The Storyteller | Samantha Blanc

The Storyteller

SAMANTHA BLANC

What if I made up a boy from college? A fire juggler I met at a bar who bought me a Rum and Coke because I couldn’t yet buy one myself, then fucked me for the first time, slow and soft on a mattress on the floor of his dirty, one-bedroom apartment? What if he offered me a cigarette afterward and I took it, but never used it, just watched him smoke until the flame was at his fingertips and I could see little blisters on his skin? Would I have flinched imagining the pain? Or just laid back, knowing he wasn’t lying to impress me at the bar when he said he wasn’t afraid of fire.

What if I made up 10 other boys? Would that be enough? What passes for the throes of youthful passion these days? What if I said I’d tried cocaine? Or MDMA? That on my first trip I saw the ghost of John Lennon and he told me I had great legs and that he was actually still alive, making good money as the manager of a quaint little New England B&B?

What if I pretended I hadn’t spent all my life fearing the unknown?

I could say I’d been to Portugal and Ethiopia and Japan. I could buy myself a green, silk kimono to prove it—one dotted with little pink cherry blossoms blooming across the chest that must have looked alluring in my youth.

And that I married, although he’s long since dead. A boring little man, because, really, is there any other kind? “How else would I have gotten this,” I could say, holding out my hand for people to admire whatever generic pear cut was slid on my ring finger. I would never look at it myself for fear of seeing dull, creped skin puckering around the band.

Surely the nurses would ask questions, but I could pretend not to hear them, and no one would think it strange. That’s the upside of a place like that where you are just one in a sea of feeble, breaking bodies that used to be men and women. And even then, there are easy answers. My sons and their families never visit because they’re just too busy with their highpowered jobs in finance. There are no photos because no one—especially not grandchildren—like to have their picture taken. One does not regret shying away from the camera until one no longer remembers what they looked like with full, rosy cheeks.

What if I spent all my time telling stories? Describing the house with my boys running naked, refusing to put on their adjustable waist pants for church. Recounting the magic of a chiffon cake with almond icing in the crisp breeze of a fall wedding, and tales of girls’ nights out full of laughter and cranberry-vodka-scented vomit, and the month I spent in Venice with a Nigerian poet who spoke only in French-accented Korean.

What if in twenty or so years, if I’m still alive, the stories spill from my lips so easily that I can tell them without even noticing my mouth has fallen open? Like rain rolling off a roof. Like my bladder—as the years go on, I lose control of that too. I wonder, sometimes, if it might be possible to tell those stories so many times that even I start to believe them.