“I think that was too subtle for her.”
“I’m sure it was, but I like to think I made her uncomfortable. Tony wanted me to play opposite against her last summer. What was the play? Mame. I took the script home and didn’t open it. I brought it back the next day. I told him I couldn’t handle the part. He said it would be a cinch for me. ‘I just can’t do it,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t got the talent.’ Of course he knew why I wouldn’t do it and he knew better than to push. This time he wanted me for Mr. Goldstone. Well, you walk on and you walk off. Anybody can do it who can wear a suit, and you don’t have to wear it particularly well. ‘I don’t have the talent, Tony.’ He had to stand there and take it. Somehow I couldn’t sympathize with him.”
“He’s been getting it pretty good from Vanessa himself.”
“He knew what to expect. He tried to tell me I thought bit parts were beneath me. I would have liked a bit part. It’s a pleasure every now and then to be part of a production without the strain of a demanding role. Next week we get going on The Man Who Came to Dinner. I’ve played that so many times I don’t think I’ll have to refer to the script, but even so it’s a taxing part. A bit part before that would have been pleasant. Well, it’s even more pleasant to be at liberty. I even like the phrase. It’s a delicious euphemism, and one can’t object to the state when it’s only going to last for a week. Peter? I’m glad to see Gretchen looking herself again. I think you’re very good for her.”
“We’re good for each other.”
“May I presume for a moment? Please don’t take this the wrong way.”
“What?”
“Just that you shouldn’t expect miracles.”
“I hardly ever do.”
“She’s gotten better before. It’s what she does when she’s not getting worse.”
“I know.
SIX
On the first of May, Hugh Markarian got up at daybreak. He showered, shaved the stubble from his neck and cheekbones, and noted that his beard needed a trim. He habitually trimmed his own beard, never having found a local barber to whom he would trust the job. But beard trimming was methodical work, certainly not to be undertaken first thing in the morning.
He got the Times from the front stoop and scanned the front page while his eggs fried in the cast-iron saucepan. He read as much as he cared to of the paper while he ate his breakfast, and in the course of it noticed the date.
A line of doggerel ran through his head:
Hey, hey, the first of May,
Outdoor fucking starts today!
Well, it would have to start without him, he thought, because he had other things to do. He generally began the annual novel at about this time and had already decided that today would be his first day on the book. If things went well he would turn it in by Christmas; even if they didn’t, he would have a final manuscript on his publisher’s desk in time for the book to appear the following fall.
Hey, hey, the first of May… .
He was at his desk with the door closed before his housekeeper arrived. Mrs. Kleinschmidt was a garrulous sort, pleasant enough company when he was in the mood but a pain in the neck when he wasn’t. When she had come to work for the Markarians fifteen years ago he had given her strict instructions: when he was in his study with the door closed she was not to disturb him unless the house was on fire.
She had taken these instructions to heart, and he suspected she might let the house burn almost to the foundation before intruding on his privacy. During the windstorms in August of ‘55 there had been heavy flooding in the front rooms of the old house, with heavy damage to the wide board floors. He did not learn of the situation until he left his desk at five o’clock. Mrs. Kleinschmidt, coping herself with the situation, had not even considered interrupting him. To her, his work was sacred.
Perhaps she was able to think so because she had never read his books or anyone else’s. She’d been an elderly widow when she came to work for them and looked now exactly as she had then, a wizened dumpling of a woman with an unquenchable passion for cleanliness. For years one of her sons drove her to the Markarian house four mornings a week and picked her up in the afternoons. When Anita divorced him, Mrs. Kleinschmidt had taken it harder than Hugh. “To leave a man such as you,” she muttered. “To do this.”
He suggested she move into a room in the house. “I was chust thinking these things,” she said. “In the car house there could be a room fixed up. The large room in the upstairs. This would be goot. The other, not so goot. These people, they chust look for such things. Then the tongues will wag. So why should the tongues wag?”
There were servants’ quarters on the second floor of the old carriage house and it had been simple enough to have carpenters fix up a bedroom and bathroom. She had insisted on bringing her own furniture from her son’s house and had seemed very comfortable there ever since. He had no idea what her living quarters looked like, having never been invited to visit them.
Although the thought of tongues wagging over himself and the little old woman had done nothing but amuse him, her idea was a good one for another reason. Another person in the house would have bothered him. This way he had as much privacy as he could have wished—the carriage house was not even in sight of the main house, screened by a thicket of white pine. And he had Mrs. Kleinschmidt nearby so that she could handle all of his housekeeping and shopping. He paid her a good salary and always wondered what she did with it. It did not seem to him that her personal expenditures could have amounted to as much as ten dollars a week.
He sat down at his desk, uncovered his typewriter. The machine was an IBM electric, the model with the little ball that moved magically along the page and somehow managed to print the proper letters as long as he touched the proper keys. At first it had seemed likely to drive him crazy. He hadn’t been able to get used to a machine without a moving carriage. He had had it three years now and its idiosyncrasies had long since come to seem perfectly natural.
It was a far cry from the broken-down Royal portable on which One If by Land had been systematically pounded out. But then this room, paneled in oak and lined with bookshelves, was at least as far a cry from the room on West Thirteenth Street.
,Because it was the first of the month, there were things he had to do before he could begin the novel. He wrote out a check for one hundred and fifty dollars and addressed an envelope to his daughter Karen, at Northwestern University. His child-support obligations had legally ceased on Karen’s eighteenth birthday, but he had insisted on paying her college tuition and room and board costs. He had not said anything about incidental expenses; if Anita wanted to send the girl pocket money, he was not inclined to discourage her. But he himself sent a check directly to her every month. This morning in particular he would have liked to tuck the check in the envelope and let it go at that. But he had never done so before and would not do so now. Karen did not always acknowledge the checks, and when she did it was with a brief and uninspired letter. He was unbothered by this. He himself had no taste for correspondence and wrote to no one regularly other than her. He enjoyed her company, indeed he delighted in it, but he did not seek letters as a substitute for it.
He rolled a sheet of letterhead into the typewriter and tried to think of something to tell her. He would again suggest that she might enjoy spending at least part of the summer in New Hope. But he would have to keep it a suggestion and avoid giving it anything resembling the force of a command. There were a few things that had happened recently around town she might find amusing. It was hard knowing just what kind of tack to take with her. He never saw her more often than twice a year, and she was at an age where personality changes and growth in a six-month period could be extraordinary.
From the day she was born he had loved her total and uncritical love, and it seemed to him that loved him in much the same way. It was the totality of his love for her that paradoxically helped make the separation bearable. He was confident of her: No matter how far away she was or how infreque
ntly he was with her, she would always be his daughter.
He began typing, hesitantly at first, then getting into the letter as he got into a piece of fiction. He covered almost all of the page, took it from the typewriter, read it and signed it.
His other first-of-the-month tasks took little time and less attention. He cleared them up and readied himself for work. He stacked a ream of fresh white bond paper at the right-hand side of the typewriter. He had not kept a carbon copy when he wrote One If By Land because it had never occurred to him that you were supposed to. Three books ago he had stopped keeping carbons. It was a nuisance, and he now felt that he could afford a couple of hundred dollars to have the finished manuscript reproduce in quadruplicate by xerography.
He put the first sheet in the typewriter. In the left-hand corner he typed his name and the name and address of his agent. Below it he typed the date followed by a dash; after it he would ultimately put the date on which the book was completed. As he typed the date, the same bit of doggerel again went through his head. Hey, hey, the first of May—
He skipped halfway down the page for the title. He grinned suddenly and typed:
OUTDOOR FUCKING
a novel
by Hugh Markarian
He took the page out of the typewriter, looked at it, and laughed wholeheartedly. Still laughing, he crumpled the piece of paper and dropped it in the wastebasket. The wastebasket was richly covered in leather; it had been a Christmas gift several seasons ago, purchased by his agent from Dunhill’s for $79.95.
On West Thirteenth Street he had torn unsuccessful pages from the typewriter, wadded them viciously into a ball and hurled them across the room. Sometimes that corner of the room had looked like the scene of a snow-storm. Now he had a seventy-nine-dollar wastebasket for failed pages, and now far fewer of them had to be discarded and redone.
Outdoor Fucking starts today. Why were the best jokes invariably ones which could not possibly be funny to anyone else? But he already had a title. It had come to him several books ago but had never quite suited anything he had written until now.
He again prepared a title page. His name, his agent’s name and address, the date. In the middle of the page he typed:
THE EDGE OF THOUGHT
a novel
by Hugh Markarian
He read it through and was happy with it. He placed the title page to the left of the typewriter and prepared a second page, this one containing the epigraph quotation. It was the first stanza of a poem by Josephine Miles and he did not have to look it up in order to reproduce it. Later, when he got around to it, he could check the punctuation.
Here’s a gray afternoon, bleak as to freeze
The edge of thought like a hacksaw. Chinese
Die in the news, this wind on them
Cold as a garden… .
The title was good by itself. The context put it in perspective. And it seemed to fit the book he intended to write. Of course the book might take its own shape, as all of his did to a greater or lesser extent. His present title could lose its significance, or a more appropriate title might occur as the book grew.
On a third page he typed “(dedication).” He had not yet decided to whom the book would be dedicated so he left the page otherwise blank and added it to the stack.
There were now three sheets to the left of the typewriter, and none of them represented any work on his part, but he had discovered that he was uncomfortable working on a book unless he had already prepared the front matter. He might discard or change all of it laier on, but he could not write the first page of the noyel until he had these other pages written.
He lit a cigarette, set it in the ashtray. By the day’s end the ashtray would be overflowing with butts, yet he would have smoked relatively little. When his work engrossed him, he would let cigarettes burn up unnoticed in the ashtray.
He typed “1.” in the top left corner of a fresh page. Halfway down he typed “Chapter One” and skipped a dozen lines. Page one, chapter one. Now what?
He lit a cigarette, having already forgotten the one burning a few inches from his elbow. He took a few drags from the new one and set it alongside the other. His fingers positioned themselves on the keyboard. The opening scene was clear enough in his mind. It was just a matter of deciding which of several ways to structure it.
For fifteen minutes he did nothing but sit with his eyes on the blank paper before him. Then he began typing, and for the next twenty minutes the typewriter was never silent for more than five or ten seconds at a time. After twenty minutes he lit a cigarette. By that time he was at the top of page four, and when he left his desk at three fifteen that afternoon there were a dozen more finished pages to the left of the typewriter and a dozen fewer blank sheets to the right.
Sometimes at night he would stay in the large stone house, reading and listening to records. His reading consisted of magazine pieces and nonfiction. He had discovered that he could not read novels while he was himself writing one. He knew writers who consciously avoided fiction while they were at work, fearing that another author’s style would adversely influence their own. This had never bothered Hugh. Instead, he found that he simply could not concentrate on another man’s book when his own was in progress. He was too conscious of style and technique. Characters seemed to lack depth, dialogue had no flavor, plot lines were impossible to remember. Between books he read voraciously, swallowing novels in huge gulps, but he could not do this while he was at work.
Other nights he went out. He needed people around him at such times, yet was too locked into his work to be of much use in conversation. He would go to Sully’s or the Logan Inn or one of several other bars. He would never drink heavily, but always had enough scotch in him so that sleep came easily by the time he returned home.
On such nights there would almost always be questions about his work. When was his next book coming out? That was easily answered but led to questions about its title and theme, and he disliked discussing one book while involved with another. He even more disliked discussing current work and simply refused to do so, explaining that if he talked about it it would go stale for him. How was the new book coming, then?
It was coming along, he would say.
Which was as much of an answer as existed, because he could not have said whether the book was going well or poorly. All he knew for certain was that it was continuing to get written, that the pile to the typewriter’s left was increasing while the pile to the right grew smaller.
Some days were good ones, when the pages seemed to write themselves. On those days he would have to force himself to stop when he had written twenty pages, the maximum he allowed himself in a single day. On other days he would enter his study at nine in the morning and it would be dark before he had finished his minimum of five pages. Some days every page that went into the typewriter wound up on the stack of finished copy. Other days there were three sheets in the wastebasket for every sheet he kept.
And later, when the book was done, no one including Hugh would be able to tell the easy work from the hard, the smooth pages that hurried their way to completion from the ones over which he sweated blood. The work itself was all of a piece. It made no sense to him, seemed as though it should not be that way, but it was so.
The summer after the divorce he lectured at a writers’ conference in New Hampshire. He had received similar invitations frequently in the past and had always regretted them, considering such conferences a waste of time for all concerned, the students at least as much as the instructors. He accepted this invitation because it was something to do and some place to go at a time when he was doing nothing and going nowhere. They paid his expenses and a fee of five hundred dollars, which they called an honorarium and which he alternately regarded as too much or too little.
The conference was about what he had expected. Tfte other instructors included a lesbian poetess of whom he had never heard, a screenwriter who arrived drunk, gave one disastrous lecture and fled to the Coast, and a pain
fully earnest woman from Washington who wrote articles for general magazines. Hugh avoided them all. The students included some who, like Hugh, seemed to find the idea of a week in New Hampshire agreeable. Others really thought the conference would help their work, and they were as agonizingly sincere about it as the magazine writer. Finally there was a sprinkling of women who wanted to sleep with a successful author. Hugh could not imagine their reasons, but he obliged one a night for seven nights and spent the rest of his time drinking.
His lectures went over well enough. Idiotically enough, his audience sat there taking meaningless notes while he told them how to write novels. Afterward he couldn’t remember what he had told them, and hoped their memories were equally selective.
Because he had no idea how to write a novel.
There was a time when he thought there was a way. After the success of One If by Land he had had considerable second-novel trouble. He threw away one effort after another, ten pages of this and thirty pages of that and once a hundred pages that simply died on him. In desperation he began reading books purporting to tell how to write a novel.
Most of them were too vague to do any harm. But one had reduced the entire process to a systematic method which anyone with a typewriter could follow. First you drew a chart with all your characters and the relationship of each to the others. Then for each character you filled out a series of index cards with all their quirks and foibles and the details of their lives from cradle to grave. Then you did an outline of the entire book, indicating every scene and conversation. Then, with your chart and your index cards and your outline to guide you, you filled in the blanks and wrote the book.