Step by Step

by Lawrence Block

  The work I’d been doing for a half century bore some responsibility. Spend your days making sausage and it will reduce your appetite for the product. I’d become overly attuned to how words and sentences were strung together and how stories unfolded, and that made it harder for me to get caught up in what I read.

  Age, too, undercut one of fiction’s roles. In my youth, one of the functions of the novels I read was that of explaining the world to me; as I grew up, I required less in the way of explanation and resisted a worldview helpfully supplied by some bright young thing fresh out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  I could still immerse myself in a book now and then, but it was apt to be by some writer I’d been reading for years, and it helped if I was a captive audience—stuck in a hotel room or a ship’s cabin, say, with time on my hands and nothing much else to fill it with. Most of the time, though, I’d pick a book up and read a few chapters and lose interest. I’d know where the author was going with this, and saw no reason why I had to keep him company. Or I’d get halfway through the thing and set it down with every intention of finishing it, only to find that I never had the slightest interest in picking it up again.

  I WASN’T THAT CRAZY about writing, either.

  I could still do it. The book I’d written earlier that year in New Orleans, Hit and Run, got stronger than usual reactions from everyone who read it, and it had certainly absorbed me fully while I was working on it. I was in fact happy enough with all of my recent books, and my readers seemed content with what I was writing.

  Yet it somehow seemed to me that I was done. I kept at it because it was, after all, what I did—and, not incidentally, because I still needed to make a living. Would I continue to write if I didn’t need the money? Maybe, but maybe not. It was impossible to say.

  The list of books I’d written no longer fits on a single page, and it was pretty clear to me that I’d long since said everything I had to say, and written all the books I had any deep inner need to write. My Matthew Scudder series, sixteen books long, seemed to have found a natural stopping point, and the character to have earned a comfortable retirement. Bernie Rhodenbarr, my burglar, could probably go on, since he didn’t age or change from one book to the next, but I’d just be repeating myself in any further adventures I fashioned for him—and it seemed to me I’d done so already in the last book or two. Evan Tanner, my insomniac/secret agent, had taken twenty-eight years off between his seventh and eighth appearances, and I’d decided the fellow had the life cycle of a cicada, and could certainly wait another twenty-eight years before he showed up again.

  And as much as I’d lately enjoyed writing about Keller, I had a feeling Hit and Run would be hard to follow. My characters were all apparently ready to hang it up.

  Maybe they were trying to tell me something.

  EVER SINCE WE’D MET, Lynne and I had shared a passion for travel. And that was waning, too. We didn’t have any trips planned, and I’d found myself tossing out cruise and adventure travel brochures after no more than a cursory glance.

  Reasons came to mind. Air travel gets more unpleasant all the time, for one thing. For another, we’d been to 135 countries, and there weren’t that many places left that we felt an urgent desire to visit. Finally, we’d had three trips in succession that, for one reason or another, had proven disappointing. We didn’t feel the need to pawn our suitcases or let our passports expire, but we could see travel playing a less prominent role in our future years.

  And there were other pleasures that no longer provided much enjoyment. We hardly ever got to the theater these days, and the prospect of so doing felt almost like punishment. It was all I could do to go to a movie. My Writers Guild membership gets me invitations to no end of screenings, and in the pre-Oscar season my WGAE card gives me free admission to most movie houses. I hardly ever get to a screening, and rarely manage to card my way into a theater. Easier to stay home. Easier to find something on television.

  One night not long ago we went to a party. It was a nice enough party, as parties go. We had a few conversations with some reasonably interesting people, and contrived to leave early. Walking home from the subway, I turned to Lynne and said, “I’ve got to remember never to leave the house.”

  Of course I was joking. Sort of.

  MY CONCERN WENT beyond walking. “When a man is tired of London,” Samuel Johnson observed, “he is tired of life.” I seemed to have tired of walking—and of reading, of writing, of roaming. Had I observed similar symptoms in a fictional character, I’d have supposed him to be not long for this world. There he was—walking through his house, turning off the lights. Shutting down, preparing for it all to be over.

  Was that what I was doing?

  The thought saddened me. I had always wanted a long life, if only to find out what happened next. But if I was no longer much inclined to turn the pages of a book to learn what happened next, or to make a similar determination in a book of my own, maybe that lifelong curiosity had run its course.

  SOMETIMES I TOLD myself that my life wasn’t ending, that it was merely changing direction, and doing so in a way that was not inappropriate for my years. I still had interests and pleasures, even passions. They were simply different from the ones I’d had before.

  For Christmas, Lynne gave me the first two seasons of The Wire on DVD. I’d tried the show early on and had been unable to keep the complicated story straight or make out what the characters were saying. Now, watching one episode right after the other, and letting the subtitles clarify the dialog, I got completely caught up in the show. Within two weeks we’d watched both full seasons and ordered seasons three and four.

  And my stamp collection continued to hold my interest. Like Keller, my wistful hit man, I’d collected as a child, and into early adulthood. I sold everything when my first marriage ended, and forgot about it, only to return to the hobby in the mid-1990’s.

  I could spend hours poring over price lists and catalogs, sitting in auction rooms, working on my albums. It absorbed me completely.

  Keller, who took up philately again when he contemplated retirement, elected not to specialize, collecting the stamps of the whole world from 1840 to 1940. (The hobby ate into his retirement fund, so he’s still working.) My collection was similar, though humbler; I lacked his discretionary income.

  But didn’t stamp collecting serve as a substitute for the travel that had so obsessed me? Wasn’t this a more leisurely and less hectic way to collect all of those far-flung countries?

  One way to look at it. Another was to note that my pleasures had become inactive, sedentary, and housebound. Instead of racing, I took my time. Instead of traveling, I stayed home. Instead of exercising, I watched young men play football. Instead of reading or writing, I looked at TV shows.

  Wonderful.

  I WAS DEPRESSED, of course, and I knew that sitting around and doing nothing was a recipe for perpetuating the depression—but I didn’t seem inclined to do anything about it.

  Come the first of the year, I told myself, I’d force myself to get moving. For starters, I’d return to the gym. You don’t burn a lot of calories sitting in front of a television set watching more active chaps play football, or sell drugs, or shoot each other. The same thing goes for sitting at a desk and mounting postage stamps in an album. Since those were my pastimes, and since I was eating like an offensive lineman bellying up to the training table, well, I had better do something about it—and I decided I’d somehow find the will once the new year got under way. I’d get back on the treadmill, and I’d cut back on the carbs.

  I needed to exercise, because my clothes didn’t fit. I needed to get something written because we were running out of cash. I didn’t wait for January to sit down at the computer. There was a short story I’d agreed to provide for an anthology, and they’d already paid me half the money in advance, the manipulative bastards, so I really had to write the damn thing. And it would be good to try something that would take days rather than months to finish.

/>   I wrote the story in a week’s time, and it turned out okay. That was encouraging, it told me that those muscles still worked, and that I could rise to an occasion when I had to.

  January came around, and on the morning of January 2 I got myself out the door and walked the block and a half to my gym. Remarkably, I still remembered which locker was mine, and the combination of my lock. I worked out that morning, and the next morning, and the morning after that.

  And then I stopped.

  Well, I told myself, I evidently wasn’t ready. Not yet. Besides, the exercise took time and energy that I needed for my work. So I returned instead to the computer, and plunged into work on a novel featuring one of my series characters. I thought of an opening, and wrote that, and then I remembered a plot element I’d thought of years ago, and incorporated that, and the words began to mount up. In a couple of weeks I’d produced around twenty thousand of them.

  I wasn’t crazy about what I’d written. And I wasn’t at all certain what ought to happen next. So I stopped writing, waiting for it to clarify itself in my mind.

  Maybe, I thought, I ought to write another short story. Maybe it would be good to write something that I knew I’d be able to finish. I had 75,000 words of a memoir lying around, and I couldn’t summon up the slightest interest in writing any more of that. And I now had 20,000 words of a mystery, and it seemed to have run out of gas. Finish something, I urged myself, and sell it to somebody, and bring a few dollars into the house.

  So I started a short story. And wrote a couple of hundred words, and returned to it the next day, and wrote a couple hundred more. And a day or two later I realized that it didn’t want to be a short story, that what I’d actually written was the opening of yet another novel, about yet another of my series characters.

  And how far would it go before it ran into a wall?

  I asked myself that question, and pondered it some, and when it was time to get to work the following morning, I decided not to bother.

  I’D BEEN WAITING hopefully for January, and it had come and gone. Depression, I’d learned over the years, was a self-limiting syndrome, running its course and moving on, but this time around it seemed to be renewing its own option and extending its reach.

  I wasn’t going to the gym. I’d done some writing, but that had stopped, and I couldn’t see much reason to get back to it. I had twenty thousand words of one book that wasn’t going anywhere, and two or three thousand words of another. Neither one throbbed with life.

  And, looming in the background, I had perhaps two-thirds of a memoir to which I no longer seemed to feel any connection whatsoever. That was a lot of work to no purpose. But there was a precedent for it. It wouldn’t be the first memoir I’d abandoned.

  Then something happened.

  30

  AROUND NOON ON SUNDAY, the tenth of February, I was one of a few dozen people sitting in a room a few blocks from my apartment. When I stopped drinking thirty years ago, I began attending meetings of a group of like-minded individuals, and over the years this Sunday gathering had become my regular weekly meeting. Unless I was out of town—or racing in Central Park—I was apt to be there.

  At some point during the meeting my mind wandered—hardly an uncommon occurrence—and I found myself reflecting on all of the things I wanted and needed to do, and seemed incapable of doing. I had to get to the gym. I had to return to the Atkins diet. I had to resume writing, and get something written.

  This was hardly news. I would acknowledge these three imperatives several times a day, day after day, but acknowledgment seemed to be as far as I could go. The days would slip by, and nothing would happen. I sat around doing nothing, and yet I never found time for the things I had to do.

  And a thought came to me, as now and then one does. I remembered something I’d heard in a similar meeting, very likely in that very room, almost thirty years earlier. “If you need to find a way to make time for the things you have to do,” someone said, “go to more meetings.”

  How’s that for counterintuitive? When I first heard that bit of wisdom, I was reminded of the old story about the fellow who complains to his rabbi about his cramped living conditions. He and his wife and their four children live in a two-room shack, along with his wife’s parents and his old grandmother. There’s no room, and it’s driving him crazy.

  “Hmmm,” says the rabbi. “You have chickens? Bring the chickens into the house with you.”

  Guy goes back to the rabbi a few days later, says it’s even worse with the chickens. “Really? Hmmm. You have a goat? Bring in the goat.”

  And so on. I think there was another animal. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a pig. A dog? A cow? Never mind.

  Guy goes back again, says it’s worse than ever, no room to turn around, and on top of everything it smells from all the animals. “Hmm,” says the rabbi. “Go home and take all the animals out of the house.”

  Guy does, returns beaming. “Rabbi,” he says, “you’re a genius. There’s so much room it’s like a castle!”

  So. Go to more meetings? Sure, why not? Then when you stop you’ve got all this free time.

  Except that’s not how it works. Go to more meetings, and keep on going to more meetings, and somehow you get more accomplished. I don’t know why this works. (I don’t understand non-Euclidean geometry, either. I mean, how can parallel lines meet? If they do, don’t they stop being parallel?)

  What I’d learned, years and years ago, was that it worked. I might not know how it worked, or why it should work, but I don’t really know how electricity works, and this lack of knowledge doesn’t keep me from turning the lights on.

  Tomorrow, I told myself, I’ll get up at six o’clock and go to the gym. After my workout I’ll go to the nine o’clock meeting. And after that I’ll come home and spend two hours at the computer. And, oh yeah, while I’m doing all this, I’ll eat in a way that would make Dr. Atkins smile with approval.

  And that’s what I did.

  MONDAY I PUT in an hour on the treadmill, and it was a daunting experience. I set out at what once would have been a very easy pace, four miles an hour, fifteen-minute miles, and found I couldn’t comfortably maintain it. I had to dial it down. By the hour’s end I had worked my way back to fifteen-minute miles. I spent ten or fifteen minutes lifting weights, had a shower, got some coffee, and went to my meeting. At ten o’clock I came home and sat down at my desk.

  And did this again the next day, and the day after. I continued in this fashion through Friday, varying the length of my treadmill workouts, never exceeding an hour, and sometimes limiting myself to forty-five minutes. Every morning I went from the gym to the meeting, and from the meeting to my computer, where I worked a little on that short story that wanted to turn into a novel.

  It didn’t seem to be all that eager, though. I got a little done for the first three days, and Thursday I took a nap instead. Friday I got home from the meeting in time to catch a cab to the airport; Lynne and I were to spend the weekend in Florida, visiting my Aunt Mim.

  Mim’s the last surviving relative of the generation before mine, and I hadn’t seen her since before my Uncle Hi’s death several years ago. The previous fall, before the debacle in Texas, I’d planned a Florida visit at the time of the AIA Marathon, a small race beginning and ending in Fort Lauderdale, and passing right in front of my aunt’s apartment building in Pompano Beach. I never did sign up for the race, and abandoned racing altogether. Instead I picked a time when my cousin Peter would be visiting, and that turned out to be the same weekend as the marathon. (Its course did in fact go right past Mim’s building, and past the hotel we stayed in a few miles up the beach, and we thought we might get out in time to watch the runners. But by the time we were through with breakfast, they were on their way back to Lauderdale.)

  I didn’t get to any meetings in Florida. I used the treadmill at the hotel one morning, and the walk to and from Mim’s was long enough to make each day a gym day. And I stayed with Atkins, and I relaxed and enjoyed
the good company of my aunt and my cousin, and I thought about stuff.

  I realized there was a change I had to make in my new regime. The components were all present, but in the wrong order. By the time I got to my desk, I was fatigued from my workout. The fatigue was not unpleasant, but it blunted the mental edge I needed in order to get good work done. If I made writing the first thing I did, and then went to my meeting, well, I might be mentally tired by the time I got to the gym, but so what? Quick wit and verbal agility were wasted on the treadmill, anyway.

  As the weekend wore on, I realized something else, too. What I needed to do was get a book finished, and I had one book—this one—that was much closer to completion than anything else I was working on. Why not return to the memoir?

  If I could put in two hours on it each morning before I went to my meeting, I could be done with it in a month or two. Anything else I might write would take longer. More to the point, anything else would be essentially a way of avoiding what I really needed to do, which was finish the memoir. Ever since I stopped working on it, it had been the elephant in the room. I had to deal with it or I could never really deal with anything else.

  WE FLEW HOME Tuesday afternoon. I went to the gym first thing the next morning, and then to my meeting, and spent the afternoon reviewing my work on the memoir and preparing myself to get back to it. That night I set the clock an hour earlier, and at five the next morning I got up and prepared for work. I was at my desk by six, and at the meeting place by eight-thirty, and by then the memoir was a thousand words longer.

  I’d had no re-entry problems. I had picked the book up right where I’d left off at the end of my Fire Island stay, somewhere after the end of the Spanish pilgrimage. It was so easy getting back into the flow of the book that I wondered why I’d ever stopped in the first place.