La recherche du temps enterré

There is something rather chilling about being the subject of a book. The implication is that you have somehow crept from the present tense into the terminal past. At first I thought my good friend David Schoffman was acting like a spoiled ungrateful child but now I understand why his decision to allow the distinguished scholar Loretta Pansesna into his life has become a source of great regret.

Loretta at Work, David Schoffman '13

Pansesna. the author of two critically acclaimed biographies (The Crease is in the Middle: Godfrey Schwartzbard the Duke of Savile Row and The Unlicked Cub: Tiebé Shirat, Picasso's Forgotten Mistress) has embarked on the first, full-scale authorized biography of Schoffman and it is exciting David's already overly hypochondriac imagination.

He sees this enterprise not as a mid-career assesment but rather as a valedictory summation, a sort of closing argument, though he's not entirely sure if it is from the standpoint of the prosecution or the defense. Whatever it is, Schoffman has never felt the cold damp sigh of mortality as vividly as he does now. He sees Max von Sydow everywhere. The devil's scythe is constantly licking the scruff of his grey tufted neck while relieving him of one pawn after the next. He can't sleep nor can he paint. After all, why bother? It is all already written. It is all for naught.

To make matters worse,  Pansesna and her research staff of three annoying graduate students are dredging up an almanac of long forgotten sins. David sees absolutely no value in ventilating such a tawdry trivial concordance of not-so-youthful indiscretion. The buried past should remain safely heaped in a mulch of palliative denial where it can neatly decay with grace and without rebuttal. Now, what little future he has left will probably be consumed with matters of paternity, libal, larceny and even murder. That Schoffman will now have to answer for the slurring allegations surrounding the long forgotten Affaire de l'étouffement sur brioche will be, at the very least, a lacerating embarrassment. 

Pansensa argues that the "accidental" death in 1979 of Adèle, the nineteen year-old daughter of Almont-sur-Gironde's chef adjoint de la Cour supérieure was a tragedy that likely holds the key to the entire Schoffman oeuvre . To ignore it would be an excerise in scholarly dereliction. Maybe this biography is precisely what David needs to finally heal this open wound.

However, I think David's chief concern is that his kids will find out that while still in graduate school their dad briefly worked as a stripper in an Austin, Texas fetish bar under the pseudonym The Rope.