That, I believe, is the formula. Still, it never fails that the moment I enter that room, whatever I meant to say flies clear out of my head. All I can think of is confession. Public confession. I feel an overwhelming need to make a clean breast of it and lift from my stooping shoulders their trust, their admiration, their dreams. I want to tell them I never sold scripts to
Magnum P.I
. or “took a meeting with Tom Selleck in a cabana at a Hollywood poolside.” And, I want to say, neither will any of you.
But that would be terrible all the way round. So I have stood for long minutes before their uplifted faces trying to recover those lost words, turning over manuscripts, fumbling aimlessly in my briefcase, buying time as I ransack a vacant mind.
Confess, I think.
My long silences always produce terrifying doubts in their minds. They take them as a sign of displeasure at their efforts. The room fills with the nervous musk of schoolrooms and courtrooms, of places where people are called upon to defend themselves before the powerful and capricious. The pale girl at the back of the room, incapable of blanching whiter, seems to yellow. The overhead lights glitter in Dr. Mandelstam’s wire-framed spectacles and his gold tooth glimmers wanly in a fixed and artificial smile. The fat ladies stare at their broken, scuffed shoes or examine, against columnar thighs, fingers that look like Vienna sausages.
You have to say something
, I remind myself, growing more and more anxious.
Only Stanley Rubacek sits massively self-confident behind his life’s work, scratching his scalp through thinning hair, showing as he does a floral tattoo on the back of his left hand. He can’t be more than five years older than I, but there are deep lines cut in his cheeks and he has lost his teeth; I sometimes catch his upper plate slipping. His gaze is always direct.
Come on, let’s strike a deal
, his expression seems to say to me.
I cannot find a path between confession, the truth, and lies. And so I hear myself saying, “These are wonderful. A source of inspiration I will carry with me to my own typewriter. Well done, one and all.”
Suddenly, Dr. Mandelstam’s gold tooth blazes forth like the sun, nearly blinding me.
5
H ideous Marsha’s father has installed her in one of those trendy condominiums which in the past few years have risen near the river. They replaced the old three-storey houses which decayed in lock-step with the elderly widows who lacked the means to maintain them. At first these houses were chopped into tiny suites, warrens for university students and welfare recipients, but the widows finally died and their heirs loosed the developers’ bulldozers for the coup de grâce. With the houses went the elms and mountain ashes which mingled their leaves in high Gothic vaults that turned the narrow streets of July into long naves of shadow streaked by sunlight rich and yellow-white as cream. Victoria and I inhabited one of those dying houses when we were first married. On summer evenings we strolled those streets while unseen sparrows chorused above in the breeze-swung branches. I miss those quiet, green stretches.
It was during our walks down our lovely street that I attempted to stonewall the trip to Greece. The argument ran on for weeks.
“Ed, what do you mean we don’t have enough money? We have the cash we got as wedding presents, and we have the money we’ve saved. It’s enough.”
“I don’t want to get halfway into my book and have to come back. I want to see it right through to the end, without interruptions.”
“You will, Ed. Just relax.”
“Next year. We’ll go next fall.”
“We’ll go this fall.”
“Half of that money is mine, Victoria. I have some say.”
“Nowhere near half of the money is yours. I’m the one who punched the keys at the checkout all last winter, remember?”
“Why can’t you be reasonable about this? What’s the rush?”
“I want to
live
, Ed!” She said that so
Magnum P.I
. or “took a meeting with Tom Selleck in a cabana at a Hollywood poolside.” And, I want to say, neither will any of you.
But that would be terrible all the way round. So I have stood for long minutes before their uplifted faces trying to recover those lost words, turning over manuscripts, fumbling aimlessly in my briefcase, buying time as I ransack a vacant mind.
Confess, I think.
My long silences always produce terrifying doubts in their minds. They take them as a sign of displeasure at their efforts. The room fills with the nervous musk of schoolrooms and courtrooms, of places where people are called upon to defend themselves before the powerful and capricious. The pale girl at the back of the room, incapable of blanching whiter, seems to yellow. The overhead lights glitter in Dr. Mandelstam’s wire-framed spectacles and his gold tooth glimmers wanly in a fixed and artificial smile. The fat ladies stare at their broken, scuffed shoes or examine, against columnar thighs, fingers that look like Vienna sausages.
You have to say something
, I remind myself, growing more and more anxious.
Only Stanley Rubacek sits massively self-confident behind his life’s work, scratching his scalp through thinning hair, showing as he does a floral tattoo on the back of his left hand. He can’t be more than five years older than I, but there are deep lines cut in his cheeks and he has lost his teeth; I sometimes catch his upper plate slipping. His gaze is always direct.
Come on, let’s strike a deal
, his expression seems to say to me.
I cannot find a path between confession, the truth, and lies. And so I hear myself saying, “These are wonderful. A source of inspiration I will carry with me to my own typewriter. Well done, one and all.”
Suddenly, Dr. Mandelstam’s gold tooth blazes forth like the sun, nearly blinding me.
5
H ideous Marsha’s father has installed her in one of those trendy condominiums which in the past few years have risen near the river. They replaced the old three-storey houses which decayed in lock-step with the elderly widows who lacked the means to maintain them. At first these houses were chopped into tiny suites, warrens for university students and welfare recipients, but the widows finally died and their heirs loosed the developers’ bulldozers for the coup de grâce. With the houses went the elms and mountain ashes which mingled their leaves in high Gothic vaults that turned the narrow streets of July into long naves of shadow streaked by sunlight rich and yellow-white as cream. Victoria and I inhabited one of those dying houses when we were first married. On summer evenings we strolled those streets while unseen sparrows chorused above in the breeze-swung branches. I miss those quiet, green stretches.
It was during our walks down our lovely street that I attempted to stonewall the trip to Greece. The argument ran on for weeks.
“Ed, what do you mean we don’t have enough money? We have the cash we got as wedding presents, and we have the money we’ve saved. It’s enough.”
“I don’t want to get halfway into my book and have to come back. I want to see it right through to the end, without interruptions.”
“You will, Ed. Just relax.”
“Next year. We’ll go next fall.”
“We’ll go this fall.”
“Half of that money is mine, Victoria. I have some say.”
“Nowhere near half of the money is yours. I’m the one who punched the keys at the checkout all last winter, remember?”
“Why can’t you be reasonable about this? What’s the rush?”
“I want to
live
, Ed!” She said that so
Similar Books
