to recall that on this first night her apartment was so neat and clean and charming—The chair by the goldfish bowl which I quickly appropriated as my old man chair, where I sat constantly sipping port for a whole week, the kitchen with its intelligent arrangements of spices and eggs in the icebox, and for that matter too the poor little son of Billie sleeping in a well arranged back room (her son from her deceased husband who was also a railroad man)—Elliott the child’s name and I didnt get to see him till later that night—And with the huge packet of Cody’s San Quentin letters in her hand she launches forth on her theories about Cody and eternity but all I can keep saying as I swig from my bottle is “Julien, you’re talking too much! Julien, Julien, my God who’d ever dream I’d run into a woman who looks like Julien. . . you look like Julien but you’re not Julien and on top of that you’re a woman, how goddam strange”—In fact she had to pack me off to bed drunk—But not before our first lovely undertaking of love and everything Cody said about her being absolutely true—But the main thing being that tho she looked like Julien etc. and had Cody’s big sad abstract letters about Karma in a ribbon and actually went out in the morning and earned a hundred a week in fashion modeling she had the most musical beautiful and sad voice I’ve ever heard in my life—The things she’s saying are really rather inane because after all her education is based on really Californian hysterias like the earlier mistress of Cody Rosemarie who also was thin and pale haired and crazy and kept talking abstract—(Like she’s saying “I thought I could do something to ease the contradiction between immanent and universal ethics which I thought was my problem and was what I hoped to gain thru therapy, like, any evolution presupposes an involution and all that kind of thinking” as I sigh, but she does say something interesting once in a while like “While Cody was in prison my main occupation was praying for him, I had an all day going, there was also a bit we did together every eve-
