rm | Dec. 17th, 2008

Every good story is a seduction.

So we're sitting there in this bar wondering what the hell do with ourselves and then this chick comes over, sits down at our table and says, "I have to tell you a story, and you have to promise never to tell anyone else."

But the best stories have a tendency to be love letters.

Sometimes, he calls her my little clinging vine, but more for the syllables of it than any truth.

Neither of these facts do much to make my life very comfortable.

"Mistress, will you let me be your dog?"

That's the problem with being a storyteller and having a bit of a misguided thing about being honorable: seduction often isn't very nice, the modern heart has a tendency to find love burdensome and no one really wants to hear the truth anyway, even if it isn't real.

He told her about long train rides in rancid heat and the way soldiers speak of women, crass and fond. He told her about the smallest and largest of demons, metal servants, dancing creatures, a dead dog by the side of the road, and a man who could find beauty in absolutely anything. His tales were full of strange flowers and poison imps and a constant, slightly cheerful regret.

Well, okay, that's one of the problems. The other problem is that you -- you, the writer; you, the teller -- get seduced too, and that makes it awfully hard to Be Here Now.

He found the two of them, their breathing regular and even, tangled together, like children protecting each other from the dark. He set the glass of water on the bedside table and stood looking down at them for a long moment.

Even when Now is pretty damn interesting.

And I'm thinking, okay, clearly I am still high. But no, this shit is really happening and there are slugs -- SLUGS! -- all over the kitchen. Every, single, goddamn surface. Slugs!

In a way it's a blessing, but of the sort it's nearly impossible to speak of, lest you think I'm mad or a child or haven't lived so many thousands of years in the tellings of all these things.

He didn't have much, he thought ruefully, and what he did have, he couldn't keep. But still, for now, there was this moment, and there were all the ghosts who walked with him, all those people and places and times to which he'd given all of his heart, poured out all of himself, those he'd defended, and those he'd failed.

And so asking me to play favorites isn't fair.

It has taken a long time to come to the trick of it.

Because how could I possibly be expected to choose between being the girl with the sexiest walk in the whole damn bar and being a man who got fourteen perfect years with a woman he lied to every day?

There was little point, they both knew, in bemoaning the state of the world or hatching plans that involved armies that did not exist and allies they did not possess.

And how could I ever choose between being the smug raconteur with the cocked hip holding court in a life of nightly parties and the hungry creature who cries in bed over the curse of loving a girl for the mere four hours of writing her, as opposed to the life, the whole life, in which I'd given her to someone else as equally a fancy?

He feels his life get just a little bit longer. It tickles, and, once he hears the news, he imagines it as the puff of her breath in his ear, rather than the dissolution of a debt.

Every good story is a seduction.

He calls me the next morning, at 7am, and tells me to pop by for breakfast. So off I go for fruit and yogurt and to see his place, which are these two amazing apartments with the walls knocked out between them. There's a baby grand and all these artifacts taken presumably illegally from native peoples. And I'm thinking, as I stare at his black silk shirt and really expensive, tacky necklace that practically screams "I engage in pretentious group sex," -- shit, this guy wants to put me in a glass box and put me up on his mantel too!

But the best stories are love letters.

He took a deep breath, sighed happily, let his eyes close and whispered, his lips red and precise and swollen like in the movies, "I love you."

And regret.

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Italicized portions come from some of my most called upon party stories; fiction and fanfiction I've written; and work I've done with