Re: B&B: Cat & Jack
He didn't have any bloody idea what had set her off nor how far. Jack hadn't spent any significant time around a woman that wasn't entirely to do with the paper in years. Not in person and certainly not the spiky friendship that had grown out of bloody books and life advice. But he had spent enough time with women before that he knew at least when her attention was somewhere else as well. He'd cleared out memory wholescale when he'd watched the auction on the old house, when he'd cleaned out the flat in London with Jen's things folded into boxes for her red-eyed mother, when he'd looked at the bloody emptiness of the place after, funereal tie still knotted at his throat. Jack didn't spend any time sitting in memory because he'd be fucked if he did.
Jack accepted the glass from her hand and rose to fill it. Cat believed the parties were an exercise in enlightenment and he already disagreed. "You think so? I'm terrible at letting go. But I also object to the idea that somehow the dark makes up for not knowing who the hell you're with. You could excavate secrets but you don't know who they belong to or who you're giving them to. You're free to pretend you never gave them in the first place."
The vodka splashed into the glass and he had his back to the board and the chair. "She asked for a story, the kind people no doubt tell when they're with one another and comfortable with telling secrets. I don't give away mine when I can't see their face. Particularly not anything ridiculously sentimental." He hadn't been a Catholic to begin with. Catholicism was too passionate, even guilt-riddled for the sort of stoicism found in British boarding schools. Anglicanism thrived on shame, on burying anything human six foot deep.
"Bukowski, when he does speak, I have no doubt is fluent in profanity." He handed her back her glass, and sat once more, and flicked his next pawn out from behind the line without rhyme nor reason. Eventually, he'd have to construct some sort of rational strategy, but he wasn't paying that much attention to the board.
"If you speak that particular language, I'd be entertained by the translation." He didn't think very often of what it meant to have a cat attached to him. Permanence, and part of the subsumation into a very alcoholic fugue was the idea that this wasn't as transitionary as he'd hoped. It was partly the reason for the clean-up but the morose idea had settled under the skin.
"Rilke. It's German, so don't expect it to be phoentic in any logical way. He's a poet. We're back to poetry, after a diversion into literature." He left his own glass empty.
"The journalist would have sold his grandmother down the sodding river for a story. He wasn't a good man, but he cocked up over wanting a story badly enough." He'd lost everything else, the trappings of what made him more, but that was enough implicit, he wasn't spelling it out. "If I don't write, I can't sell my grandmother. She's bones and dust these days, but the point remains. It's a promise. I'm terrible at them but I only made it with myself."