by Winton, Tom
None of it was healthy for our marriage. And to make matters worse, I still hadn’t written a single word. Not only that, but I was beginning to doubt myself as well. I didn’t doubt as much as Blanche did, but I was allowing myself to think that just maybe the whole Ernest thing had been a dream after all. Maybe she was right. Maybe I never did meet Desiree and Doctor Salazar. Maybe, when I’d gone comatose, my mind simply led me to believe that I’d lived the entire experience. I was no doctor. I was no shrink. What did I know about how valid someone’s memories are after they snap out of a coma?
Constantly I thought about this. As I labored in the torturous Florida sun—whether I was cutting people’s grass, trimming bushes, or installing Xeriscapes—my mind ceaselessly turned the same heavy weight over and over. It was the same deal in my free time. All I thought about was whether or not I’d really been with Ernest. Like a closely balanced scale, my mind kept tilting this way and that. It happened; it didn’t. It happened; it didn’t. Then one Saturday afternoon it all started coming back to me.
Being an early riser I liked to take short naps on weekend afternoons. I would lie down for an hour, and if I fell off that was okay. If I didn’t, that was alright too. Either way I’d get up feeling refreshed. On this particular day, I had just cleared my mind and was about to doze off when suddenly, out of nowhere, forgotten scenes from my days with Ernest began to appear. Rather than me bringing them back, it were as if they’d been delivered to me by some strange force. And all that passed in front of my mind’s eye was highly cinematic. Clear as the moment it happened, I saw myself with Ernest at the wall of his Key West home. I saw all of what went on in Cuba, New York, and Idaho as well. Everything up to our departure in Ketchum was there again.
I sprung up out of that bed, slipped my denim shorts back on and high-tailed it into the kitchen.
“Blanche!” I blurted as she was finishing a hummus sandwich. “I’ve got it! Everything has come back! I can remember it all now!”
“Oh come on, Jack,” she said, wearily lowering the sandwich to her plate, “let’s not go there again. Not today.”
“No, please, listen to me,” I said sliding the chair next to her out and plopping into it. “I know now that it all happened. I’m positive. It’s all come back.”
Dropping her elbow heavily onto the table she wearily massaged her temples.
“Just listen to this, honey. Let me tell you just one thing that happened. Please!”
Without looking at me and her eyes still on the Formica table, she said as if exhausted, “Alright, just one incident, Jack. One last damned incident. Then I don’t want to ever hear about it again. Please!”
I told her about the Pilar. About the tempestuous storm Ernest and I had gone through in the Bermuda Triangle. I brought back every sight, sound, smell, and feeling. As I told my story it were as if we were actually there. I painted that ink blue sky and the massive waves that crashed down on Ernest and me. I felt the electrical charge of the lightning cracking all around, the seawater over my ankles, and the unadulterated fear that had enveloped me.
And so could Blanche.
“Oh my god,” she slowly said when I was done. “Jack . . . this is scary. I think I’m actually beginning to believe you. Honey, you could never have made up such a story. And . . . and the way you tell it, it’s as if you were reading the scene out of a novel. A classic. I didn’t know you could do that.”
“I didn’t either. That’s part of it, too,” I said excitedly while bouncing my palms in the air. “I was there with Ernest because He thought I had a gift. He thought I had the talent to write a book about Ernest. He thought I should get to know him personally so I could show the side of Hemingway that few people realize existed.”
“What was he like . . . Ernest Hemingway, I mean?”
“He actually had a soft side, Blanche, a very soft side.
Everybody today seems to only think of him as this burly, swaggering, hard-shelled bully. But that’s all it was, a shell—a thin layer that was always tough enough to conceal the biggest part of him—the good part. He was a great guy, hon. There was more tenderness and benevolence inside that man than you’d ever imagine.”
Weighing all this in her mind now—dissecting it, examining it, letting it sink in—Blanche said nothing for a moment. As she looked at me in the silence, I watched the face I’d known and loved for so long begin to return. Right there at the table and right before my eyes, the hard, scared, angry look she’d been wearing for two solid months disappeared. It was replaced with compassion. Knowing she was now with me on this, I was the one to break the silence.
“Thank you, Blanche. Thanks for believing me.”
“Why did he do it?” she asked referring to Ernest’s hard exterior again.
With all her doubts clearing away like parting clouds after a turbulent storm, her interest was piqued. She couldn’t get enough. She wanted to know all about Ernest and everything that had happened. I told her all of it. And after answering her very last question, I told her what Ernest had said about the difficulties of being a man—how all through a man’s life he instinctively keeps his guard up and how once his life is over and he faces immortality none of that matters and how only in the hereafter can a man finally be his true self.
We talked until late in the afternoon; and after I’d told her every last detail, she took my hand and led me into our bedroom. For the first time since I’d fallen off the lawnmower, we made love. With our passions fueled by immense joy and relief, we made Adam and Eve’s first encounter seem like dull, casual, humdrum sex. It was fantastic, better than ever. And when we finished, our bodies still entwined, we lay there for a while.
Five minutes must have passed before Blanche whispered in my ear, “I want you to write that book, Jack. I want you to start first thing tomorrow.”
Chapter 18
Although I knew nothing about the writing process and although for two full months I hadn’t come up with a single sentence, when I sat down that Sunday morning, my fingers couldn’t tap the keys fast enough. With Blanche now behind me and with my entire four-day experience sorted in my mind, I was flooded with ideas. All I had to do was arrange them in their proper sequence and bang away. Not being a good typist, I had to go back and correct mistakes in almost every sentence, but that didn’t matter. Those ideas, words, sentences and paragraphs just kept coming and coming. And they were good. Damn good. When I reread certain parts, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Some of it seemed so good it actually scared me. There were passages that to me sounded like they’d come from the pages of a literary masterpiece. And I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. There were times when Blanche was absolutely stunned by some of the passages I read back to her.
She said more than just that once, “Oh my God, Jack. That sounds like you read it right out of a book!”
Crinkling my forehead as if I were already some kind of big time author, I’d tell her, “I hope so. That’s what I’m trying to do . . . write a book.” But inside I was aglow with a feeling of self-worth that I’d never felt before. I was so proud of myself. I thought that Jack Phelan—underachiever, Joe average, community college dropout—just might have found his niche.
As I am doing right here, I wrote about my four days with Ernest. But I did it differently. I went deeper into my beliefs of why Ernest had done the things he had. I gave my take on how certain events in his lifetime molded him into who he was. I told what I thought had made him tick, react, and become the legend and myth he is today. Sure, many before me had done the very same thing, but I had information none of them had. I knew the real Ernest Hemingway. And I decided that would be the title of my book—The Real Ernest Hemingway.
During the five months it took to do the first draft, Blanche continued to cheer me on. She was into the book every bit as much as I was. And she believed everything I wrote was true. I worked all weekend every weekend and a couple of hours after work each night. I even slept with a pad and pen on my nightsta
nd. When those fleeting, golden ideas came to me, I scribbled them down so they wouldn’t be lost, just like F. Scott Fitzgerald had told me to. I say the ideas “came to me,” but each time one suddenly popped into my mind, I couldn’t help but think they’d really been given to me. I don’t know. Maybe my mysterious inner mind did think them up. But to be honest, every time I’d later type those thoughts from the pad onto the computer, I couldn’t help but feel I was only a middleman relaying a higher power’s messages.
Yes, the book was coming along, but not everything else was going so well. Our financial situation was quickly worsening from bad to dire. Blanche was still only working mornings. I’d missed that month’s work after the accident and then only eased my way back after that. Our bills were stacking up.
Although Blanche and I had never made a whole lot of money, we’d always managed to stay on top of our debt. Somehow we always maintained an excellent credit rating. But things were changing fast. And for the first time ever, we were being forced to subsidize our income with credit cards. We had to make the minimum payments each month rather than paying them in full as we always had. Those balances were growing quickly. And about the time I finished the first draft of The Real Ernest Hemingway, things became worse yet.
They say that setbacks usually occur in threes. And in the past, Blanche and I had always believed that. It always seemed that when one unexpected expense came up, there would always be two more right behind it. But this time was far more financially damaging. We were hit by a long succession of unexpected expenses. Two-hundred-and-fifty dollars went to have one of my molars pulled. I could have saved the tooth, but it would have cost another fifteen hundred for a root canal and a cap. It galled me that a dentist could charge that kind of money for an hour’s work and that hard as I worked, I could no longer afford to keep my teeth.
Then the transmission on my aging Ford pickup had problems—there went two grand onto the plastic. After that a wheel bearing in Blanche’s Hyundai went, and I found out that my local mechanic had raised his labor charge to seventy-five bucks an hour. The expenses just kept coming and coming and piling and piling. Modestly as we lived, we couldn’t even afford to subsist anymore.
But as I said, despite the relentless spirit-draining gnaw of debt, I continued to write. And it seemed pretty good. Out on the porch each evening before sitting down to dinner, I’d read my previous day’s output to Blanche. And as the book’s word count grew, so did our hopes. My first priority was to tell the world about the Ernest I had gotten to know, but Blanche and I also hoped we might make a little money from the book. All we wanted was enough to catch up on those bills and maybe, just maybe, get by with a little breathing room for a change. Everything was riding on the book’s success.
I’ll forever remember the day I finished the first draft. It was November 3rd. Figuring that it would take about another month to make the necessary corrections and add some polish to the manuscript, I first sat down to work on a query letter. I had to put together a one-page summary of my eighty-thousand-word story. And it had to be good. It had to convince literary agents that I had something worthwhile—something they would be confident they could sell to a publisher. Putting that one-page letter together turned out to be more difficult than writing the book itself.
It was nerve racking. How, in just a few paragraphs, could I possibly tell exactly how good the entire book was? I must have spent fifty hours laboring in front of my keyboard over that letter. Sitting in my garage-sale computer chair night after night and for two full weekends, I drove myself crazy reworking the query. The deletions, additions, sentence restructuring, and all the rest were maddening. Finally I finished it. I didn’t think it was all that great, but I knew it was time to abandon it. I picked out fifteen reputable agents and prepared to mail the letter. But then there was another problem—another big problem. I didn’t know if I should categorize The Real Papa Hemingway as a fiction or nonfiction book.
“I just don’t know,” I told Blanche as I popped open a cold can of Busch Lite on the porch one afternoon. “If I present it as nonfiction, who on earth is going to believe it? Who in his or her right mind is going to believe that I was in a coma and at the same time running around with a fifty-year-dead literary icon? If I say it’s fiction, I’m not really doing the job I was given a second chance to do. He, upstairs, allowed me to come back so I could try to change the world’s perception of Ernest.”
“Hmmm, good point. I never thought about that.”
“Neither did I until I went to work on the query letter.”
“It’s almost like you have to call it nonfiction.”
“Yeah, I know. But you know how I was before I got the concussion. I was the last person on the planet who’d ever have believed in spirits, ghosts, apparitions and all that kind of stuff. I’d always discounted it all as mindless, hokey, whacko thinking.”
Pausing then, I looked over the tops of the swaying Areca palm fronds between our place and the Weitz’s next door. A cool front had finally arrived. After so many months of baking beneath the hot, unyielding South Florida sun, the dry comfortable breeze now coming from the north was a real treat. With the humidity gone, the autumn sky was now a deeper blue. And as I looked at it and tried to see into it, I said, “Heck, Blanche, before I got hurt, I didn’t even believe there was a God. I wanted to but just couldn’t buy into it. There was no proof.”
I took a sip of my brew, put the can back down then looked at Blanche.
“Think about it now. If I ever do get the book published as nonfiction, what are people going to think of me? They’ll think I’m some kind of nut-job. They’ll think that . . . .”
“Whoooah!” Blanche interrupted. “Since when do you care what other people think? I thought we’d both gotten past that years ago. You’re the one who’s always said that you’d love to drop out. You’re the one who’s always said you’d like to have a few acres in the woods somewhere up north. And that you’d love to live with the critters surrounded by trees rather than people.”
“Okay, hold on a minute here,” I said, straightening up in my flimsy plastic chair. “You said you’d like to do the same thing if we could.”
“Never mind. Forget that now. The point I’m trying to make, if you’d let me, is bigger than that. You now know there is a hereafter. You know there is a God. Why in His name would you, for the first time, give a damn what anybody thinks? Not only that, but you’re on a mission. The only two people, or should I say beings, who you have to worry about impressing or making happy are up there,” she said pointing to the sky.
It was decided that afternoon. I would submit the book as nonfiction. And the next day I sent out the queries—four by snail mail and eleven by email.
Agents being notoriously slow responders, I knew it could be a month or more before I heard from any of them. Then if they were interested in seeing my manuscript, it could be several months before they got around to reading it. I’d also read in a writer’s magazine a few weeks earlier that there were online communities for aspiring authors. The article said that participants submitted the opening chapters of their works, and they were critiqued by other writers. The idea behind it was that writers could improve their books. Because nobody but Blanche had read a word of what I’d written, we decided to upload my first three chapters onto one of the sites. And after we did—the very second I hit that “submit” button—I felt like I’d left my baby all alone in a cold, dark, lonely place.
The site was run by Hall and Farnsworth, one of the world’s biggest publishers. More than three thousand writers had submitted chapters. Many of them had considerable experience. More than a few had previously been published. I was a nobody. I had no experience or training. The moment I hit that button I felt like an idiot. Who was I kidding? I’d never written anything much longer than a grocery list in my entire life.
For the next three weeks, I checked the site every day. Five, ten, fifteen times I’d look. Each time there was nothing. Wo
rds can’t describe how intimate I’d become with my story. And the deeper I got into the second draft, the more emotionally attached I became. A few times it got to a point where I had to get away from that computer. I felt like I was having a panic attack. My heart flipped a few beats, and I suddenly couldn’t breath. I rushed to the front door, opened it, and had to gasp for air. I knew the whole thing was getting to me far more than it should have. I’d created in my mind a life and death scenario, and The Real Ernest Hemingway was in the center of it. The book had consumed me. Though that was all it was, just a book, it owned me. Twenty-four/seven it leaned on the back of my forehead, blurring everything else behind it. Tension was building. I couldn’t wait to read the first review on the Hall and Farnsworth site. The anticipation was not only taking its toll on me mentally but physically as well. I was still able to sleep eight, nine hours a night, but I was always tired. Then one Friday after work, that long awaited first review finally appeared on my computer screen.
“Blanche!” I yelled from the bedroom. “Come here! It’s here! The review’s here!”
I couldn’t help myself. I started reading it as she rushed from the kitchen. Then when she came into the room, she grabbed my shoulders from behind and peered at the screen with me. All I could say was, “Oh my God!”
Chapter 19
“What does it say? What does it say?” Blanche blurted, squeezing my shoulders as she shook them. “Come on, Jack!”
“I’ve only read half of it. Let me start from the beginning again.”
I did, and my partner read along with me.
“I’ve been active on this site for three years now, and I must say this is far and away the best piece I have read. The senses of places you’ve painted with words are cinematic. I could see every one of them. As I read your words, I felt as if I were right alongside you and Ernest Hemingway. I felt the pain you both experienced at times. I smiled feeling the joy during the funny and happy parts. When you saw Hemingway appear at your side in front of his Key West home, so did I. When you were aboard the Pilar and that vicious storm came out of nowhere, I was on the deck with both of you—and just as stressed. And I, too, was relieved when the seas finally calmed and that light appeared.
