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Difficult Calculations


Last weekend while rounding off the jobbing chronicle(s) I promised to tell a story. It involves a little brother who presently has maybe 50% brain activity after having tried to kill himself and failed. I do wish his body would let him go. But my family tends to be too tenacious. This is the story about a younger, way too handsome brother pretty much perfectly ammoral in his salad days. Facts are as true as the reports I got from him back in the early 80s. Colorations are mine. Typed to the screen. My apologies for any typos.


Difficult Calculations

He has been dreaming. Lying on his back, while trying to ignore the bruises and the pains in his body, he somehow managed to fall into the one realm that still held a means of escape for him. He dreamed he was on a train taking him north. The clack of its progress on the tracks was still echoing in his ears. Or was it the clattering of his anxious heart he could hear? Lying here now, and sensitive to the slightest vibrations running through him, he could still hear that train as it receded between the scrub brush and the sea. He knew there was no wonder that a train should be travelling north, since, it is the only direction leading him out of this land down under.

He took a train ride, once, to visit a friend in Pennsylvania, it was the only time he ever tried to leave home. He had thought it possible to live in a place as foreign to him as another language would be. But he soon discovered he couldn’t adjust to the four square symmetry of northern seasons, or to the way people divided themselves with concrete distinctions. And so he came back home, fairly well running back to a place where he could tumble out of himself for days and nights on end, and where the girls always freely turned to him with the closer moon in their eyes. It was really all he had ever asked for, all he ever wanted. To live out his days like a chameleon, or like a green racer lizard, to step out from the underside of dark and humid shadows to dry himself on a sunning rock, and then to turn back in again. But something has gone wrong in this paradise of his. He is twenty-seven years old, and he felt as if someone has turned the rock over on him.

He was remembering different places, now, to relieve the time. An exercise that, for him, meant he was remembering the different girls he has known. Such as the girl he met on his train ride. And even if he couldn’t recall if he met her on the north bound passage or on the train coming back home. But he had met her in the club car late in the night. Except for the sleepy bartender, and the styrofoam litter left by so many passengers and tourists, the car was empty. And he started in with her on one of those easy and uncomplicated conversations at which he was so good. She responded in the way he could have expected . And after they smoked a few cigarettes, and had a couple of drinks, she leaned over and lightly kissed him on the lips. He knew the signature of that kiss. At once a tease and an invitation, he followed it in the way he knew he should. It was to let it pass over him, to not ask for more, like a brackish creek taking in the incoming tide and letting its banks rise slowly. But when she excused herself without really saying goodbye, and passed through the car’s door, he smoked another cigarette, swallowed the melting cubes of his drink, and went out too. She was waiting for him, and so he secured the men’s room and took her inside.

Afterwards, and raising up from the train’s movable floor, he saw the pastel of a dawn’s pink shell yawning over the marshland of south Georgia. He could remember, now, that he had been coming back home. He could also remember that he did not see her again after the train crossed the St. Mary’s river that was home’s running border. But he watched at every station to see if she would get off the train before him. And when his stop came in its turn, he guessed again it was just how it was for him, and that they didn’t like giving out their names.

He turned on his side to ease the pain spreading up from the small of his back. He could hear the frenzied traffic passing on the street below his window. Only more tourists, he thought, or maybe they are the same. And more teenagers coming into town for the weekend with the wheel of their father’s car in their hands, and with the bursting sensation of poker hot money in their pockets. Right now, he could do with the smokier dreams of a mary jane streaming inside his lungs. And he sourly smiled to himself, thinking of how high he was above the city’s streets anyway. Even higher than its lamp posts, he thought, and almost free falling off the edge of evening’s petals into a bottomless night. But what he really wanted was to climb his way back down inside the city’s hibiscus before it closed him out forever.

It always has been a woman’s world for him, which is why he couldn’t understand the arguments of those who said differently. Even his father, it seemed to him, has spent his life going from the field of one woman’s bed to another. An old man with nine marriages to his name, and he is probably still counting. And it looked as if he would match his father, having found a third wife before he was twenty-five. They never stayed around for long, needing something, they would tell him, he couldn’t give them. But they always came back to spend a night, a day, even a weekend with him. And he would entertain them to the same undemanding pressure of slow desire. So what was he for them anyway? This probably being the first self-conscious question he has ever asked himself. And what else is there that they were needing? Right now, he wished his third wife would leave him too, instead of wanting from him those other things he still couldn’t understand. And maybe, he thought, there are things no man can give a woman. Maybe she has to have them from herself. Or maybe there is some kind of drama she has to play out between her several selves, a drama in which he has played much the same part all of his life. Like the time in the hotel when he played again the only part he seems to know.

He was working as a waiter, then, in a restaurant that slowly revolved at the top of a beachside hotel. The restaurant was called the King’s Table, and he was always aware, even at night, of the ocean coming in on them, and before which they all circled. The King’s Table, he thought. And he could still see the red lobster faces of all those bronzed professionals and game setters, with wives whose faces had long ago been set in stark lines of need, and who thought that spinning at the top could render them safe from observing eyes. He never felt much of anything for them, not even pity. And he quickly learned how to subserve on one side of the table while speaking pleasing, and indistinct, words to the other. He could admit to himself, now, that he never felt so much like a punk as he did then. It was the place to teach him that serious tableside manners were a thing of the past, that correct points of service were not really as important as talking a good line. And that, to make any money at all, he would have to sell his way around the tables.

What he was remembering, however, was a different kind of night. He had come on early, that evening, which meant he was the first waiter to be clocked out. Afterwards, he was sitting at the bar before starting his two mile walk home, and taking his time with a snifter of brandy in front of him. An order came up for room service, and the bartender asked him to take the drinks to their destination. So he put on his waistcoat again and retied the bow tie he despised. They were fine for short men, it seemed to him, or even for a fat man who was trying to create his own optical illusion by drawing attention away from his belly. But on a tall man a bow tie looked ridiculous. And it always made him feel as if a window blind was being rolled up and constantly slapping against the underside of his chin. But the tie was another of the house’s less imaginative rules, so he knotted it back into place. He then paid the bartender for the drinks, thinking he would continue on down to the ground floor after making his delivery. He took the service elevator three floors down to the twenty-second, and he walked along the eternally quiet hall to the room indicated on the card. 22-22 it read. Knocking on the door, and calling out his business, he then waited.

The door opened just as his cheeks were responding to his silent command for a smile. The lady standing there returned his smile in a similarly impersonal fashion. How easily we do this smiling thing, he thought. But instead of taking the drinks that were glistening in their glasses on the tray, and paying for them, she asked him to come in. He thought maybe she wanted him to set the drinks on a table while she went for her purse. So he crossed the threshold of her doorway, crossing, when he did, another house rule, and one this time he was breaking. He followed her into the room, looking for the place she would indicate to him to set the drinks. But she kept on walking until she crossed out of the room onto the balcony with its door half-open. And he had a quick moment, while walking behind her, to appreciate her. Something he had learned to do without ever letting his inside self be known.

She was different from the other guests, and he knew he hadn’t seen her at the Table. Her hair was simple and short, and it had the overlaid tones, the cooling nuances, that you only find in the sheen of forest brown hair. The skin of her neck was neither knotted with the tensions of urban living or loosely folded into creases. And the gently swinging doors of her walk were set above curving, tapering, and supple steps. Like a panther, he thought. He could tell she hadn’t come here, like so many of the others, to grease herself and sit under a burning sun in order to peel away the self-indulged layers of imagined troubles. But it also seemed to him that, in spite of her firm stepping saunter across the room, she was not young. Just nice, he thought. Maybe gentle, firm, or kind, maybe even wholly her own woman. But certainly nice to watch.

He stopped at the balcony door, and he felt just a little confused. But instead of turning back to him, she asked him to step out too. And the salty breeze graced his cheeks like a light foam flying off the crest of a wave.

“Please sit down,” he remembered her saying. “The second drink is for you.”

There was no point in showing the surprise he felt, and so he thanked her easily and did as she asked. It was her turn to look at him then, openly and without embarrassment, but not with the gaping and hungry intent he had come to know at too many table sides. And instead of responding to her study of him, he remembered looking at the trawler lights flickering against the dark of the sea. He also found himself breathing again the only air that could satisfy his bloodstream. Maybe, he thought, he would walk home by way of the beach tonight.

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” she began again, “that tie looks perfectly silly on you. I’m a painter, so I know about these things. With your height it cancels the lines you tend toward.”

This was enough to make him smile the first real smile he had felt like smiling that night. He also found himself relaxing. Or was it the healthier air he breathed?

“It would be nice of you,” he replied, “if you would suggest as much to the management. They have a suggestion box down in the lobby.”

“What about wearing it a la Frank Sinatra, if they don’t want to go all the way,” she quipped..

“Or what about no uniform at all,” he thought out loud. “I guess you could say all uniforms cancel out the lines of a body’s general tending.”

She looked at him more openly with this last comment of his. Then she laughed, which he noted was like a songbird’s song, and she asked him his name.

It was the question he disliked the most in the business. His name, at least, was his own. And he always felt like an Indian who fears the power a camera has for robbing a body of its soul. Often he lied, having chosen a new name before the night began. Sometimes he would reply his name was Garcon. And he would hear his customers calling for Garkin in clueless innocence. But he tensed only a little at her question. Not enough, he thought, for her to notice.

“David,” he said, taking a chance and giving her his name.

“Are you sure?” she replied with a touch of playfulness.

“Tonight I am,” he decided.

“Well, David,” she began, “please enjoy your drink, and smoke a cigarette if you like. If you will sit here for a few minutes while I go into the other room, I promise not to keep you waiting for long. That is, of course, unless you have to go.”

“I’m off work,” he said. “I was just on my way home when you called for room service.”

“And you don’t mind visiting with me?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I’m willing to find out.”

She left him sitting in his chair, and she passed through the living room on her way into the other half of her suite. He remembered thinking again how she walked like a cat, gliding through the continuous spaces she occupied, and possessing every blade of grass, or carpet, she pressed her paws against. She was lovely, he thought, thinking also she had given him the sign to see her in that way. But why had she called him in here? She was not a woman in need of a garcon, any garcon. And he could imagine she was well enough situated to enjoy the company of one of those men who can give a woman the other things she might need. She was definitely not a bored or forgotten housewife.

She said she was an artist. Someone from a country where maybe things are done differently. Or was she wanting to make a sketch of him? Drawing out of him some local color. If that’s what it was he would thank her for the drink she had yet to pay for, and he would make his way on down the beach. He was just too disinclined to stand, sit, or squat for someone’s professional interest.

By the time she returned, he had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his waistcoat. The ice of his drink was coolly bleeding into a pool on the glass table, and he had started smoking a second cigarette. When she stepped back out onto the balcony, he noticed she had not changed into something that could be called more comfortable. And he thought, so much for scenes of celluloid romance. She sat again in the chair across from him, and the evening’s sea breeze began to brush back her short hair.

“Thank you for waiting,” she said, “I hope I wasn’t long?” “No,” is all he replied.

It was then that she placed a hundred dollar bill over the rim of his glass, while looking at him more directly than anyone has ever.

“I have brought my granddaughter to this neon excuse of a town,” she started, “so that she can sleep with her first man. Safely and comfortably. I don’t know how it was for you, or how it is with men, but I’ve never seen any reason why a girl’s first time should be remembered for the rest of her life with regret, or even revulsion. Or why it should bind her to a first-comer forever. My granddaughter’s body is her own, and like her mother, she has come when she has felt she was ready. Just as I did with my mother, and she with hers.

“My daughter died a few years ago,” she continued, “and so I’ve come down a new woman’s road for a third time. I think you can understand what I’m saying, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked you to stay. But you also need to understand how important it is to us that you treat my granddaughter to herself and not to you. Remember, this is a first night for her. You’ve likely had many.”

She stopped in her conversation for a moment, as much to let her request settle in on him as to take her silent pictures of him again. But somehow he knew what she was saying instinctively, and without any need to follow the contours of her thoughts that led him backwards and forwards simultaneously. It was as if he had stood at the door of this room before, maybe too many times before, and waiting to be called in.

“I hope,” she resumed, “I haven’t made you uncomfortable.”

“Not really,” he replied, “just a little amused.”

“I trust you’ll take my granddaughter more seriously,” she said with a school teacher’s sharp tone.

“If that’s what she wants.”

“Yes, you’re right,” she realized. “Does this mean you’ll also spend the night? It would be best if you just left before breakfast.”

“I can only see one problem,” he said, “to any of your plan.”

“Which is?”

“Which is the money.”

“Do you want more?” she said, it being her turn to feel a slight surprise. Maybe she had not rightly calculated the current measure of inflation.

“I don’t want it at all,” he told her, looking out over her shoulder.

She looked at him, then, through eyes narrowing to a point of dismissive disdain. And she stated the age old obvious.

“A woman in your place would have no choice but to accept the rate of exchange. It’s the only one she’s known for a very long time.”

“Maybe so,” he replied, “but there is a small difference I just can’t get around.”

“Which is?” she asked, and this time with greater demand.

“Which is that when I walk into your granddaughter’s bedroom, it wouldn’t matter if you gave me a five hundred dollar bill. I would still have to get that part of me perversly called an it…up.”

But he could see he wasn’t convincing her. And he figured that someone like her could probably hear him saying what he wasn’t saying. And then the tear of defiance that kept him busy catching and checking in the inside corners of his eyes. The same defiance that kept him silent.

The midnight breeze was lifting from off the ocean while they talked. He could remember smelling the sea life starting to rise around him. And it was a smell that always evoked an image of the floating gardens of uprooted seaweed he sometimes became caught in while swimming. But the breeze was turning into a wind that looked as if it had come to settle the transaction for them. And it lifted the bill from off his glass, the greenback slipped through the railings of the balcony, and instead of standing up to catch the money, they both watched it fly free form out of sight.

So how many years have gone by since then, he asked himself while lying on his side? How many years since he played his part in the dress rehearsal of a young girl’s drama? No more than three years, he was certain. But maybe it was five. Lying here now in a jail cell, and still above the town, it seemed much longer. And he felt like a salted piece of driftwood kicked up onto a stretch of white sand.

He could still remember that night, the ageless lady, and the girl. He could remember how he too felt as newly touched as he hoped it had been for her. Not loved, he honestly told himself. But they covered each other with a shy tenderness he had not known with other women whose declarations had always seemed to mask something too fierce for him, something wanting too closely to empty him. And, afterwards, they fell asleep in each other’s arms like two clouds floating towards the horizon. Maybe he could have loved her. Maybe she could have taught him those other things she would be needing of him. But, in the morning, he kept to the terms of the arrangement, and he slipped out of her room with the first light. Returning that evening to the hotel’s restaurant, he stopped at the lobby desk, and he asked about what he half-expected to find. The occupants of room 22-22 had checked out earlier in the day. And he had never even asked for a name. He had waited when maybe he shouldn’t have waited, and he never heard a name.

She should have been here, his third wife of too long. She should have come with the bail money that his father gave her to get him out of here.

They had had another of their arguments that could sweep them into the vortex of their emotions. She was drinking heavily when he came home from work, and she and her girlfriend had just risen from their bed. His bed, their bed, what difference could it make whose bed it was? All he wanted was to sleep that night. Just sleep for awhile and slip away, so he had stretched himself out on the couch. But she wouldn’t leave him alone, and she kept standing over him and yelling in his ear. So why couldn’t he have left her? Because of his daughter, he reminded himself. He had already lost his son when a previous wife ran off to Pennsylvania, and he didn’t want to lose his second child too. But which was worse, he began to ask himself? To never see her again, or to make her witness to their sprees of arguing? Never before has he felt like so much white trash, he thought, and unmasking the rest of what remained to him.

They said he broke her nose that night, just two nights ago, but he can’t remember. All he can still see is how she stood over him, sneering at him, and telling him how little he is worth. She wanted him to walk to a late night liquor store for another bottle. He had said he was too tired, and that she didn’t need anymore anyway. And maybe she wouldn’t have argued with him if her girlfriend hadn’t been sitting in the chair, with her legs tucked up under her chin, and looking at them both with the lazy eyes of a well fed boa. Maybe also it was the musky and ammoniac smells they brought into the room, the heavy smells of what was too much of a womanly, layered sense for him, that started his stomach turning. But he remembers standing up and walking to the bathroom, while she still yelled after him. And she just wouldn’t leave him alone. She followed him out of the room, and she stood there laughing as he turned his stomach inside out over the commode. And when he splashed water on his face from the sink, and turned around for a towel, the echoes of her laughter bouncing off the tile had become like a noisy flock of wintering starlings settling in a stand of trees.

The next thing he knew he was sitting in a chair and listening to a man in a creased blue uniform read to him from a list of inalienable rights.

He finally realized she was not coming. He shook himself out of his waiting mood, and he persuaded one of the guards to make a phone call for him. And when the guard came back to his cell, he learned she had taken both the money and their daughter on a bus ride to her mother’s house. The county complex was closing for the weekend, the guard also told him, and he would have to wait until Monday morning before anyone could set him free. It was then that he saw himself sealed off inside his cell for longer than he could take. And it needed four jailers wielding their black sticks before he could equate the perfect, four square symmetry of his situation. What is sometimes a difficult calculation to make.

Terreson

Jun/26/2010, 5:11 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
Christine98 Profile
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Re: Difficult Calculations


Tere,

I'm still trying to figure out how to read your prose--sometimes your poetry too.

I was discussing a movie (Lars And The Real Girl) with my sister and I said something like: "once I understood it was a fable, I stopped trying to get it to make logical sense." and she asked, "what do you mean by fable?" and I said, "like Edward Scissorhands only less obvious."

I think your writing has a quality like that which I mean in the best sense possible so the reader has to get oriented; it's disorienting.

A lot of wonderful writing--like this:

"To live out his days like a chameleon, or like a green racer lizard, to step out from the underside of dark and humid shadows to dry himself on a sunning rock, and then to turn back in again."

So fables capture essences, describe what's just underneath; familiar and foreign at the same time.

Hope this makes sense or is, at least, not insulting.

Chris
Jun/27/2010, 1:31 pm Link to this post Send Email to Christine98   Send PM to Christine98
 
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Not at all insulting, Chris. I am guessing it might be the shifting tenses that disorients, what with this character going back and forth between the present moment of his jail cell and memories real enough to displace the present moment. Thanks for reading. This is actually the first time I've aired a story first written in '84.

Tere
Jun/27/2010, 1:47 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
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hey Tere,

Maybe I mean archetype...I'm sure that's closer to what I mean than fable. Seems like you're describing something essential in the people and relationships you write about.

There, now I've made it murkier.

Chris
Jun/27/2010, 4:28 pm Link to this post Send Email to Christine98   Send PM to Christine98
 
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Much later. Chris I've been thinking on your comment. Chewing on it really. I've had an exchange with an old friend, an American living in the west of Ireland. We were talking about novel writing. He brought it up by way of saying he had recently reread Vonnegut's Slaughter House # 5 novel and found it lacking after all these years. I opined that all great novels, the ones that last, tend to be idea driven and whose success is determined by how well the story telling wraps itself around the idea the narrative looks to body out. I won't get heavy on you and give examples of what I mean. But I think I am right. All the best stories told tend to be idea driven. In narrative they tend to body out, flesh out, give texture to, some fundamental idea, type of behavior, or archetype.

My story involves reports my little brother made to me years ago when he was still young and viable. I would return home to Daytona Beach and he would talk. The story actually leaves out a lot of unsavoury incidentals I could have pulled in had I wanted to go for what is gratuitously lurid. But to me that would have been uninteresting. I wanted to go for something essential and flesh it out in close and atmospheric detail.

You know what strikes me the most about the fable (and the word works for me)? It is how the young gallant is given all the chances for salvation and fails every test.

Tere
Jun/28/2010, 12:14 am Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
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Tere,

Examples, please. Off the top of my head, I'd say I prefer character driven novels; then I'd think of half a dozen or so exceptions right away. In my case, these categories tend to break down but they're as good a starting point as any.

So give me some examples of great, idea driven novels. I'd like to get a better handle on what you're talking about.

Chris
Jun/28/2010, 7:39 am Link to this post Send Email to Christine98   Send PM to Christine98
 
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Haha, what a story! Starts with the defloration of a virgin, and I don't believe a word of this, it's a male fantasy, but moves into stark reality with the broken body parts of the 3d wife.

The writing is very good except for two things:

Dialog tags. Never have he or she do anything other than "said".

"And" at the beginning of sentences. Most distracting and useless.

Hope this crit isn't too frank, but we ain't got much time to get better,

Auto
Jun/30/2010, 6:03 pm Link to this post Send Email to pjouissance   Send PM to pjouissance
 
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Also, the title isn't working for me. I'd look for something that grabs. The story grabs, why not the title?

Auto
Jun/30/2010, 6:05 pm Link to this post Send Email to pjouissance   Send PM to pjouissance
 
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Chris, I am so not explaining myself well, am I? You and my friend in Ireland would have perfect concert. You and I share a love of John Steinbeck. I think you once said my stuff put you in mind of him, which I took as a supreme compliment. He being one of the best story tellers I've ever read and who thoroughly got how characters make or break a novel. But I would say that behind all of his novels there were ideas he looked to flesh out, make textual, through his chracters. Cannery Row? One lonely man's stand against the encroachment on CAs wild wild coast by civ. East of Eden? The perfect and early portrait of the loss of the idea America as a paradise limitless for all the dreams Americans looked to play out. Of Mice and Men? The quintessential portrait of America looking to stay one step ahead of the economic bust always looming over.

So many other examples come to mind of how a story teller's characters body out the driving ideas. Fitzerald's Gatsby was inspired by the Roman story of how a slave made good, got rich. Trimalchio by name and whose ostentatious banquets would do him in. Flaubert's Madame Bovary also comes to mind. So many men readers have fallen in love with her character. For him she was an idea and a statement against petite bourgeoise vanities. Melville's Moby Dick. Full of characterizations. And all of whose characters but for one are destroyed by the monomaniacal egotism of one captain. The Bronte sisters were also idea driven, keenly aware of how social prejudice gets played out, determines any individuals chance for love and and life. The list goes on.

The talent of novelists is that they make their characters believable. The thing about the best novelists is that their ideas are archetypal.

But I still bet I am unconvincing.

Tere
Jun/30/2010, 8:01 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
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Thanks, Auto. I was wondering what you might think. Said in a good way you are always hardest on my stories.

Actually the story doesn't start with defloration, as you call it. It starts with a young man in a jail trying to make sense of things. Intro strikes me as key. As for the jeunne fille, I don't know what to say. If this strikes you as unbelievable, Daytona Beach might be an environment to steer clear from. I did at age 16. Hell, I could tell stories of mothers giving up their daughters to brothers. And of more. I actually view this story as a bit of social realism, with not a report the product of imagination.

I know you don't like my syntax used some thirty years ago. I am good with the objection.

Tere
Jun/30/2010, 8:30 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
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Hi, Tere,

Yes, I see that initial meditation and set of memories, but the story begins for me with "He was working as a waiter".

Much enjoyed,

Auto
Jul/1/2010, 6:11 pm Link to this post Send Email to pjouissance   Send PM to pjouissance
 
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And (ducking) I get your point of view. It is true that that is where the real narrative begins. I don't know. Maybe a certain mis en scene seems important to me. Then again maybe it is not.

Got a question for you. I've almost always eschewed dialogue. A dramatic poet I am not, not naturally in the way, say, of E. Albey or T. Williams. When it comes to dialogue what are your tricks? How do you move along conversational exchanges?

Tere
Jul/1/2010, 6:42 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 


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