The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll

sounded like he was calling a name rather than stating it.
    “Yes?”
    The voice came up from behind me, and I felt my bowels expand and contract.
    With my back to Anna France, I lived in that momentary limbo that precedes a drastic change in your life. I wanted to turn around, but I didn’t dare. What did she look like, what was her voice like, her eyes, her mannerisms? The realization that I was the closest I’d ever come to Marshall France suddenly crept up behind me at a town barbecue, and I was paralyzed.
    “Can I join you people?” Her voice was on my left shoulder like a leaf. I could easily have reached back and touched her.
    “‘Course you can, Anna. These people here have been dying to meet you, from what they say. They came all the way out here from Connecticut.”
    I heard Saxony slide over on the bench to make way for her. The two of them mumbled hello. I had to look.
    It was the woman who’d been carrying the boxes of hamburger rolls. She had short black, glossy-clean hair cut in a kind of monk’s bowl that came down over her ears, although the rather large lobes could still be clearly seen. A small nice nose that peaked up a little at the end, eyes that were almost Oriental and either gray or dusty green. Her lips were full and purplish and I was sure that that was their natural color, although sometimes they got so dark you would have thought that she’d been eating some kind of grape candy. She had on a pair of white carpenter’s overalls, a black T-shirt, no jewelry at all, and black rubber flip-flop thongs on her feet. All in all, she was great-looking in a kind of hip, clean, youngish Midwestern housewife way. Where the hell was the Charles Addams character David Louis had referred to? This woman looked like she’d just had the family station wagon washed at the Shell station.
    She offered me her hand, and it was soft and cool, not sweaty at all, like mine.
    “Are you Thomas Abbey?” She smiled and nodded like she already knew I was. She kept hold of my hand. I’d almost jerked it away when she said my name.
    “Yes, uh, hello. How’d you — ?”
    “David Louis wrote and told me that you were coming.”
    I frowned at that one. Why had he done that? If she was the Medusa he’d made her out to be, knowing what I was here for would only make her seal off whatever cracks into her father’s life I might have been able to find snooping around on my own, incognito. I vowed to send Louis a ten-page hate letter at the first opportunity. No wonder no biographer had ever had any luck with her. With him running interference, she had a twenty-mile head start.
    “Do you mind if I sit down? I’ve been hopping around here so today in this crazy heat… .” She shook her head, and her monk’s cut flipped back and forth like a tight little grass skirt.
    I realized that I hadn’t properly introduced her to Saxony.
    “Ms. France, this is my colleague, Saxony Gardner.” Colleague? When was the last time I’d used that word?
    They smiled at each other and shook hands, but I noticed that their shake was short and barely touching.
    “You’re a writer too, Miss Gardner?”
    “No, I do the research and Thomas will do the writing.”
    Why didn’t she say “Thomas does the writing,” rather than put it in the future tense? It would have sounded so much more professional.
    I looked at their two faces and tried not to think that Anna was lovely and Saxony was wholesome. Maybe it was just my momentary anger at Sax.
    “You want to write a book about my father? Why is that?”
    I thought that by now the best thing to do was give it to her straight and see how she reacted. “Because he’s the best there is, Ms. France. Reading his books was the only time in my entire life when I was totally gone into the world of the story. Not that it makes any difference, but I teach English at a boy’s prep school, and even all of the so-called ‘greats’ have never affected me the way The Land of Laughs