In Which She Still Comes Across As Very Respectful

by Matty Byloos

Wendy Sapphire

by MARK ARTURO

He was born in a godawful place. The avenues were resplendent with manure and offal, mercurios dotted the carapaces of old horses and mules. Scavengers like them haunted the old reservoir.

A town fair held every year overflowed with vitriol. He hawked coins shaded pink, flipping them in the air for effect. A momentary distraction is all it took.

Wendy's father was a drunk, but the kind of happy one who never vomited on anyone else; only fell asleep in his own. Wendy cashed out the large bets and doubled as a horse whisperer. She featured auburn hair and a noticeable gap between two teeth. She was very respectful of him, but that was nothing he wanted very much.

The other girl had a stage name of Sapphire. She did not like being called this casually at all. Her hair was red and blonde in parts, and he was disappointed to learn her parents dyed it that shade. If it had been natural it would have been a miracle.

The old reservoir was pumping out all sorts of calcified deposits, clumps of hair and grease and magnesium. It smelled strong, but not overly terrible, sort of the way the scent of gasoline can be pleasant in a nose.

by Matty Byloos
Wendy said, "One of the ponies caught a very degrading disease." Touching her fingers to a small horse comb, she asked if he wanted to see the pony's corpse. He declined and offered her orange sherbet. She put the creamy substance in the corner of her mouth and started tousling his hair. "You wash it too much."

Her body, warm to the touch, was far less enervating than he had imagined. He told Sapphire about the time he spent with Wendy. The other girl had no great interest, but offered that everything looked a lot better in the dark.

Sapphire loved cotton candy, and a boy shaped like a grouse named Lacob was always bringing her some. At times she nodded to Lacob, and every once in awhile she would mutter, "You're too kind."

He thought things would be awkward after their intimate act, but Wendy was a lot of fun. She knew all the latin cognumens of birds, and liked to rhyme them with proper names.

At the beginning of July one of the ponies ran Wendy down and her left leg was never the same. It definitely shivered when it rained, and she apologized a lot more: for what he wasn't sure.

When she wasn't practicing her new song, a jazz number that featured a not-insignificant amount of hip thrusting, Sapphire was feeding and grooming a large tortoise. The animal did not like him very much, but he stole birdseed for it anyway after Sapphire asked.

Wendy hated the turtle's guts. "It's a stupid beast," she would say whenever she saw it. "Wendy hates Genevieve because she reminds her too much of herself," Lacob explained. He found himself regarding the sharded boy with a newfound admiration after that. Lacob's tongue was very sweet, and it turned out he was only Sapphire's cousin.

Once he had asked Sapphire whether she was interested in sex. "You don't have the funds," she said. He asked whether she ever enjoyed it. "You have to know what you're good at," she said.

He agreed to take Genevieve on walks since Sapphire had lost interest in her pet. Sometimes Wendy went with him, shuffling along with a long metal cane that allowed her to move at a rate commensurate with a tortoise. At first he did not know who he felt worse for, but then he realized it was himself.

The last day of the fair featured the biggest race, which was called the Santa Maria. One of the ponies snapped and fled into the forest. He was sent after it because Wendy could not go and there was not much hope of recovering the animal in any case.

It was dark by the time he hit the old reservoir. The pony had gone to water and was sampling the verdant sludge, and soon, puking some of it back up. She had no interest in the oats that were offered her, but lay down near a dessicated maple and whimpered. He felt he could sense a low movement of the earth beneath his piddly legs, sort of like a insect swallowing.

After a few hours he gave the pony some of his water, brushed her and on impulse, ascended her back. As he broke into a small clearing he heard a clear, masculine voice. It said, "Come down from there." Without thinking about it too much, he hopped off the pony and bowed.

by Serban Savu

The man was tall and slim, almost a stick figure. He grabbed the pony's lead and whispered to it. The man asked if the pony belonged to him.

"Not really."

"She hasn't been cared for properly. She needs water."

He shrugged. "I don't suppose you know how to care for a tortoise."

"No," the man said. "Nasty creatures. Do you have one nearby?"

"Back at the fair."

"You're one of those travelling folks?" He nodded. "I should have known. It takes a lot to get a tan from this sun."

While he slept, the man roasted the pony's hind meat on a spit and packed the rest away in a large cooler. The man suggested he say the pony had drowned in the reservoir, since they would never look for the animal if they believed that was what happened. "Anything that drinks that sludge will die," the man said. "Did you know that?"

He shook his head.

Back at the fair, vendors packed up their goods. He told Wendy's father what had happened, in so many words, and Wendy cried.

He went looking for Sapphire. Her dressing room was empty. Behind a splintered armoire he found Genevieve munching on a pile of smashed tomatoes that had been thrown at her various times throughout the summer. Lacob showed up, kissed him softly on the forehead, put the tortoise in a small wheelbarrow, and trundled after his mother Josephine.

He packed up everything he had stolen in the last few months and headed towards the reservoir. It now twinkled an unabashed aubergine. He took out a glass he had lifted and dipped it in the water. The sludge positively glowed. He felt silly for looking around as he raised the liquid-filled glass. There was no one.

He filled the rest of the glasses, covered them with wax paper and headed north, careful not to step in the water.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about St. Patrick's Cathedral.

by Serban Savu

"Wyoming" - Lady and West (mp3)

"Everything" - Lady and West (mp3)

In Which We Drop Our Tired Glamour

Getting Away With It

by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON

The following is an excerpt from the novel I Have To Tell You, available for a limited time in pre-release from 0s&1s Novels.

I work as a secretary for LunchKase Games, a mobile gaming company based in a loft on King West. They’ve got more venture capital than they know what to do with, so it’s a pretty sweet gig: we have a patio, a home theatre-sized screen on one side of the office, and a lavish kitchen on the other. The other secretary, Sherene, kind of hates it here though: she talks a lot about her trysts with professors and poets, and punctuates her hourly smokes and our daily tasks with heavy sighs (we order office chairs at Grand and Toy, we purchase ever-more envelopes, we refill drawers with granola bars for the BWs – which stands for Boy-Wonders, our secret name for the LunchKase developers, designers, and programmers.) It’s Monday, so this morning I hear all about her weekend: she was too hung over from cigars and Cristal to do anything but stay in bed all Sunday, reading some theory she’d forgotten she’d hated in school, and eating canned soup. “So much psychic tiredness I couldn’t even shower,” she says, dropping her tired glamour and condescending academic-speak for a moment, and I am touched.

Irving, our boss, peers out from his office and points at the overfull sink, and I stand. I collect Tupperware containers from the BWs and peel limp crusts and lasagne from them, then scrub each with green apple detergent. Restocking the office fridge with dozens of soft drinks I’m painfully aware that I’m being watched: the BWs watch me in mini-shifts, popping their heads up like groundhogs, staring as I strain, lift and stack; strain, lift and stack. I’m never so aware of my body as I am when I restock the drinks. I feel squeezed into whatever I’m wearing, my belt always too tight, as sidewalk slush dries inside my slow-rotting shoes, as I clop back and forth with armfuls of cans, hating them all. Sherene doesn’t look up at me once, though I wish she would.

It’s hard to explain how Sherene gets away with everything, though I understand it perfectly because I’ve known a dozen girls like her. She hardly does anything and complains about everything, and everyone falls over themselves to cushion her experience of the office – of carrying boxes, of answering the phone, of purchasing new software, of the spectral men in her stories. Of course I don’t know her specifically; I don’t know her at all – she wouldn’t bother with me. Once I spotted her lingering by Irving’s desk with the mail cradled in her arms, and overheard her describe me as ‘cute,’ and I understood she meant ‘boring.’ I don’t resent her, and I don’t envy her either – I really don’t. Her magic is exhausting and unsustainable, and I think – I know – it’s running out.

So even if it’s Sherene’s fault, Irving only addresses me when something’s wrong, and it’s always immediately accusatory: “You didn’t…’ ‘You didn’t…’ ‘You didn’t…” I guess I’ve had it coming: for the past few weeks I’ve been drinking too much at night with my heartbroken roommate Mark and spending the daytime all glazed, ignoring the slow drift of paper from one side of my desk to the other. I’ve been getting thin pink invoice slips from the Pepsi supply company, from office-chair delivery people, but allow them to sit in my plastic in-box undisturbed. Last week I started getting yellow slips, playing dumb for the grim-faced delivery-people who smell like King Street traffic, then stuffing those in my in-box as well.

Later in the morning Irving calls me into his office. He closes the door, picks up a letter, and returns to his desk without once leaving his wheelie-chair, steepling his small fingers and giving me a long look. He tells me I’ve been careless. I cry. He shifts around in his seat as I cry, hands me a tissue box, then rolls over to a stack of receipts, gossamer-thin and four inches high, secured with a dirty rubber band. He curls my fingers around it, telling me to tally the expenses, and I spend the rest of the day tallying four-hundred dollar dinners and two-minute cabs, ignoring Sherene’s hissed whispers about the sexist Pepsi delivery man and his busy hands, and ignoring the BWs too, as they put the newest game Smash Princess through final tests and throw paperclips at each other. In the washroom Sherene and I stand side-by-side in front of the marble sinks, and her eyes seek mine in the mirror. “It’s not worth it,” she says, so matter-of-factly I don’t ask what ‘it’ is supposed to mean until she’s almost out the door.

“What do you mean, what do I mean?” she asks, her eyes focusing on me, then flicking to her own reflection in the mirror behind me, and then back to me again.

I clear my throat. “What isn’t worth it?”

She pauses, and then takes a couple of steps towards me, then a few more. She lowers her chin and fixes me with a long stare. She touches one of my hands.

“You strike me as very young, Ashley. Don’t tell me how old you are specifically – I’ll get jealous.”

She laughs, so I laugh too.

“The thing is, you’re not only young young, you’re…I get the feeling you’re from a smaller place, a smaller town. Am I correct?”

“Yeah, I’m from St. Thomas.” I’d already told her this maybe four times. “What do you mean, you get the feeling?”

“Well,” she begins, and to my amazement she blushes a little. She looks down at my hand and then, after a pause, grabs the other one. I stiffen up.

“Listen to me, Ashley. You call this the big city, and maybe that’s true – for Canada anyway, this is it. And maybe it’s great here in Toronto – I think it is. I certainly couldn’t leave. But there are such fucked up people here, such twisted sickos, and the city produces and attracts and encourages them. It gives them ample and luxurious venues to do fucked up things together and to others and just… and Irving is one of them. You hear me? And so if he makes it easier for you when you let him…on days like today when he, when you, you know –”

She lets go of my hands. “I mean just what I said: it’s not worth it. It might feel like an exchange, but it’s robbery.”

She turns. She leaves.

The sun that afternoon slants through the blinds, slowly lighting up my desk. I bring Irving the final sum and he wheels over to take the still-warm printout and banded receipts from me, then rubs my palm.

“I make you nervous,” he tells me. I allow him to rub my hand, terrified that I’ll lose my seventeen-dollars-an-hour job, accustomed as I’ve become to overpriced King Street lunches (fifteen-dollar salads; nicoise with artichokes and truffle oil one day, peppery green with seaweed and avocado the next.)

“How many boyfriends have you had, Ashley?” Irving asks, wheeling over to close the door, then rotating to face me. I look down at him, and he looks up. “Hundreds,” I say, and we understand each other at last.

“I think you misunderstood,” he says. “You see, Sherene and I…we’re basically dating.” I think in a flash about how she’d tower over him, then wonder what they could possibly talk about, then wonder what ‘basically’ means.

I trail Sherene to the bathroom, scrub my hands, watching her in the mirror. “He said you’re dating. Irving.” I say, but maybe she can’t hear me over the water, because she doesn’t respond. She smells foul with cigarette smoke and rub-on perfume, and squeezes her hair in her hands as she leaves.

Irving is standing in front of the BWs when I get back, buttoning up his coat and knotting up his nice scarf and saying something that elicits a scattered cheer. “We’re having a release party for Smash Princess tomorrow,” the lead illustrator, Seth, explains to me, and Irving glances over. “I’ve compiled a shopping list of party snacks and alcohol for you, Ashley,” he says, then turns back to the BWs. “Booze!” he says, eliciting one more cheer as they get up and drift out separately.

I watch them leave, stacking some folders, then walk over to the giant screen. I’ve Windexed the whole thing dozens of times – tight little circles, standing on a chair to reach the top – but I’ve never turned it on before. I flick the switch now. The screen glows brighter in some patches than in others, then a massive jungle shimmers to life.

I pick a controller off the coffee table, and Smash Princess herself jerks awake, blinking huge eyes and flexing her biceps. I make her leap into a tree, then leap down, her skirt fluttering; I guide her through a river where she fights with an alligator, and I grind the controls and shout my exhilaration as she grips its pebbled back and rips it in half. She stands in the river as the alligator bleeds and melts into the molten water, straightening her back – she’s almost life-sized on this screen – and another alligator brushes her leg, and she roars. I drop the controller on the floor with a yelp and she dives dutifully into the water, and no matter what I press, I can’t bring her back again.

+

“You messed up, dude,” Mark whispers. “Companies like yours are legally required to provide food at boozy, you know, gatherings.”

“No way,” I say, slurping my wine.

“Yes way! Hey, do you think the BWs will play the new game with me?”

“Shh, don’t call them that here! You should hope they don’t play it with you, they invented it,” I say, and he looks around the room, then asks, “Which guy’s the one who leaves mouldy lasagne every week?” I look through the small clumps of BWs, sipping their Gatorades and beers. “The ginger one,” I say, nodding toward Seth, then poke Mark – “Jesus! Don’t stare.”

"Fucker,” Mark growl-whispers, sort of flexing his skinny chest, and I laugh. “You went on a date with him, didn’t you,” he retorts, and I blush: I did, it was awful. I ate too much and too quickly; he scrolled through his iPhone and took his blazer on and off.

“Did you cut his steak for him? Did you throw in a massage?”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is I should’ve gone into engineering like these guys – look at them, fresh out of school, a hundred-ten pounds each, ordering beautiful women around all day.” He puts his empty beer bottle on the floor, then walks to the conference room to replace it.

“Irving – that’s Irving, short guy in the kitchen – he said yesterday I’d be an exotic dancer in another life,” Sherene is saying very quickly to Seth and his brother, laughing a little into her wineglass, rubbing a sequined shoulder with her free hand. “And while that’s enormously problematic and maybe a year ago I’d slap him silly, I understand he gets such a thrill from old-fashioned, painfully gendered behavior, and hell, so do I. I mean, what you like in bed doesn’t always align with your politics, right? He’s not saying it’s because I’m slutty, you understand, but because he knows how I am with people. You know: lots of people, that sort of connection, all easy. You know?”

“That’s fucked up,” Seth says, and his brother snorts. Sherene laughs again – her earrings jangling – then turns to me and Mark. We’re still lurking by the conference room, and I’m feeling swollen-headed and oafishly drunk, suddenly terrified I’ll start giggling and not stop for hours. “What a shit. I don't care. I could have him fired if I wanted. My name’s Sherene, how are you, you’re Ashley’s boyfriend? How you both doing for wine and beer?” Sherene says as she grips the fleshy part of my arm and leads me into the office kitchen. Mark follows, and drains his new beer in three long gulps. “She’s friendly,” he whispers when she steps away.

Sunlight streams through the kitchen windows, reminding me that it’s daytime and that I’m drunk. It’s so bright that I squint a little, and Sherene – her dress fiercely aglitter – hands my glass to Irving, who is drinking by himself. He leans back in his chair and, with his free hand, yanks the blinds down. Seth comes into the kitchen again. “Hey, uh, I didn’t mean to come off as rude before,” he says.

“That is so OK, Seth,” Sherene says, rubbing his arm, and Irving watches her do it. “Me and the other illustrators are wondering if you’d pose for us sometime, Sherene,” Seth continues. “We’re starting Smash Princess 2, and we’ve got this new, like, bikinied revenge character. We need a tall, sort of Amazonian woman for reference.”

“Sure,” she says, “When?”

“I’ll have to talk to the guys and get back to you,” he says, taking out his iPhone.

Sherene stares at him for a moment, then grips the hem of her sequined dress, and yanks it up over her head. Her hands are veined and beautiful and her breasts look heavy, striped with the light coming through the blinds. I gawk at the freckles, the mottled nipples, the paleness and pinkness and brownness and blood vessels. I could stare for an hour. I’m red down to my neck. I understand the five dollars men forked over for Penthouse before the internet made porn cheap and grainy and free. I start prickling with sweat.

“No. Do it now,” she commands.

“Whoa,” Seth says, then recovers: “can you stand with one foot up on this chair, like a warrior? Perfect. I’ll be right back, I gotta get my pencils.”

“Irving and I were talking – are you really just twenty, Ashley?” Sherene asks me, scratching her elevated thigh. “You seem so mature.” I look at her, understanding her envy and her fear, and Mark glances at me quickly, then says: “You bet she is! She’s been keeping me out of trouble since she was sixteen.”

“My first wife was pregnant at your age,” Irving murmurs in my ear, and then Seth returns, trailing three other BWs laden with pencils and massive sketch pads. I watch the stream of dark wine as Irving refills my glass himself. I watch Sherene pose, shivering in the chill of the too-bright office, feeling too sad to speak: she will never be on my side, and they will never be on hers.

You can purchase I Have To Tell You here.

Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. Getting Away With It is an excerpt from her novel I Have To Tell You, for which she gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council. You can find her website here. You can find an an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Love Don't Owe You Anything" - Strays Don't Sleep (mp3)

"For Blue Skies" - Strays Don't Sleep (mp3)

In Which There Is Another Life Besides This One

by laura tryon jennings

Rocquefort

by MARK ARTURO

I saw my first painting by John Rocquefort when I was fifteen.

He was a friend of my father's brother David. My father was three years older, and the pride of his parents. Dad had inherited the family jewelry business and kept it solvent during very lean years. In contrast, David had been something of a wayward son, and the entire family seemed to view him with apprehension you show overly precocious children who never grow out of their eccentricities. There was also something darker there that I never completely understood.

They knew David owned a Rocquefort canvas — they kept it for him while he was away — but they did not know where he had procured it. David had spent the decade in the Orient until he came back in a coffin. The Orient was what my father called it, maybe because he had misunderstood a joke David told him, conceivably for other reasons. Unlike the rest of his family, my father did love David sort of effortlessly, the way a bird of prey encounters the air he had already moved beyond.

I too loved my uncle, but only in an absent fashion. Memories of him were hard to come by. Since he always wrote to me until he died, I assumed he wrote to my parents and many others that way.

I learned at David's funeral that this was not the case. None of the family had very much idea what David had been up to over the years. I told Dad some but not all of what David told me, as the letters hinted I should.

+

John Rocquefort arrived at the cemetery looking as a businessman might. He was a large man, towering over my entire family. He stuck out for this reason, and his presence there almost eclipsed the casket. It seemed to my aunt and my mother that his arrival had been both completely gauche and strangely relieving. David could not really have been so bad if this great man attended on him at death.

David went in the ground after that. I watched my father as the casket descended; slowly Dad's face was purloined of all affection, I remember thinking. When I think back on it, only one word centers in my mind to describe the entire affair: crass.

Rocquefort greeted all my relatives, introducing himself. They did not ask him to speak of David, and at the time I wondered why that might be — now I know it was because they were afraid of what he might say.

It was my father who made a show, at the reception, of offering Rocquefort his painting back. We all knew it was worth a substantial sum, and by the aghast expression on my mother's visage I knew she did not really want my father to do it. I saw Rocquefort, resplendent in the finest suit at the party, pause a moment. Others including myself centered our attention on his response. He shook my father's hand but did not take the painting. Instead he whispered a few words in my father's ear. My father nodded and Rocquefort excused himself.

Before I could ask either of my parents what had happened, my mother came over to me and explained that Rocquefort was waiting outside for me, and didn't he seem like a strange sort of tumbleweed? I did not have to go, she explained, but would I like to? You know what I said.

You also know the painting. It seems to open on a marsh. At first the greenish algae glimmering over the surface appears to extend roughly forever, but then it pulls back over the nose of an airplane, tumbling perspective itself askew. It is no marsh.

Outside, peeling back a rhododendron flower, Rocquefort shuffled a bit suspiciously. He loomed over me, though I was not short for my age, and had surpassed my mother's height when I was only ten years old. He stood nearly twice my size.

He did not move towards me, only asked if I knew who he was.

"Suppose I don't," I said.

"I was a friend of your uncle's," he said, ignoring my inflection. "I don't know what they - your family -" he choked. Then he seemed to stop at some new idea. I realized that he did not like them, and with that came the knowledge that I was not sure if I did, either. That insight too vanished with the wind.

He now looked, instead of brave and smiling, slightly corrupted. "What did they tell you of your uncle?"

I asked him quite sincerely by what right he felt he could ask me about my uncle. Instead of bristling, he smiled a bit wider and stood up.

"You're right, of course." I shuffled uncomfortably, but something crept into his eyes. I asked him how old he was.

"I'm 47," he said. "Well, that's what I tell people anyway. It's close enough. It must seem very old to you."

"I'm fifteen," I said, since I could think of nothing else, and had to fall back on fair play.

He twisted a flower in his hand and dropped it. "If you wish," he said brightly, "you may live with me, until you are 18, and then you may stay or do as you like." Blood rushed into my face. I leaned forward to capture some of the meaning I felt I must have missed in this sudden change of topic.

Rocquefort offered me a cigarette and I declined. I began to answer him with a question, and did not complete it. Out of respect, I made it a statement.

"You loved my uncle."

"Yes."

"Once he wrote me he was not sure."

Rocquefort sighed and said, "In every relationship, you understand, one person is more responsible for it than the other, if only by degrees." He suggested the cigarette again and I took the offering, holding it my hand. He said, "You're Jewish. Did you know?"

I asked if he was a Jew.

"Yes. My mother was. She was a wonderful woman. The only thing she loved more than God was me."

I asked if he missed David.

"He was my life. He reminded me of my mother, I'm not ashamed to say. I have always felt, you understand" — he said this often, I noticed, usually when he thought I was not really going to understand — "that something was missing in me. I learned it could not be filled, not really, only abrogated. But here I am telling you that life is full of concessions. You live in this place. You know."

You can probably imagine how difficult it was for me to wrap my mind around this. Finally I asked whether he had known my true mother. He nodded, and explained he had come here to tell me of her, and other things. "David did not want you to know. She was taken, along with other members of her family. She would have known you if she could." He made an expansive gesture I could not recognize.

"He longed to stay with you, you understand. You must know how much he wanted to take you with him, but he could not. They would have brought him back in chains." His face took on a wretched cast, and he turned away. I said I thought I understood, and that David had tried to tell me without telling me.

My father emerged from the house then, carrying Rocquefort's painting under his arm like a scolded child. "It belongs to you," Rocquefort whispered to me. He smelled airily of carnations, I have always remembered that as important. "It has always belonged to you. And many others do as well, no matter what you decide to do." I could see in my father's eyes that he thought the artist was telling the truth.

+

The next days passed uneventfully. My parents did not ask me what Rocquefort had spoken to me about, and they seemed glad he had not accepted their offer of his own painting. My life went on as before. I went to school, did my lessons, and nothing seemed very different, except there was suddenly the presence of another possible life parallel to my own that I might have been living all this time.

The fact that David was gone dimmed my anger at him leaving me for the second time. Mitigated, but not at all completely. In the interim, I sought out all I could find about Rocquefort in the local library. My mother saw me at this.

One night, as I rested my head against a pillow, I felt something hard and flat instead. It was a retrospective on an exhibition of Rocquefort's work entitled The Lantern Beyond the Ceiling. In those pages, the elements in his paintings were rendered if not comprehensible, then clearer. Each was far more individuated, and the curator of the exhibition explained the themes and relative movement in the man's evolution. Personal comments sometimes filtered in; she appeared to hold her subject in unbelievably high regard, but there was still considerable distance between them, as between a toad and a marsh, a soldier and his country, or a woman and her nightmares.

Naturally I reviewed the letters from David in a new light. Still, I did not feel I was uncovering very much, and I packed up. You know where I went.

The lavishness of his hotel surprised me, even though I had mentally prepared for what I believed I would see. Although I knew it was very far beyond the means of anyone I knew to live this way, I also sensed that John Rocquefort himself was not entirely comfortable in such places either.

Since that time, I have learned Jews believe this is an aspect of their existence that can never be removed or forgotten completely.

Seeing Rocquefort in robe and slippers, divested of the order David had described in his detailed, abstruse letters, relaxed me. I showed Rocquefort that I held David's words in my hands without saying anything. I placed them on the bed. They were not very painful to me, as I had read them too many times to be fearful of what they contained, but in case they upset him, I said, "You need not look at them at all."

The expression of surprise and pleasure on his face told me everything else I needed to know about him.

His house, in the south of France was magnificent. I stopped counting all the people he paid to get us there. When I could stand it, I was attended on by an ancient servant named Alexandros. There was a maid who prepared my bed and washed my clothes. Her name was Velma, and she had a daughter whose eyes were the deepest shade of green I had ever seen.

Since I had not taken any clothes with me, I had been prepared to wear my best blouse and pants for as long as I had to. Rocquefort, or someone he knew, seemed to know what I might be comfortable in. The weather there afforded me the luxury of wearing very little. He taught me himself from the first day I arrived. At the end of my first lesson, a survey of the troubadour civilization of the Languedocs, he asked me if I wished to write to the people who had, inescapably, raised me.

I said I thought they knew, if not exactly where I was, then where I had been going. I told him I did not see the point of saying any more.

After a month of getting fat and slim again by swimming in the ocean, Rocquefort packed me away in his car on a random Tuesday. I supposed we were going to his dealer, a tiny man named Jerome, or to his friend Elaine who lived a few miles away as a happy widow.

Instead we arrived at a bustling, impossible building in the heart of Marseille.

The sun hit David at a distance, any distance, alongside a magnificent locomotive. It seems completely silly then and now, but watching him come into view, I felt so thankful for progress, for whatever engines had brought my true father to me. Advancement was marvelous, at heart, and those who disapproved of it were nothing more than detritus. The world, the old world that was, would still be there if I wanted it, though I did not. I hoped it was lost.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about the run of the play. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

photograph by Aleksandra Mir

"Let Her Go" - Jasmine Thompson (mp3)

"Stay" - Jasmine Thompson (mp3)