The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [111]
“He’s a … ghostwriter, an as-told-to-ist. His name’s Geoff something. He’s doing something for Memento Vivere.”
“Volta’s vanity press? What’s he doing? A hagiography for its editorin-chief?”
As the unsmiling waitress cleared the table, deftly emptying things into a bucket, Noel glanced at the gentleman in question. He was sitting at a table half-hidden by a pillar, pushing buttons on a tiny machine. “He … well, he asked me to keep it quiet.”
“He’s not doing that product-placement novel is he? For Vorta? In which everyone sits around drinking Maxwell House coffee?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Vorta’s memoirs?”
“Something like that.”
“Memoirs,” said Norval, shaking his head. “The favourite genre of people who never had a memorable thought.”
“Come on, Nor. There are lots of—”
“Has-beens with imaginations so barren they can’t write fiction. And memories so barren they can’t write the truth.
Noel again glanced over his shoulder. And got a better look at the machine the man was fiddling with: a mini-CD-R recorder.
“His fees must be as paltry as his writing skills,” said Norval, “if he’s working for that dwarfish quack.”47
“Why has he been ‘pestering’ you?”
“He wants permission, for some reason, to publish a chapter of my novel. Which he’ll never get. He was also harassing Sam last week. I think he’s in love with her.”
Noel furrowed his brow. “It was JJ who got him the job. After Vorta fired two other writers.”
“For telling the truth? So this hack hiding behind the pillar is a last resort?”48
Here a woman, an underdressed platinum-haired woman with breasts padded to videogame dimensions, stopped at the table. When Norval rose, as if to embrace her, she began poking a finger into his chest, her voice rising from twenty to seventy decibels. As her anger grew her words became less and less comprehensible, almost a foreign tongue. She began to sob and moan as her body heaved. Norval observed her, with shocking unflappability. “Be back in a second,” he said as he escorted the hysterical woman outside.
Noel watched the two through the window, as in a pantomime, as Norval evidently sorted things out. The woman was no longer crying; she was kissing his fingers. Noel shook his head. If she knew what acts those hands had committed, she might think twice before lifting them to her lips. She was now walking away—calmly, even contentedly by the way she glanced back at him. Why do women bother? Surely it’s not a turn-on, surely the truism is not true: that women, and beautiful women in particular, are drawn to men who remain aloof from them, or wipe their shoes on them …
Norval returned to the table with a dangling cigarette in his mouth and two drinks in one hand. “There should be a pound where you can leave people like that. With anaesthetists. And cages.”
Noel wasn’t listening. He was brooding over the same things he was brooding over when he arrived at the bar. Samira. Her love for Norval. Her attempts to understand him. Norval’s feelings for her. Norval’s capacity for love. He described the sentiment in his novel, realistically, poignantly. And Dowson’s “Cynara,” he had confessed, was on his Top Ten list. But how to approach all this? He took a sip of the beer that Norval had placed in front of him.
“I don’t understand you,” he said finally.
“In general, or with reference to some particular?”
“When you say you’ve never been in love.”
Norval took a gulp of his Irish whiskey. “Which word escapes your understanding?”
“I don’t understand the concept. I’m convinced you’re lying. Are you?”
“Never felt less inclined to. Love exists for only one reason—to spread the genes of the person doing the loving. It may boil down to a chemical called oxytocin. Do you know it?”
“Well … yes.”
“I am thus unable to love one woman. But quite able—compelled,