that is, aside from her diary, the tape, her clothes, some old magazines, a couple of books that were overdue at the library, and a couple of letters from the library about these books (and âthe potential loss of library privilegesâ). They got a search warrant and went into Citronâs house, and in the backyard, right at the property line, they turned up a pair of underwear with Sallyâs blood on them.
Another woman, a friend of Sallyâs from a high-end wax shop in Boston, said that Citron had said that Sally wasnât going to be working at the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon anymore. When this friend had asked where she was, Citron had smiled and said, âI think you better look in L.A. She wanted to be in the movies, you know? Yeah, she wanted her name on the Boulevard, her hand in the cement at Graumanâs. What have you got if you havenât got dreams?â
[ CHAPTER NINE ]
WHEN YOU COME unglued, you are the last person to know it. But emotional explosions have their own revelations, which arenât so obvious when you are flying through the air in the power of the first blast, but the implications are more obvious on the way down, when those details of your life have gone just as far as gravity will allow and now, in the moment of exquisite weightlessness, as in a dream, they turn and fall. In this concussive moment, at the top of the arc, all the tricks I had used, all the devious methods of hiding what I really thought, revealed themselves as the innocent frauds they were.
Of course, as a prosecutor I resisted blowing my top. I had tried to contain what I felt when I held the bloody rags (so conveniently stored in a clear plastic sack) that were brought in from a woman found in an empty lot, or after I had handled, in that same plastic, pieces of bone picked up in the ashes of a woodfurnace, or after confronting a man killed over a boom box, a woman stabbed in a drunken argument over what kind of pizza to order, a child dropped out of a window because a boyfriend was angry with a teenaged mother who had bought the wrong kind of microwave enchilada.
I tried to feel nothing. And saved it, just as my grandfather had done, for the late nights when I read Herodotus, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius, and Thucydidesâs The History of the Peloponnesian War . Those old outrages and vicious events, which were so distant, made it safe to have my feelings about them. I could be appalled by Roman soldiers who had their way with a town that had betrayed them by going over to Carthage. The town thought that when Carthage was winning the war, it was a good idea to make an alliance, but then Carthage lost the war and the Romans appeared. At the sight of the Roman army, the women in the town stood on the walls and watched a battle in front of it, and when it was clear that their men had lost, they threw their children over and then jumped themselves. This reading was an antidote to my remoteness.
Also, in Thucydides I read this:
The Thracians, bursting into Mycalessus, sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age, but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden . . . and in particular they attacked a boysâ school, the largest that there was in the place, into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all. In short, the disaster falling on the whole town was unsurpassed in magnitude, and unapproached by any in suddenness and in horror.
. . . Mycalessus thus experienced a calamity, for its extent, as lamentable as any that happened in the war.
After thousands of years, Thucydidesâs grief and horror was still palpable: he was simply appalled, so much so that he was left only with a sadness and fury that descended like a fog.
When I read this, after Sally Sunshine, my own resistance to the horror of the banal, the idiotic smallness for which people died (a TV dinner, a boom
Another woman, a friend of Sallyâs from a high-end wax shop in Boston, said that Citron had said that Sally wasnât going to be working at the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon anymore. When this friend had asked where she was, Citron had smiled and said, âI think you better look in L.A. She wanted to be in the movies, you know? Yeah, she wanted her name on the Boulevard, her hand in the cement at Graumanâs. What have you got if you havenât got dreams?â
[ CHAPTER NINE ]
WHEN YOU COME unglued, you are the last person to know it. But emotional explosions have their own revelations, which arenât so obvious when you are flying through the air in the power of the first blast, but the implications are more obvious on the way down, when those details of your life have gone just as far as gravity will allow and now, in the moment of exquisite weightlessness, as in a dream, they turn and fall. In this concussive moment, at the top of the arc, all the tricks I had used, all the devious methods of hiding what I really thought, revealed themselves as the innocent frauds they were.
Of course, as a prosecutor I resisted blowing my top. I had tried to contain what I felt when I held the bloody rags (so conveniently stored in a clear plastic sack) that were brought in from a woman found in an empty lot, or after I had handled, in that same plastic, pieces of bone picked up in the ashes of a woodfurnace, or after confronting a man killed over a boom box, a woman stabbed in a drunken argument over what kind of pizza to order, a child dropped out of a window because a boyfriend was angry with a teenaged mother who had bought the wrong kind of microwave enchilada.
I tried to feel nothing. And saved it, just as my grandfather had done, for the late nights when I read Herodotus, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius, and Thucydidesâs The History of the Peloponnesian War . Those old outrages and vicious events, which were so distant, made it safe to have my feelings about them. I could be appalled by Roman soldiers who had their way with a town that had betrayed them by going over to Carthage. The town thought that when Carthage was winning the war, it was a good idea to make an alliance, but then Carthage lost the war and the Romans appeared. At the sight of the Roman army, the women in the town stood on the walls and watched a battle in front of it, and when it was clear that their men had lost, they threw their children over and then jumped themselves. This reading was an antidote to my remoteness.
Also, in Thucydides I read this:
The Thracians, bursting into Mycalessus, sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age, but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden . . . and in particular they attacked a boysâ school, the largest that there was in the place, into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all. In short, the disaster falling on the whole town was unsurpassed in magnitude, and unapproached by any in suddenness and in horror.
. . . Mycalessus thus experienced a calamity, for its extent, as lamentable as any that happened in the war.
After thousands of years, Thucydidesâs grief and horror was still palpable: he was simply appalled, so much so that he was left only with a sadness and fury that descended like a fog.
When I read this, after Sally Sunshine, my own resistance to the horror of the banal, the idiotic smallness for which people died (a TV dinner, a boom
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