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Show The will, I am certain, does not mention me; it is not at issue here. But the inventory includes four rings. My eyes slip from the papers on the opposing desk to the figure of Luel. I realize I am already breaking the rule I have set for myself in these proceedings: I will stare at the floorboards, the walls, the awkward angles of the chairs, but I will not look at her. But now I see how she has tricked me into doing so: she is wearing the same black low-cut dress she once wore when she came to my apartment, though she has tried to make it chaste by inserting a white lace dickey at the throat. She sees me looking at her; she composes a smile. But at the same time she is pointing out to her father and to the attorney the disheveled pile of volumes that are on my desk: she knows they are the journals, the "family album," I have kept. It is a loose collection of notebooks, copybooks, photograph albums, pads of notepaper: something less than a uniform series, something more than a wad of scraps. I've kept these journals, as Luel has discovered, almost since I began to live near the GoldenGlow, during the last five or six years. I've kept them only intermittently, mostly when I wanted to think about something I'd seen, or heard, or found myself doing, and then I would write it down in a loose, casual way, just so I could hold it up to the light, look at it, and think in a careful clear way about what it is, what it means, whether it is good. * * * Despite the objections of my attorney, I read: |