Re: Cat + Jack: booze and books
She had no idea and Jack didn't feel much like enlightening her given the whole sordid story tied together with string and newspaper ink. His own morality was thin, threadbare in places but there was time and circumstance for stories that ended for a man that couldn't even muster up anti-hero status and the man in her book was small potatoes when it came to disaster.
"Funereal it isn't. The Chinese do it, when somebody dies. Paper cars and houses and shoes and clothes, facsimile for what the dead require in the next life. Sacrificial paper, seems apt enough."
God, how utterly depressing. Jack didn't romanticize the years past. They were dark, and filled with long hours and stultifying conventions and he'd had enough of all of the above at boarding school, thanks plenty. The novels set in the period Cat combed her fingers through with evident enjoyment were all secret rules and society whispers. Given she sallied through society with two fingers flicked at convention - near enough, he imagined - no doubt they held appeal. They didn't, if convention was bred into your blood.
"She couldn't, but therein falls the cautionary tale. Don't marry someone you don't enjoy fucking and frequently enough you know if you'll bore of each other." Advice? Experience, and Jack was half-way into the beer, and enjoying it. "From what you said, you're the faithful type. Same menu, or multiple entrees? Have you ever cheated on someone?" He was broadly comfortable under the weight of her speculation: he'd cheated. Jen had cheated, compared notes, shouted, fucked, started all over again. Boredom had been a threshold that strung their relationship over a high-wire, but it was not conventional.
But he shook his head on her assertion. "No. Longing is different. You can mourn longing, but longing is imagining what it is, what it would be. Loss is knowing what it feels like under your hands, tastes like, what it means to have it. Longing's hope. Unfulfilled. And love isn't just between people. I disagree." Baiting? No, not at all.
And Auden was a palpable hit. Jack swallowed, until his throat was wet enough to finish the poem. "The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good. You think that could be about what you've never had? Auden was a man."
She didn't believe him. Jack considered the paint that crossed his palm, "Call me a liar, I'll show you the reason why it's truth, Suspicion." But she'd made that killing off the back of scared and annoyed people who had fled toward refuge, and Jack thought she buried anything she herself felt in the active.