of screen history.
"No, the art director certainly was not Ben Carre, how absurd to think that!. . . My goodness me, young man, Wallace Reid was dead and buried by then, and good riddance to bad rubbish. . . Edith Head? Edith Head design Nancy Carroll's patent leather evening dress? Who put that into your noddle?"
Now and then the lion sandpapered the back of my hand with its tongue, as if to show sympathy. The butch sister put away gin by the tumblerful, two to my one, and creaked resonantly from time to time, like an old door.
"No, no, no, young man! Laughton certainly was not addicted to self-abuse!"
And out of the dark it came to me that that dreamy perfume of jasmine issued from no flowering shrub but, instead, right out of the opening sequence of Double Indemnity, do you remember? And I suffered a ghastly sense of incipient humiliation, of impending erotic doom, so that I shivered, and Sister, alert and either comforting or complicitous, sloshed another half pint of gin into my glass.
Then Sister belched and announced: "Gonna take a leak."
Evidently equipped with night vision, she rolled off into the gloaming from whence, after a pause, came the tinkle of running water. She'd gone back to Nature as far as toilet training was concerned, cut out the frills. The raunchy sound of Sister making pee-pee brought me down to earth again. I clutched my tumbler, for the sake of holding something solid.
"About thish time," I said, "you met Hank Mann."
Night and candlelight turned the red mouth black, but her satin dress shone like water with plankton in it.
"Heinrich," she corrected with a click of orthodontics; and then, or so it seemed, fell directly into the trance for, all at once, she fixed her gaze on the middle distance and said no more.
I thankfully took advantage of her lapse of attention to pour my gin down the side of my chair, trusting that by the morrow it would be indistinguishable from lion piss. Sister, clanking her death's head belt-buckle as she readjusted her clothing, came back to us and juggled ice and lemon slices as if nothing untoward was taking place. Then, in a perfectly normal, even conversational tone, the Spirit said: "White kisses, red kisses. And coke in a golden casket on top of the baby grand. Those were the days."
Sister t'sked, possibly with irritation.
"Reckon you've had a skinful," said Sister. "Reckon you deserve a stiff whupping."
That roused the Spirit somewhat, who chuckled and lunged at the gin which, fortunately, stood within her reach. She poured a fresh drink down the hatch in a matter of seconds, then made a vague gesture with her left hand, inadvertently biffing the lion in the ear. The lion had dozed off and grumbled like an empty stomach to have his peace disturbed.
"They wore away her face by looking at it too much. So we made her a new one."
"Hee haw, hee haw," said Sister. She was not braying but laughing.
The Spirit propped herself on the arm of her wheel-chair and pierced me with a look. Something told me we had gone over some kind of edge. Nancy Carroll's evening dress, indeed. Enough of that nonsense. Now we were on a different plane.
"I used to think of prayer wheels," she informed me. "Night after night, prayer wheels ceaselessly turning in the darkened cathedrals, those domed and gilded palaces of the Faith, the Majesties, the Rialtos, the Alhambras, those grottoes of the miraculous in which the creatures of the dream came out to walk within the sight of men. And the wheels spun out those subtle threads of light that wove the liturgies of that reverential age, the last great
"No, the art director certainly was not Ben Carre, how absurd to think that!. . . My goodness me, young man, Wallace Reid was dead and buried by then, and good riddance to bad rubbish. . . Edith Head? Edith Head design Nancy Carroll's patent leather evening dress? Who put that into your noddle?"
Now and then the lion sandpapered the back of my hand with its tongue, as if to show sympathy. The butch sister put away gin by the tumblerful, two to my one, and creaked resonantly from time to time, like an old door.
"No, no, no, young man! Laughton certainly was not addicted to self-abuse!"
And out of the dark it came to me that that dreamy perfume of jasmine issued from no flowering shrub but, instead, right out of the opening sequence of Double Indemnity, do you remember? And I suffered a ghastly sense of incipient humiliation, of impending erotic doom, so that I shivered, and Sister, alert and either comforting or complicitous, sloshed another half pint of gin into my glass.
Then Sister belched and announced: "Gonna take a leak."
Evidently equipped with night vision, she rolled off into the gloaming from whence, after a pause, came the tinkle of running water. She'd gone back to Nature as far as toilet training was concerned, cut out the frills. The raunchy sound of Sister making pee-pee brought me down to earth again. I clutched my tumbler, for the sake of holding something solid.
"About thish time," I said, "you met Hank Mann."
Night and candlelight turned the red mouth black, but her satin dress shone like water with plankton in it.
"Heinrich," she corrected with a click of orthodontics; and then, or so it seemed, fell directly into the trance for, all at once, she fixed her gaze on the middle distance and said no more.
I thankfully took advantage of her lapse of attention to pour my gin down the side of my chair, trusting that by the morrow it would be indistinguishable from lion piss. Sister, clanking her death's head belt-buckle as she readjusted her clothing, came back to us and juggled ice and lemon slices as if nothing untoward was taking place. Then, in a perfectly normal, even conversational tone, the Spirit said: "White kisses, red kisses. And coke in a golden casket on top of the baby grand. Those were the days."
Sister t'sked, possibly with irritation.
"Reckon you've had a skinful," said Sister. "Reckon you deserve a stiff whupping."
That roused the Spirit somewhat, who chuckled and lunged at the gin which, fortunately, stood within her reach. She poured a fresh drink down the hatch in a matter of seconds, then made a vague gesture with her left hand, inadvertently biffing the lion in the ear. The lion had dozed off and grumbled like an empty stomach to have his peace disturbed.
"They wore away her face by looking at it too much. So we made her a new one."
"Hee haw, hee haw," said Sister. She was not braying but laughing.
The Spirit propped herself on the arm of her wheel-chair and pierced me with a look. Something told me we had gone over some kind of edge. Nancy Carroll's evening dress, indeed. Enough of that nonsense. Now we were on a different plane.
"I used to think of prayer wheels," she informed me. "Night after night, prayer wheels ceaselessly turning in the darkened cathedrals, those domed and gilded palaces of the Faith, the Majesties, the Rialtos, the Alhambras, those grottoes of the miraculous in which the creatures of the dream came out to walk within the sight of men. And the wheels spun out those subtle threads of light that wove the liturgies of that reverential age, the last great
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