Scissors (12 page)
“Huh?”
“We’ll swap roles. I’ll be Stewart Granger. ‘Perhaps,’ ” I say, clenching my teeth. “ ‘But I have known people to make elaborate sacrifices for reasons they themselves don’t quite understand …’ What are you doing?”
Ray turns up the volume on the radio. A trombone solo invades the interior of the van. “I don’t feel like playing anymore,” he replies.
I close the notebook and look out through the windshield. There’s an illuminated billboard farther down the road. My eyes are too wet to read the slogan.
I give him back the notebook. After all, he’s right. The actress in the family isn’t me, it’s my sister.
September 8
Dear Douglas
,
You’d laugh in my face if I told you the name of the godforsaken backwater I’m writing you from. What a hole. If it weren’t for the copy of the collection you sent me—my daughter forwarded it to my address here in nowheresville, and I’m not even going to tell you where that is—yes, if it weren’t for this book, a thing of my own
that I can hold in my hands, I wouldn’t just be stuck in this hole, I’d be hanging from a rope in my shabby room, which features a view of the parking lot
.
But the book’s here. My book
.
I’ve published thirty-five short stories in about a dozen different magazines, but strangely enough, a stack of magazines has never provided me with the sensation I feel today when I look at this collection. The sensation of having accomplished something
.
I don’t know how to say it any other way. Maybe it’s because of the emptiness I’ve been surrounded by. My house is currently empty. I’m here. Marianne’s gone to live with her sister. Leo stays with his grandmother. Sarah stops by the house from time to time to pick up her mail. My daughter’s living with a moron I suspect of sniffing glue. I don’t know what it can be that makes the guy so glassy-eyed. TV, probably. Whenever I imagine my empty house, I see the TV screen—Sarah leaves the television on to discourage thieves. Just the picture, no sound. It’s a game show, one of those with a big turning wheel, and when the arrow stops on the jackpot, you can’t hear the bell ring or the audience applaud. I imagine I’m watching that game show
.
Ten years of my life are in this book. Seeing it published makes me feel I’ve won the jackpot. Thanks for the money, by the way—I’m going to be able to get my car fixed. And I should still have enough left to pay the rent on this room. The arrow stopped on the winning number, but I don’t hear anything in my empty house
.
Tears come to my eyes as I write. If you saw me, you’d say, “Be proud, Ray. Be content.” I am, I assure you I am
.
Insofar as alcohol is concerned, things are much better. God, that’s bad writing: “Insofar as alcohol …” I should take more care with letters, now that my prose, thanks to you, is liable to become
immortal … But I don’t have the heart to make up pretty phrases. Except for this story collection of mine, everything I write seems so lame. Every hour I swallow half a glass of whiskey. That’s the first step in the drying-out process. Tomorrow it will be every two hours, and so on from day to day. I’ve learned a cure in this center: bourbon in small doses and at fixed times. If anyone had told me I’d be boozing by the clock in here, I would never have checked in—the thought of doing things under constraint has always horrified me
.
I would have liked to write to you in detail about the cuts. To discuss this one or that one. But the state I’m in doesn’t allow me to concentrate for very long. Besides, there would be too much to write. My big hope right now is to recover in time to start the job you scared up for me, my first teaching job. Classes begin in a week
.
I don’t know if writing can be learned. I’ve always thought the best way was simply to get down to it, as with fishing or wood-chopping. The only valuable advice I’ve retained from all the workshops I’ve been in is “No tricks, no ruses, write with sincerity.” Maybe I’ll tell my students that
.
Back to your cuts. Thank you, Douglas, thank you for all the sweat you put into revising my texts. I have a few reservations, of course, but as I wrote you from the hospital, you were fully authorized to muck around with the stories I submitted. (I believe that’s in the contract I signed, but I don’t have it in front of me.) I would have preferred to see “Petunias” instead of “Muck”—pardon me, “Compost”—I’m modifying titles too! And I would have liked to keep what passes between Robert and his wife at the beginning of the story. I find your cuts in “Compartment” a bit extreme. I don’t have anything to say about “Cookie” or “Collision,” even though “Collision” seemed longer when you published it in the magazine. To tell the truth, I didn’t think you’d go through the stories you cut
before and cut them again. I would have wanted to spare you that labor, but I understand you have to deal with the most pressing matters first. (That’s something I’ve noticed about editors; everything goes very very slowly in the beginning and, in an equally inexplicable way, very very fast thereafter.) On a related subject, I’m enclosing a check in this envelope to cover the expenses you incurred while making your cuts. I know it cost you an arm and a leg to have all the versions of my stories typed, and I insist on being fair
.
It’s time for me to get re-plastered
.
And if I manage to write a story between one glass and the next, be ready to unsheathe your weapon, Douglas—because we’ll be starting again soon. Me from the bottom of my hole, you from the top of your skyscraper
.
We make a hell of a couple, if you ask me
.
Ray
P. S. If you answer this letter in the next few days, don’t send your reply to the university. I was there yesterday, and they don’t know who I am. The girl who handles the mail thought I was a prowler. Write me at the address on the envelope
.
I see it on your faces. It’s dripping out of your mouths. It’s moistening your little lips, which can’t wait to give me a smile.
There’s only one thing on your minds: You want to please me.
It’s nauseating. Your stories nauseate me—they’re so much like you. “Is that good, Mr. Douglas? Is that what you want to read? Because that’s what I tried to write: a story you’d want to read …”
HOW SHOULD I KNOW WHAT I WANT TO READ?
If I knew, I wouldn’t be an editor. I’d be the guy who decides what’s going to be shown on TV—I think a computer does that. It programs for tomorrow the successes of the day before yesterday. If something worked yesterday, it puts it out again the day after tomorrow. The same way with Ithaca—Ithaca’s my son. He’s ten years old, he collects stickers. If you present him with one that’s not in his collection, he starts to cry. Do I look like I collect stickers?
Hurry up and displease me, and maybe we’ll see one another again.
A bad communication between postal workers, no doubt. Our regular mailman’s on leave. He alone knows that if our mailbox is as flat as a pancake, it’s not because we don’t want any more mail, it’s because you came home loaded and rolled over it. He had experience with us, he knew what was up, and so he used to put our letters under the doormat. But his colleagues just pass us up and the mail gets here three weeks late (when Sarah goes and picks it up
at the post office). That’s why I didn’t answer you right away. Do you believe me, Ray? That’s really the only reason it’s taken me so long to answer you
.
I can gauge how much progress you’ve made. Even if you didn’t tell me, I could figure it out. You’re in a detox center for the eighth time in three years, not to mention various stays in the hospital. I can only repeat what I’ve been saying to you since you started drinking—really drinking. I think it was your twentieth birthday. Keep that in mind for the day when you stop, and we’ll etch a few words onto an empty bottle: “Raymond’s Alcoholism. Start date–end date.” Why not stop this year, when you make thirty-seven? I’m going to say it again: If what you want is to be a second-rate writer, then keep on drinking. Forget you were supposed to be counted among the best one day. Because the pact we made was that and nothing less than that. If it was less, then all our sacrifices were pointless
.
Claire and I have talked and talked—it’s all we do here. Talking to my sister does me a lot of good. On the telephone, it’s not the same. Here at least when she cries, I can stroke her face. Claire just has to keep plugging away and not give up. It can’t be easy to be an actress in a part of the country where so many actresses are out of work and a select few are always on display. I was wondering, couldn’t actresses be interchangeable, like the box-office cashiers in the movie theater where I used to sell programs? They were never the same from one week to the next—I think the boss harassed every one of them. But actresses aren’t interchangeable, not the way cashiers are. Can you imagine a place where all the cashiers in the country would come looking for work? No, of course not. That’s why I told Claire, “While you’re waiting for your chance,
you should be a cashier.” But she wasn’t interested. Sometimes she worries me, I’m afraid she’s cracking up
.
She and I have that in common: not the cracking up part, but the obstinacy, like my stubborn confidence that she’s going to be successful someday, even if not as an actress. And I think about us. I can’t imagine that we could fail, that you could not become a great writer
.
Chekhov wasn’t an alcoholic, was he? How sad that he died so young. The other day it occurred to me that you ought to write a story about Chekhov. Since you love his stories so much, you should write one about him. Well, look at me, suggesting subjects to you again, when I promised myself I’d stop
.
I’ve made myself a lot of promises
.
I wake up at night and I can’t remember what happened. I don’t know why our house is empty, why the mail’s so slow, and why these words of mine seem to have so little power to reach you
.
Why are we so far from each other when we’ve got so much love left?