Foul Matter (8 page)

It was always coming at you, thought Ned, forcing you down paths you would never otherwise have gone.

She went on: “And all of that ‘writing-is-torture’ stuff, Saul. I’m amazed you’d stoop that low.”

Saul raised his beer in a sort of salute. “Jamie, I wish I had half your confidence.”

She dropped her head in her hands, shook it. “Christ, this from a man who’s won the Pen/Faulkner, the National Book Award, the New York Critics’ Award, and blah blah blah.” She lifted her head and looked at him. “Do you really expect me to believe you need my confidence?”

“No.”

“Haven’t you ever had writer’s block?” Ned asked. “Even when you were starting out?”

“Why should I? Why should anybody? You can’t be blocked if you just keep on writing words. Any words. People who get ‘blocked’ make the mistake of thinking they have to write
good
words. I look at words the way whoever wrote
Field of Dreams
looked at that damned baseball field. ‘Write it, and they will come.’ ”

Ned said, “You don’t seem to think there’s anything hard about writing.”

“Oh, I sure do,” Jamie said, picking at the label of her beer bottle. “Page numbering, that’s the hardest thing to do: number the fucking pages. This one I’m doing now. I wound up with two 198s. I’m just lucky the first 198 is the end of a chapter and there are only two lines on it. That means all I have to do is excise the two lines.”

Saul had laughed. “For God’s sakes, Jamie. If you put in the two lines in the first place, I’d think you’d consider them a little necessary.”

“Oh, pul-
eze.
Don’t pull that pompous every-word’s-set-in-stone writing crap with me. The only two lines I think are necessary are the first two lines of ‘Cry.’ ”

And she’d trotted off to Swill’s jukebox to play it again.

N
ed was sitting that morning on the flaking green bench, always the same bench, in the little park, watching people going off to their jobs in other parts of the city, hurrying down subway stairs, rushing to catch buses just pulling away, stopping at newsstands, hailing cabs, lurching in and out of delicatessens and Krispy Kreme with paper cups and sacks and cartons. He liked to watch all of this. There was so much preparation for something other than jobs, something to take up the slack between desk and work, something filling—newsprint, doughnuts. There had to be something to move a person from the fecund mysteries of sleep, through the harried showering and shaving and dressing, to the harsh elliptical light above the desk. Something had to cushion the blow of a job.

Especially on a Monday, and especially one that promised to be oppressive, the sky cold and gray. He was happy to sit in isolation here (sometimes wondering why the park got so little foot traffic) and watch all of this. He felt lucky not be to be part of it. Yet he understood the need for that buffer between waking and settling into work. He had his own cup of coffee, cooling beside him on the bench, and watching all of this early-morning hurry was itself a kind of shield between him and his writing.

Ned picked up the part of the manuscript he’d been carrying, got out a pencil, clicked the lead into place. He enjoyed that
click
of a lead pencil or pen; it sounded so obedient, granting him control.

Which of course he didn’t have, for the
click
was all there was.

Instead of Paris and Nathalie’s dilemma, he was thinking of Pittsburgh. Ned was born in Pittsburgh. He remembered so little about it, and this haunted him. How can a person live in a place for seventeen years and not remember it?

After half an hour of this, of thinking about Pittsburgh instead of proofreading his manuscript, he decided to go to Saul’s house.

Saul came to the door wearing slippers (calfskin), a cardigan (cashmere), and smoking a cigar (Cuban). No matter what time of day, whenever Ned saw him, Saul always looked dressed for something—some expensive, exclusive place no one else knew about. It was as if he had a men’s club in his mind. But Ned knew Saul never strove for effects; this was simply the way he’d been brought up.

“How about some coffee?” said Saul. “Go on into the living room; I’ll bring it in.”

His great-grandfather had been rich; his grandfather had taken that and made the family richer; his father had reshuffled the money and made himself the richest yet. Ned did not know how much money Saul had, but he knew it was plenty. Lawyers, accountants, money managers—they handled things. Ned doubted that Saul even knew what he was worth. In any event, all of that entrepreneurial magic had ended with Saul. He spoke of himself as the end of it. He spoke of this so often that he’d finally used the phrase as his book title.

Ned had not sat down yet. He liked moving about the room, looking around. The house was so beautiful, the rooms so tactile with their moss-brown velvets and rain-washed silks, and the history so abundant—Ned could touch it and taste it, like the smooth ripe fruit in the porcelain bowl on the marble-topped commode. He stood looking at the portraits that hung above the fireplace and to the right of the mahogany butler’s desk at which Saul sometimes sat and wrote, liking its position near one of the long windows that opened over the street and whose thin curtains were buffeted by summer winds. He could sit and look out, he said.

The portraits were of his grandfather and great-grandfather; a third portrait of his father, the smile he wore in the picture that hung between the windows was particularly chilly, only barely a smile. All of them looked equally serious, as if a scowl were the only way to get the job done.

On the other side of the window, though, were two small oval frames of some rich and seemingly pliant wood. One was a sepia print and the other a charcoal drawing of the same woman, who was Saul’s grandmother. Her beauty was almost unnerving, for one had to wonder how in God’s name she could manage ever to coexist with the no-nonsense menfolk in this abstemious household. Even though neither picture was in color, Ned could still see it from Saul’s description: reddish gold hair and eyes of the dark blue of lapis lazuli.

Saul’s grandfather and great-grandfather were men of so grim an aspect that they looked as if they embodied every homily on thrift and the curative powers of work imaginable. They would probably be scandalized to find they would live out their days in these opulent gilt frames overseeing their descendant who sat around
writing.

But they were also powerful paintings that looked as if the artist had sucked out the soul of his subjects and returned them to the canvas, reconstituted. That was how alive they looked.

“Don’t look at him too long; he’ll burn your cornea,” said Saul, coming in through the dining room carrying a whole coffee service on a heavy silver tray. He poured out coffee for both of them into thin, nearly transparent cups. He handed one to Ned, then he retrieved his cigar from a heavy glass ashtray that the sun, striking it suddenly, turned to a swirl of blue. Saul had to light the cigar again to get it going.

Both of them remained standing, looking at the inhospitable trio on the wall. Saul said, “The irony is, of course, that the life I lead is far more austere and rigorous than anything they could ever have devised, much more than were their own lives. I don’t do anything. Their ghosts probably move about, watching me in the exciting act of holding a pen. My grandfather was a legendary ladies’ man; and old Noah, there”—he nodded toward the portrait near the butler’s desk—“was addicted to both gambling and booze. How boring I must seem in comparison. No, they wouldn’t be able to stand me, you know. Too dull, a dull life, nothing in it but writing and reading. For them, it was all action, and most of the action was aimed at making money. That was probably their recreation, too, together with slipping at night across the back porch of the lady of the moment. How in hell did I descend from such people? Maybe I’m a changeling. More coffee?” Saul raised the silver coffeepot.

Ned held out his cup. “That was your father’s side, but what about your mother?”

“I remember my mother only as an unobtrusive woman, silent, but never quite still, always moving, like a fleeting shadow. But I always remember myself as stationary. That window seat there—I spent my childhood in it, reading. That gold cord that holds back the drape? I can remember pulling at it or working the threads apart as I sat there. I’m surprised it held up at all. My reading drove them all crazy; I don’t think they read a book through, in spite of the library back there.” He nodded toward a room behind him. “Reading was what I did. Funny, but I think that was my way of rebelling, instead of dope or fast cars or fucking. Reading. It was only a small step to writing, I guess. My past seems to be a series of flickering images, like an old silent movie.” Saul laughed. “I’ve never done one damn thing, except in my head. How would they like that?” He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down on the moss-brown sofa.

Ned sat down then in the leather wing chair he always favored, positioned to take in most of the objects in the room. He could not imagine the things here as fleeting. In firelight and lamplight they looked crusted over, sealed against the looting of time.

“You know more about the past than I do. You’ve cracked its code. I don’t even recognize these people sometimes.” Saul prodded the air with his cigar.

“ ‘Cracked its code’? Don’t I wish. Yesterday I couldn’t write at all. Literally, I didn’t set down a word for three hours. The story’s set in Paris, yet I keep thinking of Pittsburgh.”

“Pittsburgh, I’ve always thought it a mysterious sort of city.”

Ned laughed. “That’s the last thing I’d think. Why?”

“Oh, it’s reinventing itself. Becoming beautiful after having been so ugly. At least, that’s what I’ve read.”

“Maybe so. Anyway, it stalled my writing well enough. What do you do when you can’t write? I sharpen pencils into spears. They’re lethal by the time I get through with them.”

“According to Jamie, we can always write. How the hell she does it, all of those books, all of those different genres, I don’t know. I wander around and pick up things—silver bowls, pieces of porcelain—and look on the bottom to see whether the stamp’s there and looks authentic.” Saul blew a smoke ring and pierced it with his finger.

Ned got up to look at the pictures again, the two small ones of Saul’s grandmother. Saul, like his grandmother, was a softer rendering of the sharp-eyed, imperious male ancestors. She had been alive through his childhood. Saul felt himself lucky; he was fifteen before she died, and even then she was young, only in her late fifties. She had been quite young when Saul’s mother had been born—the unobtrusive mother. Her death (Saul had said) had leveled the house and everyone in it.

It had not occurred to Ned before that “everyone” was not really Saul’s grandfather (he of the mutton whiskers) or Saul’s father (of the chilly, painted smile), but Saul himself. It rattled Ned to think this; it shook him, only because he’d pictured Saul as another, altogether different sort of adolescent—distinct and distant, a writer even then who didn’t trust anyone or anything not of his mind’s own making. Because his mother and father had pretty much cast him adrift, Ned had assumed everyone else had, too. Or at least that Saul felt they had. But this was not so.

He turned from the two oval pictures and asked, “Do you think about her much, your grandmother?”

Saul took the cigar from his mouth and studied the coal end in the way of those strange lunar moths that beat their wings slowly before fire in an unquenchable need of light. “All the time,” he said.

Ned looked at him, surprised again; he would not have thought Saul to be stuck in the past. Then he wondered why, why had he not thought this?
The End of It
dealt precisely with an overwhelming loss suffered by the austere and exacting narrator. Indeed, how could anyone have written this book other than a person who had never recovered from the loss of someone—or something, even—and never would.
The End of It.
Ned foundered here, wondering if there was some clue in this that would explain why Saul couldn’t finish the novel he’d been working on.

“They called her Ossie; her name was Oceana. She was the dose of good humor that the others had to take daily. Though you could see,” Saul said, “it lay on their tongues like lead.” Saul looked at him. “What are you thinking?”

Ned just shrugged; he did not want to say what he had been thinking because he hadn’t thought it over enough. Neither of them was given to talking off the top of his head. Neither was given to epiphanies in their writing, either. Any page or paragraph that seemed prompted by “revelation” they each saw as suspect.

Saul stood up. “Listen: let’s go to Swill’s. Early yet, but I want to get out of the house. At least, go to the park or for a walk.”

Then Ned wondered if he’d been wrong, too, about the house. Perhaps it wasn’t a refuge, a “safe house.”