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Novels by Mary Marcus
New on the Blog
Blinded By The Light
Photo: Joel Goodman Flash Fiction “I want you to touch my______” Tatiana cried out, the second they had their clothes off. He had never heard that particular word said out loud before, he scarcely knew what the word meant. His wife didn’t call it anything and neither did he. She said it now again, and reached for his hand, in case there was any question of him not hearing. Though one ear was kind of whacked, he wasn’t deaf. Not yet anyway. He wondered if it was true what they said, if you didn’t have one sense, it made the others stronger? Presently, she declared, “Ah,” in her faintly accented English. Her brother, who had arranged this whole unreal situation, had a much more pronounced accent than she did. It was two on a Wednesday afternoon in Westwood in September. Outside the windows of the high rise, the mountains were rust colored and looked like any moment they would burst into flames. He wondered what it would be like to live with such a view: such expanse, such space? And of course he wondered what it would be like not to be able to enjoy it, or at least in the way most sighted people could. Maybe if they decided to go through with all ten sessions, he’d been paid for five, he’d find out what it was like to be so smart, so successful in the world, did she know how beautiful she was, was she always blind? II Today Tatiana had on a bright silk caftan and, artfully applied make up. Her black hair was shiny...Once Upon An Afternoon
Gentle Readers: Instead of a blog, this is a flash fiction offering… My first! While the female in the flash fiction does yoga, that’s about where the resemblance to the Blogger you know (and hopefully love) begins and ends… “I think it’s a terrible idea, really I do.” And she did. He was 34 and she, though she didn’t like to say it, or allude to it, and could pass in some circles for ten years younger, was 60. In four years she’d be the song. “Do you really want to do it with someone my age?” He did. He really did, so eventually, she succumbed. One afternoon, they met at one of the big hotels on the beach where his company had rooms. She had wondered when the idea came up if she would pay for it. She had cash, she had miles, and she had everything a proper 60-year-old could want–to a degree. She even had a husband and grown up children, one a year older than her new boyfriend. She had everything, except her seamless legs back, or her old face, not the one with the injectables at discreet creases. She didn’t even want to think about hair. Every three weeks on top. And if she wasn’t exactly grey down there, she didn’t do any of the stuff the girls did. That wasn’t her generation, or if it was, she had not participated, other than what they called the “Alaskan” at the waxing parlor where she paid a visit a few days before the first tryst. A la recherché de la temp perdu. She remembered all right. She...Irene
I don’t know why Claude Lanzmann dying the other day has made me think almost non-stop about Irene, my son’s Polish nanny from so long ago. Lanzmann wasn’t Polish; he was a French Jew, very different from being a Polish Jew. And very different from what Irene certainly was: a Catholic child who came of age in the aftermath of the Shoah, in a Warsaw where there weren’t any Jews. We were in fact, the first Jews she had ever met. Soon after, Irene met more Jews: Mrs. Greenberg and her family who had a huge place on the East Side, and whose apartment she cleaned in the mornings, and to whom I gave a phony reference. “Irene has worked for my family for ten years. And I trust her with my life!” In fact I only knew Irene then for a month or two, when she asked me to speak to Mrs. G. Somehow she sensed that I implicitly understood the rules one follows under dictatorships be they in America or Warsaw. One lied for one’s friends to the authorities. One shared one’s treasures, and one never ratted each other out. Irene arrived in New York before the solidarity movement briefly flowered. She was escaping the cruel arm of communist repression. And come to think of it, she treasured above all things, the black Lancôme tote I gave her (perhaps because of the solidarity rose) filled with goodies from the Lancôme company store. On the days I worked at Lancôme and other cosmetic firms, Irene would pick my son up from nursery school and then kindergarten. And stay...
The New Me
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