Tell-All

soft focus, this flashback occurs in grainy, echoing cinema verité. The only light source, the afternoon sun, flares in the camera lens, washing out the scene in brief flashes. The grizzlies stagger and bellow among the sharp rocks below. From off-camera, a peacock screams and screams with the hysterical voice of a woman being stabbed to death.
    On top of all these ambient animal sounds, we still faintlyhear the master of ceremonies saying, “We bestow this honorary PhD in humanities not so much in recognition of what she’s learned, but in gratitude—in our most earnest gratitude—for what Katherine Kenton has taught us.…”
    Surfacing in the zoo sound track, we hear a faint heartbeat. The steady
thump-thump, thump-thump
matches the jumping pulse of the vein in Miss Kathie’s neck, immediately below her jawline. Even as the animal sounds and human chatter grow more faint, the heartbeat grows louder. The heart beats faster, more loud; the tendons surface in the skin of Miss Kathie’s neck, betraying her inner terror. Similar veins and tendons surface, twitching and jumping in the backs of each hand clamped to the bear pit railing.
    Standing beside Miss Kathie at the rail, the Webster specimen lifts one arm and drapes it around her shoulders. Her heartbeat racing. The peacock screaming. As the Webb’s arm settles over her shoulders Miss Kathie releases the rail. With both her hands, she seizes the Webb’s hand dangling beside her face, pulling down on the wrist and throwing Webster, judo-style, over her back. Over the railing. Into the pit.
    Dissolving back to the stage wings, the present moment, we hear a grizzly bear roar and a man’s faint scream. Miss Kathie stands in the dim light reflected off the speaker. The skin of her neck, smooth, not pulsing, moving only her lipstick, she says, “Have you found any new versions of the manuscript?”
    On the upstage wall, she appears as Mrs. Leonardo da Vinci , as Mrs. Stephen Foster , as Mrs. Robert Fulton .
    Any interview, actually any promotion campaign, is equivalent to a so-called “blind date” with a stranger, where you flirt and flutter your eyelashes and try very hard not to get fucked.
    In truth, the degree of anyone’s success depends on how often they can say the word
yes
and hear the word
no
. Those many times you’re thwarted yet persevere.
    By shooting this scene with the same audience and setting as the earlier one, we can imply how all awards ceremonies are merely lovely traps baited with some bright silver-plate piece of praise. Deadly traps baited with applause.
    Stooping, I twist the cap off one thermos, not the one full of black coffee, or the thermos full of chilled vodka, nor the vacuum bottle rattling with Valium like a Carmen Miranda maraca. I open another thermos bottle and pinch out the thin sheaf of pages which are rolled tight and stuffed inside. Printed along the heading of each sheet, words read Love Slave . A third draft. I give her the pages.
    My Miss Kathie squints at the typed words. Shaking her head, she says, “I can’t make heads or tails out of this. Not without my glasses.” And she hands the sheets back to me, saying, “You read them. I want you to tell me how I’m going to die.…”
    And from the audience, we hear a sudden rush of thunderous applause.

ACT II, SCENE SIX
    “ ‘On the day she painfully fried to death,’ ” I read in voice-over, “ ‘my beloved Katherine Kenton enjoyed a luxuriant bubble bath.’ ”
    As with previous final-chapter sequences read aloud from Love Slave , we see the younger, idealized versions of Miss Kathie and the Webb, cavorting upon her bed, in a soft-focus, misty version of her boudoir. In voice-over, I continue reading as the fantasy couple leave their lovemaking and stride, slow, trancelike, long-legged into the bedroom’s adjoining bathroom.
    “ ‘As was her custom,’ ” reads my voice, “ ‘subsequent to strenuous oral contact with my romantic meat shaft, Katherine rinsed her delicate palate with a mouthful of eau de cologne and applied chips of glistening ice to her slender, traumatized throat.
    “ ‘As I opened the taps,’ ” continues the voice-over, “ ‘fillingher sunken, pink-marble tub with frothy steaming water, I added the bath oil, and dense mounds of lather billowed. As I readied these luxuriant ablutions, my dearest Katherine said, “Webster, my darling, the pints of love essence you erupt at the peak of oral passion taste more intoxicating