The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) (21 page)

I had no contact with anyone - except the housekeeper, Ruth Reynolds. She was a large, cheerful woman in her late thirties. Her husband, Roy, was a welder at the nearby Bath Iron Works, they had a gaggle of kids, and in between keeping her large family organized, she picked up a little extra money as caretaker of the half-dozen cottages at Popham Beach. I was the only resident in the colony at this time of year, so Ruth lavished attention on me. The cottage had a bicycle - which I’d occasionally use to get to the nearest shop (a hilly five-mile pedal down a back road). Most of the time, however, Ruth insisted on driving me to the town of Bath to get groceries. And every Thursday night, I had a standing invitation to eat dinner with her family.

Their house was around a mile down the road from the colony - a different world from the battered gentility of this patrician enclave. Ruth and Roy lived with their five children in a cramped, tumbledown three-bedroom Cape Codder. It needed a paint job - both inside and out. Roy - a big bear of a man, with biceps like the steel girders he spent the day welding - was friendly in a shy sort of way. Their kids - ranging in ages from seventeen to five - generated extraordinary amounts of spirited chaos, yet Ruth was a real master at keeping their collective domestic life in order.

Dinner was always at five thirty. The young kids were in bed by seven. The two teenage boys then huddled in front of the radio in the kitchen, listening to Buck Rogers or The Shadow. Roy would excuse himself to start his night shift at the Iron Works. Ruth would dig out a bottle of Christian Brothers Port from the breakfront, pour out two glasses, then sit opposite me in a big squishy armchair.

It became a weekly ritual, this Thursday dinner.

‘You know why I like to have you over on Thursday nights?’ Ruth said to me as we settled into our chairs and sipped the sweet sticky port. ‘Because it’s the only day of the week when Roy works the eight-to-four a.m. shift. Which means it’s the only time I have the chance to sit down with a girlfriend and natter.’

‘I’m glad you consider me a girlfriend.’

‘Of course I do. And I tell you, I wish I could see more of you. But five kids and a house to run leaves me just about enough time every day to sleep six hours - and not much more.’

‘Well, you’ll be seeing a bit more of me, as I’ve decided to extend my stay at the cottage for a few more weeks.’

Ruth clinked her glass against mine.

‘Glad you’re sticking around for a while,’ she said.

‘Well, it’s not as if anyone’s desperate for my presence at
Life.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Yes, I do’ - and I explained that, a few days earlier, I telegrammed my boss, Leland McGuire, explaining that I wanted to remain on in Maine, but would return to New York instantly if a freelance assignment came up. Twenty-four hours later came his reply, via Western Union:

We know where you are if we need you. Stop. Leland.

‘That’s kind of a terse answer, isn’t it?’ Ruth said.

‘But wholly expected. Around six months from now, I fully expect to be out of a job.’

‘If I were you, I wouldn’t be worried.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re obviously smart, and you’ve also got a lot of poise.’

‘I’m hardly poised. If you only knew the mistakes I’ve made recently …’

‘I bet they weren’t really big mistakes.’

‘Believe me, they were big. I let something foolishly overwhelm me.’

‘Something?’

‘No … someone.’

‘I did wonder if that was the case …’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘No one comes to Maine at this time of year unless they’re really trying to put some distance between themselves and a problem.’

‘It wasn’t a problem. Just the height of foolishness. Especially as it lasted just one night. And like an idiot, I allowed myself to believe it was true love.’

‘But if you
thought that,
then maybe it was.’

‘Or maybe it was just pure fantasy on my part. Falling in love with love.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘In Europe - with the Army. I’ve written to him so many damn times … but so far, there’s been no reply.’

‘You know what you have to do, don’t you?’

‘Forget him, I suppose.’

‘Oh, you’ll never do that. He’ll always be there - because he made such an impact on you.’

‘So what do I do?’

‘It’s simple: tell yourself it wasn’t meant to be.’

‘You know what you have to do, don’t you?’
That sentence stuck with me - because it summed up one of life’s ongoing dilemmas: how do you reconcile the head with the heart? My rational brain told me to accept the reality that Jack Malone had come and gone out of my life within twelve hours. My irrational heart said otherwise. What astounded me was how persuasive the heart could be - especially since, before that Thanksgiving night, I considered myself immune to all things illogical. But now …

Now I knew otherwise.

The morning after that talk with Ruth, I was up at dawn. I ate a light breakfast. I walked the beach. I was back in the cottage by nine. I put a pot of coffee on the stove. While it percolated, I went into the bedroom and removed my Remington typewriter from the closet. I hauled it over to the kitchen table. I removed its cover. A thin packet of typing paper was stored on the inside cover. I opened the packet, and fed a sheet of paper into the roller. The coffee pot began to jerk spasmodically back and forth on the stove. I turned down the flame and poured myself a thick black cup of steaming Chock Full O’ Nuts. I set the cup next to the typewriter. I sat down. I blew on the coffee, then took a long, steadying sip. I put the cup down. I placed my fingers over the keys. They immediately clenched up into fists. I forced myself to unclench them. Before I could think further about it, I suddenly typed a sentence:

I hadn’t planned to be at that party.

My hands left the keys. They ended up on the table, my fingers drumming its stripped pine surface as I read that sentence again and again. After a few minutes, I decided to try a second sentence.

I had planned to be elsewhere.

My fingers jumped away from the typewriter and continued their rat-a-tat hammering on the table-top. I sipped the coffee. I stared at the two sentences emblazoned on the otherwise empty page. I decided to risk a third sentence:

Because that was the night I had promised to treat myself to that rarest of Manhattan pleasures: eight unbroken hours in bed.

Three sentences. Thirty-six words. I read through them again. Punchy. Direct. A hint of wryness creeping into the last line. The language was simple, with no excess verbal baggage. Not a bad start. Not bad at all.

I reached for the coffee cup. I downed the remaining contents in one go. I went over to the stove and refilled the cup. I fought the momentary urge to run out the door. I forced myself back to the kitchen table. I sat down. My fingers recommenced their manic rat-a-tat drumming on the table.

Three sentences. Thirty-six words. A full double-spaced typed page usually contained around two hundred words.

Well, go on, finish the page. It’s just another one hundred and sixty-four words. Hell, you wrote those thirty-six words in ten minutes. An additional one hundred and sixty-four words should only take you …

Four hours. That’s how long it took. Four long, dreadful hours - during which time I ripped out five sheets of paper from the roller, drank another pot of coffee, paced the floor, chewed on a pencil, made notes in the margins, and eventually,
miraculously,
made it to the bottom of the damn page.

Later that night, after supper, I nursed a glass of red wine while re-reading what I had written. It flowed reasonably well. The voice seemed approachable (or, at least, not off-putting). Stylistically, it had a bit of bite (without sounding too smarty-pants for its own good). Most importantly, the narrative took off quickly. The story had momentum. It was a plausible start.

But it was only one page.

The next morning, I was up again at sunrise. A fast breakfast, a brisk hike down the beach, a pot of coffee on the stove, and I was sitting in front of the typewriter by eight thirty.

By noon, I had the second page written. Later that night - just before slipping into bed - I re-read my two finished pages. I excised around thirty extraneous words. I tightened up several descriptive passages. I rewrote an awkward sentence, and eliminated one clunker of a metaphor (‘His eyes had the seductive glow of a Broadway marquee’… changing it to: ‘He had bedroom eyes’).

Then, before I could start having a crisis of confidence, I placed the pages face down on the desk.

Up again with the sun. Grapefruit, toast, coffee. The beach. More coffee. The desk.

And I remained at the desk until I finished that day’s page.

A work pattern was emerging. My day now had a structure; a purpose. As long as I got a page written, I would feel as if something had been accomplished. Everyone talks about the heady creative pleasures of writing - everyone except those who’ve actually tried to do it. There’s nothing heady about the process. It is a task. Like all tasks, it is only pleasurable in retrospect. You are relieved to have met your daily quota. You hope the work you did today is of a satisfactory nature. Because, come tomorrow, you have to blacken another page at the typewriter. Willfulness is required to get the job done. Willfulness … and a strange sense of confidence. As I was discovering, writing was a confidence trick you played on yourself.

A page a day, six days a week. After the second week of work, I sent a telegram to Eric:

Have decided splendid isolation suits me. Stop. Will be here for another few weeks. Stop. Am doing some writing. Stop. Don’t be horrified. Stop. It actually goes well. Stop. Please keep checking my mail for news from Europe or the Department of Enlisted Personnel. Stop. Love, S.

Forty-eight hours later, a Western Union man showed up at the door of the cottage, with Eric’s reply:

If you’re happy doing something masochistic like writing, then this fellow masochist is happy for you. Stop. I’ve been checking your mail twice a week. Stop. Nothing from Europe or Washington. Stop. File him away under ‘mirage’ and move on. Stop. I hate Joe E. Brown. Stop. And I miss you.

For the first time in months, I didn’t feel a sharp stab of sadness about Jack. More of a dull discomfort.
Tell yourself it wasn’t meant to be.
And while you’re at it, get that next page written.

Another week. Another six pages. As usual, I took Sunday off. I returned to work on Monday. Having spent the first three weeks eking out every page - spending an hour worrying about the construction of a sentence, or scrapping one hundred and fifty words right when I neared the end of a page - I started sprinting at the typewriter. I pounded out three pages on Monday, four on Tuesday. I was no longer obsessively worrying about form, structure, rhythm. I was simply running with the material. It had taken over. It was writing itself.

And then, at 4.02 p.m. (I glanced at my watch) on Wednesday afternoon, April 20th 1946, I came to a halt. For a moment or two, I simply sat bemused in my desk chair, staring at the half-blackened page in the typewriter. The realization dawned.

I had just finished my first short story.

Another few minutes passed. Then I forced myself up, grabbed my coat, and hiked down to the water’s edge. I squatted down in the sand, and stared out at the metronomic rhythm of the Atlantic surf. I didn’t know if the story was good or bad. My self-deprecating Smythe family instincts told me to accept the fact that it probably wasn’t worthy of publication. But, at least, it was completed. And I would revel in that achievement - for a moment or two anyway.

The next morning, I sat down at the kitchen table and read through the twenty-four-page story. It was called ‘Shore Leave’ - and, yes, it was a fictional reworking of the night I met Jack. Only in this instance, it was set in 1941, and the narrator was a thirty-year-old book publisher named Hannah: a single woman who has always been unlucky with men, and has started to write herself off as someone who will never bump into love. Until she meets Richard Ryan - a Navy lieutenant, on shore leave for one night in Manhattan before shipping out to the Pacific. They meet at a party, the attraction is instantaneous, they spend the night walking the city, they fall into each other’s arms, they take a room for a couple of hours at a cheap hotel, there is a stoic goodbye at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, and though he promises his heart to her, Hannah knows that she’ll never see him again. Because the timing is all wrong. He’s off to war - and she senses that this night in Manhattan will soon be forgotten by him. So she’s left with the knowledge that, having bumped into her destiny, she’s lost him within twelve hours of finding him.

I spent the next three days editing the story, making certain that the language was spare and devoid of mawkishness. What was it that Puccini said to his librettist when they were working on
La Boheme?
‘Sentiment … but no sentimentality.’ That’s what I was striving for - a certain poignancy that didn’t edge into schmaltz. On Sunday, using carbon paper, I typed two clean copies of the edited story. Late that night, I read it through for a final time. I really didn’t know what to think of it. It seemed to move along, and evoke a certain bittersweet mood … but I was too close to the story to discern whether it was any damn good. So I took the top copy of ‘Shore Leave’, folded it in half, and placed it in a manila envelope, along with the following note: