Scissors (6 page)
Sometimes Raymond’s as modest as a silly young girl.
RAYMOND
“Is that what you meant to say, Raymond? You meant to say ‘spreads’?”
“I don’t know what I meant to say.”
“Then how can he? How can Douglas know that for you?”
“Maybe I thought ‘spreads’ and then wrote ‘moves.’ It’s true that I have a tendency not to say things.”
“That’s a virtue, right? Chekhov, Salinger—you always say their force comes from not saying things.”
“In
their
work. In their work, it’s a force.”
“And in yours?”
“It might be a weakness.”
Raymond has a strange way of ending his stories. It’s like when another driver stalls out in front of you at a green light. You don’t wait for him to restart his engine. You steer around him and pass him by. That was my first reaction to Raymond’s work.
The second, no, the third time I read through it, I understood.
I no longer saw any clumsiness in the way he stalled. I perceived that the fulfillment of his short stories was in that very stalling.
Yes, Raymond’s art lies in stalling in front of your eyes when you least expect it.
I get out of my car and walk over to his old jalopy. I open the passenger door and get in. Raymond’s eyes are blurry with alcohol. I grab the steering wheel with my left hand and say, “Onward.”
Have confidence, Raymond. Onward.
We’re going to travel down a stretch of road together.
And we’ll both stall when we feel like it.
I look in the rearview mirror and see my car with nobody at the wheel. I have no regrets. The gas tank was practically empty.
Go. He’s paying for your ticket, you may as well go. But don’t drink in front of him, okay? And tell him you want to keep “Excuse Me” as the title for your story. If that’s what you want. I don’t even know anymore.
Of course I’m happy, of course I’m excited.
But don’t discuss our debts, all right? Be sure you don’t say a word about our money problems.
Lately I’ve had my doubts. First of all, there’s Lorraine, talking to me about divorce. I take her at her word and call up the best lawyer in town. I didn’t expect to find she’d hired him two days previously.
And then there’s Nicole, that whore. I discover the best female short-story writer of her generation, and what does she do? She signs an exclusive contract with the outfit across the street to publish her novels. I say to her, “Nicole, your name is Ingratitude.” She replies, “No, it’s Nicole.” Novelists are too prosaic.
I wished her good luck, but because of her departure, I hit an air pocket. My scissors were snipping at the void. Then Raymond came. With his fondness for whiskey. In his case, alcohol and writing make a compatible couple. Until alcohol prevails. Then he loses all restraint. He says too much when he ought to say less. He sounds like someone who wants to be forgiven. But nobody forgives too many words.
When I’m editing Raymond, a strange phenomenon occurs: I see Douglas through him.
All his secrets are mine
. When I edit Raymond, I have no more doubt.
He was supposed to have arrived in town by now. He was supposed to be in this office.
Hello, Sibyll? Why isn’t he here yet?
My head’s spinning. The colors in the bar I work in clash so hard it hurts. Every day I go from the school where I’m a student teacher to the bar where I’m a waitress. This morning I handed out plastic letters to the kids. Then I waited patiently until they managed to spell “CONSEQUENCE.” While waiting, I considered the best way of illustrating that word. “As a
consequence
of my marriage to an alcoholic writer, I have two totally unrelated jobs and a feeling of vertigo when I go from one to the other.” I didn’t tell them that—I would have been fired on the spot—but the sentence has stuck in my head and leads to other sentences. “For the moment, everything that Raymond writes remains of no
consequence
; he might as well copy out a mail order catalogue. But maybe his meeting with this editor, this high mucky-muck, will have some
consequences
, who knows?” I’m still not finished with that word when I find myself pouring hot coffee and trying hard not to splash the red, yellow, and fuchsia leatherette wall seats. “As a
consequence
of his misdeeds, the interior decorator should be hanged.” A greasy smell permeates the fibers of my apron, the straps of my top, the locks of my hair. I feel like slapping that customer down there with his elbows on the bar—I can’t stand the way he lets his coffee get cold and looks as though his house has just been seized—but I’ve got to watch the little old freezer repairman, whose eyes aren’t anywhere near focused. Look at him, a miracle, he manages to hold on to the stool. I don’t want to have to lift him out of the beer puddles on the floor again today. I replace the coffeepot
and switch on the percolator. Nobody complains about the noise—everybody’s as numb as I am. Only three hours to go.
I notice a couple I didn’t see come in. Two young people sitting in a booth and facing each other. They look as though they just had a fight. They’re like Ray and me right before we got married, when I was several weeks pregnant. The girl’s a bit plump, the way I was at sixteen. She’s sitting back with her arms folded. Looking at her, you’d say she feels she’s being accused.
I see their lips moving, and I have the impression I’m listening to us.
“You want them both. Why compare them, why put them in competition with each other?”
“Marianne—”
“You can want to write and you can want our baby.”
“But I couldn’t choose. I’d be forced to—”
“Not forced, no. You wouldn’t have to force yourself.”
“If I was obliged to choose between my family and my writing, I believe I’d choose—”
“You can have both.”
“I’d choose writing.”
I look at the girl. Her face is set. She’s very close to standing up, walking through the bar, and going out. Why shouldn’t she have a choice? Why not her too? Holding back tears, she looks over at the door.
Then she turns to the boy. “I can make it work. You’ll see. Everything will go so well you won’t have to choose.”
She falls silent. She’s just sealed her fate. Let no one say this fate was reserved for her at her birth, that it’s the
consequence
of her sex and her upbringing. Let no one say that. It’s the consequence of nothing but her love.
In that case, why do the blinds on the front window make her think of prison bars?
The boy leans over and kisses her.
“I love you so much, Marianne. You’ll never know how much I love you.”
I choose that moment to approach their booth, coffeepot in hand.
“All right, you two, what’s your pleasure?”
DOUGLAS
“You visit them?”
“Of course.”
“But not when they’re so far away? Not as far as where I live?”
“Sometimes even farther.”
“Really?”
“If it’s necessary. Only if it’s necessary.”
“When is it necessary?”
“When I want to prevent them from going over to the competition. How do you think a person becomes one of the three editors that count in this town?”
“I had no idea.”
“You’re not going to eat your sushi?”
“I don’t know if sushi’s my thing.”
“I’ll eat it for you. Have you brought the manuscript?”
“The one you mailed me?”
“We’re going to keep it the way it is now, all right?”
“Well … I mean … I discussed it with Marianne.”
“Marianne?”
“She’s my wife.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”
“I married Marianne when she was sixteen.”
“I got married three times in sixteen years. You don’t want your beer?”
“You can have it.”
“My divorce comes through next week.”
“Marianne finds the cuts—”
“Lorraine thinks I spend too much time at my office.”
“She finds the cuts, the cuts in my short stories—”
“Raymond. Let me stop you right away. Writers’ wives are their worst enemy.”