That was interesting. John hadn’t thought about that, since he’d been concentrating on the short stories. Too well done? There had been a lot of talk in the eighties about Hemingway’s sexual ambiguity—gender ambiguity, actually—could Hadley have been upset, sixty years after the fact, remembering some confidence that Hemingway had revealed to the world in that novel; something girls knew that boys were not supposed to know? Playful pillow talk that was filed away for eventual literary exploitation?
He used his life that way. A good writer remembered everything and then forgot it when he sat down to write, and reinvented it so the writing would be more real than the memory. Experience was important, but imagination was more important.
Maybe I would be a better writer, John thought, if I could learn how to forget. For about the tenth time today, like any day, he regretted not having tried to succeed as a writer, while he still had the independent income. Teaching and research had fascinated him when he was younger, a rich boy’s all-consuming hobbies, but the end of this fiscal year would be the end of the monthly checks from the trust fund. So the salary from Boston University wouldn’t be mad money any more, but rent and groceries in a city suddenly expensive.
Yes, the writing would be the hard part. Then forging the manuscript, that wouldn’t be easy. Any scholar would have access to copies of thousands of pages that Hemingway typed before and after the loss. Could one find the typewriter Hemingway had used? Then duplicate his idiosyncratic typing style—a moment’s reflection put a sample in front of him, spaces before and after periods and commas ...
He snapped out of the reverie as his right foot hit the first step on the back staircase up to their rented flat He automatically stepped over the fifth step, the rotted one, and was thinking about a nice tall glass of iced tea as he opened the screen door.
“Scorpions!” his wife screamed, two feet from his face.
“What?”
“We have scorpions!” Lena grabbed his arm and hauled him to the kitchen.
“Look!” She pointed at the opaque plastic skylight. Three scorpions, each about six inches long, cast sharp silhouettes on the milky plastic. One was moving,
“My word.”
“Your word?” She struck a familiar pose, hands on hips, and glared up at the creatures. “What are we going to do about it?”
“We could name them.”
“John.”
“I don’t know.” He opened the refrigerator. “Call the bug man.”
“The bug man was just here yesterday. He probably flushed them out.”
He poured a glass of cold tea and dumped two envelopes of artificial sweetener into it. “I’ll talk to Julio about it. But you know they’ve been there all along. They’re not bothering anybody.”
“They’re bothering the hell out of me!”
He smiled. “Okay. I’ll talk to Julio.” He looked into the oven. “Thought about dinner?”
“Anything you want to cook, sweetheart. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there with three ... poisonous ... arthropods staring down at me.”
“Poised to jump,” John said, and looked up again. There were only two visible now, which made his skin crawl.
“Julio wasn’t home when I first saw them. About an hour ago.”
“I’ll go check.” John went downstairs and Julio, the landlord, was indeed home, but was not impressed by the problem. He agreed that it was probably the bug man, and they would probably go back to where they came from in a while, and gave John a flyswatter.
John left the flyswatter with Lena, admonishing her to take no prisoners, and walked a couple of blocks to a Chinese restaurant. He brought back a few boxes of takeout, and they sat in the living room and wielded chopsticks in silence, listening for the pitter-patter of tiny feet.
“Met a real live con man today.” He put the business card on the coffee table between them.
“Consultant?” she read.
“He had a loony scheme about counterfeiting the missing stories.” Lena knew more about the missing stories than ninety-eight percent of the people who Hemingway’ed for a living. John liked to think out loud.
“Ah, the stories,” she said, preparing herself.
“Not a bad idea, actually, if one had a larcenous nature.” He concentrated for a moment on the slippery Moo Goo Gai Pan. “Be millions of bucks in it.”
He was bent over the box. She stared hard at his bald spot. “What exactly did he have in mind?”
“We didn’t bother to think it through in any detail, actually. You go and find ... “ He got the slightly walleyed look that she knew meant he was reading a page of a book a thousand miles away. “Yes. A 1921 Corona portable, like the one Hadley gave him before they were married. Find some old paper. Type up the stories. Take them to Sotheby’s. Spend money for the rest of your life. That’s all there is to it.”
“You left out jail.”
“A mere detail. Also the writing of the stories. That could take weeks. Maybe you could get arrested first, write the stories in jail, and then sell them when you got out.”
“You’re weird, John.”
“Well. I didn’t give him any encouragement.”
“Maybe you should’ve. A few million would come in handy next year.”
“We’ll get by.”
“ ‘We’ll get by.’ You keep saying that. How do you know? You’ve never had to ‘get by.’ “
“Okay, then. We won’t get by.” He scraped up the last of the fried rice. “We won’t be able to make the rent and they’ll throw us out on the street. We’ll live in a cardboard box over a heating grate. You’ll have to sell your body to keep me in cheap wine. But we’ll be happy, dear.” He looked up at her, mooning. “Poor but happy.”
“Slap-happy.” She looked at the card again. “How do you know he’s a con man?”
“I don’t know. Salesman type. Says he’s in commercial fishing now, but he doesn’t seem to like it much.”
“He didn’t say anything about any, you know, criminal stuff he’d done in the past?”
“Huh uh. I just got the impression that he didn’t waste a lot of time mulling over ethics and morals.” John held up the Mont Blanc pen. “He was staring at this, before he came over and introduced himself. I think he smelled money.”
Lena stuck both chopsticks into the half-finished carton of boiled rice and set it down decisively. “Let’s ask him over.”
“He’s a sleaze, Lena. You wouldn’t like him.”
“I’ve never met a real con man. It would be fun.”
He looked into the darkened kitchen. “Will you cook something?”
She followed his gaze, expecting monsters. “If you stand guard.”
~ * ~
4. romance is dead
subtitle: the hell it is
“Be a job an’ a half,” Castle said, mopping up residual spaghetti sauce with a piece of garlic bread. “It’s not like your Howard Hughes guy, or Hitler’s notebooks.”
“You’ve been doing some research.” John’s voice was a little slurred. He’d bought a half gallon of Portuguese wine, the bottle wrapped in straw like cheap Chianti, the wine not quite that good. If you could get past the first couple of glasses, it was okay. It had been okay to John for some time now.
“Yeah, down to the library. The guys who did the Hitler notebooks, hell, nobody’d ever seen a real Hitler notebook; they just studied his handwriting in letters and such, then read up on what he did day after day. Same with the Howard Hughes, but that was even easier, because most of the time nobody knew what the hell Howard Hughes was doing anyhow. Just stayed locked up in that room.”
“The Hughes forgery nearly worked, as I recall,” John said. “If Hughes himself hadn’t broken silence ... “
“Ya gotta know that took balls. ‘Scuse me, Lena.” She waved a hand and laughed. “Try to get away with that while Hughes was still alive.”
“How did the Hitler people
screw up?” she asked.
“Funny thing about that one was how many people they fooled. Afterwards everybody said it was a really lousy fake. But you can bet that before the newspapers bid millions of dollars on it, they showed it to the best Hitlerologists they could find, and they all said it was real.”
“Because they wanted it to be real,” Lena said.
“Yeah. But one of the pages had some chemical in it that wouldn’t be in paper before 1945. That was kinda dumb.”
“People would want the Hemingway stories to be real,” Lena said quietly, to John.
John’s gaze stayed fixed on the center of the table, where a few strands of spaghetti lay cold and drying in a plastic bowl. “Wouldn’t be honest.”
“That’s for sure,” Castle said cheerily. “But it ain’t exactly armed robbery, either.”
“A gross misuse of intellectual ... intellectual ... “
“It’s past your bedtime, John,” Lena said. “We’ll clean up.” John nodded and pushed himself away from the table and walked heavily into the bedroom.
Lena didn’t say anything until she heard the bedsprings creak. “He isn’t always like this,” she said quietly.
“Yeah. He don’t act like no alky.”
“It’s been a hard year for him.” She refilled her glass. “Me, too. Money.”
“That’s bad.”
“Well, we knew it was coming. He tell you about the inheritance?” Castle leaned forward. “Huh uh.”
“He was born pretty well off. Family had textile mills up in New Hampshire. John’s grandparents died in an auto accident in the forties and the family sold off the mills—good timing, too. They wouldn’t be worth much today.
“Then John’s father and mother died in the sixties, while he was in college. The executors set up a trust fund that looked like it would keep him in pretty good shape forever. But he wasn’t interested in money. He even joined the army, to see what it was like.”
“Jesus.”
“Afterwards, he carried a picket sign and marched against the war—you know, Vietnam.
“Then he finished his Ph.D. and started teaching. The trust fund must have been fifty times as much as his salary, when he started out. It was still ten times as much, a couple of years ago.”
“Boy ... howdy.” Castle was doing mental arithmetic and algebra with variables like Porsches and fast boats.
“But he let his sisters take care of it. He let them reinvest the capital.”
“They weren’t too swift?”
“They were idiots! They took good solid blue-chip stocks and tax-free municipals, too ‘boring’ for them, and threw it all away gambling on commodities.” She grimaced. “Pork bellies? I finally had John go to Chicago and come back with what was left of his money. There wasn’t much.”
“You ain’t broke, though.”
“Damned near. There’s enough income to pay for insurance and eventually we’ll be able to draw on an IRA. But the cash payments stop in two months. We’ll have to live on John’s salary. I suppose I’ll get a job, too.”
“What you ought to get is a typewriter.”
Lena laughed and slouched back in her chair. “That would be something.”
“You think he could do it? I mean if he would, do you think he could?”
“He’s a good writer.” She looked thoughtful. “He’s had some stories published, you know, in the literary magazines. The ones that pay four or five free copies.”
“Big deal.”
She shrugged. “Pays off in the long run. Tenure. But I don’t know whether being able to write a good literary story means that John could write a good Hemingway imitation.”
“He knows enough, right?”
“Maybe he knows too much. He might be paralyzed by his own standards.” She shook her head. “In some ways he’s an absolute nut about Hemingway. Obsessed, I mean. It’s not good for him.”
“Maybe writing this stuff would get it out of his system.”
She smiled at him. “You’ve got more angles than a protractor.”
“Sorry; I didn’t mean to—”
“No.” She raised both hands. “Don’t be sorry; I like it. I like you. Castle. John’s a good man, but sometimes he’s too good.”
He poured them both more wine. “Nobody ever accused me of that.”
“I suspect not.” She paused. “Have you ever been in trouble with the police? Just curious.”
“Why?”
“Just curious.”
He laughed. “Nickel-and-dime stuff, when I was a kid. You know, jus’ to see what you can get away with.” He turned serious. “Then I pulled two months’ hard time for somethin’ I didn’t do. Wasn’t even in town when it happened.”
“What was it?”
“Armed robbery. Then the guy came back an’ hit the same goddamned store! I mean, he was one sharp cookie. He confessed to the first one and they let me go.”
“Why did they accuse you in the first place?”
“Used to think it was somebody had it in for me. Like the clerk who fingered me.” He took a sip of wine. “But hell. It was just dumb luck. And dumb cops. The guy was about my height, same color hair, we both lived in the neighborhood. Cops didn’t want to waste a lot of time on it. Jus’ chuck me in jail.”
“So you do have a police record?”
“Huh uh. Girl from the ACLU made sure they wiped it clean. She wanted me to go after ‘em for what? False arrest an’ wrongful imprisonment. I just wanted to get out of town.”
“It wasn’t here?”
“Nah. Dayton, Ohio. Been here eight, nine years.”
“That’s good.”
“Why the third degree?”
She leaned forward and patted the back of his hand. “Call it a job interview, Castle. I have a feeling we may be working together.”
“Okay.” He gave her a slow smile. “Anything else you want to know?”
~ * ~
5. the doctor and the doctor’s wife
John trudged into the kitchen the next morning, ignored the coffeepot, and pulled a green bottle of beer out of the fridge. He looked up at the skylight. Four scorpions, none of them moving. Have to call the bug man today.
Red wine hangover, the worst kind. He was too old for this. Cheap red wine hangover. He eased himself into a soft chair and carefully poured the beer down the side of the glass. Not too much noise, please.
When you drink too much, you ought to take a couple of aspirin, and some vitamins, and all the water you can hold, before retiring. If you drink too much, of course, you don’t remember to do that.
The shower turned off with a bass clunk of plumbing. John winced and took a long drink, which helped a little. When he heard the bathroom door open he called for Lena to bring the aspirin when she came out.
After a few minutes she brought it out and handed it to him. “And how is Dr. Baird today?”
“Dr. Baird needs a doctor. Or an undertaker.” He shook out two aspirin and washed them down with the last of the beer. “Like your outfit.”
She was wearing only a towel around her head. She simpered and struck a dancer’s pose and spun daintily around. “Think it’ll catch on?”
“Oh my yes.” At thirty-five, she still had the trim model’s figure that had caught his eye in the classroom, fifteen years before. A safe, light tan was uniform all over her body, thanks to liberal sunblock and the private sunbathing area on top of the house—private except for the helicopter that came low overhead every weekday at 1:15. She always tried to be there in time to wave at it. The pilot had such white teeth. She wondered how many sunbathers were on his route.
She undid the towel and rubbed her long blond hair vigorously. “Thought I’d cool off for a few minutes before I got dressed. Too much wine, eh?”
“Couldn’t you tell from my sparkling repartee last night?” He leaned back, eyes closed, and rolled the cool glass back and forth on his forehead.
>
“Want another beer?”
“Yeah. Coffee’d be smarter, though.”
“It’s been sitting all night.”
“Pay for my sins.” He watched her swivel lightly into the kitchen and, more than ever before, felt the difference in their ages. Seventeen years; he was half again as old as she. A young man would say the hell with the hangover, go grab that luscious thing and carry her back to bed. The organ that responded to this meditation was his stomach, though, and it responded very audibly.
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 30
