Tuesday 125: In Process

I’m doing a terrible job of adhering to the advice of successful Substack writers and posting irregularly (or not at all, really) because I’ve been working on a longer piece of fiction that I have yet to name. In the interest of being a better poster, here is a short, mostly unedited excerpt from that piece. I haven’t decided whether I’ll do this regularly or return to my regular schedule (such as it was), so feel free to share any preferences with a comment below.

And as always, if you like what I write, please share it with your friends.

1986

Rascal’s head slid down the ornate walnut back of the parlor sofa, across the lavender tufted arm, leaving a visible streak of sweat and grease on the velvet and polished wood. He leaned forward too quickly, catching the end of his cigarette on the matching walnut coffee table, littered with beer cans and stray cigatette butts overflowing from the glass ashtray he was presumably aiming for, then falling fully off the sofa and to his knees on the carpeted floor, striking the side of his head sharply on the coffee table and coming to a rest on his back, chuckling with mild delirium, his smoking, broken cigarette aloft in a fencer’s defense as the room gasped and went still. “Jesus Rascal,” someone said, “are you alright?” One of the beer cans, tipped over by the impact, rolled musically in the sudden quiet; the record had ended, and no one had noticed.

For a moment that Julia knew would not last, the room’s former beauty sighed to life. Thin smoke hung in the hot summer air, stirred by the presence of people so still that she could sense the secret futures between them. The light in the room was old. It bled from lamps that had been old even when new. There were times, Julia thought, that you felt the past in you. She saw a man standing at the window, absently turning a ring on his finger and looking out at the lawn, the street, his suspenders tufting his sweat-damp shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, his shoulders held back loosely, yet something in his bearing ready to pounce, with hair parted and combed neatly, he gave off the air of someone who was always ready. Julia couldn’t see his face, then he was gone and she smelled aunt Helene’s floral and ghostly perfume, old without age, that Aunt Helene had said enchanted since Napoleon’s time.

“Shit, this got singed.” Amelia was bent over, inspecting the table’s edge where Rascal had caught his cigarette. He was laughing harder now, and someone had turned the record over; limpid guitars cut through the room like laughter and a bored voice was singing from somewhere behind the leather armchair across which Julia was draped. Amelia’s bony knees pressed together as she squatted, feet splayed wide in fashionable black leather loafers that must have smelled horrible, even though Amelia looked like the sort of girl who never smelled, even waiting on the hottest subway platforms in the dead of summer, though of course she did, and anyway she wasn’t even wearing socks; that was probably why she hadn’t taken the shoes off. Rascal propped himself up on an elbow, pulling himself to a seated position with a groan and a triumphant grin. He wasn’t bleeding, but a sharp red L shape on his shaved temple marked the beginning of a bruise that, as the drummer of a punk band, he was probably happy to have. He tilted a warm beer backward and finished it, crushing the can gently and taking a drag from his ruined cigarette, smiling again. “I’m a fuckin clown man,” he said. “Maybe I should work on prat-falls, bring back the Three Stooges.”

Julia lifted her feet on the arm of the chair, looked up at her toes and asked him which one he would be. “Same one as everybody else, man,” said Rascal, grinning again, pointing, “Same one as you.”

Julia awoke in her bed to the sound of stirring. A robust morning light shone in through the windows of her bedroom, white curtains shifting silently in a light breeze. Today would be the fourth day of a heatwave, and by the early afternoon, the house on Abermarle Road, spacious as it was, would be stifling. Tree shade and gardens in the neighborhood kept summer mornings pleasant, but less than a mile in any direction were people similarly waking in the brick ovens of Brooklyn, already leaning out desperately onto fire escapes with tapwater and black coffee, heat radiating from the asphalt below.

Julia wasn’t sure who was downstairs. Some polite clinking of glasses and silverware, the hum of a coffee grinder, low voices moving from the kitchen to the sunroom, more clinking, this time the remorseful dull tap of empty cans and a shuffle of garbage, the voices moving to the back garden where the house’s distinctive echo died in the expanse of the world, the hiss of the screen door’s piston and birdsong as the voices became recognizable as Henry and Leo, beneath Julia’s dormer window. She sat up on the side of her bed and looked out.

Henry and Leo moved together through the garden, the breezy shadows thrown from trees dappling their wrinkled clothes and tanned limbs. Henry’s fine black hair fell neatly over his small ears, while Leo, with the thick straw-blond hair of a farmboy, had a stubborn cowlick he kept trying to rub down with his palm. They reached the fountain and sat down on its lip, crossing their legs and sipping coffee from steaming mugs. Henry was tall, with long, thin legs and an efficiency of movement that brought to mind a distance runner, a calmness and control in his physical action—even in his breathing—beneath which a rabid intensity boiled. He was competitive, and though naturally amiable, Julia had always sensed his fury when he lost at pool or backgammon. Leo could love him because he lacked that sense, maintaining an easy aloofness that transcended even his own black moods, just as Henry’s need to win in every part of his life made his sadness deep and inscrutable.

They sat down on the lip of the stone fountain: a female figure perched delicately on a plinth of flowers, smoothed by a generation rain and winters and covered in lichen that speckled the figure’s lithe flirtatious limbs. A hard breeze stirred the canopy of oaks, maples, London plane trees in the garden with a dry dull roar like the ghost of some far off titan and all three of them—Julia, Leo, and Henry—squinted into the dusty cacophony of the sun. When she looked back down, the boys were shading their eyes, looking back. Henry waved with ironic enthusiasm; he must have been as hung over as she was, if not more. Leo only smiled slightly, the shadow of his broad hand casting a veil over his eyes. She waved back and slipped from the bed, padding across the hardwood floor and down the stairs to join them.

Two voices moved from the but she could hear them

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