Misery(23)

"Then I'll just take the tray," she said, "and you can get started." She favored him with a glance that was very warm. "I just can't tell you how excited I am, Paul." She went out, leaving him to sit in the wheelchair and look at the water running from the icicles which clung to the edge of the barn.

Chapter 6

29

"I'd like some different paper, if you could get it," he said when she came back to put the typewriter and paper on the board.

"Different from this?" she asked, tapping the cellophane-wrapped package of Corrasable Bond. "But this is the most expensive of all! I asked when I went into the Paper Patch!"

"Didn't your mother ever tell you that the most expensive is not always the best?" Annie's brow darkened. Her initial defensiveness had been replaced by indignation. Paul guessed her fury would follow.

"No, she did not. What she told me, Mister Smart Guy, is that when you buy cheap, you get cheap." The climate inside her, he had come to discover, was like springtime in the Midwest. She was a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen, and if he had been a farmer observing a sky which looked the way Annie's face looked right now, he would have at once gone to collect his family and herd them into the storm cellar. Her brow was too white. Her nostrils flared regularly, like the nostrils of an animal scenting fire. Her hands had begun to spring limberly open and then snatch closed again, catching air and squashing it.

His need for her and his vulnerability to her screamed at him to back off, to placate her while there was still time if indeed there still was - as a tribe in one of -those Rider Haggard stories would have placated their goddess when she was angry, by making sacrifice to her effigy.

But there was another part of him, more calculating and less cowed, which reminded him that he could not play the part of Scheherazade if he grew frightened and placatory whenever she stormed. If he did, she would storm all the more. If you didn't have something she badly wants, this part of him reasoned, she would have taken you to the hospital right away or killed you later on to protect herself from the Roydmans - because for Annie the world is full of Roydmans, for Annie they're lurking behind every bush. And if you don't bell this bitch right now, Paulie my boy, you may never be able to.

She was beginning to breathe more rapidly, almost to hyperventilate; the rhythm of her clenching hands was likewise speeding up, and he knew that in a moment she would be beyond him.

Gathering up the little courage he had left, trying desperately to summon exactly the right note of sharp and yet almost casual irritability, he said: "And you might as well stop that. Getting mad won't change a thing." She froze as if he had slapped her and looked at him, wounded.

"Annie," he said patiently, "this is no big deal."

"It's a trick," she said. "You don't want to write my book and so you're making up tricks not to start. I knew you would. Oh boy. But it's not going to work. It - "

"That's silly," he said. "Did I say I wasn't going to start?"

"No... no, but - "

"That's right. Because I am. And if you come here and take a look at something, I'll show you what the problem is. Bring that Webster Pot with you, please."

"The what?"

"Little jar of pens and pencils, " he said. "On newspapers, they sometimes call them Webster Pots. After Daniel Webster." This was a lie he had made up on the spur of the moment, but it had the desired effect - she looked more confused than ever, lost in a specialists" world of which she had not the slightest knowledge. The confusion had diffused (and thus defused) her rage even more; he saw she now didn't even know if she had any right to be angry.

She brought over the jar of pens and pencils and slammed them down on the board and he thought: Goddam! I won No - that wasn't right. Misery had won.

But that isn't right, either. It was Scheherazade. Scheherazade won.

"What?" she said grumpily.

"Watch." He opened the package of Corrasable and took out a sheet He took a freshly sharpened pencil and drew a fine on the paper. Then he took a ballpoint pen and drew another line parallel to the first. Then he slid his thumb across the slightly waffled surface of the paper. Both lines blurred smudgily in the direction his thumb was travelling, the pencil-line slightly more than the one he had drawn with the pen.

"See?"

"So what?"

"Ribbon-ink will blur, too," he said. "It doesn't blur a much as that pencil-line, but it's worse than the ballpoint-ink line."

"Were you going to sit and rub every page with your thumb?"

"Just the shift of the pages against each other will accomplish plenty of blurring over a period of weeks or ever days," he said, "and when a manuscript is in work, it get shifted around a lot. You're always hunting back through to find a name or a date. My God, Annie, one of the first thing you find out in this business is that editors hate reading manuscripts typed on Corrasable Bond almost as much a they hate hand-written manuscripts."

"Don't call it that. I hate it when you call it that." He looked at her, honestly puzzled. "Call what what?"

"When you pervert the talent God gave you by calling it a business. I hate that."

"I'm sorry."

"You ought to be," she said stonily. "You might as well call yourself a whore." No, Annie, he thought, suddenly filled with fury. I'm no whore. Fast Cars was about not being a whore. That's what killing that goddamned bitch Misery was about, now that I think about it. I was driving to the West Coast to celebrate my liberation from a state of whoredom. What you did was to pull me out of the wreck when I crashed my car and stick me back in the crib again. Two dollar straight up, four dollar I take you around the world. And every now and then I see a flicker in your eyes that tells me a part of you way back inside knows it too. A jury might let you off by reason of insanity, but not me, Annie. Not this kid.