Jayla Mile. Chapters 9 & 10

9. Lilacs and Roses

Jay and Gold bar hop, from Club Intime to the Cloak and Dagger to Stop 39, where they are thirty-nine storeys into the sky and twenty-six stories into his life. He punctuates his lengthy diatribes with the lighting of cigarettes. Holding the lit match for a pregnant moment, his chiseled features are illuminated from below; devilish shadows play there as he tilts his head down to ignite the waiting fag. Exhaling, he extinguishes the match flame with a snap of his wrist, then looks up at her through strategically arranged eyebrows to resume the spinning of a metaphysical qabbalistical quandary around and about her brain.

Jay wonders: Are his moves measured for effect? That pause of suspense with the inhale of the cigarette? Is he an actor (Clark “Eyebrows” Gable) filming on the spot? Am I a necessary prop? Frankly, my dear, I couldn’t give a damn. I don’t care who he is: doctor, lawyer, boy scout, actor, priest, I’ll take him.

Inebriated memories crowd her brain: collecting rose petals in Rosie’s garden, a child trying to escape sorrow through the beauty of nature; and then, in adolescence, indulging in the boys of summer to dispel dark clouds, until entanglements grew and complications ensued and finally she threw her hands up and swore off the opposite sex forever.

“Forever,” she murmurs, looking his slender silhouette over as he moves toward her from the cigarette machine. Sitting down, he continues his spiritual theorizing, illustrating his meaning on the backs of coasters. He sees life in stages that are arranged in groups of threes or sevens. And then there are stages within his stages.

He pontificates; she listens. He explains; she nods her head. When he drives his umpteenth point home with a cigarette smoked to the filter then dashed out in an ashtray, she lights up a smoke and speaks up: “But this is all just a way of communicating, isn’t it? I mean this fitting of experience into systems of thought and all that. Even Stanislavski, famous for his system, said that really there is only one so-called system: creative organic nature. And he said that it changes every day.”

“Stanislavski?” the man queries, raising a Gable brow.

Jay had assumed he’d know of the great Russian actor and teacher. “Stanislavsky,” she explains, “devised a body - excuse my language - a group of techniques for the actor.”

“You’re an actress,” he says.

“I study,” she corrects.

“Where?” he asks, and she realizes that this is the first question he’s asked her since the mysterious query of their first meeting, and that this is her chance to explain the answer she’d given then.

“The Lilac Circus,” she answers. “My teacher is a kind of carny incarnation of Jean Genet and Lee Strasberg. His sense memory exercises involve elephant dung, lilacs, popcorn, mimosa. It’s method acting by way of the carnival. And we use a lot of Stanislavsky’s techniques: sense memory, emotion memory, the magic if. But lately, I feel like the freak in the circus. I’ve just lost my footing.”

10. Emotion Memory

Yes, Rosie Mile went out and had an affair. Only it wasn’t described as romantically as “affair” back then, coming out of the 50s. The term Jay heard as she was growing up was “shacking up”. And it was a phrase that would linger years in her brain, colouring romantic love Shack Black and Outhouse Brown.

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