Free The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll

Hugh described James as a young man who was lost but convinced there was something significant waiting for him. Something that would arrive one day out of the blue and lead him home.
    “After my last lecture he came up, looking so bewildered that I was concerned. I asked if he was all right. The only thing he could say was, ‘I want to know about this. I have to know more about this.’ I’d felt that same excitement at Columbia when I heard Federico Zeri speak. Do you know his book Behind the Image ? You must read it. Let me write the title down.” He slipped a hand into his pocket and brought out a Connolly leather notebook and a silver mechanical pencil. He wrote down the title and author’s name in distinctive block lettering. It was not till later that I learned it was the typeface known as Bremen. Another of Hugh Oakley’s many hobbies was meticulously copying in various faces poems and stories he liked and then, like a monk from the Middle Ages, illuminating them in paints he made from scratch.
    I was so absorbed in what he was saying that it took a while to realize I was hogging him from the rest of the party. I worried what his wife would think. Looking around, I was relieved to see her deep in conversation with Dagmar Breece.
    Somehow we’d gotten off the subject of James. I needed to know as much as Hugh was willing to tell.
    “What exactly did happen to James?”
    “The idiot heart.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “ ‘Hope gleams in the idiot heart.’ It’s a line from a Mayakovski poem. His girlfriend had those words—the idiot heart—tattooed on the inside of her wrist like a bracelet. Can you imagine? But it’s the age of tattoos, isn’t it?
    “Her name was Kiera Stewart. She was a graduate student at Temple. Beautiful Scottish girl from Aberdeen. James was nuts over her, but you only had to meet her once to see she was an ocean of bad news. Women like that give you wonderful for the first few months, but then start taking it back bit by bit as the relationship goes on. After a while you’re wondering if that great stuff ever really existed at all. But you’re so hooked on them by then and the tidbits of delicious they parse out, it’s like being addicted to drugs.
    “The tragedy was, James was just coming into his own around the time they met. He’d found what he wanted to do with his life. And he was so good at it that the right people were already watching to see what he’d do next.
    “The good is always the enemy of the great. From the beginning, he had the rare ability to discern between them. The trouble was, in our business insight often comes slowly and through meticulous detective work. James constantly wanted to achieve right now, this second.” Hugh shook his head. “He once said he had a lot to prove but didn’t know to whom.
    “So everything happened at once. Not many people can handle that. His star was rising, he’d met a wild woman who sent him spinning, and then his bosses sent him to look at the Adcock paintings. James thought he was invincible. For a while it looked like he was.
    “Then it all crashed. He made a big mistake. Adcock’s husband turned out to be a clever crook, but not clever enough. The deal blew up in James’s face. That was bad enough, but then Kiera got wind of what happened. Over the phone she told him their relationship was finished. Over the phone. Classy, huh? A platinum bitch. He got in his car in the middle of the night, drove down to Philadelphia to see her but never made it. That’s the story, Miranda. I’m sorry I can’t tell you more. He was a great favorite of mine.”
    “You haven’t touched your desserts!”
    Startled, I felt a firm hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Dagmar glaring at us.
    “I’m sorry. We were talking—”
    “No excuses! That is a yogurt trilogy, which I had to torture a man into making. So eat!”
    She stood there until we picked up our spoons and started shoveling it in. Tasted like yogurt to me.