“I know. It’s so weird how we keep learning how to relate to each other.”
“Yes, it is. I’m enjoying it, kitten.”
“So am I.”
The conversation shifted to easier areas when Mrs. Kleinschmidt made an appearance. Over breakfast they talked easily, with Mrs. Kleinschmidt ultimately joining the conversation and, inevitably, taking it over. Hugh was grateful, glad to let the old woman take up the burden of filling time with words.
Jeff.
The black boy.
Man, he supposed he meant. Only Caucasians could be referred to as boys. At what age, he wondered, did blacks bridle at being called boy?
The same afternoon he was in the living room reading a magazine. He looked up when the front door opened. She bounced into the room, asking if she was interrupting. He told her she wasn’t.
“Untrue,” she said, gaily. She dropped into his lap like a child and memories clutched at his heart. “Of course I’m interrupting. What I meant was do you mind awfully?”
“I do not mind a bit.”
“Good. What were you reading?”
“Article about blood banks. Commercial blood banks.”
“What’s there to say about commercial blood banks besides yecchhh?”
“That’s about what the article said. How drunks and junkies sell their blood and it spreads hepatitis and other unpleasant things.”
“And that’s what you were reading? I don’t think I feel at all guilty for interrupting. Actually I have an ulterior motive.”
“Oh?”
“See, it’s a beautiful day, I was thinking it would be fantastic to take a walk in the woods, but suppose there are bears there? I mean, I wouldn’t feel safe unless I had company.”
“I see.”
“And I’m sure you would never forgive yourself,” she said, “if I were eaten by a bear.”
“How well you know me. If you get up, then I could get up.”
“Deal.”
And in the special stillness of the woods, she said, “I was thinking about a habit I have. Of jumping to conclusions. The only way to avoid it is to come out and ask, isn’t it?”
“Ask what?”
“Well, you did have sex with Melanie, didn’t you?”
He started to laugh, then assured her that he did. A few steps farther she said, “I didn’t.”
“Oh?”
“With Jeff. What you didn’t do with Linda, I didn’t do with Jeff.” She turned from him, bent to pick up a dead branch. She straightened up and punctuated her speech with little slaps of the branch into the palm of her hand. “By the time we got upstairs I realized what I was doing. I mean I realized all along in a way but I didn’t see how rotten it was. I was doing a number.”
“We’ve both been feeling each other out a lot, kitten.”
“But this really sucked. It was like I was saying, ‘I’m testing you by bringing home a spade, and if you can handle this one, tomorrow I’ll bring home a kangaroo.’ And I was using Jeff. I wasn’t even using him as a person, I was using him as a spade. Which is a racist thing.”
“Well—”
“It is. I was trying to show that you were a racist, or that you weren’t or … fuck it, I don’t know what I was trying to prove, I honestly don’t. But I was into a racist thing myself in doing it.” She slapped the branch harder against her palm and it snapped. She stared at the piece still in her hand, then opened her hand and watched it fall.
She said, “I wonder if he knew what I was doing. He didn’t say anything but he must have picked up on it. Maybe he didn’t care. You know, anything to get laid. Do men really have that attitude?”
“Some of the time. Most of the time, maybe. More than women, certainly.”
“That’s kind of depressing, that he could see what I was doing and still want to ball me. But when I saw, I don’t know, I just couldn’t do it. I don’t know what it was exactly but I couldn’t. I knew I had to get out of it without being horrible. I told him—what was it I said? I told him I couldn’t do anything with you in the house, that it just made me clutch completely. He wanted me to go somewhere else but I wouldn’t.” She stared at him suddenly. “I wonder if I told him the truth without meaning to! Maybe I was uptight about that without knowing it.”
“It’s possible.”
“I just thought of that. What I thought after he left was that maybe I was a racist in another way, that once we were upstairs there I was all alone with this black guy and I couldn’t go through with balling him because he was black. I never made it with a black person before. It’s so hard to know why you do things and what’s good and what’s bad. Sometimes I—”
“Kitten.” His arm encircled her. “Just let it go. You don’t have to keep picking at scabs.”
“Is that what I’m doing?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe. Could we sit down for a minute? Because I’m getting tired.”
“Sure.”
They sat with their backs against the trunk of an oak. A breeze was blowing, and he watched the dancing pattern of sunlight filtered through the leaves overhead, bright green dots dancing on the dark green forest floor. She settled her head on his shoulder. He patted his pockets, searching for a pipe, but he hadn’t brought one. It would have been pleasant to smoke a pipe now while watching the sunlight pattern and enjoying her presence beside him.
“No bears,” she said.
“Hibernating.”
“This time of year?”
“I snuck into their dens in January and turned off their alarm clocks.”
“When will they get up?”
“As soon as they stop hibernating.”
“Daddy? Can I ask you something?”
“About bears?”
“No. Heavier than bears.”
“Bears are pretty heavy.”
“Daddy?”
“What is it, kitten?”
“I just, I don’t know—I say that all the time, don’t I? ‘I don’t know.’ I never realized I did that until the psychiatrist pointed it out. But I still say it.”
“When were you seeing a psychiatrist?”
“At school. I got … oh, things bothered me a lot. Or I thought they did. I saw him three times. No, four. He said I was all right. Daddy?”
“What?”
“Does it get easier?”
She was so vulnerable, so soft and open and vulnerable. He said, “Do you mean sex or love? Or both?”
“I mean the whole thing. You know. Life. When I was a kid I always thought when you grew up everything was perfect, and I’m eighteen years old, and I always thought eighteen was when you got to be grown up, and then, I don’t know.”
After a moment he said, “I was trying to remember what it was like when I was eighteen. It’s hard to see your own past with any real clarity. I was much less mature at your age than you are. I didn’t really get around to the kind of growth you’re going through until after the war. The war had something to do with it but not everything. Kids grow up much faster than they did. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad.”
“Neither am I.”
“Does it get easier? That’s a good question. I don’t think it gets better. But in a way it does get easier. Because you learn things. You learn how to handle it. And it doesn’t hurt as much.”
She had taken his hand in both of hers. Now she squeezed it hard. They sat awhile in silence before heading back toward the house. He was happy, very happy, and very close to tears.
On the way back she said, “You got me out of my mood. I just wish—”
“What do you wish?”
“Oh, that I thought more of myself. I don’t think I’m a very terrific person.”
“I think you’re an utterly terrific person.”
“Well, you have to. I’m your daughter.”
He said, “If I weren’t your father, and if I had a daughter, I would give anything to have her turn out like you.”
She began to
cry. He took her in his arms and held her close. She looked up at him, beaming through her tears, “You always know just the right words,” she said. “You ought to be a writer, you know that?”
The book didn’t stink.
He gathered up the manuscript, squared its edges, set it on the desk top. He had read it carefully all the way through, expecting to hate it, and it simply wasn’t awful. It was taut, spare. The characters sounded real. The scenes had life.
But it wasn’t quite right, either.
He lit a cigarette, leaned back, watched the smoke crawl toward the ceiling. This reading, he decided, had been worthwhile. He knew what was wrong with the book. It was possible that the book’s flaw was not what had mired him on its hundred and nineteenth page, but he knew that the resolution of that flaw would be enough spur to get him going again. If he could figure out what to do about it.
The book was thin. There wasn’t sufficient substance to it.
It was, very simply, the story of a woman’s life as shown in the three years before and two or three years after the death of her husband. Other parts of her life would be included in flashback and reminiscence, so that the book in total would present the woman’s entire life.
Was she a remarkable woman? He did not know that yet, and would learn only by writing her story. But he did know that her life was not remarkable. He did not know all its details—these would emerge as he wrote—but he knew that she was born on an Eastern Pennsylvania farm, went to New York to be an actress, married a boy who was killed in the war, took a second husband shortly after the war’s end. Her second husband was an advertising man in New York, who then took a job with a Philadelphia agency. They moved to a suburb of Philadelphia, had a daughter, grew toward middle age in a marriage that was neither good nor bad.
In the book’s first chapter the husband suffers a coronary thrombosis and lives through it. Over the next several hundred pages he would have two more coronaries, the last of which would kill him. And after that—well, he knew very little of what would happen after that. If the book took proper form, he would know the story’s ending when it was time for him to write it.
Somehow it lacked dimension, and he did not know exactly how or why.
A little later he put part of it together. Part of the problem—it was the wife’s story, but it was the husband who was doing the dying. So in a sense she was along for the ride, but you never saw him from the inside, never saw him except through her eyes. And yet it had to be that way; she absolutely had to be the viewpoint character.
He sat for a long time, turning the problem over and over in his mind and looking for ways out of it. His fingers never went near the keyboard, and “119.” stared back at him, along with the musings he had typed on it earlier. But he did not mind. He was working now whether he put anything on paper or not. His mind was on his work. While he looked for solutions to the problem he found various scenes sketching themselves out, heard in his mind exchanges of dialogue which would fall into place as the book progressed. He didn’t write them down. He had learned over the years to let them stay there, tucked somewhere in the cupboard of his mind. Some would be bad ideas, superfluous scenes that would only pad the script. Some would be inconsistent with the ultimate plot. The worthwhile ones would stay alive and would drop into place when the time came. When he emerged from the den, late in the afternoon, the problem itself remained unsolved. It was the man’s story and had to be, and the woman’s eyes had to be the window to his soul. He could write it that way. He could sit down and finish it, with no more worries about blocking. But there ought to be a better way.
Perhaps he’d know it the next morning. Sleep often solved that sort of problem. Unless it was too much disjointed by cliffs and ledges and endless flights of stairs.
Karen was in the living room. She said, “Mrs. Kleinschmidt said to call her when you wanted dinner. I said you might want to eat out, but she said to call her and she’ll cook for you.”
“What time is it?”
“A little after seven.”
“That’s at least four hours later than I would have guessed. I thought it was the middle of the afternoon.”
“You must have gotten a ton of work done. Should I call her or what? She made supper for the two of us, but I’ll keep you company.”
“I may just go get a hamburger. I’m not very hungry. What I am is thirsty.”
“You sit. I guess I know how to mix them.”
She brought him a drink and sat down across from him, waiting for his approval. He sipped, smiled. “El Exigente is satisfied,” he said.
She heaved a great sigh of mock relief, then drank some of her own drink. “It must be a great feeling,” she said.
“What must?”
“To be so involved with something that you lose all track of the time.”
“Oh, it is. Even if I didn’t write a word today.” He smiled at her expression. “The book had a problem,” he explained. “I spent half the day figuring out what it was and the other half looking for a way to solve it.”
“And you did?”
“No, but I will. I’m seeing it the right way now.”
“I can’t wait to read it.”
“Have you ever read any of my books?”
“All of them. Does that surprise you?”
“You never said anything.”
“Well, you never asked. And I never knew what to say or anything, so I didn’t.”
“I wonder if I ever thought of you reading them. I don’t think so. Isn’t that strange. Well? Pretty bad, huh?”
“I think they’re wonderful.” Such a heavy feeling in his chest. “I can’t judge books. I’m not that kind of a reader. All your books—I get completely wrapped up in them until it’s as if I’m not reading. I’ll think about trying to know you through your books but I just get caught up in the story and—Daddy? Did I say something wrong?”
Of course. That was the way to do it. The husband’s life, seen through other eyes. But not just the wife’s. The wife’s and the daughter’s.
The two women in his life. The two points of reference from which the man’s life could be triangulated and transfixed.
Of course. Two women knew him, and in the two ways in which a woman might know a man. He would have to scrap a great deal of what he had written. Most of it could be reworked, at least. But it would work. It would work beautifully, and if he handled it properly it would do a great deal more than reveal one man’s life.
It might be … important.
“Daddy?”
“You just solved my problem.”
“I did?”
“You damn well did.” He was standing, his drink abandoned on the coffee table. “I’ve got the whole opening now. I have to start over on page one but it’s all, right there.”
“You’re going back to work?”
“I can’t let it cool off.”
“But you already worked all day—”
“All I did was sit in a chair. I didn’t even move my fingers.”
“Do you want anything to eat? I could bring it to you.”
He shook his head. “You could bring me a thermos of coffee, though. Just don’t be hurt if I ignore you.”
“I’ll tiptoe. You won’t even know I was there.”
She did tiptoe, but he wouldn’t have noticed if she’d stamped her feet. It was all there, just as he’d said, and it flowed. At four o’clock he pushed himself away from his desk with thirty-two pages written and huge chunks of the rest of the book etched vividly in his mind.
He had made it a rule for many years now not to do more than twenty pages a day. But it was absurd to keep to that rule in a situation like this. The sooner he got it all down, the better it would be.
Thirty-two pages, and he didn’t have to look at them to know they were good.
And the dedication page was no longer blank.
TWELVE
When Gretchen Vann strode into the Lemon Tree, Linda did not notice her immediatel
y. It was a Friday night. The weather had been good all day, the sky clear and the sun not too hot, and the town was packed with tourists. The Lemon Tree had been getting its share all day. Now, while Olive was in the back room showing Central American wood carvings to a rather intense young couple, Linda was at the desk watching a longhaired boy contemplate shoplifting. There was a bracelet of polished bits of rose quartz which he kept picking up and putting down, and she was certain he was trying to decide whether or not he liked it well enough to drop it in his pocket.
She decided to approach him. Once it was in his pocket there wasn’t much she could do. Olive had told her not to bother much about minor pilferage; it wasn’t worth the nuisance of running for a policeman, and while she was thus engaged other more ambitious browsers could empty half the store. She had learned, though, that it was easy to stop most shoplifters in advance. If you just went up to them and gave a sales pitch for whatever you figured they were about to steal, it generally routed them from the store without making a scene.
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
The words, spoken sharply and bitterly, came just as she was about to step out from behind the counter. For an instant she thought she had said them herself, and the long-haired boy evidently had no doubt they were meant for him; he straightened up, dropped the bracelet back where it had come from and walked nervously away from it.
“You think you’re fooling me, don’t you?”
She turned toward the voice and saw Gretchen. The woman’s drab blond hair hung flat and lifeless, framing a face that was drawn and haggard. Her skin had the dull sheen of wax fruit. Her eyes were unlike anything Linda had ever seen, wide and wild, slipping in and out of focus, madness gleaming in them.
“You and Peter are not fooling me, not for one moment. You treacherous cunt.”
Conversation died throughout the shop. Some customers began edging toward the door. Others stayed to watch the show. In the hallway outside, a crowd began to gather.
“Gretchen—”