Mao II (7 page)

“Incidentally. I bring a message from Charles Everson.”

Bill hitched up his pants. He seemed to look past her, frisking himself for signs of cigarettes.

“I ran into him at a publishing dinner somewhere. He asked how my work was going. I told him I’d probably be seeing you.”

“No reason you shouldn’t mention it.”

“I hope it’s all right.”

“The pictures will be out one day.”

“Actually the only message I bring is that Charles wants to talk to you. He wouldn’t tell me what it’s all about. I told him to write you a letter. He said you don’t read your mail.”

“Scott reads my mail.”

“He said that what he had to tell you couldn’t be seen or heard by anyone else. Far too delicate. He also said he used to be your editor and good, good friend. And he said it was distressing not to be able to get in touch with you directly.”

Bill looked for matches now, clearing papers off the desktop.

“How’s old Charlie then?”

“The same. Soft, pink and happy.”

“Always new writers, you see. They sit in their corner offices and never have to worry about surviving the failed books because there’s always a new one coming along, a hot new excitement. They live, we die. A perfectly balanced state.”

“He told me you’d say something like that.”

“And you waited to tell me about him. Didn’t want to spring it on me prematurely.”

“I wanted my pictures first. I didn’t know how you’d react to news from out there.”

He struck the match and then forgot it.

“Do you know what they like to do best? Run those black-border ads for dead writers. It makes them feel they’re part of an august tradition.”

“He simply wants you to call him. He says it’s a matter of some importance.”

He swiveled his head until the cigarette at the corner of his mouth came into contact with the flame.

“The more books they publish, the weaker we become. The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless.”

“You like being a little bit fanatical. I know the feeling, believe me. But what is more harmless than the pure game of making up? You want to do baseball in your room. Maybe it’s just a metaphor, an innocence, but isn’t this what makes your books popular? You call it a lost game that you’ve been trying to recover as a writer. Maybe it’s not so lost. What you say you’re writing toward, isn’t this what people see in your work?”

“I only know what I see. Or what I don’t see.”

“Tell me what that means.”

He dropped the match in an ashtray on the desk.

“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I’ve worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. This book and these years have worn me down. I’ve forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill. I’ve lacked courage and perseverance. Exhausted. Sick of struggling. I’ve let good enough be good enough. This is someone else’s book. It feels all forced and wrong. I’ve tricked myself into going on, into believing. Can you understand how that can happen? I’m sitting on a book that’s dead.”

“Does Scott know you feel this way?”

“Scott. Scott’s way ahead of me. Scott doesn’t want me to publish.”

“But this is completely crazy.”

“No, it’s not. There’s something to be said.”

“When will you finish?”

“Finish. I’m finished. The book’s been done for two years. But I rewrite pages and then revise in detail. I write to survive now, to keep my heart beating.”

“Show someone else.”

“Scott is smart and totally honest.”

“He’s only one opinion.”

“Any judgment based strictly on merit is going to sound like his. And how it hurts when you know the verdict is true. And how you try to evade it, twist it, disfigure it. And word could get out. And once that happens.”

“You finish, you publish and you take what comes.”

“I will publish.”

“It’s simple, Bill.”

“It’s just a question of making up my mind and going ahead and doing it.”

“And you’ll stop redoing pages. The book is finished. I don’t want to make a fetish of things are simple. But it’s done, so you stop. ”

She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. She moved in closer and refocused, she shot and shot, and he stood there looking into the lens, soft eyes shining.

S
cott told her a story at lunch about his days of wandering, ten years ago, sick and broke in Athens and trying to cadge yankee dollars from tourists so he could get on one of those amphetamine buses that take you to the Himalayas in about a hundred hours of nonstop terror, through wars and mountain passes, but he was getting nowhere. He walked into the main square and saw some people gathered on the steps of a nice-looking old hotel with a European name he couldn’t recall.

“Grande Bretagne.”

Right. There was a film crew and some men who looked like government officials and fifty or sixty people just passing by and Scott went over there and saw a man on the top step who wore a khaki field jacket and checkered headscarf, a short guy with a scratchy beard, and it was Yasir Arafat and he was waving at the people on the sidewalk. When a hotel guest came out the door, Arafat smiled and nodded and people in the crowd smiled in response. Then Arafat said something to an official and the man laughed and everyone on the sidewalk smiled some more. Scott realized he was smiling broadly. He could feel the smile stretching across his face and he looked at the people around him and they looked back smiling and it was clearly agreed they all felt good together. And Arafat smiled again, talking to officials, overgesturing for the camera, pointing toward the entrance and then moving that way. Everyone applauded now. Someone shook Arafat’s hand and there was more applause. He lets a stranger shake his hand. Scott smiled and applauded, he saw the men on the steps applaud. When Arafat went inside, the people on the sidewalk smiled and clapped one last time. They wanted to make him happy.

“Did you get to the Himalayas?”

“I got to Minneapolis. I went back to school for a year but then I dropped out again and fell into another spiral of drugs and nonbeing. There was nothing very special about it, even to me. I was a salesperson for a while in a heavily carpeted shoestore. Somebody gave me Bill’s first novel to read and I said, Whoa what’s this? That book was about me somehow. I had to read slowly to keep from jumping out of my skin. I saw myself. It was my book. Something about the way I think and feel. He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten.”

“Yes. Sentences with built-in memories.”

“When I read Bill I think of photographs of tract houses at the edge of the desert. There’s an incidental menace. That great Winogrand photo of a small child at the head of a driveway and the fallen tricycle and the storm shadow on the bare hills.”

“It’s a beautiful picture.”

“Finish eating. I’ll show you the attic.”

“Why don’t you want him to publish?”

“It’s his call. He does what he wants. But he’ll tell you himself the book falls short. Woefully short. Bill has been working on and off for twenty-three years on this book. He quits it, then returns. He rewrites it, then puts it aside. He starts something new, then comes back to it. He takes a trip, he returns, he resumes work, goes away, comes back, works every single day for three years, he puts it aside, picks it up, smells it, weighs it, rewrites it, puts it aside, starts something new, goes away, comes back.”

“Sounds like total.”

“It is. The work has burnt him out. He’s burnt out. Bill has always had to struggle for every word. Bill walks five feet from his desk and doubt hits him like a hammer in the back. He has to go back to his desk and find a passage he knows will reassure him. He reads it and he’s reassured. An hour later, sitting in the car, he feels it again, the page is wrong, the chapter is wrong, and he can’t shake the doubt until he gets back to his desk and finds a passage he knows will reassure him. He reads it and he’s reassured. He’s been doing this all his life and now he’s run out of reassuring passages.”

“How long have you been with him?”

“Eight years. The last few have been tough on him. He’s gone back to drinking although not so heavily as before. He takes medications for ailments unknown to science. He rarely sleeps past five a.m. Wakes and stares. When the sun comes up, he shuffles to his desk.”

“To me, publication is exactly what he needs. You have to show people what you’ve done. How else do you resolve anything?”

“Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn’t published in years and years and years. When his books first came out, and people forget this or never knew it, they made a slight sort of curio impression. I’ve seen the reviews. Bric-a-brac, like what’s this little oddity. It’s the years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by doing nothing. The world caught up. Reprint after reprint. We make a nice steady income, most of which goes to his two ex-wives and three ex-children. We could make a king’s whatever, multimillions, with the new book. But it would be the end of Bill as a myth, a force. Bill gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens.”

“Then why do you want these photographs?”

“I don’t want. He wants.”

“I see,”

“I’ve said again and again. Craziness. I’ve harangued the poor man. Don’t do it. Madness. Self-destructive.”

“I didn’t realize from your manner.”

“Because I do my job. He makes the decisions, I follow through. If he decides to publish, I’ll work with him day and night on the galleys, the page proofs, everything. He knows that. But for Bill, the only thing worse than writing is publishing. When the book comes out. When people buy it and read it. He feels totally and horribly exposed. They are taking the book home and turning the pages. They are reading the actual words.”

In the attic there were file cabinets containing research material. Scott recited subject headings and showed her dozens of color-coded folders. His desk and typewriter were here. There were cardboard boxes filled with loose manuscript pages. There was a large photocopy machine and shelves lined with reference books, style manuals and stacks of periodicals. He handed Brita a pale-gray manuscript box, unmarked, and gestured to six identical boxes on the desk and said this was the final version, the typed and corrected and proofread copy of Bill’s new novel.

But Bill was still working, making changes. They heard him typing when they went down the stairs.

 

 

He had coffee and a sandwich at his desk. Then tapped on the keys, hearing an old watery moan deep in the body. How the day’s first words set off physical alarms, a pule and fret, the resistance of living systems to racking work. Calls for a cigarette, don’t you think? He heard them come down the stairs and pictured them making an effort not to creak, setting their feet down softly, shoulders hunched. Let’s not disturb the family fool in the locked room. He didn’t know whether she was leaving right away. He thought it would be awkward to see her again. There was nothing to say, was there? They’d shared a closeness that felt sorry and cheap the minute she walked out of the room. He couldn’t clearly recall what he’d said to her but knew it was all wrong, an effusion, a presumption, all the worse for being mainly true. Who was she anyway? Something strong in her face, the rigor of life choice, of what it takes to make your way, a stripped-down force, a settledness, bare but not unwary. He could easily get up from the desk and go to New York and live with her forever in a terrace apartment overlooking the park or the river or both. Staring past the keys. Used to be that time rushed down on him when he started a book, time fell and pressed, then lifted when he finished. Now it wasn’t lifting. But then he wasn’t finished. Live in a large bright apartment with gray sheets on the bed, reading perfumed magazines. There is the epic and bendable space-time of the theoretical physicist, time detached from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there is the haunted time of the novelist, intimate, pressing, stale and sad. His teeth felt soft today. He needed to sneak to the bedroom and mix up some pink-and-yellow fluoride multivitamins and in the meantime let’s concentrate on the page, tap a letter, then another. He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let’s face it. Must finish. Can’t die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn’t she? I’m a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick. He saw he’d inverted two letters, which he’s been doing a lot of lately, one of many signs there’s something growing on his brain, and he elevated the page and whited out the mistake, then had to wait while the liquid dried. How he punished himself for repeated errors at the machine, eternal misfingerings, how typing mistakes became despair, meaningless flubs bringing a craze to his eyes, and he stared at the white fluid drying and would not resume work until it faded into the page, which was both the punishment and the escape. Her hand on his face, how surprised he’d been to feel so affected by the gesture, the entireness of simple touch. Want to live like other people, eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. He examined the immense complexity of changing the ribbon. So many pros and cons, alters and egos. He felt it coming and then sneezed onto the page, nicely, noting blood-spotted matter but thin and sparse. He would not dignify it by calling it snot. She likes my anger. Live at the center of the cubist city, Sunday papers spread everywhere and glossy bagels on a plate. I’m between novels, he used to say, so I don’t mind dying. The problem with his second wife. But never mind. Live near the museums and galleries, stand on movie lines, uncork the wines, redo the rooms, sleep in the gray sheets, loving her, ordering out, let’s order out tonight, walk the dogs, speak the words, hear the doormen whistle down the cabs, rain beating on the windows.