It all comes down to what we can learn to live with, and what we can't, and if I did not need the experience of Frank's sweaty brown diseased pockmarked water heavy lava laden body, why did I spiral into it, cutting him down barely two weeks before our nuptials'? I tried to take the advice of a relationships expert on NPR, of all things, settling for a sick spic who wanted a woman to tend to his regressive need to be babied, and to continue to argue with Frankie's memory, as you'll learn, our dead are never entirely resolved, whether they made us happy or not, he could not have possibly loved me when he proposed and offered me the ring. It doesn't work that way, despite my belief as a young woman that my initial conversation with a Shakespearean from New York was destiny. First impressions are just that, impressions, and Jerry after that then became an obsession in progress, my own blind spot to an interior emptiness. My error with a Bronx piece of refuse wasn't being persuaded by a woman on the radio to settle for a half breed who wanted me, whom I despised. Ingrid tried to persuade me too, the lanky spider limned black girl with her dead still born on her t-shirt: what we can live with, and what we can't. I could have talked Frank out of the ring, and rolled away, closed the book, failed experiment, but I was 42, and was never going to reconstruct an angry sexually dynamic beatnik for myself, even when I dated his double. All women, all girls, know how to do the math, and Frank paid a terrible price for his aspiration. I lost my temper, we had escalating bouts of domestic violence. I punished him. I punished him for his misogyny, for strangling his first wife, for his low life son. Did I get anything back, at all? Yes, living with someone is not the same as being marred for life by what we think we want and can never attain. Frank, however, was not emblematic of the Quasimodo, distressingly brought to life by a queer, rescued by the cerebral and rigid Frollo. As great a humanist as Hugo is, his flaws hit you like a cold August drought, signaling the movement away from the Sun's life force, raising hairs and goose bumps, and Frollo's dramatic turn into madness, borne out of lack of living intimacy, while entirely credible, isn't as convincing as Hugo might have made it. The priest was drawn too well as a Catholic, doing his duty before God, in saving the bell ringer, the freak who didn't have intellectual accretion tied to the respect his sheer physicality demanded.
If this freak is to save herself, she has to sever/e these ties with Riverside Presbyterian, and accept whatever calamity then ensues, even if former freelance cleaners call her at ten in the morning in the middle of a post. Though I may have misinterpreted the gesture, a voice in my head warned me that Karina wasn't phoning to check in on me. I had the sense she needed something. I am probably not the best person she can call on for counsel, as I need a consigliore of my own, always behind my own goals: I have a small window to stall for time, but Trudy Richardson believes she's cowed me, and this is one linear minded tootsie roll who is sadly mistaken. She has crossed too many lines. I've marginalized her even in blind fury, outmanned as I am by mass stupidity, asking as it does why I cannot see my own limitations, be a compliant passive angel. UCPA never did me any favors, between this rock and a hard place wherein I wedge.
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