Friends

by Stephen Dixon

  “No, I couldn’t write or call him about that book. It still sticks in my throat.”

  “Want another drink?”

  “I think I’ve had it.”

  “Dave,” Floyd says to the bartender, “another for me, a fresh soda in back; I think he’s finished. —So, do me a favor and yourself one too. He’s more than just sick. He’s deteriorated pitifully in the last two years. By the way he looks and what someone said the doctors say about him, he isn’t going to last another year. He’s too weak most days to leave his apartment and some days to leave his bed. He’s living off Welfare and Medicare and what money the writing organizations give him from their emergency funds. But still trickling out his fiction—not getting any of it published—and some articles for the Voice.”

  “I’ve seen them. Throwbacks to the Fifties and Sixties.”

  “He’s only writing them for money and to keep his name in print, so he’d mostly agree with you. But call him, don’t write. Say you just read his book a second time and realize what a shit you’ve been about it all these years. You don’t have to explain. Just talk about how good’s his book. He’s been carrying this sore for a long time and it’ll make him happy. And you know, outside of what you say he did to you, I’ve never heard anything but the best things about what he’s done for others.”

  “I don’t have a copy. I gave mine away after I read it.”

  “So what? All I want you to do is praise. Call him now, in fact. From the phone over there. While I drink, you call. He loves your work, you know.”

  “Does he? What’s he looking for, another of my unpublished manuscripts?”

  “Don’t be mean. He likes your work a lot and feels lousy you still haven’t a book out. And he’s done what he could for you—without telling you and despite your silence; even wrote several book editors in your behalf, he said. That was nice of him. Most writers don’t go out of their way for other writers like that—you’ve said so yourself.”

  “He sort of owes it to me, no? Because I’d say fifty pages of that six-hundred-page book of his had some of my stuff in it—that’s why I stopped sending my novel around. I thought anyone who had read his book—”

  “Not many did, so little chance of that.”

  “But if someone had, he’d have said he’d read something like this before—parts of it—and word might have got around that I plagiarized Gabe’s book and then no publisher would have looked at my work again.”

  “You got them down as too scrupulous. Anyway, it’s over, past—illness makes it over if anything—so call him now, because if you don’t, you never will. What do you say?”

  “I hate that he’s so sick, but calling him still isn’t easy.”

  “Come on.”

  “Okay.”

  He goes to the back and dials Gabe’s number. Gabe answers weakly. “It’s Will, Gabe—long time no talk and all that—but how’s it going?”

  “How’s it going? Will who? Not Taub.”

  “The same. Haven’t changed my name.”

  “Well I’ll be. I thought you were dead.”

  “You mean you wished I was dead.”

  “Actually, I knew you weren’t and of course I’d never wish it. Floyd says he keeps running into you—I bet it was he who told you to call.”

  “Truth is, that’s true. You know me—could never tell a lie. He said you weren’t feeling too good, which I’m very sorry about—I hate to see anybody I know sick—so I’m calling. Look, he also said something I’m not supposed to say to you—”

  “That I was angry you never wrote me about my first book. That it hurt me.”

  “Right. Listen, I’m sorry. If you can keep this a secret between us two—meaning, not tell Floyd I said this, because he’ll only think I was trying to hurt you again, which I’m not, believe me, I’m not—I didn’t write you then because I was mad as hell at you for lifting certain scenes and dialogue and even two characters from my own novel Flowers.”

  “Flowers?”

  “Come on, you know the one. The novel I asked you to bring to White Nights because you lived around the corner from them then. And you called up that night—early in the morning, really—”

  “Oh yeah. But you thought I stole from that piece of crap? You’ve got to be mistaken. If I’m going to steal from something—”

  “‘Crap’? You called me at two or three in the morning—it’s what I’m talking about—and said you loved it—loved the first hundred pages of it, at least—as much as anything you’ve read of anyone’s in the last ten years—and could I give you another half day to finish it.”

  “I said that? Bull. It’s true I started to read it—on the subway home that night. I was with Pearl—remember Pearl?”

  “Floyd said she got married and had a kid.”

  “Sure she got married. To a rich man—the kind she always wanted, the whore. I hope she’s unhappy. Not the baby, but just she. She’s a bitch—was, is, always will be.”

  “I thought she was kind of nice. Almost too good for you, if you want to know what I felt then. Too good for me too, if I can be—”

  “Too good for anyone. A goddamn snob. Good riddance to her forever. I’ve known ten better women since. Prettier, better, smarter—everything. But about your piece of trash Flowers, if that was its title. So that’s what you must tell people why you cut me off flat. Well let me tell you, baby, I read twenty pages of that manuscript on the subway home—if you ever see that bitch Pearl again, ask her. She’ll corroborate, if she hasn’t also become a liar, that I thought it trash then and wanted to toss it out the train window—even made believe I was going to and she had to grab my arm to stop me—not that I’d go that far. You would have killed me. But I read about twenty pages and told her that anyone who could write this badly will never be able to write well in his entire life. And I still think it. Your work since—what I’ve seen of it in small magazines—stinks. God only knows why they print it. Just tells me what I’ve thought all along about them—the little magazines have no taste, it’s all in and who you know and the rest of that crap.”

  “You’re just saying this because you’re too damn ashamed—did I say ashamed? I mean you’re too damn gutless to admit that you lifted from my manuscript. You read the whole thing all right. You had to to steal one of the characters who doesn’t appear till my novel’s last scene. You even stole that idea.”

  “What idea?”

  “That a character—an important one to the denouement of the novel—”

  “Oh, ‘denouement’ now. Big words from a small mind.”

  “—doesn’t appear till the very last scene in your novel. But whole sections lifted. Dialogue—almost word for word sometimes. The way your main character made love to his wife—every Saturday, exactly at midnight, while my main character did it every day but Sunday and exactly at eleven. And that both our couples always used the same position when they made love—yours not much different from mine—and that the girlfriend in my novel would never take off her earrings in bed while the wife in your novel wouldn’t take off her stockings or socks.”

  “What, you invented all the sex in the world—you invented the clock? The clock’s been invented and so have all the positions and sexual peculiarities and hang-ups.”

  “Listen, this phone conversation is a bust. You know what I’m saying but you’re intentionally distorting it to protect yourself. I’m sorry you’re ill and I hope—and this is the truth—you get well again and sooner the better, but somehow your lousy situation right now isn’t enough to make me forgive you for what you did.”

  “Bull and more bull. You’re just angry, and are also trying to do some double number on me when you couldn’t get me to admit to the first, because your own novel wasn’t good enough to get published, just as none of your longer works have been. While at least one of my fat novels, which was equal in size to about three of your midgets, not only got published but by a major house. For you know damn well I never lifted anything from you. If I
did take a line or word or two from the first twenty pages, then it was subconscious. But I doubt even that happened because I think everything in those first twenty pages wasn’t good enough to take.”

  “Again, I hope you get better, Gabe, and I’m sorry for the tough time you’ve had recently, but I also think you’re a liar and a thief. Goodbye,” and he hangs up.

  “So, how’d it go?” Floyd says, handing Will a drink. “I knew you’d need one after your call, so I ordered a brandy for you—French and straight up.”

  “Thanks. I do need it. How’d it go? Okay. He sounded weak in the very beginning but then his voice got really robust. I told him I reread his book and liked it and he said thanks. But everything overall, he doesn’t seem well.”

  “Did he give you the business about his living another ten years but not later than that?”

  “Something like it, I think.”

  “He’s imagining it. I’ve had a couple of discussions about him with his last live-in, Cecily.”

  “I don’t think I knew that one.”

  “You wouldn’t have. She dropped him about half a year ago—moved out, they were battling all the time—but still comes over with food and things and clean laundry sometimes. She said the doctors definitely think—but I mentioned this before, didn’t I?—oh damn,” and he starts crying. He wipes his eyes with his bar napkin, then his face with his handkerchief.

  “Yeah, you told me. I’m sorry. I can’t say the world of letters is losing a great writer—I shouldn’t even talk about it that way. He’s a good writer and once was very good, but the world in general is just, well, losing a very nice guy, mostly. Whatever, it’s just awful when someone so young–”

  “It’s disgraceful. A cure will be found for his disease-you’ll see-two to three years after he goes. It happened with my sister and it’ll happen to him. To Gabe, right?” holding up his glass. “To Gabe Peabody, a hell of a good writer—still, I think; even with the crap he has to produce, it’s still better written than most anybody’s—and let’s face it, one of the most decent courageous guys around.”

  “I can drink to that.” They drink.

  “Then it’s all straightened out with him?”

  “Straightened out? Sure. Well. Listen, Floyd, why am I lying to you? Lie to you, lie to everybody—I just ought to stop. I called Gabe with good intentions, but once I heard his voice and we started talking, I got upset about what he did with my manuscript then. So I—”

  “You didn’t. Brought it up? You told him off?”

  “That’s what I did. I called him a thief and worse. But do you know what he had the balls to tell me?”

  “You’re a bastard, do you know that? For do you realize how sick he is? Kicking the goddamn guy like that when he’s so far down?”

  “Listen, I know Gabe too and I thought he’d appreciate the truth more—or just what I was thinking more—the grudge I’ve held—than some b.s. about how much I liked his book. But you know what he said about my manuscript? That he never—”

  “I don’t want to hear. Dave,” he yells to the bartender. “Please, I have to go. Will a twenty take care of it?”

  Dave nods. Floyd puts two tens on the bar, gets his coat off the hook behind them and heads for the door.

  “Well, I just don’t think an illness, no matter how severe—” Will’s saying to Floyd’s back. “Oh, maybe if he was on his deathbed,” but Floyd’s out the door.

  Will grabs his coat and runs after him. He catches up with him a half-block away. “Listen to me, Floyd—I told Gabe the truth, the truth, because the issue has been with me a long time. Because my gripe I thought was as big as his—that he stole and didn’t apologize. Even bigger. That I didn’t write him was the least of what I wanted to do then. I wanted to sue him. Did for a couple of years. I wanted to turn him in to every writing organization there was. You don’t know—you’re not a writer—what it’s like to write something for two-plus years and then have some guy—a friend—copy from it left and right and make your manuscript useless.”

  “You could have rewritten and changed the parts you say he took from. So it would have taken awhile. But it would have saved the manuscript and for all you know, made it better. Anything can stand more work.”

  “He took the best parts. I would have had to change the whole tone or something. He took the spirit out of that novel or just out of me. Whatever he did, I just couldn’t go back to it.”

  “Maybe then, but now?”

  “Now it’s old stuff to me. I’m doing other things in other ways—I couldn’t imitate that style anymore. That’s what happens.”

  “You say. Maybe you should get over the idea that you can’t. Anyway, you know your business, but what I want from you right now is to call him. That’s right—don’t look at me as if I’m nuts. There’s a booth there. If the phone’s working, call him and apologize. Even if you don’t mean it—though you should—say you’re sorry. You lost your head, you didn’t mean what you said, you realize he didn’t steal from your book. Maybe a line here, a word there, but so what?—and you were just drunk or something before. Not ‘something’; you drank too much tonight and said those things out of some drunkenness or some blind rage against something else that’s been bothering you, but it wasn’t what you know is true.”

  “He’ll know you put me up to it. I already told him you told me to call him to say what a great book he wrote—”

  Floyd swings at him, grazes his forehead, lunges at him again with his arm cocked but Will steps back and walks the other way, saying with his back to Floyd “It’s just what I always thought about life. Not always but for a long time. People don’t want to—oh the hell with it.”

  “Of course they don’t in certain situations, you idiot,” Floyd shouts. “You bastard. You goddamn pitiless sonofabitch and your goddamn pitiless truth. Sure, keep walking, but no wonder your writing smells.”

  Will goes into the bar, says to Dave “If you think you don’t want me in here because of the commotion I made before, tell me and I’ll go.”

  “No, it’s okay. Only don’t get so loud again if you don’t mind. Brandy?”

  “Right. A double. Not the expensive kind Floyd ordered; just the house stuff.” He drinks two doubles, turns it all over in his mind several times. Maybe I was wrong. No, I was right. Stealing from an unpublished manuscript is bad news—unforgivable if the person who stole it doesn’t acknowledge it. I should call him. He should have called me. Ages ago. But I gave away Floyd’s secret. So what’s he complaining about? I made him look like an even nicer guy to Gabe. But Gabe’s dying, Floyd says. Maybe he is. Let’s say he is. No, he is—everyone says he is. They say I wouldn’t recognize him even if I made an appointment to meet him someplace and he showed up at the exact spot at the right time. That he’s lost maybe thirty pounds and he was always thin. All right. I did the wrong thing. I couldn’t control myself. That’s how I am. No, that’s not good enough. Floyd was right about everything. I have to apologize to him when he gets home. Call him in five minutes. And Gabe. Call him and apologize for everything—say you were drunk—and then call Floyd and say you called Gabe and apologized just the way he asked you to.

  He goes to the phone, calls Gabe. Gabe says “Yes?”

  “Listen, Gabe, it’s Will.”

  Hangs up. Calls back. “Gabe, don’t hang up. I apologize. I was drunk. I’m a schmuck. I didn’t mean what I said at all. I was mad about some other things and took it out on you. This woman I was seeing—she dumped me. I’ve been bitter and depressed about it for weeks and have been dumping on everyone since because of it.”

  “Whew. Nice excuse. You’re a writer. Writers usually have good excuses. I should know. I’ve got good excuses too when I need them—to me, to the people I’m excusing myself to. Fine. I accept your apology. I accept it because I’m not a big grudgeholder and because it took a lot to call back. Floyd obviously pressured you into it, but it still took a lot.”

  “Floyd won’t even speak to me
now. He tried to slug me after I told him what I told you. But literally—threw a punch.”

  “Really? That’s very flattering. Floyd’s a good guy; you and I, we’re not such good guys. Hey, I think we should talk more, Will, but now^ not the time. You want to have lunch soon?”

  “Sure, when? Why don’t you come to my place? I’ll make us something.”

  “I can’t get around much.”

  “I’ll send a cab and pay for it too. Call it part of my apology.”

  “You’d do that? My old pals are really coming through for me tonight. But you’re so apologetic, so guilty. Never saw you like that.”

  “That’s right, I am. But I’ll do it. I want to forget what happened. Let’s say we worked it out. Have we?”

  “I think this phone conversation has done something to that effect.”

  “Then, and I’m saying this in all sincerity and without any animosity, admit to me something too. You stole, didn’t you?”

  “If I said yes, just to see what you’d say, I know you’d call me the worst names going. You’re wily and changeable like that. But I’ll say yes, I did steal, just to see what you’ll say.”

  “No, the truth. Say it without those added things. Did you or did you not steal from Flowers? And not just a few words or sentences from it. I’m talking about whole characters and parts. You read the whole thing. You had to have.”

  “I read twenty, at the most thirty to thirty-five pages on the subway as I said. And skip-reading. You’re asking too much to think anyone could read it any other way or read more.”

  “Look, I’m not going to prosecute or hold you to it after this call. It’s all over. My novel’s junked. I just want to know for my own satisfaction.”

  “And I’ve told you. If it doesn’t satisfy you, what can I say?”

  “Forget the lunch invitation.”

  “Think I would have come even in a chauffeured-driven car? You’d put poison in the food. For both of us. You’re suicidal. You hate life because you can’t write and you’ve never really been published and so you want to take everyone with you.”