Do you like my tulips?
He’s gone out for his long walk along the river and left his laptop open for once.
I could set the record straight, but why spoil his fun. Or yours! Or mine too, when it comes right down to it. I read these little stories and they are so much fiction that I forget I’m the Georgette he’s writing about. He has such a fascination for anyone with that name!
When I correct the inaccuracies in his stories, he just tells me I should make my own story series called Being Georgette. His other Georgette already took a shot at that and gave up. Apparently I was dominating her stories too.
I’m really not what he paints me to be, but I’ll play along as long as they say it seems to be helping him.
***
Some people ask me what it’s like to be the famous Georgette from his stories. I say I’m not the Georgette from his stories. I’m my own Georgette, and am famous in my own right.
They always reply: “More like infamous.”
See how he manipulates things?
He’s the one with the secrets you wouldn’t believe. But you won’t hear any of it from me. I’m his protector. He lets enough of himself out through his hints and suggestive situations and somewhat naïve narration.
***
I’m not so flighty. I’m really not. But he’s such a challenge to be around. You don’t see him between the stories. That stubborn silence. That fixed stare. That lifelessness. You just want to scream to wake him up, and when all you get is that innocent, gentle smile, followed by: “What is it Georgette?”, all you can do is fly away as far and as fast as you can. I have my own life to live.
I return now and then. Not out of duty, but out of our deep kinship. I know him better than he knows himself. And he would probably say the same about me. At least he intimates that in his stories. Or maybe I just read that into his stories.
***
I’m sorry I don’t describe things like he does. How he turns a jar of pickles into the closest thing to a confession he’s made so far. For me a jar of pickles is a jar of pickles. I look around the kitchen here and can tell you about a knife, a refrigerator, a sink, and a flickering fluorescent light that he refuses to replace. I see a rack of drying dishes and a whole chicken thawing on the counter. He’d tell you he’s making chicken ballotine, but I swear he has no clue what that is. He just read it in a book somewhere.
You see, nothing interesting develops out of such descriptions for me.
I asked him about these descriptive tricks once, and he said he just writes what he sees when he closes his eyes and watches the movie unfold. He said sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures.
I don’t see a movie when I close my eyes. I just see blackness.
***
My garden. I could tell you about my flowers. But for me, a picture is worth a thousand words, so you’ll have to make due with the picture of my tulips. Around here, they bloom in May. I prefer to be where they bloom in February. But here I am.
***
He knows things. What he lacks in people skills he makes up for in intuition. He says maybe his problem with people comes from what he intuits of them. I tell him I think he is right, but he suspects I don’t know what I’m talking about.
He knows I have a secret or two that I can never tell him. I feel him probing me, trying to provoke me through these stories. He doesn’t know how much it would kill him to the ends of the earth to know one thing especially, and that is why he will never know. And neither will you.
***
If he were writing this, he would have ended with that last sentence. I sometimes catch on to his literary tricks. But I’m not interested in being so dramatic. When I finished my coffee on the front porch, he was just coming up the highway from the river. So I have a little time to sign off and wish you a good day.
Sincerely,
Georgette
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