Hell-bent from Paradise: 'Once upon a time . . .'

 Hell-bent from Paradise: ‘Once upon a time . . .’ 

As all stories do, this one begins before its beginning. “Once upon a time . . .” connotes there was something before.

Uncle Albert was reading Thérèse Raquin for the third or fourth or tenth time. He was complaining to me that it was no better than when he’d read it the second, third, or ninth time. “It always begins well,” he was saying. “Then those fools Laurent and Thérèse kill Camille, Zola’s inner Del Tenney takes over, and the book becomes like a bad early-sixties zombie film. But, it will, I trust - it always has before - pick up again in the final third after Madame Raquin discovers she is living with her son’s murderers. The way Camille haunts Laurent and Thérèse becomes less spooky, less green and fishlike, less putrid - Zola loses interest in it. Laurent and Thérèse are no longer dealing every hour of the day and night with the slimy presence of the murdered man, and they turn back to the murder itself, and that they are murderers.

not Thérèse

     “They are no longer trying to escape Camille, because he has effectively disappeared; they are trying to learn what to do with what they have done and what they have become. The novel becomes once again psychological. Passion!: the lovers-haters rely on their passions to slake their guilt. It doesn’t matter that none of their experiments works - or none but the last. They are again themselves, the brutes Zola has assured us they were, not the hypersensitive souls they become in the middle section. Thérèse whores herself; Laurent beats her black and blue; they exhaust each other, so they can sleep.”

     “And?” I said.

     “And,” Uncle Albert said, “that’s it. They sleep.”

It was Thursday not long past noon. He was eating an egg; I was eating an egg; we were just back from seeing Dr. Feight in my case or reading his magazines in Uncle Albert’s.

     “I’ll finish it tonight,” he said.

     “Thérèse Raquin?” I said.

     “Yes,” he said. “And I can go back to listening to Patsy Cline.”

     I didn’t know if he was kidding. It didn’t look like it. And anyone that knew Del Tenney movies could well like Patsy Cline.

     “I’m going back to listening to Patsy Cline. And I’m going to plan a trip.”

Uncle Albert had met the mother of one of the co-eds that lives in the house he’s living in now, and he had discovered that she worked for a concierge service, a making-arrangements-for-just-about-anybody-for-just-about-anything service. You tell Jeeves’ Enormous Brain what you want and when you want it, and they make it happen. The co-ed’s name is Zenobia - her father is Syrian apparently, a dermatologist in Fairfax. The mother-that-works-for-Jeeves’ name is Ann-Marie; she grew up in Chicago.

     So Uncle Albert said.

 08.07.17