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Back The Great Pretenders
Chapters (55)
  1. Cover
  2. Praise for The Great Pretenders
  3. Dedication
  4. Epigraph
  5. PART I
  6. Chapter One
  7. Chapter Two
  8. Chapter Three
  9. Chapter Four
  10. Chapter Five
  11. Chapter Six
  12. Chapter Seven
  13. PART II
  14. Chapter Eight
  15. Chapter Nine
  16. Chapter Ten
  17. Chapter Eleven
  18. Chapter Twelve
  19. Chapter Thirteen
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Chapter Seventeen
  24. PART III
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Chapter Twenty
  28. Chapter Twenty-one
  29. Chapter Twenty-two
  30. Chapter Twenty-three
  31. Chapter Twenty-four
  32. Chapter Twenty-five
  33. Chapter Twenty-six
  34. PART IV
  35. Chapter Twenty-seven
  36. Chapter Twenty-eight
  37. Chapter Twenty-nine
  38. Chapter Thirty
  39. Chapter Thirty-one
  40. Chapter Thirty-two
  41. Chapter Thirty-three
  42. Chapter Thirty-four
  43. Chapter Thirty-five
  44. PART V
  45. Chapter Thirty-six
  46. Chapter Thirty-seven
  47. Chapter Thirty-eight
  48. Chapter Thirty-nine
  49. Chapter Forty
  50. AUTHOR’S NOTE
  51. Readers Guide
  52. DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  53. Acknowledgments
  54. About the Author
  55. What’s next onyour reading list?

PART V

The Oubliette

1956

Chapter Thirty-six

Like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, I had had the stuffing kicked out of me. I stuffed it back in, enough to get up and shamble haphazardly along, but without Terrence, without work, my life emptied of purpose. I bestirred myself enough to clean the seats and interior of the Silver Bullet by hand, and though they would never quite look the same, at least they weren’t visibly stained with red. But for the exterior, I had to find a place that would repaint the entire car without asking too many questions. I finally found one and explained that it was a sorority hazing gone awry, which seemed to satisfy the guy. A week later I had the car back, no longer silver gray but a dark green.

Other than painting the car, the days, weeks of that early summer seemed to me blurred as though they got left out in the rain, mottled and muddied. Jobless, manless, unwashed hair, unshaved legs, and stinking of failure, I ate nothing but cornflakes and Hostess Sno Balls. I drank way more than was good for me. I slept way more than I should have, though I didn’t wake rested. I read books without pleasure, or even much comprehension. I played the piano, plunking out some of Terrence’s old tunes, vainly trying to ease the ache. The phone never rang except once a day when Thelma called to be sure I was still among the living. I moved the artwork that artists had lent me to the back bedroom. (Mercifully the red paint splashed across our furniture and desks had not reached the walls. Thelma’s brother and nephews rescued the artwork as well when they moved our file cabinets to Malibu.) Methodically I went through the file cabinets, and in the big stone fireplace, I burned anything that might incriminate anyone who had dealt in my subterfuges. I’d regret it at tax time, of course, but it seemed necessary now. Other than that, I dealt with the death of the Granville Agency in a truly immature and unprofessional fashion by leaving everything in the hands of Adam Ornstein, my attorney, who sent me stuff I had to sign. I signed it, sometimes without even reading it through. The past had been so hollowed out that I cared nothing for the future.