"Why you can't tell me," Didier began the next day.

"Why can't you," I corrected, not being able to stop myself.

"Why can't you tell me about things like country house life?"

"You've been reading my blog," I said.  [I refer the reader to yesterday's post in order to draw the same conclusion].  "And here I thought all you did on that I-Phone was Instant Message your friends."

"I do.  And I read what you type, and now I watch a movie too."

"On such a little screen, I should think it wouldn't be very good for your eyes."  Didier has lovely eyes, so brown they drown their pupils into shiny ebony depths.  "What movie?" I ask, trying not to peek.

"Teorema," he replies.  "It is Passolini.  It is about this English boy seduces a rich Italian family.  Father, mother, son, daughter.  The daughter becomes --"

"-- catatonic," I finish for him.  And for good reason I am tempted to add but don't.  I have seen the film.  The mother becomes a nympomaniac as a result of her infatuation.  1968.  The actor is a young Terence Stamp.

"I am more handsome," Didier declares, as though he has been assessing the matter and has made up his mind.  He nods to himself.  He looks up.  "So why you can't -- why can't you tell me?" he demands.

"Really, Didier, I think you have more than enough people in your life right now telling you you're handsome."

"I mean about what you write."

"Oh.  But you can read what I write."

"No," he said with surprisingly rather more emphasis than the matter called for.  "I want you to tell me.  I want you to tell me everything."

 Datestone, York.  Image 1904Y from "To Date?," 31 July 2007 entry, Varieties of Unreligious Experience, see Blogroll above. 

As many of you know, the Writer so often struggles to find an audience -- once, that is, he's found his voice (provided he ever finds that).  Writing involves a great deal of looking and searching for things, doesn't it.  And here, draped half in and half over a lumpy slipcovered armchair, clutching a battered throw pillow to his chest and, more or less in the flesh, as it were, was precisely what (theoretically) I'd been searching for.  Perhaps without quite even realizing it.  If Didier did not exist, you could say I'd have to invent him.

"Why?" I asked anyway.

"Pourquoi?" he echoed.  He gazed around us, mostly at the clutter and piles and shelves of books which, except for the view out the windows, is pretty much all there is to look at.  "Because I want to know the things you know," he answered, as if the books represented those "things" but in some other less interesting and more inaccessible form.

"You want me to entertain you," I said, attempting to translate and not content to accept this gift from the gods without a little prying.  Sometimes I'm so obtuse I even shock myself.  "You're staying in a lovely home in Bel Air," I continue, "with servants and tennis courts and a pool and home theater and a fully-stocked kitchen but you come here so I will tell you stories."

"Yes."

"Right then, just checking."

"They let me take the Ferrari to come here," he adds.

"I see."

"Tell me why 1904 is the important year where everything is happening," he says.

"It's a long story," I offer.

He throws aside the throw pillow (which is, after all, what they're for -- throwing), clasps his hands behind his head, wiggles and shuffles himself like a dog down into the crook of the chair's arm, getting comfortable.  "Ready," he explains.

What else is there to do?  I sigh. 

"Once upon a time," I begin.