I phone her and we meet and I tell her what I’ve been thinking lately and she says I’m crazy and she loves me and was thinking the same thing about herself to me, that she’s not good enough for me, not intelligent and insightful and pretty enough and other things, and if I want—”Well is this what you want, because it’s what I want, let’s get married, let’s have a baby, let’s live together, do everything forever together, or as much as we can do together, okay?” I said yes and that’s where we stand today.
I phone her and we meet and I tell her what I’ve been thinking and she says she’s afraid she’s been thinking the same thing lately, the relationship should probably end now before it gets even more serious for me and where she’d have to end it on her own rather than do it mutually as we can do now, and I put my hand out to shake hers, she said “Oh don’t be silly,” and kissed me on the lips and I turned around and walked home and cried inside just about all the way and that’s where it stands today.
I phone her and she’s not in but I get her later and we meet and talk and she says it’s not that she’s too good for me or the other way around or even that we might just be perfectly suited for one another or anything like that but that there’s another man in her life, one of the ones she might have mentioned before, she hasn’t seen him since a few months before we started seeing each other a half year ago, but he called last week and said he’s thought and thought about why their relationship ended and all the things she said would improve it then but at the time he didn’t believe in, well anyway, he now goes along with everything she said and knows she was definitely right for him just as she is now and just as he still thinks and hopes and even prays he’s still right for her and he wants to give their relationship another chance if it isn’t too late and also if it isn’t too late to move back in with her. She’s afraid she still loves him, she said to me, and that her feelings for him the last six months are probably what always kept her a little held back and unrelaxed and withdrawn from me at times. I said I never noticed her being any of these ways with me particularly but if there is this other man and she’s in love with him and wants to resume things and so on, well there’s nothing I can say, can I? especially after I already said I’ve been feeling for weeks she’s just too good for me in so many ways. That’s just not true, she said.
She’s not like that at all. If it wasn’t for this other man she knows we could have worked out in time and had a wonderful relationship. There’s just no saying how far we could have gone. That I have everything she ever wanted in a partner, everything, but just that this man is someone who has, not more than me, it’s not that he’s better or brighter or handsomer or anything like that, and actually on many of those things I do even better than he, but just something mysterious she can’t quite explain or communicate and maybe it’s ridiculous trying to explain it because it is so mysterious, but just something, and for all she knows it could be just his being there before me and suddenly leaving while she was still very much in love with him and didn’t want him to go and also because of everything they went through, and what those things were she doesn’t want to go into. But that’s it, she’s sorry, in some ways she wishes he never came back so we could have continued our relationship and she could have seen how it developed and in time perhaps lived with me and maybe even got married and had a child or two if that’s what it would have come to, but in some ways she’s very glad of course, and she has to be honest about it, very very glad he came back, though also of course what she regrets most is how it will affect me. “But don’t be silly,” she said. “I was certainly good enough for you and you were more than good enough for me.” We shook hands and kissed and I left her at a street corner and crossed the street and turned around when I got to the other side and saw her walking the opposite way from me and she didn’t do what she usually did when we left one another on a street—turn around and look back and wave—she kept going, till I couldn’t see her anymore, till she was part of the big midafternoon crowd walking both ways on the sidewalk. I went home and was surprised I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would.
The Beginning of Something
The wind is wet. That sounds nice but doesn’t make much sense. Any sense. I wrote it because it sounded nice. In my head. Wrote it as I usually write something to start off a story, or rather, as I often do. I don’t know where it came from. The wind is wet. Wet wind. The windy wet. Any of those could have come and I suppose a wet wind and Wind is wet could make some sense. It doesn’t make for good reading though. They don’t and The wind is wet doesn’t. At least I don’t think it does. And make for good writing, I mean, since it hasn’t really led to a second and then a third, and so on, sentence. Maybe in rewriting it or just writing it over, rather, I could make it better. I’ve done that before several times and it sometimes worked.
The wind is wet. That sounds nice but doesn’t make much sense. Any sense, or very little. I wrote it because it sounded like a sentence that might be the, or rather, a suitable beginning of a story. I don’t like Suitable but I don’t want to lose my line of thought. Because I sat down to write a story. When I sit down to write a story and nothing’s in my head when I sit down, I usually write the first thing that comes to mind when I start typing. The first thing I think of. The wind is wet was the first thing I thought of. It sounded right. As though it might lead to other things—sentences, phrases, etcetera—that would connect one after the other to be the first draft of a story. It’s happened before. I’ve written opening sentences in a similar way. Meaning I wrote the first thing that came to mind when I started to type and which had no connection to anything around me, since not only wasn’t there a wind out when I started to type but it was and still is a dry sunny day, and they’ve often led to follow-up sentences or dialogue, which became paragraphs and then pages or just one long paragraph, and once one nine to ten pages, which became in the end first drafts of stories. This one I don’t think will. It doesn’t have what? I don’t quite know, or rather, I can’t quite put it into words, but something—a force, some action, some staying or holding power, something. I knew I couldn’t quite put it into words. Not Quite.
I couldn’t put it into words at all or just about. But what I meant to say was that it doesn’t have what my instincts tell me a story must have to be a good story. Good meaning, well, Good. Meaning what? Now I’ve lost the line or thread or whatever it is that also keeps a story from continuing. Not From but just Keeps it continuing. Maybe if I write that first line from the first paragraph again or just start to write that whole first paragraph or even this paragraph from the beginning I’ll eventually come to a good beginning and can start the story from there. Is that what I’m aiming for or am I aiming to just write a story with a whole bunch of beginnings and rewriting of beginnings and rewriting or pretended rewriting of paragraphs, etcetera? For this is the first story I’ve started in more than a month. Actually, the first thing I’ve written, except for a letter to my mother and about three dozen postcards, several to my mother, in more than a month. I’ve been away. Explored prehistoric caves. Not so much Explored as Visited these caves. Paid the full admission fee if the ticket sellers wouldn’t, when I showed them my faculty card, charge me a reduced fee or let me in free, and went in with groups of ten to twenty people and once with about forty French schoolchildren and their chaperons and teachers and was guided through various caves with prehistoric paintings and engravings on the walls and one cave with both those and another with the painter’s hand stenciled on several of the walls, in the Dordogne region of France. The Department of France. Or maybe the Dordogne region in the Perigord Department of France. I left my map of that region or department in the Paris hotel we stayed in our last day in France and there isn’t an atlas in this summer cottage we rent in Maine. Anyway, all that has little or nothing to do with what I’m writing now except to say I haven’t written a stitch of fiction in a month because I’ve been away and wanted to start writing today, the day after we got back from
France, and this is what I’ve written so far. I should have started today’s writing with a letter or postcard to someone, but I usually do that first thing after I’ve been away from writing for a week or more and I thought I’d try something different this time to see what would come out. This is what did. Not much for sure. I’ll probably put it away uncompleted or just throw it away, and if I don’t throw it away now, pick it up in half a year or so and see its worthlessness and then throw it away. But first see if something can come out of it now. Start, as an exercise, from the beginning of the last paragraph and see what happens. Or just start, since you already started from the beginning of the last paragraph, which was the beginning of the first paragraph you started, and as an Experiment, not an Exercise, from any place of the three written pages you blindly put your finger on. You’ve never done that before. So do it. I’m going to. Not because I never did it but because it seems like a good idea. I’m going to do it right now.
To other things. That’s what my finger landed on. I closed my eyes, shuffled the three pages and spread them out on top of the dictionary on my right side and put my finger down on page one’s second to last line. It actually landed on To other, so maybe I should have been true or something to what I said I’d do and just put down To other. Nothing much has come of the experiment so far, so maybe that’s what I’ll do right now.
To other. To other what? Two other what? Not either of those Whats but just To other. But To other what? That wasn’t a good idea. Or maybe it was but I just happened to land on the wrong words or one of the grouping of words least conducive or adaptable or malleable or whatever to start something going on the page. Maybe no grouping of words from those three pages would have started something going just then, but how could I ever know? I couldn’t. So it’s ridiculous thinking about. All I can conclude is that something might have started some other time with that grouping or any grouping of words from those three pages or even a single word my finger might have landed on, but didn’t when I tried it before. So try it again. Not blindly putting your finger on one of the pages, though I could also do that, but with To other, as now might be that Other time.
To other. Tother. Tuther. Tether. The wind is wet. I like that best. Or rather, I like it better than the rest. Wind is wet. I am wet. I am not. Not wet. I’m. Writing The wind is wet. I’m sitting here writing The wind is wet and Wind is wet. Magna’s downstairs writing whatever she’s writing. She’s writing something. Her typewriter’s going. She’s angry at me, or rather, she still might be if she’s still thinking about the spat we had about half an hour ago and which was most if not all my fault. Seems difficult for something to be All my fault. Anyway, I lied. The wind is wet wasn’t the first thing I wrote since I came back from France—I wrote—where is it?—I wrote—I’m going to look for it now—I wrote—just before I started this piece—This time I’m going to make it work. I’ve ruined all my other relationships. I know what I did. I knew it while I was doing it I didn’t even put in a period. I just stopped writing it and threw it away. I didn’t throw it away though would have if I had a waste basket or large paper bag or something like that here to throw it in. I put it at the right end of this table thinking that later I’ll go downstairs and get a paper bag, as the one waste basket in this cottage we’ve rented the last three summers has been beside Magna’s desk, and put in all of today’s trash: eraser pencil shavings—first thing I did when I sat at this table was sharpen two eraser pencils—and discarded manuscript pages and the like. Used tissues and pieces of toilet paper, since I’ve the start of a head cold and know I’ll be blowing my nose. In fact I’m going to blow my nose now with a tissue, not because what I just wrote gave me the idea to but because I suddenly have to.
Time to Go Page 14
