The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll Page B

wrote first to tell him how much he liked The Green Dog’s Sorrow . When Father later told him about his collection, KIee sent him that one.”
    To me the puppet looked like something from a fourth-grade arts-and-crafts class.
    Sax sank into a nearby leather chair and went on communing with the Klee. I looked at Anna and smiled, and Anna looked at me and smiled. For two seconds it was as if Saxony wasn’t in the room with us. For two seconds I felt how easy and nice it would be to be Anna’s lover. The feeling passed, but its echoes didn’t.
    “So who are you, Mr. Abbey? Besides Stephen Abbey’s son.”
    “Who am I?”
    “Yes, who are you? Where are you coming from now, what do you do … ?”
    “Oh, I see. Well, I’ve been teaching at a prep school in Connecticut …”
    “Teaching? You mean that you are not an actor?”
    I took one of my deep breaths and crossed one leg over the other. A bit of hairy ankle showed between the cuff and the top of my gray sock, so I covered it with my hand. I tried to laugh off her question/statement. “Ha, ha, no, one actor in the family was enough.”
    “Yes, genug . I feel the same way. I could never be a writer.”
    She looked at me calmly. Again, that kind of unspoken, just-between-us intimacy was there. Or was I fantasizing? I pulled on my shoelace and undid the bow. I was tying it again when she spoke.
    “Which of Father’s was your favorite book?”
    “ The Land of Laughs .”
    “Why?” She picked an oblong glass paperweight off an end table and rolled it around in her hands.
    “Because no one else ever got that close to my world.” I uncrossed my leg and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else’s world. If it’s a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what’s going to happen to you there, what’ll be around the next corner. But if it’s a lousy book, then it’s like going through Secaucus, New Jersey — it smells and you wish you weren’t there, but since you’ve started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you’re done.”
    She laughed and bent down to pet Petals, who was resting her chunky head on Anna’s foot. “You mean that you finish every book that you start?”
    “Yes, it’s this terrible habit that I have. Even if it’s the worst thing that was ever written, once I get started with it, then I’m hooked until I find out what happens.”
    “That is very interesting, because my father was the same way. As soon as he picked up anything — even the phone book — he would read it until the bitter end.”
    “Didn’t they make a great movie out of that?”
    “Out of what?”
    “The phone book.” I knew it was a terrible joke as soon as I said it, but Anna didn’t even attempt a smile. I wondered if she judged future biographers on their sense of humor.
    “Excuse me for a minute, will you? I have to go look at the dinner.” She left the room to Saxony and me. Petals looked up and wagged her tail but stayed where she was on the floor. Naturally I jumped up and poked around. France or someone in the house liked biographies and autobiographies, because there were so many of them around, the pages bent over and whole sections marked off. It was a strange assortment, too — Richard Halliburton’s The Magic Carpet , the notebooks of Max Frisch (in German), Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men , a French priest who fought for the underground in WW II, Mein Kampf (in German), the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Three on a Toothbrush by Jack Paar.
    A cardboard shoebox with Buster Brown on the side contained a collection of old postcards. When I thumbed through them, I noticed that many were of European train stations. I flipped one of the Vienna Westbahnhof over and got the shivers when I looked at the signature printed across the bottom — “Isaac.” The date on it was 1933. I couldn’t read the