OCR Text |
Show 15, Jeffries, Islamorada The blue smoke thickened. In this place, he had gotten old. A metronome, he had written on a cocktail napkin, like some frightful siege engine, had moved against the threaded walls and broken turrets of the fragile secret city where he hoarded time. Mint pastels on white. Too loud, and dressed crazy and springlike in this hard weather, an old lover greeted him on the stair. "Oh hello, Dorian, are you still teaching?" "No, uh, I'm-" In the routine they mentally undressed each other, while her nostrils flared down toward the hors d'oeuvres in the smoke, and Pete Nardalla cannibalizing The Shadow of Your Smile. "Approximately what could that be," he wondered out loud. "A shadow of a smile. Examined in the framework of phenomenology, it would be less a Cartesian perception than a druidic-" "It's a Chesire smile, a smile that isn't there anymore. Oh my poor Dorian," she said, putting a cool hand to his forehead, "he always had to listen to the words. Now the subject was, how are you supporting yourself?" "I'm, uh, I'm writing." |