Call If You Need Me (23 page)

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.”

“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 form. 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.

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.

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.