In his place beside me, there is a tall, beautiful woman, black-brown-skinned and slender with long, crow-black hair, gleaming. She’s wearing a soft, silky green dress that flows and twists around her body, wrapping her in some intricate pattern of folds and gathers from neck to feet.
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The question must have lingered in me because the next morning I awakened to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, the eulogy standing in the air before me like a composition. That was it, I realized. It had been composed. That is what had made the difference.
The eulogist had been remembering herself as a young doctor coming under the formative influence of the older one. The memory had acted as an organizing principle that determined the structure of her remarks. Structure had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language. Expressiveness deepened association. At last, a dramatic buildup occurred, one that had layered into it the descriptive feel of a young person’s apprenticeship, medical practices in a time of social change, and a divided attachment to a mentor who could bring herself only to correct, never to praise. This buildup is called texture. It was the texture that had stirred me; caused me to feel, with powerful immediacy, not only the actuality of the woman being remembered but— even more vividly—the presence of the one doing the remembering.
It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.
The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.
She’s coming down the stairs as I’m going up. She’s wearing a thin shirt. My left hand brushes her left hand. She turns around and takes my hand in hers. Between her thumb and four fingers I place my four fingers. Between my thumb and four fingers her four fingers are placed and we slowly walk up the stairs. Not for a moment longer can I bear not to be inside her.
He has a voice that’s a whole-body experience, the way my father’s was.
James saw Eleni, who’d stayed in oil and gas and was beginning to be considered a star in the industry. Some of the rich-girl swishiness had gone. The waterfall of black Greek hair had been cut short. She’d become sharper-edged. He got the sense she was doing a lot of exercise.