oral histories.

In reality, I attended few classes once I began to show, but I received a lot of private tutoring. I was given special allowances for helping Henry research his book and the time seemed to pass that way without my noticing. After the sixth month I was almost a prisoner in their house in Noe Valley, rarely allowed to go out. I think I was going out of my mind, but I didn’t realize it because everyone in that house was so crazy.

I loved Abbey, at the same time she was so strange to me, and I think despite what she said she really hated me. A part of her couldn’t accept that I was having her husband’s child, even as she smiled at me and painted my growing body, it deeply disturbed her because she couldn’t have children. I don’t blame her for going out of her mind with the pressure and embarrassment of it. I can only imagine.

After the night we discussed it and decided what would happen when you were born, we didn’t discuss it again. It was like everyone knew how fragile an arrangement it was and if we spoke of it, if we really questioned what was happening, our whole delicate balance would be overturned. It seemed to suit them, but I still had so many unanswered questions. Like, what would happen to me? Did they expect me to go away, or would I go on living there with them like before? If Abbey was going to be the child’s mother, then who would I have to pretend to be? An aunt? A cousin? The housekeeper? How long could that lie go on? In the end people would see the baby looked nothing like Abbey. I suppose she would say you were adopted. I had to assume these things because no one told me. It was all so weird I don’t know how she tolerated it. And yet on the surface she was so polite, even physically affectionate in ways no woman had ever been to me, touching my hair, feeling my stomach, listening for a heartbeat.

Sometimes I feared she’d try to kill me. I had dreams where she was trying to drown me and I’d wake up in a panic. I put the thought out of my mind, but kept vigilant all the same.

III

There they were in his kitchen, sharing a pizza after the day’s recording. First time they’d done it in the house, before it had always been at his office, the recording equipment there was better, but he’d had no time to go in so he asked Ivy to come to his house instead. Abbey was away, so of course he knew where it might lead, but he still did know if she wanted to. She was so young, it was hard to read her mind. He didn’t want to be creepy with her, for now they were just sharing a pizza.

On his side he added pepper flakes and as he did this she smiled to herself. She was slicing a tomato and scattering it. He asked her why she was smiling, but she wouldn’t tell him. She was secretive like that, he noticed, liked to have things prized out of her. She said it was the way he made his pizza, what it said about him. It said he needed a jolt to his palette, his taste for hot things, adventure, like it wasn’t something he got enough of in his life. Was she making a jibe at his wife now? He couldn’t tell.

“That’s pretty psychological. You get all that from pizza?”

“It’s food. It’s always psychological. Not just you, look at me. The way I slice this tomato, using just half. It’s a big pizza, I could use the whole tomato, but I saved half. What does this tell you about me?”

“That you’re prudent, plan for the future?”

“Maybe. Maybe it says I grew up poor and never knew where my next meal would be coming from.”

“It’s hard to escape our upbringing.”

“Mom taught me to read tealeaves. In her shop, people like to have their leaves read, but she never reads the leaves, she reads the people. By the time they get to the end of the cup, she says she’s seen everything she needs to know.”

“Like what?”

“Like if they drink too quick, don’t wait for it to steep properly, they’re impatient. Maybe reckless. And if they wait for it to go cold it means they’re lacking passion. It’s not a science.”

“I like your mom.”

“She likes you, too. She said to me, he’s a good man. Are you?”

The pizza was almost finished now. They could hear the oven timer winding up, quicker now. On the counter were two tall glasses of water.

“I knew I shouldn’t have drunk tea in front of you. What did it tell you about me?”

“Everything I needed to know.” She picked up her glass and swallowed it down in one continuous gulp. A small trickle came over the rim and splashed the spoon-shaped collar of her dress. As he watched her finish, ice cubes hitting against each other and the inside of the glass, he could already hear the sound of her bra snapping off.

When it came it came suddenly. She shrugged her shoulder and her loose-fitting dress slipped to the floor. She’d been right about him. His impatience. He was reckless. He didn’t even take the time to remove his belt (well, only later, when he was fastening her wrist to his bed, but that was the third time). He unzipped his pants and took her there, against the still warm oven, dough burnt now and beyond saving, on the counter that was too high and cut into her back, and then, tumbling, onto the floor, they collided like those ice cubes, the noise they made together, harsh and slack and underneath this her soft sighs, like he was taking the last breath from her.

She bit down suddenly on his finger and made it bleed. But he did not think of this pain now, only the pleasure that came from making love to this...she’d been right about that too, this was exactly what he needed, heat, something to prick up his tongue...but this was different than his other lovers. God, she was so young. And it made him feel like he’d never felt, or not in a long time. Maybe years ago when he was young too and didn’t know how to control himself. But now experience had toned his body and he knew how to handle himself. The way she handled herself surprised him. What of her experience? In their recording sessions she had spoken obliquely of her father. He shuddered as the last drop of pleasure squeezed out of him. She hated talking about her father. Could this be some kind of revenge or re-enactment?

He didn’t want to consider that. She did not seem her age, she handled herself with the confidence of a woman, he told himself. What he was doing, it was not wrong. It was natural. Anyway, there’s no space in his brain for thinking right now, only space for pleasure.

How had it felt that first time? He later told his therapist. It was like that time he was in a helicopter. He remembered when the thing went up into the air, up and sideways and backwards and forwards, like being pulled in all directions. Later, when they were up in the air, the pilot had let him put his hand on the stick and he could feel the pressure, like if he did not hold on he would spin out in all directions.

“That’s what it felt like,” he told his therapist.

“Did you like the feeling?”

“Oh, man, are you kidding me!”

“And do you think you’ll be doing it again?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“That was good. Let’s do it again.” And she was already turning him over onto his back and pushing her hand down there and tickling him.

“Wait a second. Let me catch my breath. I’m not a young man, you know.”

She brought her head up from under the sheets and smiled. “I know.”

After the third time, when he’d brought out his belt to restrain her hands, she’d gone to the bathroom and on the hallway stand she saw Abbey’s photo for the first time. She was blonde, but she knew that already, the volunteers at the center had told her. No, that’s not true, it wasn’t the first time. She had googled him early on and seen them smiling together in a photo, but the photo on the hall stand was the first evidence of her existence in his life. He didn’t talk about her often. Using her name anyway. He often used the pronoun ‘we’ and she assumed he meant ‘Abbey and me’. Abbey was attractive: straw-coloured hair, bleached complexion and lips/eyes so light it was like they weren’t even there.

Ivy imagined kissing those pale Nordic lips. What would they taste like? Ice. Maybe that’s why he prefers kissing mine.

Later, when she came home after meeting Abbey for the first time and her mother asked her, Ivy would say, “Oh, I don’t know. Like an attractive nun.”

And her mother had had to think about this a second and then went back to bagging tea leaves. “It’s weird, but I know exactly what you mean.”

IV

I cannot think of them without thinking of that house. Too big for a couple without children, they could inhabit it without hardly having to see each other. Inherited, of course, from Henry’s parents, hippies who did well for themselves or money even older than that. Henry didn’t like to talk about money, as though it were an inconvenience to explain where his came from. It was only when journalists started covering the trial that I learned Henry’s hippie dad, Sam, was Samuel Winter III, the retail clothing heir.

Abbey had come into the marriage with less, maybe that’s why, in the end, I liked her more. She knew what it was to struggle, although in the end I liked neither of them very much. Their entitlement, their weirdness, the way they acted around each other––a brother and sister would not have been more alike, nor more distant when it came to sex, physical warmth. I think they’d even begun to resemble each other. They seemed to know without asking what the other was thinking, but I could never tell what it was. 

And so I fell in love with the house around the same time I fell in love with them, or maybe I fell in love with the house and was never in love with them. Not individually, certainly, there was always a them, even before I met her I’d seen her paintings, knew her story, her reputation as an educator, a feminist.

“I could tell the first time I saw you that you were a survivor.” This is what Abbey told me on our second meeting, when Henry left us alone at that picnic table in Dolores Park overlooking the new playground, when he could be sure we could be left alone together without clawing each other’s eyes out. A dyke couple who looked like twins were taking turns pushing their daughter on the swings. I didn’t know what Abbey meant. A survivor?

“I read your file,” she said. “The fire, that must have been hard.”

“I hardly remember,” and it was true. “I only told Henry that story because he wouldn’t stop asking me questions unless I told him something miserable.”

“So, it’s not true?”

“Oh, it’s true, but I don’t store sad things in my brain.”

“That’s quite–”

“You can be really angry at someone. Or you can just cancel them. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that way? Hated someone so much it just consumes you? You can’t live like that, thinking the same thoughts all the time, allowing another person to collonize your thinking. It’s like inviting your enemy to live with you.”

It was just so strange with them. At first I stayed in their converted garage. One day I was combing my hair in the mirror and I saw Henry looking in through the crack in the door. I looked up towards the house and, at the same moment, Abbey was standing at her bedroom window looking down at me. 

I never thought I would be one of those women who accepted everything, like my mother. I often felt sorry for her as a child, as an eight year old girl I felt sorry and promised myself. And yet there I was, in their house, following their rules. I owned nothing, not even my own body. All I had was that bed, that tiny closet, my books, which I turned to as though they were my best friends, which I suppose they were. Apart from Kenji, I had no one my own age to talk to. If I had I’d have realised. Kenji said the situation was ‘fucked up’, but my mindset at the time, I couldn’t see a way out.

V

I liked to spend my afternoons in the bath because there I could forget. And in that beautiful bath she painted me, transforming from girl to woman, losing my shape of girl and becoming something heavy and immoveable.

I found this page in my diary from that time:

I’ve been asked to pose for photographers before, but I never said yes. They were men and she is a woman. Claudia at the Center jokes that she’s not, that Abbey’s the man and Henry’s the woman, but Claudia is studying the politics of gender and everyone is a “beard” to her.

Abbey, picking up the clothes I’ve dropped on the floor, Are you nervous?

I haven’t done this before, I tell her.

She brings me upstairs to their bedroom. I have been here before, but under other circumstances. I’ve removed all my clothes and am now naked. Tell me what you want.

If I can capture what I sometimes see in you. It’s a certain aspect, I’d be very happy.

Like what?

You have this look. It’s probably not something you’re conscious of. To me you seem neither Asian nor Occidental, but something in between, and it’s that aspect, the sharpness of your features that is sometimes slightly severe...a sort of severe beauty, if that makes sense...That’s what I’m looking to capture.

I gently lower myself into the bath. Long hair loosens underwater like a black silk shawl. Kneeling down to straighten the hem of the dress, through which sections of my body are visible, Abbey’s eyes are on me. They are serene, observant, blue like the sea and empty of judgment. They’re almost vulnerable and only widen in awareness when she is working. They seem to pin me beneath their gaze so I can’t move. I feel for the first time that someone sees me, that someone sees into me.

I spend several minutes just lying still.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to be married. Were you always so certain? I don’t mean anything by the question. I’m just curious.

I can see she wants to talk about herself and has been waiting for someone with whom it would be safe.

Not really, but it seemed very natural at the time and I just went along with it.

I don’t know if that would be enough for me. I have a feeling somehow I will always be alone.

Something could happen. You don’t know that.

Oh, I do. I think I’m too odd to find someone to put up with me.

Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll see. You’ll have men flocking around you, I can tell.

It’s not that. It’s just I see how when people live together they change each other.

Are you afraid of change? Life is change.

I don’t want to be changed by the wrong person.

But you’ve a strong personality. Chances are the–, Abbey hesitates, the man you meet will end up changing to suit you.

She’s says, You’re perfect, as though this will keep me in the same position. My neck feels tense because I’m pretending that my head is floating on the water. I’m wondering how quickly she can work and all the while I’m in pain trying to keep a calm facial expression. But I trust her because I’m almost naked with a stranger. My eyes are closed and just my imagination is alive. She speaks excitedly, as if she’s been released from a long solitude and happy to have some company. I compliment her on her work and it’s as if no one has praised her in such a long time.

She is painting me as Ophelia because I was in a production of this at school. She paints me drowning, even as my body grows larger underwater.

VI

When the weather turned, I had to move into the house with them and use the small room next to their bedroom. A door communicated between the two rooms and I could not lock it. One night, Henry came into my room. I was quite heavily pregnant by then so I don’t know what he wanted. He said he was restless and couldn’t sleep and just wanted to sit at the foot of my bed. I made him leave. Later that night Abbey checked in on me. She wanted more or less the same thing, for me to comfort her. These two adults who could not find peace within themselves, who needed a girl to help them make their marriage whole. It was too creepy. I told my mother I wanted to come home, but she wouldn’t listen. To her the Winters were important people who could do no wrong. She had completely blinkered herself to the situation.

And so I waited for things to get better, but they didn’t. And the night it happened I was slightly delirious because it was not an easy pregnancy. You were kicking and giving me no rest.

I couldn’t stand it anymore. It was cold and I got terrible chills in my feet, so I lit a fire in the fireplace, an old Victorian one. My bed was quite close to it and Abbey was always saying a spark could fly out and catch my bedcover on fire, but it was so draughty in the house. That night Henry came to my room again. I’m not sure what he wanted, I don’t know if he wanted something sexual or just to hold me. I was tired, so tired of their game. He came at me and I pushed him away, throwing my bedcover at him. Some of it landed on the floor at the foot of the fireplace and caught fire. Henry thrashed around the floor trying to put the fire out, but it only fed the flames. Abbey was sound asleep when it happened. Sleeping tablets, I guess. She was hooked on Ambien. Did she wake up? I remember hearing someone screaming, but possibly that was someone from the street. I had only one thought, to get you out of there alive. To save you. Abbey and Henry, I thought, could save themselves, but you were all I had. I had to look after you.

When it was all swallowed by flames, I watched the house vanish under an avalanche of ashes. Dazed, I asked one of the firefighters where the Winters had gone and then I disappeared.

Honestly, I don’t know what happened. Did I wander away from the house when it was burning down? I must have, but I don’t remember anything. I woke up later on the N-Judah train, my clothes were wet. How did they get that way? I’d been on fire, but they couldn’t find the charred clothes. Had I removed them? I was staring out the window of the train when that man woke me up. Because I was sitting up, but really I was sleeping until that stranger shook me and said, “Are you okay?”

The trial, the publicity and all those lies they said about me, making me out to be a demon in the press. I’m sure Henry’s father had something to do with that. Him or his legal team or his PR handlers. Henry had told me that about his father, “the man has no friends, only people who work for him.” The things they leaked to the press. Lies. That Kenji was my lover and we were trying to exhort Henry and Abbey’s money. I mean that’s so silly, he was gay, but that didn’t stop them. Once a story is out there, it doesn’t matter if it’s not true, people will start adding their own details. And the more you deny the more they become convinced. Henry’s father spent a fortune trying to prove I was guilty. The first trial and then––concocting that new witness testimony––the second one. Both times acquitted.

I’m amazed at the number of kind people I’ve met in my life. A woman all the way on the other side of the country read about what was happening to me, the joke of lawyer I’d been assigned, the way the press was twisting everything and flew out to see me. She paid for my legal fees, she ran a fundraising campaign to raise more money for my defence. She really got the word out. Her mission was “to let the world know you’re the real victim,” is what she said. Although I never felt like a victim. We were all adults in that relationship. They were biologically older, of course, but no more mature in matters that count.

And during all this farrago I met my husband. He was Czech, but really he was Polish and part Russian or I don’t know. He was a pathological liar, really, although I was very fond of him, you should know this about your father, he was a liar. But he wrote wonderful poems, although he was far too lazy to do anything truly great. He devoted much more energy to drinking.

But you wanted to know how we met? I don’t really remember how we got talking. It was one night, maybe a month after their deaths. Professor X took kindness on me and let me stay in the basement of his house, even though it was a little damp and not good for a pregnant woman to breathe in, and that’s probably why you have respiratory problems to this day. I was just so grateful to have some place to stay. I did not want to return to your grandmother’s apartment. I felt I’d already caused enough embarrassment. He was at the party, your father, and drunk, because he was always drunk. And he sees my womb even before he sees my face, he sees you and he goes towards you like it’s the sun, it’s the moon, this radiance and he puts his hands on it and begins talking some kind of gibberish, I’m not sure what. And then he looks up at me and he says that’s when he fell in love.

I was not drinking, of course, so I was not so enamored. I shut myself in the small room, a closet really, which I had made my study. And he follows me in there and I was working on a book–the one which will be published six months after your birth–and he picks up a page and starts reading and when he’s finished he asks me, he tells me really, “you didn’t write this,” and I say I did. “No, you didn’t. This is the work of someone else. A man? One of your lovers.” He’s convinced, but I tell him it’s mine. All mine. And he says, well, it’s good, whosever it is. And those are the rumors I’ll hear all my life, that my first work I stole from Winter before I burned down his house. And then after your father walked out on me, that my second book was his (I believe he started that rumor) and on and on, whoever I was with, there grew around me this myth, that I, the woman with the mysterious past and the immovable expressions could not write a book. That it’s a lie and I’m the cover for someone else less remarkable.

Your father wasn’t interested in the publicity machine, the interviews and all that, one of the few people I can really say that about. He didn’t care who I was. Who I was supposed to have killed, not like the creepy gawkers that I attracted in those days, and still do, sometimes. I’ll be approached by a young person occasionally. In the town where I live, in the hilltops in Perugia, where you’d think no one would know or care about those things, sometimes I get a knock on the door. It’s a student from the local university looking far too young to know anything about that time of my life, and he’ll start off all charming, saying he wants to talk to me about literature, about books, and I’ll answer his questions because he’s a kid, all those stupid questions which I don’t take offence to anymore like what do I eat for breakfast and do I write by hand or computer, in the morning or night––who cares? But as I get older it’s nice to have the company so I give in. It’s funny, when I was younger, I was drawn to the company of those my senior who I thought knew more than me. Now I know that nobody knows anything and I prefer the company of young people, their minds are still open to the world.

But then after a while, and this happened a few times, so that’s why I’m still sore about it, the young man will try to trap me in a question about the past and it turns out he’s not a student of literature, but a journalism major or some kind of courtroom ghoul collecting memorabilia. I swear since that young man left the other day I’m missing things. A silver broach and my hairbrush. That tells you how weird he was. Who takes an old lady’s hairbrush?

But if you open your door to strangers, how can you tell the lunatics from the normal people? It’s impossible to know. So what do you do? Not open your door? Talk to nobody? I’ve always been a bit of a loner, but once it a while I need a break. Share my solitude with someone else, anyone else. Even you. When you get to be my age, you come to prefer the company of strangers.