Call if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose

  He sipped the drink and smoked and in a little while he took the letter out of his pocket and commenced to read. Now and then he stopped and looked out the window at the boats. The men at the counter went on talking.

  “That’s a start, for sure,” she said. She had put her arms around his shoulders, her breasts just grazing his back. She was reading what he had written.

  “It’s not bad, sugar,” she said. “No, it’s not bad at all. But where was I when this was taking place? Was this yesterday?” “What do you mean?” He glanced over the pages. “You mean this, the house was quiet? Maybe you were asleep. I don’t know. Or out shopping. I don’t know. Is it important? All I say is—the house was quiet. I don’t need to go into your whereabouts right now.

  “I never nap in the morning, or in the middle of the day either, for that matter.” She made a face at him.

  “I don’t think I have to account in this for your whereabouts at every minute. Do you think? What the hell.”

  “No, I mean, I’m not making anything out of it. I mean, it’s just strange, you know, that’s what I mean.” She waved her hand at the pages. “You know what I mean.”

  He got up from the table and stretched and looked out the window at the bay.

  “Do you want to work some more?” she said. “Lord, we don’t have to go to the beach. That was just a suggestion. I’d rather see you work some more, if that’s what you want.”

  She had been eating an orange. He could smell the orange on her breath as she leaned over the table and looked seriously at the pages once more. She grinned and ran her tongue over her lips. “Well,” she said. “So. Well, well.”

  He said, “I want to go to the beach. That’s enough for today. That’s enough for now, anyway. Maybe tonight I’ll do something. I’ll fool around with this tonight, maybe. I’ve started, that’s the main thing. I’m the compulsive type; I’ll go on now. Maybe it’ll work itself out. Let’s go to the beach.”

  She grinned again. “Good,” she said. She put her hand on his cock. “Good, good, good. How is our little friend today?” She stroked his cock through his trousers. “I’d hoped you’d start today,” she said. “I thought you might today for some reason, I don’t know why. Let’s go, then. I’m happy today, this minute. I can’t tell you. It’s as if … I feel happier today than I’ve felt in a long, long time. Maybe—”

  “Let’s not think maybe or anything,” he said. He reached under the halter and touched her breast, took the nipple between his fingers and rolled it back and forth. “We’ll take one day at a time, that’s what we decided. One day, then the next day, then the next.” The nipple began to stiffen under his fingers.

  “When we come back from swimming we’ll do things to each other,” she said. “Unless, of course, you want to put off swimming until later?”

  “I’m easy,” he said. Then, “No, wait, I’ll put my trunks on. When we’re at the beach maybe we’ll tell each other about what we’re going to do to each other when we get back here. Let’s go ahead and go to the beach now while the sun’s out. It may rain. Let’s go ahead and go.”

  She began to hum something as she put some oranges into a little bag.

  Halprin slipped on his trunks. He put the sheets of paper and the ballpoint pen into the cupboard. He stared into the cupboard a minute and then, the humming gone, turned slowly.

  She stood in front of the open door in her shorts and halter, the long black hair hanging down over her shoulders from under the white straw sun hat. She held the oranges and the straw-covered water bottle against her breasts. She looked at him a minute, and then she winked, grinned, and cocked her hip.

  His breath went out of him and his legs felt weak. For a minute he was afraid of another seizure. He saw the wedge of blue sky behind her and the darker blue, shining blue, water of the bay, the small waves rising and falling. He closed his eyes and opened them. She was still there, grinning. What we do matters, brother, he remembered Miller saying long ago. There came to him an empty tugging in his stomach, then he felt his jaws simply tighten of their own accord until he ground his teeth and felt his face might tell her things he himself didn’t yet know. He felt light-headed, but all senses on the alert: he could smell the broken orange in the room, could hear a fly drone and then bump the window near the bed. He heard flowers around the steps, their long stems moving against each other in the warm breeze. Gulls called and waves rose and then fell on the beach. He felt at the edge of something. It was as if things he had never understood before might now suddenly be made clear to him.

  “Crazy about you,” he said. “Crazy about you, baby. Baby.”

  She nodded.

  “Close the door,” he said. His cock began to rise against the swimming trunks.

  She put her things on the table and pushed the door shut with her foot. Then she took off her hat and shook her hair.

  “Well, well, well,” she said and grinned again. “Well, let me say hello to our friend,” she said. “Not so little friend.” Her eyes shone as she moved toward him and her voice had become languorous.

  “Lie down,” she said. “And don’t move. Just lie down on the bed. And don’t move. Don’t move, hear.”

  OCCASIONS

  On “Neighbors”

  “Neighbors” first hit me as an idea for a story in the fall of 1970, two years after returning to the United States from Tel Aviv. While in Tel Aviv, we had for a few days looked after an apartment belonging to some friends. Though none of the high jinks in the story really occurred in the course of our apartment watching, I have to admit that I did do a bit of snooping in the refrigerator and liquor cabinet. I found that experience of entering and leaving someone else’s empty apartment two or three times a day, sitting for a while in other people’s chairs, glancing through their books and magazines and looking out their windows, made a rather powerful impression on me. It took two years for the impression to surface as a story, but once it did I simply sat down and wrote it. It seemed a fairly easy story to do at the time, and it came together very quickly after I went to work on it. The real work on the story, and perhaps the art of the story, came later. Originally the manuscript was about twice as long, but I kept paring it on subsequent revisions, and then pared some more, until it achieved its present length and dimensions.

  In addition to the confusion or disorder of the central personality in the story—the main theme at work, I guess—I think that the story has captured an essential sense of mystery or strangeness that is in part due to the treatment of the subject matter, in this case the story’s style. For it is a highly “stylized” story if it is anything, and it is this that helps give it its value.

  With each subsequent trip to the Stones’ apartment, Miller is drawn deeper and deeper into an abyss of his own making. The turning point in the story comes, of course, when Arlene insists that this time she will go next door alone and then, finally, Bill has to go and fetch her. She reveals through words and through appearance (the color in her cheeks is high and there is “white lint clinging to the back of her sweater”) that she in turn has been doing pretty much the same kind of rummaging and prowling that he has been engaging in.

  I think the story is, more or less, an artistic success. My only fear is that it is too thin, too elliptical and subtle, too inhuman. I hope this is not so, but in truth I do not see it as the kind of story that one loves unreservedly and gives up everything to; a story that is ultimately remembered for its sweep, for the breadth and depth and lifelike sentiment of its characters. No, this is a different kind of story—not better, maybe, and I surely hope no worse, different in any case—and the internal and external truths and values in the story do not have much to do, I’m afraid, with character, or some of the other virtues held dear in short fiction.

  As to writers and writing that I like, I tend to find much more around that I like than dislike. I think there is all kinds of good stuff getting written and published these days in both the big and little magazines, and in book for
m. Lots of stuff that’s not so good, too, but why worry about that? To my mind Joyce Carol Oates is the first writer of my generation, perhaps any recent generation, and we are all going to have to learn to live under that shadow, or spell—at least for the foreseeable future.

  On “Drinking While Driving”

  I’m not a “born” poet. Many of the poems I write I write because I don’t always have the time to write fiction, my first love. An offshoot of this interest in fiction is that I’m interested in a story line, and as a result I suppose many of my poems are narrative in bent. I like poems that say something to me the first time around, although poems I like a lot, or don’t like especially but can see value in, I’ll read a second, third, and fourth time to see what makes them go. In all my poems I’m after a definite mood or ambience. I constantly use the personal pronoun, although many of the poems I write are sheer invention. Very often, however, the poems do have at least a slender base in reality, which is the case with “Drinking While Driving.”

  The poem was written a couple of years ago. I think it has a certain amount of tension, and I want to believe it’s successful in presenting a sense of loss and faint desperation on the part of a narrator who seems—to me anyway—at dangerously loose ends. When I wrote the poem I was working an eight-to-five job in a more or less decent white-collar position. But, as always with a full-time job, there was not enough time to go around. For a while I wasn’t writing or reading anything. It was an exaggeration to say “I haven’t read a book in six months,” but at the time I felt it was not far from the truth. Some while before the poem happened along I had read The Retreat from Moscow by Caulaincourt, one of Napoleon’s generals, and once or twice during that period I had ridden around at night with my brother in his car, both of us feeling aimless and hemmed in and working on a pint bottle of Old Crow. Anyway, there were these vaguely remembered facts or traces in my head, along with my own very real feelings of frustration at the time, when I sat down to write the poem. I think some of all this came together.

  I really can’t tell you more about the poem or the process. I don’t know how good the poem is, but I think it has merit. I can tell you it’s one of my favorites.

  On Rewriting

  When I was asked if I’d like to write a foreword to this book [Fires], I said I didn’t think so. But the more I thought on it, it seemed to me a few words might be in order. But not a foreword, I said. Somehow a foreword seemed presumptuous. Forewords and prefaces to one’s own work, in fiction or poetry, ought to be reserved for literary eminences over the age of fifty, say. But maybe, I said, an afterword. So what follows then, for better or worse, are a few words after the fact.

  The poems I’ve chosen to include were written between 1966 and 1982. Some of them first appeared in book form in Near Klamath, Winter Insomnia, and At Night the Salmon Move. I’ve also included poems that were written since the publication, in 1976, of At Night the Salmon Move—poems which have appeared in magazines and journals but not yet in a book. The poems have not been put into a chronological order. Instead, they have been more or less arranged into broad groups having to do with a particular way of thinking, and feeling about things—a constellation of feelings and attitudes—that I found at work when I began looking at the poems with an eye toward collecting them for this book. Some of the poems seemed to fall naturally into certain areas, or obsessions. There were, for instance, a number of them that had to do in one way or another with alcohol; some with foreign travel and personages; others strictly concerned with things domestic and familiar. So this became the ordering principle when I went to arrange the book. For example, in 1972 I wrote and published a poem called “Cheers.” Ten years later, in 1982, in a vastly different life and after many poems of a different nature entirely, I found myself writing and publishing a poem called “Alcohol.” So when the time came to make a selection of poems for this book, it was the content, or obsession (I don’t care for the word “theme”), which most often suggested where the poems would go. Nothing particularly noteworthy or remarkable about this process.

  One final word: in nearly every instance the poems that appeared in the earlier books have been slightly, in some cases ever so slightly, revised. But they have been revised. They were revised this summer, and I think they’ve been made better in the process. But more about revision later.

  The two essays were written in 1981, and I was asked to write them. In one case, an editor at the New York Times Book Review wanted me to write on “any aspect of writing” and the little piece “On Writing” was the result. The other came about through an invitation to contribute something to a book on “influences” called In Praise of What Persists which was being put together by Steve Berg of American Poetry Review, and Ted Solotaroff at Harper and Row. My contribution was “Fires”—and it was Noel Young’s idea that we call this book after that title.

  The earliest story, “The Cabin,” was written in 1966, was collected in Furious Seasons, and was revised this summer for publication here. Indiana Review will publish the story in their fall 1982 number. A much more recent story is “The Pheasant,” which will be published this month in a limited edition series by Metacom Press and will appear later this fall in New England Review.

  I like to mess around with my stories. I’d rather tinker with a story after writing it, and then tinker some more, changing this, changing that, than have to write the story in the first place. That initial writing just seems to me the hard place I have to get to in order to go on and have fun with the story. Rewriting for me is not a chore—it’s something I like to do. I think by nature I’m more deliberate and careful than I am spontaneous, and maybe that explains something. Maybe not. Maybe there’s no connection except the one I’m making. But I do know that revising the work once it’s done is something that comes naturally to me and is something I take pleasure in doing. Maybe I revise because it gradually takes me into the heart of what the story is about. I have to keep trying to see if I can find that out. It’s a process more than a fixed position.

  There was a time when I used to think it was a character defect that made me have to struggle along like this. I don’t think this way any longer. Frank O’Connor has said that he was always revising his stories (this after sometimes taking the story through twenty or thirty rewrites in the first place) and that someday he’d like to publish a revised book of his revisions. To a limited extent, I’ve had that opportunity here. Two of the stories, “Distance” and “So Much Water So Close to Home” (from the original eight stories that made up Furious Seasons), were first published in book form in FS and were then included in What We Talk about When We Talk about Love. When Capra approached me about reprinting, between two covers, Furious Seasons and At Night the Salmon Move—both books were then out of print—the idea of this book began to take hold. But I was in something of a quandary about these two particular stories Capra wanted to include. They had both been largely rewritten for the Knopf book. After some deliberation, I decided to stay fairly close to the versions as they first appeared in the Capra Press book, but this time hold the revisions to a minimum. They have been revised again, but not nearly so much as they once were. But how long can this go on? I mean, I suppose there is, finally, a law of diminishing returns. But I can say now that I prefer the later versions of the stories, which is more in accord with the way I am writing short stories these days.

  So all of the stories here have been reworked, to a greater or lesser degree; and they are somewhat different now than the original versions published either in magazines or in Furious Seasons. I see this as an instance in which I am in the happy position of being able to make the stories better than they were. At least, God knows, I hope they’re better. I think so anyway. But, truly, I’ve seldom seen a piece of prose, or a poem—my own or anyone else’s—that couldn’t be improved upon if it were left alone for a time.

  I’m grateful to Noel Young for giving me the opportunity, and the initiative, to look at the work once more
and see what could be done with it.

  On the Dostoevsky Screenplay

  In early September 1982, the director Michael Cimino called to ask if I would be willing to rework a screenplay on the life of Dostoevsky. After we talked and I’d expressed interest, we decided to talk further, once the business side of things had been worked out. His agent contacted my agent, an agreement was made, and then Cimino and I arranged to meet for dinner in New York. At the time I was teaching at Syracuse University and the semester was under way. I was also writing the last story for Cathedral, and editing and arranging the work that would go into Fires. I didn’t know where I was going to find the time to work on a screenplay, but I’d decided it was something I wanted to do.

  I called Tess Gallagher, who was spending that fall out in Port Angeles, Washington. She was on leave from her teaching duties at Syracuse so she could help attend to her father, who was dying of lung cancer. I asked if she wanted to work with me. This project had to be done in a hurry and I knew I wouldn’t have time to do research or reread the novels. Tess agreed to help. She would research and write new scenes where necessary and edit what I’d done. In general she would co-rewrite with me—or, as it turned out, cowrite an entirely new script.

  Cimino and I met for dinner at Paul and Jimmy’s, an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park. After dinner, we got down to business: Dostoevsky. Cimino said he wanted to make a movie about a great writer. In his opinion, it hadn’t been done before. He cited Doctor Zhivago as an example of what he didn’t want to do. As we talked about the movie, I recalled that Zhivago, the writer-physician, is seen only once in the film trying to write something. It is winter, the height of the Bolshevik civil war, and Zhivago and Lara, his mistress, are hiding out in an isolated dacha. (In case anyone has forgotten, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie played these roles in the film.) There is a scene with Zhivago at a desk, wearing woolen gloves against the cold, trying to write a poem. The camera moves in for a big close-up on the poem. Granted, the writing of poetry or fiction is not in itself exactly show-stopping material. Cimino wanted to keep Dostoevsky the novelist visible throughout. His idea was that the dramatic, often melodramatic, circumstances of Dostoevsky’s life, played out against the obsessive composition of the novels, offered a wonderful opportunity for a movie.