Five Tuesdays in Winter(53)

She slipped off the couch down to Matty, who secured her with a meaty elbow on her thigh. The man was adding more notes to the margins. He was old again, her desire for him already a ludicrous memory. “The third book is traditionally the strongest of the early works.”

“This is my first.”

He shot her a stern, disappointed glare. “Novels in boxes are still novels.” Then he softened. “Why haven’t you been able to finish them as well?”

“As well? As well as I finished this one?” He looked hurt by her disbelief in him, and she decided to try and answer him honestly. “I don’t know.” Matty had crawled behind her and was hoisting himself up by her hair. “That hurts Mommy,” she said. “Please stop.” And when he didn’t, she felt the anger stir, the deep pool of it, always there. “I used to feel ambitious, I think, in college. My professors were so decent and respectful, nothing like the adults I had known before. They made me feel like I could do anything. Sometimes still, I get these burning electric jolts of, I don’t know, belief, I guess. I’ll write and I’ll believe. But then—” It was like those nights when she was a kid, it was just like that, her father making the jokes and her mother laughing and everything was like something to believe in and then the timer for the fish sticks goes off and we sit down and it’s all shifted completely. “Then it just stops.” There was a raw ache in her chest. “You have kids, and everything else becomes so . . . faint. And that old desire is like a cramp you wish would go away for good.”

“But those first two books. You’ve done nearly all the work. Why bury them?”

“They should be burned. They’re awful.”

“You have trouble finding the merit in your own work.”

“You do too, apparently.” She pointed to the last redsplattered page.

A look of revulsion came over him, as if he’d forgotten to whom he was talking. “Well that— That last chapter is awful. It’s disgusting. There’s no excuse for it.”

She felt a familiar weakening in her stomach muscles. She still buckled so easily under a sudden change of mood, an unexpected attack. Gone was the compassionate face, the sympathetic ear. “It is entirely unconvincing. Why do you people even try to write scenes of violence? It’s not your genre; it’s not in your nature.” He threw the book down on the floor and stood over her. “It makes absolutely no sense.” He walked to the end of the room and back. “You breach every understanding, every promise to the reader when she commits that act. Maybe someone like Bowles or Mailer could have pulled it off, but not you, honey.” He shook his glass at her. “Not you.”

He was one of those lightweight alcoholics, she realized. Three drinks and he was toast. Either of her parents could have six martinis and still drive her to a friend’s house.

“And without a weapon. It’s priceless,” he cackled. “A weapon is necessary to the triad. Don’t you even know that? The killer, the body, the weapon. They interact. They interchange. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for Christ’s sake. After a murder, the murderer is really the murdered, killed by his own lack of humanity. It’s his death that is significant. The weapon stands as the judge and jury, the object that casts him out of the dream back into reality. Without it, you simply don’t have murder.”

She never stood up to the drunks when she was young. Not to her father or her mother, not to any of their friends on Friday and Saturday nights, their heavy hands on her hair, their strange, unchecked thoughts spoken aloud. She still remembered Mrs. Crile finding her in the TV room, stroking her, putting a hand up the back of her shirt and clucking with pity, declaring that no one ever recovers from being an only child. Look at Richard Nixon, she’d snorted before turning away.

“I think you’re full of shit.” She didn’t even know what he was talking about, who could possibly die at the end of her book.

He glared at her. She was not surprised to see Nixon’s small eyes and bulging jowls. “It is wrong on every level: schematically, thematically. You are meant to feel at the end of a book that what has gone on is completely unimaginable and yet inevitable. Do we feel that? No. Not to mention that no woman could bury a grown man’s body in an hour. And in the backyard? In January?” He thrust out his arm toward her windows, as if this were the house of her novel. “The whole thing is an atrocity.” Without asking, he headed to the kitchen for a refill.

“No,” she said.

The bite in her voice jerked him like a rope. “One more, then I’ll go.”

“No. No more. You need to leave now.”

“I’m not leaving until I get another drink,” he said from the pantry, his hands having reached safety, “and you come up with a better ending.”

“Get out of my house.” She grabbed at his arm but only caught his coat sleeve; glass and ice shattered across the countertop.

He locked his fingers through a bottle opener fixed to the wall and she couldn’t yank him out of the tiny room. With his free hand he began to make another drink. She reached behind him and shoved his arm. Another highball shattered. He took down a third and she did the same thing. He paused then, staring at all the broken shards.

“I have never understood why a person who is not a genius bothers with art. What’s the point? You’ll never have the satisfaction of having created something indispensable. You’ve got your little scenes, your pretty images, but that desperate exhilaration of blowing past all the fixed boundaries of art, of life—that will forever elude you.” He took down another glass, waited for her to smash it, and when she didn’t he quickly made his drink. His eyes wandered over her as he drank. Then he said, the liquid still glistening on his lips and tongue, “And why don’t you tighten up that robe. I’m done looking at those things.”