Twice Told Tales Page 8

  The margins on the pages were thick with scrawls.

  “Just a little polishing,” I said. If a voice could be pale I thought my voice sounded pale.

  “Easy, buddy, you wanted to know about flat and round characters.”

  “I said I thought it was bullshit. I didn’t say I wanted to know.”

  “Same thing,” he said, implacable. “Your guy is flat where he should be round and Lois Wan—she’s good—but she’s too complicated—round when she should be—well, you get the idea. Here …” He hunched over the manuscript on the table.

  I sat frozen. It was the moment to pull out. I was broke and I could be in deeper trouble than I knew about. But the one thing I had left was what had happened to me. I had done what I’d done and seen what I’d seen. There was a certain solidness in that. Maybe you couldn’t buy food with it but it felt as if you could stand on it.

  He was damned smart, old Gideon Two; he knew what was going on. He leaned back a second and said, “You don’t have to keep on. You can call it off, pay back the advance, and maybe somebody else’ll give you a contract to do it your way. Anything’s possible.”

  I called out, “Waiter, Stoly on the rocks.”

  The damn fool waiter almost ruined my gesture.

  “Sir?” he asked.

  I said, very carefully, “Stolichnaya vodka. With ice, please.”

  I didn’t wait for a reaction. I said: “Her name in the story is not Lois Wan. I forgot to change to the fictional name from the first draft.”

  “At this stage,” he said, “names don’t count.” He waited while the waiter put the cold vodka in front of me.

  “How about nicknames,” I said. “Like Stoly, for example?”

  I have to give him the credit. He didn’t take a beat. He was not about to notice my monumental gesture. His finger jabbed at the pages and he hunched over again. I was implacable, now. “I don’t understand what that stuff means. About flat characters being ‘humorous.’”

  “It doesn’t mean funny,” he said.

  The wheelchair shot back from the table. “Come on, old buddy,” he said. “Let’s have some dinner.”

  I grinned. We hadn’t talked about having dinner, tonight. I figured I’d caught his attention. If not his concern.

  “I’ll bring my drink,” I said.

  He ordered the worst food possible for a man who could never exercise anything but his arms: a monster steak, fried potatoes, that kind of thing. Lots of butter on the bread. I ordered another Stoly and poked at a piece of swordfish without much interest. Whenever I drank, food lost its sex appeal.

  Gideon ate and talked; how he talked. He talked about adding dimension to my hero and taking it away from my heroine. He told me the “flat” characters didn’t have to be thin—just one-dimensional. When I told him Kim’s theory about Coca-Cola and cocaine, he said to give that obsession to my heroine.

  “Nothing like a few obsessions to make a character jump off the page,” he said. “And it’s about Coca-Cola which conquered the Far East long before the U.S. Army arrived. A double-whammy is always the best.” He kept talking. He would talk about everything, apparently, except the fact that I was drinking again. By the time the meal was over his steak was gone, my fish was cold, and I was bombed.

  I had the courage I needed to attack.

  “Listen, I’ve been over those chapters twice.”

  “Go over them again. And start the next one.”

  “I’m going to do this the way I want!”

  “Anyway you like, old buddy. You’re the one who’s on the spot.”

  “My God, your clock stopped in the army. You still talk PX talk. Civilians don’t have buddies.”

  His hand was up again, high, signaling for the check. It was one of the swift gestures I remembered from my drinking days. It means the owner of the hand saw trouble coming and was calling a halt.

  It felt familiar and good. I’d gotten a measure of control back. He was signing the check when I got one of those daring notions I used to enjoy when I was drinking. I took the E. M. Forster book and shoved it towards him.

  “Here,” I said. “I’m through with this. Enough.” My gesture of independence lasted about one second.

  Gideon grabbed the little paperback, opened it and tore it in half and as far down as the remaining pages would tear. It was a shocking thing to see—a book being destroyed—I don’t quite know why. It wasn’t the only copy in the world or anything, but the sound it made was unnatural. Nobody tears books up. You don’t even throw them away when you’re finished; you donate them to hospitals or the army or somewhere. They’re meant to be permanent. It was a disgusting thing to see.

  There was a stir at the tables around us. Gideon threw the debris onto the table; some of the pages floated to the floor. The headwaiter watched us from the front of the dining room and behind him, the manager. Something told me they’d won their battle. This would be Gideon’s last visit to the Cote Basque. There would be no more disabled editors to depress the patrons.

  “Why the hell’d you do that?” I said.

  “I hate to hem in a free spirit, like you. You can make your characters rectangular for all I give a damn.”

  He shoved the wheelchair back from the table, executed a swift turn, and headed for the exit. I followed. I had no choice. A lot of heads stared straight in front of them while their eyes followed us out. A dynamic duo: shouting, tearing up books, wheelchairs.

  Out on the sidewalk it was like walking in a warm soup. I began to sweat right away. Gideon’s car was parked half a block away. It was one of those special cars you could operate without using your feet, all hand controls. It was a Chevy. I never dreamed Chevy would bother to make special vehicles for the disabled.

  In minutes he had wheeled himself to the car, unlocked the door, hoisted himself onto the front seat, and collapsed the chair in one practiced movement. The exertion must have been awful for a man of his bulk but he did not make a murmur. He paused and seemed stuck for an instant. I forgot the Gideon rule of never helping. But in moving towards him I tripped on a sidewalk crack. He pointed a finger at me.

  “I’ll give you a perfect flat character,” he said. “A drunk. Predictable, comical in spite of himself—stumbles on cue … can be visualized by the reader in one sentence. ‘Lewis Griswold, in the course of an evening’s drinking would become jocose, bellicose, morose, lachrymose, and, finally, comatose.’”

  Once, during a poker game in the army barracks at Fort Meade, Maryland, some young tough convinced himself that I was cheating—I wasn’t—and threw a glass of vodka in my face. That’s the way Gideon’s speech made me feel. For a minute I had no breath to talk with. I could hear myself breathe but I couldn’t use my voice. I had finally bloodied the kid’s upper lip pretty bad. But I couldn’t do anything now. Gideon waited.

  “Aren’t you ever afraid,” I said. At last I was able to say something. “That you might go too far?”

  “What’s too far?”

  “That you could push somebody like me—over the top. That you could make me feel like such a piece of shit that I might keep on drinking—” I felt a surge of sorrow as I spoke. It disgusted me, but I couldn’t do anything about it. “And I might kick off for good.”

  “And it would be my fault. Right?”

  “Right. And I can’t hit you, right? You can’t hit a cripple, even if he’s trying to do you in, right?”

  “Wrong,” he said flat out.

  I stared at him in the dark. The car embraced him from behind; the half-folded wheelchair was like a weird metal and leather lectern or pulpit. His eyes gave back my stare; icy blue they were.

  “What makes you so different from the rest of us poor struggling folks?”

  Gideon gave the locked wheels of his chair a little shake. “Because I could be selling pencils in this thing,” he said. “One ounce of pity and you’re a fair mark for pencils.”

  One of us, probably me, must have been talking pretty loud because
a couple of women had stopped nearby and were watching, one of them fanning herself with a program of some kind. They were wondering, I suppose, if the drunk was going to actually attack this guy in the wheelchair.

  In my vodka haze I reached for words. Some people become eloquent when they’re stoned; I get dumber and dumber. I’m too desperate; the mark of a deadly drinker. I wasn’t looking for words, anyway; I was searching for a wound to poke at.

  “How come you got shot in the back?” I said. “In the spine. Were you facing the wrong way?”

  The two women walked by us in that elegant upper East Side darkness. I guess I’d lowered my voice and the danger of murder had clearly passed.

  “It was an accidental American bullet,” Gideon said. “A buddy of mine, actually.”

  “Everybody’s got a buddy.”

  “Yeah, I was ahead of my time. Happened all the time in your war. Only not by accident.”

  “Some buddy.”

  Gideon collapsed the chair completely with a series of metallic clanks, like chains. He swung, a special kind of discus thrower, turning from the waist, and hurled it into the seat next to him.

  “You don’t know anything,” he said. “The guy who did it loved me. A buddy of buddies. It killed him when it happened.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You’d lose! I could trust him, today, more than your Washington friends—the ones you’re waiting on to see if you go to trial or not.”

  I leaned against the hot metal of the car, as exhausted as if it were the morning after. My high was gone.

  “You’re flat, Gideon,” I said. “In one sentence: ‘Gideon, wounded in action, stuck helplessly in a wheelchair for life, decided to take aggressive action on every front, always, so no one could ever feel pity for him.’”

  Gideon grinned. I saw his teeth, pumpkin-like, in the dark.

  “Close,” he said. He grabbed his right leg with two pudgy hands and swung it up and under the dashboard and then did it again with the left leg.

  “Close, but no cigar.” He turned the ignition key. “Go home and get it right,” he said and tossed the envelope holding my manuscript at me.

  I went home drunk and defeated. Kim was very quiet the next day. I took in nothing for two days but black coffee and Cokes. Then I circled the typewriter for a day and sat down in a kind of trance and finished the draft of the novel in fifteen weeks. It was either a sustained act of rebellion or submission; but it had as much to do with Gideon as it did with the “characters” in my story. The first change I made was to put the Wiggy character into a wheelchair. I’d seen a lot of the wounded taking R & R and I knew how to do that. It went smooth as cream after that. Well, not that smooth. In fact it was hell some days. But at least I was able to put one word in front of another and each scene seemed to lead forward. Oh, I gave Lois Wan—Sara Hsu as I named her—the Coca-Cola/cocaine obsession Gideon had suggested. I stayed away from him. The notes in the margin were conversation enough.

  I’d gone out and bought a copy of Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster which Gideon had torn up in that spectacular way. It was comforting to know that it was there in the store and I could buy one. I took it home sort of amused at myself for thinking of it as a friend. Now that Gideon had turned against it in a weird way, my resistance to it was gone.

  I read the part about plot; about how “The King died” and then the Queen died was a story but “The King died and then the Queen died of grief” was a plot. It was a real help to me and I was grateful and learning about gratitude at the same time.

  Six weeks into my marathon a letter came from the publisher. Except it was marked Please Forward and it was from Wiggy. When you cut through all the crazy talk about God punishing us all and Sin and Hell, what it said was: I could expect a phone call in a few weeks. People had believed him at last and a grand jury would be called and some wonderful human being he’d met, who happened to be an assistant D.A., would be getting in touch with me. There was one small touch of the old Wigglesworth. He said he knew I was trying to hide out—but that the kind of people now “on the case,” as he put it, would have no trouble finding me or my phone number. Just like the good old days.

  I always knew I’d hear. Not how or when—or even from who. But I always knew there would be some kind of a trial, that I was just getting extra good at kidding myself that it would all go away. I wondered if Gideon always knew also.

  I remembered him saying, “If there’s no trial we’ll do a novel.”

  It was too late to change now. The phone call would undoubtedly come and the grand jury summons would come after that. In the meantime I would finish my novel—as I now thought of it without shame—collect the second half of my advance, get an apartment for Kim and me, and find a lawyer. The book and the inevitable trial together conspired to give me the shape of a life. I didn’t tell Gideon about the letter or the promised phone call from Washington. That could come later.

  Later got to be very important. Later on I would attend to Kim and her daytime Scotches and her dumb training for a dumb job. Everything could come later, after I’d finished. After I saw the look on Gideon’s face I wanted to see, everything else could begin.

  Gideon died on the Wednesday after Labor Day. He was knocked on his back by a heart attack. I read it in the Times. He’d had the heart attack at home then—bang—pneumonia—and out! I’d turned in the finished manuscript ten days before; left it at his office not wanting to face him until he had read it.

  The obit said there was to be no service, just a private cremation ceremony for the family. I didn’t know his family. But I figured Uncle Alfred would be calling and it was time to start packing up.

  Two days later the manuscript came back in the mail. When I saw the thick scribbles in the margins I suddenly got the idea that I would never see Gideon again. I mean it stopped being an idea at that moment. Old Gideon, so scared people might feel sorry for him. At least he’d gotten hurt in the right war. He wasn’t a back-alley courier picking up an easy dollar in the shadows. He was right inside the center: a hero-on-the-hoof, in maybe the last war everybody agreed somebody had to fight. It might not carry the day or the night, at 4:00 A.M. in a bed with legs that couldn’t move. But it must have been worth something, a guy like him, to carry a wound that nobody could laugh at, or put down, or say boo to, somebody as proud as him.

  I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be crippled, but it might be nice to be proud. Then I got teary and felt foolish and scared for myself, too.

  “Well,” I told Kim, “he can’t stop me feeling sorry for him now.”

  She was packing the few special things she cared about; rolling the breakables up in newspaper; a porcelain Hindu dancer; a bud vase. I told her that because she might have seen my reaction. But she just kept carefully placing those little packages into a carton. We were sitting in the kitchen, the manuscript on the kitchen table.

  Finally she said something. “Couldn’t we go back?” she said. “He wasn’t so nice to you, anyway.”

  “Even if we could go back—what would I do?”

  My mind was running. I’d always been good at business. If you call what I’d been doing out there business. It wasn’t exactly buying low and selling high. It was who needed what you had badly enough. Like me and Gideon. I needed what he knew—he and Mister Forster. We’d done our work, finished now. And I was spoiled for the old business, uncertain in the new.

  The one thing I hadn’t done since Gideon died was to go over the pages and see what he’d scrawled. There would be somebody else to deal with at the publishers. It was so hard to figure—he went everywhere comfortable, trapped for life in a wheelchair, from which, if you allowed an ounce of pity you’d be selling pencils on a street corner, but at home in his skin. Me, my nerves scramble on my bones when I have to talk to strangers or any new people these days. Him in his chair; Mister round character. He was round all right.

  I told as much of this to Kim as I could make her understand. She surprise
d me.

  “You’ve been tossed around the world too much, Lew,” she said. “It takes a thing from you. He was stuck right in his place, in his chair. But it was his place. A chair is a place.”

  Sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was the Scotch talking or if there were still things I had to learn about Kim. The oriental women I’ve known try to look like flat characters. But it’s just a way of looking, not the way they are.

  I squeezed a half a lime into my Coke and went to the kitchen table to leaf through the pages on the kitchen table. In the margins Gideon had scrawled his signatures: Weak from paragraph two on … No guts … rewrite from the gut … falls apart in the middle of the scene … No balls …

  What energy the dead could muster! What aggression from the crematory fires! It should have been no surprise to me. Half of the people dragging me to a criminal trial were dead. I finished my Coke and tentatively, very slowly, Kim said to me, “You want to have a drink?”

  I looked at her as if I was testing her. “You mean one of these—or a real drink?”

  She turned those brownish-black eyes away; couldn’t face me. “Whatever you want,” she said.

  I sat facing the open window. To look out I had to see the pile of manuscript on the kitchen table, with the black marks all along the white sides of the paper. It looked like I wasn’t finished yet. I felt the rise of the old frustration and rage: whenever you thought you were finished with Gideon he came back at you, and you had to start all over again. It was endless.

  I got up and looked at the pages more closely. I stared, trance-like; everything felt mixed together, Gideon being gone along with all the other losses, Phan-Phen, my kid sister, the confusion of those years which had seemed so lively and practical, while things held together: picking up from Jeff, delivering—everybody always glad to see me arrive and then R & R until the next time—the strange isolation of my affair with Lois Wan … “It’s always oriental women with you because you think your own kind are critical of you while others are just grateful.” Wiggy’s pronouncement just before the break … an amateur psychologist before becoming an amateur prophet.