While I was in Portland I came across Billy Bathgate, which I read long ago and had entirely forgotten about; surprising because it left such an indelible impression upon me the first time that I read it. For instance, this spring, "...my only sartorial aspiration has ever been, and possibly will ever be, to look like a Prohibition-era gunrunner's moll, in the manner of Billy Bathgate..." –– is just about the truest thing I ever said. The narrator is enchantingly streetwise and green shoot-tender, the era captivating, and the girl in question, Miss Lola Miss Drew aka Mrs. Harvey Preston, unforgettable. Her beauty and its correspondent cool charm, and the advantages, and dangers, it accords her in life, is sort of its own subplot in a way, and thus described in aching detail. You never know what she's thinking, but you know how she looks, because no one can tear his eyes away while she's in the picture:
"There she was across the table from me, we were cocooned in our own light, and I had to remind myself I had intercourse with her, that I had carnal knowledge of her, that I had made her come because I wanted to do this all over again, but with the same yearning as if it never happened, with the same questions about her, and wonderings and imaginings of her physical quality, as if I was looking at an actress in a movie. This was the moment I began to understand that you can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing. You can remember its anatomy, and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened, and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again." –– Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow.
Comments