The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [133]
Stella laughed, a deep belly laugh, one Noel hadn’t heard in a while. “My mother used to feel the same way,” she said. “She had every bad habit in the book—and told her doctors to go to the devil.”
Noel was now smiling, delighted at his mother’s new coherency—and the latest drug responsible for it. “All right, Mom, I give in. If cigarettes and alcohol are a pleasure, go for it.” He could hardly wait to tell JJ—it must be the A-1001. He should make more. “Listen, I’ve got some things to do in the lab, and a couple ideas I want to work out. You two’ll be all right? Got everything you need?”
Norval gave a slight nod, then waited for the basement door to close. “Let me light that, Stella.”
As she leaned over the match Norval caught a glimpse of the cleft of her breasts and black lace bra. When she resumed her position, he studied her swept-back salt-and-pepper hair, her patrician face, her upper lip the shape of an archery bow. More like Lauren Hutton, he decided, than Catherine Deneuve. About the same age and with that seductive incisor gap that a tongue might just slide its way through. And that luscious Scottish accent …
“Stella, in the interests of art, I was wondering if you’d help me out with this project I’m working on …”
Chapter 21
Stella’s Diary (II)
20 April 2002. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.
Well, that feels better. My fingers feel better, my mind feels better. I’m not all the way there but I feel like I can finish sentences now. And I can remember what I had for breakfast this morning.
If the sword of Damocles fell, it missed.
21 April. Touch wood. I remembered something else today. When Noel reads to me at bedtime -– as I read to him aeons ago -– he often mumbles something before starting, almost like a prayer. Which sometimes makes me cry. But no matter how hard I tried, I could never remember what it was, until today: ‘To you mother I will read these lines, for love of unforgotten times.’
24 April. Finally met Noel’s best friend, a Frenchman named Norval Blaquière. He’s what my students would have called ‘hot’. I never thought I’d use that word. He’s handsome (almost looks like a Burun!) and his clothes -tailor-made by the look of them –- are exquisite: white muslin shirt with metal snaps, leather jacket of the deepest green, black wool trousers with grosgrain trim ... But all on the well-worn, genteel-shabby side, as if picked up at an aristocrat’s jumble sale.
And he can be quite charming, despite his air of selfsatisfied superiority in all matters of taste and intellect, and this cold, cutting tone he has (he wears his hatchet on his sleeve). Still, he makes me laugh -- even more than JJ. The strangest part of it all is that, from the way he looks at me so piercingly, I almost think he’s attracted to me, that he’s ‘making love to me’ (in the old-fashioned sense). Is that a figment of my imagination? Wishful thinking? A faded beauty’s yearning for attention? But I did feel something –unless, like so many other things, my woman’s intuition is failing me.
25 April. After my husband died my relationship with men seemed to die as well -– apart from two or three unhappy skirmishes. The chemistry was never quite right. Or perhaps it was the past