Читать книгу The Wonder Singer - George Rabasa - Страница 11

When Lockwood returns to Anaheim at the end of the day, the Señora’s absence continues to absorb him. He decides that grief and shock feel like the flu; the day’s events bring on a dull ache in his chest. A scattering of unopened mail and unread newspapers lies by the door, but he goes directly to his office upstairs. He sits at a heavy oak desk; to one side his Mac workhorse; on the other a printer and two metal filing cabinets stacked like a fortress. He is surrounded by fiberboard bookcases, their slats swaying under the weight of handy references: dictionaries and a thesaurus, Bartlett’s quotations, Books in Print, volumes with maps and holy books of all creeds, America’s Most Beloved Poems from Auden to Whitman, The Unabridged How Things Work, Trees and Plants of North America, Audubon’s bird books, insect books, fish books, and 1001 Jokes, Insults, and Toasts for Every Occasion.

The gooseneck lamp on his desk sheds scant light on the rest of the room, where Claire, half in shadows, is a vaguely reproachful presence. “You’re here,” she says.

“Yes, I’m here.” He starts. Then he turns from the pile of tapes and papers cluttering his desk.

“You could’ve said hello.”

“If I don’t organize the interviews as soon as I get home, I’ll end up with a mess. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“I was making dinner. What’s there to disturb? It’d be nice to see you once in a while, Mark. You left this morning without making a sound.”

“You need your sleep.”

“I get enough sleep.”

“Why are we having this conversation?” Lockwood shakes his head in exasperation.

Claire leaves and closes the door behind her.

He could ask the same question about all the conversations he has been having. He is in fact surrounded by conversations in which he has no role but to listen. Radio banter wakes him up in the morning. TV banter puts him to sleep.

Lockwood suspects that writers wear out their souls in the same way that prostitutes or spies or beggars do. When put on the spot—to write a brochure inviting retired union members to invest in waste-management start-ups or a fund-raising letter for the evangelization of Guatemala, to name two recent examples—it is not his role to question but to rent out his craft.

The voice that calls Lockwood belongs to a lesser Muse—the deadline, the mortgage, the fear of failure. A hundred typing chimps might, with the help of a decent editor, write Hamlet in a thousand years. Point a gun at Lockwood’s head and he could do it in a month. The world, however, doesn’t want another Hamlet so much as it does a reassuring How to Prepare for Your Colonoscopy.

His résumé lists several accomplishments, including the six-page fund-raising letter for Amnesty International (“Sincere emotion, honest indignation, principled righteousness!”) which won the Direct Mail Association’s Gold Award in its category and pulled an unheard-of 6.7% response, and the booklet How to Talk to Your Teen About God (part of his series for the Troubled Teen Press covering Drugs, STDs, Safe Driving, Money, War, Divorce, and Sexual Orientation), which has been recommended by hundreds of ministers across the country, mostly Unitarian but also a few of the more easygoing Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Con-gregationalists, and such.

The myth that hack work is effortless, a notch above typing, was fostered by writers who have never been called to produce three thousand words on “Accident and Disability Insurance Exclusions.” Once you’re over the limitations of subject matter and intended audience, the good old mot juste is discovered just as joyfully while explaining to a teenager how to put on a condom as while narrating the death of Emma Bovary.

A younger Lockwood wrote his debut collection of short fiction—Two Loaves of Bread and Other Tales of Fame and Famine— with the fervor of a stone carver chiseling the words into eternity. It earned him an MFA from the Writer’s Workshop at twenty-three and sold 875 copies, mostly to libraries, some to friends and to his mother, who bought a carton to distribute on birthdays, weddings, and graduations.

The unsold books remain packed in a dozen boxes. Occasionally he offers a copy to a client. He gave one to his dentist and to his favorite mechanic at the Saab shop. He also made a dent in the inventory by abandoning copies in busy places—airport gate areas, bus seats, phone booths, coffeehouse tables, taxis, shelves in small-town libraries. For years he took books wherever he went. He signed his name on the title page and underneath wrote his phone number—312-693-3126. He still fantasizes a stranger picking up the book and being moved enough by its contents to call him: “Yes, I read your stories. I cried at ‘The Onion Peeler’ and laughed at the end of ‘The Perfect Uncle.’ ”

Over the years there have been a couple such calls. One woman wanted to know his address so she could return the book to him. Surely he had left it by mistake at a Northwest gate in the Minneapolis—St. Paul airport. He asked her if she had read any of the stories. Oh, she was not much of a reader. She had started a couple, but had not gotten very far with them.

Another caller said he was a psychiatrist. He had found the book on a bench in Central Park, had read the stories with great interest and claimed to have detected the writer’s morbid fascination with his own body fluids. All those references, he observed, to urine and tears and saliva and semen and sweat. Not natural, not healthy. “What a sad loser you are!” he sighed. “I think I can help you.”

Lockwood stared at the receiver and hung up. When the phone rang again a minute later, he grumbled a tentative “Hello?”

“Hang up on me again, and I’m done with you.”

“What do you want?”

“I didn’t pay for the book. But I am interested in your career. Which is not going anywhere, unless you get professional help.”

“That would be you?”

“Yes. Take down my number. Just in case you feel like exploring some ideas.”

“Shoot.”

“One, 900, Dr. Phone.”

“A 900 number?”

“Yes. 24/7, $3.99 a minute.”

“That’s $240 an hour.”

“I do charge more than a regular psychiatrist on account of the convenience. You don’t have to schedule your dreams, your phobia attacks, your crises to correspond to Tuesday—Thursday appointment days. I’m here for you, day or night, help at hand. And you don’t have to pay for a fifty-minute hour. The moment a crisis hits, dial 1-900-Dr Phone.”

“Sure, maybe sometime.”

“You need help now, you idiot.”

“Why do you keep calling me names?”

“My active therapeutic style is suited to your passivity.”

Lockwood sighed unhappily. “Fine, don’t call me. I’ll call you.”

“Remember, I believe in you,” the voice was saying seductively as Lockwood disconnected.

He kept writing through the years. The thin notebook in his shirt pocket was full of tantalizing beginnings and provocative themes. He rose at four in the morning and sat at his desk until it was time to go to work as a copywriter at the Freidl and Perez advertising agency.

In the dark misty mornings, the fog from the sea crawled inland. It softened the silhouette of the hills and seemed to carry the sounds of the waves crashing on the rocks. Lockwood thought of it as the dreamer’s time, the moment for poetry, the space of the imagination. After a cup of strong French roast and a slice of baguette spread with Bonne Maman strawberry jam, he would open the small window beside his table and let in a rush of air, imagining he could smell the tide’s deposits of weeds and mollusks and rotting driftwood.

Brimming over with the warm well-being that came to him for doing the virtuous thing, for getting up in the morning, for doing the important work of his life first, Lockwood would prepare to write: three deep breaths. Ten fingers wriggle above the keyboard like hungry baby snakes. The back is straight for attack. The gift that goes unused will atrophy. He writes in order to write. Write first, think later. Appease the unseen reader. Hands up! Your words or your life. If the Muse betrays you, shoot the bitch. He considers the possibility that the 72,349 words of Two Loaves may be all he was born with—the cool sparks from two happy planets rubbing against each other during a cosmic nanosecond back there at the Workshop in the middle of the corny prairie, in his very own Year of Great Promise. He buries the thought. Somewhere there are reserves that can still be tapped, like the last precious organ cells that keep an anorexic alive.

“Who are you talking to, anyway?” Claire calls up again. “Your dinner’s getting cold.”

He waits until he is seated at the table. The steam from a bowl of pea soup clouds his glasses. “She’s dead, Claire. I can’t get over the reality that she’s gone.”