“When you know Isaly’s a better writer?”
Clive looked at him. “How the hell would you know?”
“We’re reading their books.”
Clive blinked. “Why?” It was all he could think of.
“To see what gives with them, what kind of guys they are.”
Clive stared from Karl to Candy and back again. Candy’s position, his head propped in his hand so that he could see Clive even when Clive was looking down, put him nearly as close as the glass of Scotch. “For a couple of—you know—you guys have a strange way of looking at a, uh, contract.”
“Yeah, well for a couple of you-know’s we don’t mess up.”
“Hah! The way you’ve been showing your faces all day doesn’t say much for your tailing expertise.”
Candy made a dismissive gesture. “You watch too much TV. It don’t make a shitload of difference he sees us. If he does. I get the impression our Ned is so wrapped up in Pittsburgh and writing, we don’t even register.”
“I ought to just fire your sorry asses—” Boy, was he ever drunk.
Far from taking offense, Karl and Candy laughed as if Clive had just told them a side-splitting joke.
Then Candy tugged at Clive’s sleeve and, in a stagy whisper, one hand to the side of his mouth, said, “Not so loud; there’s a lady sat down a minute ago.”
Clive looked to his right. Two seats away sat Blaze. He hadn’t even seen her come in. How could he have missed her? How could anyone, seeing her hair released from the imprisonment of that schoolmarm bun? She smoked a cigarette and thanked the bartender for the martini (“Straight up, twist”) he set before her. She gave all three of them a glancing look a little like sun striking a cold surface before slipping behind a cloud. She had a book. She opened it and proceeded to read.
“And here comes our Ned.” Candy righted himself and turned his back.
At the far end of the lobby, Sally watched Ned walk from the elevator to the bar. She’d been watching the bar over the top of a magazine. What was Clive talking to those two men about? They were the two who’d lately started coming to Swill’s. Who in hell were they? They were turning up everywhere. All of this was so confusing. On top of this, she could have sworn she’d seen Saul in Schenley Park.
In the mirror over the bar, Clive saw Ned sit down in a booth in the corner. There were three small tables embraced by the shadows for people who didn’t care to sit at the bar. Guests occupied the other two tables also. No, just one table. He could have sworn there was a man sitting at the third table when he’d first looked . . . but it must have been just a mess of shadows he had seen.
And wasn’t this just like Ned Isaly? Sit in this gray area, be only half there, which was nearer the truth than not. Fugue state. Writer’s coma. Or whatever the hell it was that had writers legging it out of this sorry old world alone, yes, but aloneness had never before looked so tempting. Maybe there was a parallel world where characters were like the several of them in Schenley Park, more or less exposed “to a divining eye.” Clive shook his head. Christ, he must be drunk if he was quoting Emily Dickinson. With his fourth Scotch sitting sunnily before him—Bobby’s contract goons must have bought a round—Clive settled in to imagine a writer’s day and found he couldn’t. He couldn’t get any further than a cup of coffee by the notebook or typewriter. He couldn’t get past the blank page. He felt his shoulder gripped and an unwelcome voice exclaiming, “Clive, man!”
Dwight Staines. Oh, hell. Since Candy and Karl both greeted Dwight he would now have to introduce them since Dwight could not get through an encounter unless everyone present knew he was a best-selling author.
“Monumentally best-selling author,” said Clive, while Dwight pretended a humility he neither felt nor could stick to.
“Hey, we read your book—”
Clive seriously doubted it. He turned away as Dwight droned on. He must be the writer laymen imagined: talking constantly about what you wrote, and why, and how (pen and ink? typewriter? computer?), talking constantly of your experiences, admonishing your rapt pupils to write write write.
God! Don’t tell them that! Tell them their chances of getting published were less than zero; tell them getting an agent was almost as impossible, since agents wouldn’t take on unpublished writers (a catch-22 dilemma that had always delighted Clive). Clive was always being cornered at cocktail parties by round young people who seemed to think one word from him would be the open sesame to publishing. “Where,” they would ask, “should I send it?” To which Clive would reply, “Into the great beyond and the sweet hereafter.” He loved the uncertain looks this reply called up. The unconvinced would keep it up: “No, but where?” “Nowhere, not a chance, nil, nix, zero.” They were greatly offended, either because he hadn’t offered to read what they’d written (or had an idea to write) or because they’d been caught out in their fantasy: editor likes it, publisher buys it, reviewers love it, fame and fortune follow.
The total lack of understanding of what writing was about never ceased to astonish Clive. No one would have expected a plumber, an electrician, a mechanic to proceed along the lines these wannabe writers did. Imagine a mechanic saying, “Hey, I’m gonna take this Porsche apart” without knowing the difference between a steering column and a brake pad.
A person like Ned Isaly (Clive surprised himself by thinking). Ned, who sat over there in the shadows with his notebook, whose thoughts were anywhere but here in the bar of the Hilton, who did not think of best-seller lists or six-figure advances, who was lucky enough—good enough, that is—to have an editor like Tom Kidd, who himself didn’t think of these things, who didn’t press notions of money and fame on his writers and who didn’t encourage them to seek them, who never spoke of promotion or publicity. These things were not Tom’s job.
Unlike Clive, who acquired books—an “acquisitions editor” (an appellation that should shame him into speechlessness). Some of the books he acquired, he edited “lightly.” He did not edit with ease; he hardly edited at all other than to speak in relatively safe generalities. The trouble was (and he could not recall ever admitting this) his belief in himself was very frail; he was simply not good enough to take a manuscript and improve it. That’s why he’d assigned himself to best-selling drivel, Dwight Staines drivel. He was at least bright enough to know what was wrong with Dwight Staines.
Clive took another sip of his drink. Behind him Dwight was still going at it, hammer and tongs, talking about his new book. Candy and Karl were both talking about collaborating on a book and Staines was giving his pithy advice on that subject.
At the same time, on the other side of Dwight, Blaze Pascal was getting up with her book and her cigarettes. She walked over to Ned’s table.
(“Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.” What was all of this poetry about? And who was Helen? Helen of Troy? Or someone who had simply wandered in off the street to sit in his mind? An enormous, empty room, except for the one chair—Queen Anne?—she sat in. She simply sat.)
What was Blaze doing? He could not hear what she said, but he did know she was offering Ned a book—that is, Clive assumed it was Ned’s book Solace that she was asking him to autograph. Ned reached over with his pen and signed it and smiled. She kept on standing there talking to him. Good manners must have dictated that he ask her to sit down, which she did. Another round of drinks was ordered.
She refused to meet Clive’s eye. “Refusal” was what he wanted to think. Actually, she probably wasn’t aware that he was staring at her. What was she up to? What was she doing? What she was doing was, apparently, picking Ned up.
Sally looked up from her magazine and saw Ned and the woman with red hair walking through the lobby, moving in her direction. Quickly, she raised the magazine to cover her face. She’d been sitting here ever since Ned had gone into the bar. She’d been sitting here for what felt like hours. Bored, she had gotten careless of anyone’s recognizing her.
As they passed, Sally could see the redhead was carrying a cop
y of Solace. Ned, Ned! Surely you didn’t fall for that cheap trick! That “would-you-please-autograph-this?” ploy! But they were standing by the bank of elevators, both of them, obviously going somewhere together and the somewhere that the elevators could take you was up. Sally did not know what to do. Probably she would just go upstairs and order through room service.
Clive had left the three sitting at the bar just after he’d watched Ned and Blaze walk out. He had no idea why Blaze thought this particular approach was needed by way of “keeping an eye on him,” but it certainly met the criteria, he supposed. He got off the elevator and walked down the corridor lit by tiny lights that made it look almost as if dusk were settling in. Clive caught a flash of blond curls when a head poked out of a door as if checking on the cause of some disturbance. Down farther, a hand adjusted the DO NOT DISTURBsign and he thought he saw a flash of red hair. At the far end of the hall (which gave onto another corridor), the man in the cashmere coat came out of a room and disappeared around the corner.
Sweet Christ! Were they all on the same floor? Even the same corridor? Had the clerk, in her madcap way, kept them all together?
His watch told him it was nearly ten. How could that possibly be? How in the world had he spent all of that time in the bar, and not happily, either? He ordered coffee and a croque monsieur from room service, undressed, and fell into bed. The waiter came and left as in a dream. Dipping into sleep and coming out again and dozing off again, he wondered if he could stay awake long enough to eat the sandwich.
He heard singing.
It wasn’t that the voices were loud; rather that the voices were the cutting kind that slid as easily through doors and walls as a knife through butter. Clive was glad he’d left before the fraternity party began. The voices drew closer, nearing his door. So Dwight, Candy, and Karl must be up here, too.
“Waltzing Matilda,
Waaaaaltz-ing Matilda,
You’ll come a-waaaltzing Matilda with meeeee.”
As they passed Clive’s door they even threw in a little harmony, as if to say to him, What the crap difference does it make if we can’t write? We can sing!
THIRTY-TWO
Ned stood outside of another Isaly’s, the small store set within a line of other small stores—a bookshop, a Tru-Value hardware store, two little dress shops—wondering if he wanted another pistachio ice cream cone and then wondering if that’s what he ate when he was eight years old. Probably not. His taste probably wasn’t adventure-some then; probably he stuck to chocolate or maybe cherry. But he didn’t remember.
He wished he hadn’t been so careless of the past. You always started too late saving things, collecting things, keeping a journal. His parents had died within a year of each other and he was orphaned. Everyone made sure he was aware of this particular disgrace, as if he’d been careless with his parents as well as with the past and now look what happened. Beneath the arrangements of sad expression, he had felt their disapproval.
What Ned remembered of his childhood was not love, but solace for the lack of it and solace had come in many forms. Even though he couldn’t have seen them, there were Forbes Field and Jackie Robinson and Stan Musial, his bat unwinding like a snake; there was Panther Hollow and East Liberty; there was dawn smog, afternoon smog that darkened the whole city at noon—no, this could not possibly have been his own memory but memory in a picture in a book. But still there had been wonderful, unbreathable Pittsburgh!
And there was the occasional visit to his well-to-do relations in Sewickley. They were very proud and very severe and they kept servants. They were the Broadwaters and were referred to in that way as if “Broadwater” were a fiefdom. Ned remembered the dining-room table and the buzzer beneath it by which Isabel Broadwater would summon the maid, who would appear with the next course. He especially recalled that dinnertime when the buzzer had been pushed following the soup, but no one had come with the lamb. Isabel Broadwater’s thundery demeanor refused any of the diners’ going out to fetch it. Suddenly the cook appeared wringing her hands to tell her mistress the dire news that the maid had died: as she had been carrying the lamb she had slipped down to the floor. “And the lamb?” Isabel Broadwater had asked with a raised eyebrow.
Mary-Anne, the dreadful ten-year-old daughter, had reacted with much excitement at this news. Mary-Anne was always excited by others’ misfortunes. The servants milled, the doctor arrived, the poor maid was pronounced dead at the scene. Heart, probably. The body had been carted off to some morgue where there would be an autopsy. But Mary-Anne later insisted, in Ned’s attic room, that the maid had been murdered and everyone suspected him, Ned.
Mary-Anne liked these visits of Ned’s as it gave her the opportunity to lord it over him, to drag out her latest new toy—a Barbie doll or badminton set. Ned brought along his baseball cards, wanting so much to share the wondrous crack of Jackie Robinson’s bat or that time Willie Mays caught a fly ball with his bare hand or that incredible home run of Maz in the 1960 series. Oh, to have seen this! To have been alive then and in Forbes Field! Mary-Anne only made fun of him and his cards. She always reminded him that he was orphaned. The only thing she was sorry about in his history of dead parents and being orphaned was that she hadn’t been the one to tell him first they had died.
He said it didn’t make any difference for he was an Isaly and he could get free ice cream whenever he wanted. Wasn’t it too bad there wasn’t an Isaly’s in Sewickley? Then he could get her a free ice cream cone. This infuriated Mary-Anne, but she couldn’t think how to rid him of this belief.
Despite Mary-Anne and her stuck-up friends with their superior smiles, there was solace in Sewickley, for it was beautiful. There were the chestnut and oak trees with their flame- and copper-colored leaves lining the wide streets; the huge Victorian and Colonial-style houses set within brilliant emerald lawns and immense laurel bushes; the pool at the country club; the little movie house they visited on Saturday afternoons; the games around the fireplace. Yes, there was solace in Sewickley.
Ned stood there thinking of solace.
Snow was coming down now, soft and dreamy, in big flakes you could catch on your tongue. That’s what Sally was doing while she stood at the bus stop. Snow stuck to her synthetic yellow hair. She was across the street and down a little way from where Ned was looking at that building. What was it? She was bored with standing there, pretending to be waiting for a bus. This would fool no one (if anyone was watching her) since four buses had already come and gone without her boarding one.
“Don’t this nut know it’s snowin’ for fuck’s sake?” Candy gathered the top of his down jacket more firmly around his neck and pulled the hood forward.
It was not really cold; snow just made it feel that way. The sun was still out, having made its late-afternoon arrival in glorious form. Sun spilled across the buildings on the other side of the road. Candy and Karl sat at a green metal table in another coffeehouse watching Ned gaze at the Isaly’s Ice Cream store. Candy and Karl were drinking cappuccinos, Candy doing his summary of Don’t Go There.
“It’s a noir-type thing.”
“I don’t follow. You mean like that ‘film-noir’ stuff? Kind of thing Al Pacino’s always in?”
“Not all of his stuff is noir.” Candy wanted accuracy here.
“That’s not the point. Anyway, your book doesn’t sound like noir to me. All that stuff about drugstores and boutiques. That, my friend, ain’t noir.”
“So what about Ned’s book? You finished it?”
“I’m maybe two thirds through.”
“And?”
“It’s about a man and woman who keep passing each other. They never get together.”
“And . . . ? What happens?”
“That’s pretty much it, I guess.” Karl was feeling almost apologetic, as if there should be more to his critique than what he’d just said.
“That’s it? In a nutshell, that’s it? What do these writers do for excitement, anyway?”
Karl pondered. �
��I guess they don’t need much.”
“Jesus.” Candy shook his head.
“So maybe Ned thinks, you know, that less is more.”
“Ha! Well, that sure won’t get him off the hook.” Candy shook his head. “Sounds like Sleepless in Seattle. You know, where they never get together till the very end? It’s got what’s her name in it?”
“Meg Ryan.” Karl shook his head. “No, it’s not like that at all. These two come across each other several times.”
“They did in Sleepless in Seattle, too. Remember, she saw him by the water—”
“Look, it’s not the same. You just know how that movie is going to end. With them together and happy. This Solace you don’t know, except I have a feeling they don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Meet, get together. It’s not going to have one of your happy endings.”
“So?” Candy raised his palms and his shoulders. “Who wants to read it if it’s a downer?” He scooped up a handful of peanuts, popped one at a time into his mouth with his fist. After all, Karl had found nothing but fault with Don’t Go There. “Right? Reading’s for escape, ain’t it?”
Karl was impatient. “That’s crazy, C. Look at your ancient writers, your great writers, your Shakespeare, your Russians. Those aren’t for escape. I bet you none of them ends happy, not one.”
Candy flapped his hand as if shooing away misery, and said, “Ah, come on. Sure they do. How about that one where this girl Laura Doone has all this trouble at the beginning, but in the end it works out to be happy? Now, that’s one of your classics. It starts out bad, but it ends up good. At least, that’s what I heard.”
Foul Matter Page 22
