Big Bad Love

by Larry Brown

  She didn’t want to have children yet. There was plenty of time, she said. Wait till I sell my novel, she said. I even took this high-paying job, working inside a nuclear reactor, so she could quit the post office and write full-time. I didn’t mind. I didn’t even mind having to eat TV dinners by myself sometimes. I mean, if you love somebody, you put up with them. Hell, I told her to go for it, grab all the gusto she could. But even that wasn’t enough. When we first got married, we’d go to a movie every Friday night. Then on Saturday night, we’d go out somewhere with some of our friends and listen to a band, have a few drinks, do some dancing and just kick up our heels.

  And then she started writing. She wrote a novel first. Blasted straight through, seven months, night and day. I’d be in there on the couch watching old Hopalong Cassidy or somebody and hear that typewriter going like an M-60 machine gun in the bedroom. That’s where she writes. I’d stay in there by myself until the movie or Johnny Carson or whatever I was watching went off, and then I’d get up and open the door and ask her if she was ready to go to bed. And most of the time, she’d say she was right in the middle of a scene and had to finish it. She’d give me this sort of pained but patient expression that said clear as glass, Shut the door and leave me alone.

  What the hell. We had some fights about it. Anybody would. We had some knock-down-drag-outs. I busted a picture that her mother gave us over the goldfish bowl one night, and another time I kicked a hole in the bedroom door after she locked me out.

  And that wasn’t the worst of it. All our friends started wanting to know why we never went out with them any more. The only thing I could tell them was that she was working on her writing. I hated doing that. You tell people something like that and they look at you like you’re crazy. I mean, who sits around writing fiction besides Edgar Rice Burroughs or Stephen King, or in other words, somebody who knows what the hell he’s doing? I used to tell her that shit. Especially if she’d just written something I didn’t particularly like. Like this one time, she wrote a short story about a woman who was a hunchback. She called it “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.” It wasn’t worth a shit! I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but it was boring as hell. And the whole time I was reading it, she was sitting right beside me on the couch, sipping a glass of wine, smoking one cigarette after another. She was looking over my shoulder, trying to see where I was on the page. This damn woman who was a hunchback had a son who was a cripple. The only thing he was good for, apparently, was shoveling out horse stalls. But every night he’d bring his little twopence or whatever home. I think it was supposed to be set back in olden times or something. They were trying to save up enough money for an operation. But she didn’t say who was going to get the operation, the woman or the kid. That was the big suspense of the whole crappy story. It turned out they had this damn dog you didn’t even know about until the last page, and the dog had some rare disease that only this veterinarian in Cincinnati could cure, for—you guessed it—the exact same amount this kid made after working for a year shoveling all this horseshit. I damn near puked when I got through reading it.

  But I didn’t say anything when I finished it, not right away. I got up and went into the kitchen and got a beer. I still had on my radioactive work clothes. She hadn’t even given me time to eat my supper. I was trying to think of some nice way to bring her down, but hell, I didn’t know what to say. She was sitting on the couch with her legs tucked underneath her, grinning. Sipping that wine, smiling like the cat that ate your sardines.

  “Well?” she said. “What did you think of it?”

  She leaned forward a little on the couch and held her wineglass between her hands. I told her I didn’t know. I told her I thought I ought to read it again to sift out the ambiguities and decide which mode of symbolism the denouement pertained to. I took some English Lit classes in college and that was the only thing that saved my ass that night. It was like old times when we went to bed. She came twice. She said I was the greatest husband and the most understanding human on earth. I felt like a real bastard.

  The next morning was Saturday, and I didn’t have to go to work. I remember waking up and thinking about a little early morning love, but then I heard the typewriter pecking. I dozed off for a while because I didn’t want to be by myself all day. Saturdays she wrote all day. When I got up and went into the kitchen to make coffee, it was already made. There was bacon laid out on a paper towel just as pretty as you please, hash browns and scrambled eggs on the warmer on the stove, and my plate was set with the morning paper folded right beside my cup. She had butter and biscuits and molasses on the table, just like in a restaurant. I really felt like a bastard then.

  I didn’t know what to do. If I said it was bad, she’d sull up or maybe cry. She cried a lot when I didn’t like her stuff. And if I said it was good when it really wasn’t, she’d get very encouraged and sit right down and type it up all nice and neat and send it off to Playboy or somewhere, and then get all broke down when it came back rejected. I used to hate mail-time on Saturdays, when I was home. About eleven o’clock, if she had a story out, she’d sit down on the couch and open the drapes on the front window, watching for the mailman. She’d sit there with a cup of coffee in her hands. She’d start doing that about three days after she’d sent a story off, I think. I guess she did it every day while it was out. I don’t know. But I’m sure she did. She wouldn’t even write while she was waiting for the mailman. When she was waiting for the mailman, she wouldn’t do anything but look out the window. Every once in a while, she’d get up and go to the front door and open it, and look up the street to see if she could see him coming. And finally, there he’d be. She’d get up and get over to one side of the curtains, and peek out to see what he was pulling out of his bag. If it was just some small stuff, some white envelopes, or circulars from TG&Y or somewhere, she’d rush out as soon as he put the stuff in the box. But if she saw him pull a long brown manila envelope out of his bag, she’d jerk the curtains back together and sit down fast on the couch and put her face in her hands.

  She’d say: “It came back” like she was talking about a positive test for cancer of the womb. She’d sit right there and shake her head and never lift her face from her hands.

  “I don’t want to go out and get it,” she’d say. “Lonnie, you go out and get it.”

  So I’d go out and get it. What the hell, it was no big emotional experience to me. Just a piece of mail. That didn’t mean I didn’t know what it meant to her. I knew it hurt her to have her stuff come back. But Playboy is never going to publish something like “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.” Never. Ever. Not in a million years. I’d bring it in, and she’d be sitting there. She wouldn’t look at me. She would have turned on the TV by then. She’d be looking at it like she was really interested in it. We had this routine we’d go through. It was always the same thing.

  “You want to open it?” I’d say.

  She’d shake her head quickly, violently almost.

  “No! You open it.”

  I’d always tear the damned thing opening it, and she’d scream, “Be careful! There might be a note in it!” She meant like a note from an editor.

  Of course there never was. There was never a note from Playboy inside the envelope. Big Daddy Hugh had never taken the time to tell her he was dying to see something else she’d written.

  “Open it slow,” she’d say. “Look in.”

  I’d open it slow. I’d look in.

  “Do you see anything?” she’d say.

  I always said the same thing: “Yeah, I see something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it a note?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Then there’d be this small period of silence. She’d lean forward and turn down the volume on the TV She’d look over at me like we were about to be gassed and only had a few remaining moments between us.

  “Look,” she’d say.

  I’d reach in and pull it out.
“The material enclosed has been given careful consideration and is not suitable for use in our publication at this time. Due to the volume of submissions received, we regret that we cannot offer individual criticisms. All submissions should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope if their return is desired. Your interest in blah blah blah is most warmly appreciated. The editors.”

  And then she’d go off on a crying jag. She’d just get up and rush off into the bedroom and throw herself on the bed. So I didn’t want another one of those scenes coming up that Saturday morning. She didn’t have anything out right then; she’d sent some stuff off to Redbook, but they’d rejected all of it. I think she’d already gotten about fourteen rejection slips when she wrote “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.” I was sitting there eating my breakfast when she came in. I had the story beside my plate. I’d been reading it over again, but it didn’t look any better than it had the night before. As far as I could tell, the kid was a nerd, and his mother was a turd, and the only thing the dog did, even on the last page, was lie around and whine and thump “its tail weekly against the hard unforgiving gray cobblestone pavement littered with cruel gray pigeon droppings.”

  “Well,” she said. She was grinning again. “You’ve slept on it.”

  Yes I had.

  “I didn’t know you knew so much about literature,” she said.

  “Ah, I’m a closet fan of Flaubert’s.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Gustave. I like Melville, too. You ever read Moby Dick?”

  “No, but I saw it on the late movie. Gregory Peck and all them. Did that come from a book?”

  “Yes, it did, dear. A very great book.”

  “Well, I didn’t know it was a book. What’d you think about my story?”

  I knew that if I said I liked it, she’d ball my brains out. She’d shut down the typewriter, lock all the doors and pull the curtains closed, strip naked down in the floor and tell me to climb on.

  “It was something else,” I said. “Indescribable.”

  She started stripping out of her clothes.

  “Unbelievable.”

  She stepped out of her panties.

  “I can’t believe you wrote it.”

  She got back on the pillows of the couch and put one foot on the coffee table and said, “Come and get it, big boy.”

  “You’re better than Jackie Collins,” I said, and went to her.

  Okay, so it was a lousy thing to do. But it made her happy, for a while at least. Naturally she typed up a clean copy of “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati,” didn’t change a word, and sent it off. I think it set some kind of record for coming back. I came home from the reactor one evening and she was drunk in the living room. She had a bottle of vodka, a pint, and she was halfway through it. She had it mixed up in some grape Kool-Aid, and she was soused. Supper wasn’t fixed, and she started getting sick, and I wound up holding her head over the commode for her while she threw up.

  All this happened before things got bad.

  I really got into that first novel she wrote. It was about this grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park that had lost its fear of humans and was running around eating everybody. The story line was pretty good, even if her dialogue did suck, and she somehow knew how to make all these narrative hooks. For instance, getting one of the characters into a tight squeeze, then cutting to another chapter so that you’d rush along to see what was going to happen. And she invented all these people. That was what amazed me. She just made up all these people out of her mind. I mean people that were nothing like us. It was all about these park rangers who were trying to kill this bear. Most of them had bad marriages, but one of them, this young guy named John, was a newlywed. He was a real upright guy, loved his wife and all that, was dedicated to the Park Service. But his buddy, Jesse, had this wife who looked like Ann-Margret and was always coming on to him. Okay. Then, there was this other ranger named Walker, who’d already been dipping his wick into Jesse’s wife, Glenda, and this Walker dude was sort of nuts. But he kept it carefully hidden. He was a big muscled-up mean motherfucker with a temper like a short fuse. John had this other friend, Ben, who knew what was going on between Walker and Glenda, but he didn’t say anything. (You know how that shit goes if one of your friends’ wives has ever been messing around on him and you didn’t want to tell him. I mean, you’re sort of caught in the middle. You can tell your friend, and risk him knocking the shit out of you and calling you a liar, or keep your mouth shut and feel like a bastard for not telling him.) So that’s what old Ben was going through. He had a wife, too, but she was almost nonexistent in Judy’s novel. All these park rangers were running around trying to kill this man-eating bear, and the bear was killing their dogs and eating campers. They had a bunch of close encounters with the bear, missed some shots and things, and then close to the end of it, old Jesse went one-on-one with this bad Ursus Horribilus, missed his shot, and got killed. Very painfully. That was a heart-breaker. I liked old Jesse. And right after that, old Ben amost went crazy because he hadn’t told Jesse that Glenda was messing around on him with Walker. And then he really went crazy. He beat the shit out of this other dude named Tommy, who’d been messing around with Glenda a few years before, and they kicked him off the Park Service. And see, that left John and this maniac Walker to kill the bear. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I imagined all sorts of bad things happening. What I figured was going to happen was that Walker was going to rape John’s wife, and John would come in and catch them in bed at the same time he found the bear going through the garbage in his back yard, and there’d be this big incredible scene of bloodshed and retribution right at the end. But the ending was so disappointing that I don’t even want to talk about it.

  She built me up for a big letdown. It pissed me off. But I didn’t know what to say to her. I mean she came so damn close on her first try, and then screwed it up at the end. The ending just left me hanging. But naturally she flew into a big flurry of typing and typed it all up, didn’t change a word, and sent it off to Random House. Excellent choice. One of the biggest publishing houses in the world. And guess what? It came back with a note. Somebody had scribbled in at the bottom of the rejection slip, suggest you send this to a paperback house. She freaked out. She ran around showing that damn note to people and calling everybody. And then she sent it off to seven other places and they all rejected it. I think it cost us about forty-seven dollars in stamps. And then she gave up on it.

  “Give up on it?” I said. “What the hell for? After you spent all that time on it?”

  “It’s not any good,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever read. I think you just need to fix up the ending a little, maybe cut it some, work on the dialogue.”

  She just sat there with her arms crossed and her legs crossed and looked at me. I could tell what she was thinking. There I was, the non-writer, trying to tell the writer how to write.

  “I used to think it was good. Now I don’t.”

  “Why? ”

  “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “The more I write, and the more I read, the more I see how bad I am.”

  “Well hell. What’s the use of keeping on, then?”

  “Because. The more I write, the better I’ll get.”

  “When?”

  “In a few years.”

  “Years? How many years?” I wasn’t sure how much more radiation my system could stand.

  “I don’t know. Nobody does. But I’ll know it when I get there. Now run along, hon. I’m working on a new story.”

  “What?” I said, and I couldn’t help it. “‘Cinderella and the Four Flashers’?”

  I didn’t look at her face before I slammed the door.

  I didn’t mean to be mean to her, hell. But my sex life was practically nil. Oh, sometimes we’d have a quickie, just before she went to sleep, but most of the time she was just too tired. She worked like a dog, and I started working more overtime just so I wouldn’t have
to sit around the house by myself. When I got home I’d smoke a joint and watch TV I’d watch Buck Rogers, anything. I couldn’t play the stereo because she said it bothered her.

  Sometimes she wouldn’t even eat. She’d get up in the morning and have a piece of cheese toast or something, and she’d go until supper without anything else. She started losing weight, and I bitched at her about that. That made her mad, and she’d retreat into her work. One thing caused another, and sometimes the only time we spoke to each other was during arguments.

  But she was getting better. There was no denying it. Sometimes in the morning when I was getting ready for work and she was sleeping, I’d read part of what she had written the night before. You could just see the things the characters were doing, and why they did them. But she got to where she didn’t like for me to read her stuff, said it wasn’t good enough yet, and she’d hide it.

  It wasn’t just the sex. I mean, I loved going to bed with her, but more than that, I loved her. I wanted to hold her. Just kiss her. I wanted to spend time with her and talk to her, and I wanted us to be just like other married people we knew. But we weren’t like them. We stayed in separate rooms and only slept together. Half the time I’d have to go to bed before her, because I had to get up. She didn’t have to get up. All she had to do was write and sleep. And I guess I began to get a little bitter.