Linette Marie Allen

Creative Non-Fiction

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London, 1998 

Was orange that summer, wet and very orange. When October finally rolled around, I was ready, Woman; here for it; had frolicked around Charing Cross and Leicester Square multiple times, all within walking distance of Newman House, where I lived. But that tiger orange, that sticky-star orange, stuck around all autumn, to be honest. Lauryn Hill on the backs of new double-decker buses, larger than life, dominating the tube walls of Embankment. Euston. Edgewater. And me, wishing I was a smoker, feeling carrot over blue, collar upturned, forcibly so.

So when I first saw Lauren, I bled orange. I smiled, and stood in awe of her command: one hand on the wheel of her mental Maserati, her swanky Maserati, smashing gears like butter. Prized butter! So I, American-loud, 26, and all that, was doing my master’s degree at the London School of Economics in crisp Holborn, and there I was. A snow globe in her stupendous hand, her hot Korean hand. I read to her every evening, for hours—sometimes by lamplight, sometimes by starlight, sometimes by firelight, cold and serious. Yeah, it was like that. Lauren was heavy into the pink, into the planetary.

We gelled instantly. I loved her sense of style. She had a fantastic sense of alertness, lovely humor, soft humor. Every Tuesday. Every Thursday. Arm on arm, we’d walk to the British Library. A doctoral psychology student, she read many subjects, which meant a steady string of guys and gals, week to week, young mouths moving. Cheekily, she’d stare down a subject, order it to strip and submit, take intimate notes.

( ) Peach cider.

( ) Honey carrot.

( ) Apricot salmon.

Lord, I was completely in the dark. I was, you know, feeling my way through this role, rolling like a stone through a book. In many ways, she was my eyes; my personal hands-on guide at Uni to help me help her do a swell job. We decided it would be great just to relax and hang out at her place so, you know, she let me inside and everything like that. Told me to take off my coat. She knew exactly where everything was, you know. She went straight to her closet, her fashionista closet, and just took her time, you know, like a classy curator of a museum, a cloth museum?

She was tactile. She placed her hands on groups of hangers at a time and was able to tell me exactly what category of clothing they belonged, their traits: some warm, some cool; textured; a long beautiful scarf or two, off-colored. “Oh,” she started up, “these are my blouses / and these are my skirts, see? / and these are my jumpers—God, this red one’s my favorite!

She dropped her sweater, gave me

The tour. The show. Showed me her things, told me “There’s no such thing as a weak verb, love.” 

Passed me a spare set of keys, just in case.

Lord, a mini fashion show, self-guided. Right there in her living room, her tightly-squeezed ochre living room. She peeled off her blouse, skirt, pantyhose, and folded them just so; tried on different colors with different looks—that bronze tee with that carrot skirt; that celery dress with those lime stils. Cinnamon trench. Rust fedora. Lord.

We discuss her favorite Laurens of all time: Lauren Bacall. Lauryn Hill. Yves Saint Laurent. We laugh and laugh over tea and tins of broken biscuits, of me repeatedly calling them “cookies” and her rolling hard with a toddler’s grin. We talk people and seafood and music—how lilies are particularly poisonous to cats. I wait for the plot twist.

Psychogenic alopecia. (n). A cat condition that arises from compulsive licking, chewing, or sucking on the skin. We rise, go off cats, and jump on grammar, how she hates apostrophes. I argue for Shakespeare, Camus, Plath. She argues for Sexton, Dickinson, Poe. We swivel to backstory. (My copy of “How to Write a Blackwood Article” safely stashed in my riding boots).

I’m invited to remove my boots but decline. I complain of cold feet. She offers me peanuts and honeydew. I nod and nibble a bit, await her next move. Her subject is psychology, after all, and I never take such things lightly. I want the experience to be exactly as it ought, exactly how she pictures it, exactly how she imagines it at this very moment. It is my first time. I tell her that. She knows it, and quivers in pleasure, I imagine. Lauren is mighty, full of agency. So much so, she scares me.

Me:   Have you always lived in London?

Her:  Yes, but my parents were born in a literary town east of Busan.

Me:   Got a favorite book?

Her:  She pops up and reaches for Homer. Mint condition. 

Me:   I ease her wrist toward my face. Can I smell it?

My nostrils are happy, full of burnt figs. I beg for a wee bit of wine to wash it down, and she fingers a handsome Malbec from Spain. We both adore a young, full-bodied vintage, I later learn. Nothing over two years to keep the tannins away. We drink from mugs with muddy images of the Monalisa on them, hand-painted from the Louvre, a gift from her absentee boyfriend, the one who drives a gold Jag, speaks five languages, and leads scores of women to take up the flute.

Drunk, we tattoo each other’s arses: TA-HELL WID-A BLUDDY FLOOT!

Wate, I’m lion… SHID lol 🙂 We NEverR got drunk.

We nevah!  / LL ?? hooze callin’ ?? what tha foggen shidz, diK–hed ! / naH, gott-daMMitt //@!!

Lauren taps my wrists, dying of laughter. Painful laughter. She admires my comedy, my one-woman spiel, my monologue of the night, after a long day of reading Foucault. Her apartment, not far from mine, was in Cheapside, a quaint and quiet business district tucked from the tourists. The only drunks I ever saw during our time together were in blue pinstriped suits, pelting a preppy pub’s courtyard, whistling me down, seconds after the start of “Happy Hour.”

She shuts off the dictator, closes the text I’m reading from, her fingertips are pink, a very painful pink! To soothe her pain, I teach her to read poetry with her mind, to picture it in the pages of the wind in her hair, dead tired, on orange October nights, all the right trappings, the nightingale at her writing desk, the monk parakeet on the fence, the clipped owl in flight. When Lauren opens her mouth and speaks, I write it down like a thief, like a flaming memory thief!—regurgitating it now (and only now!), just for you, just because:

The Bellman

Picture it this way.

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Picture the moon that Sunday morning, the way Lauren K. pictured it.

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From the town crier’s garden—with elegance and ease, crouching.

*

Soft spit of cadmium. The larkspur. The doe.

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The grave smell of English lyre.

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LAST CALL:

“Am I doing it right?” I ask.

“You’re doing it great,” she says, giggling like God, wielding her big white cane, tapping and feeling for my glasses. “EEEven-IF you’re as BLIND as a

bluddy BATT!”

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Linette Marie Allen, winner of the 2021 Kay Murphy Prize for Poetry, holds an MFA from the Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program at the University of Baltimore. A Turner Fellow, she has been published in journals worldwide. Twice nominated for the Best of the Net awards, her poetry has been set to music by Peabody composers.

Photo Credit: Minta Samii is from Iran. She started photography 2 years ago and is very interested in documentary and street photography. Many of her works have been published in domestic and foreign books and magazines. She is also the judge of the International Association of Yarushat and the artistic editor of the association’s magazine.