Foul Matter (31 page)

“And here comes our Ned.” Candy righted himself and turned his back.

At the far end of the lobby, Sally watched Ned walk from the elevator to the bar. She’d been watching the bar over the top of a magazine. What was Clive talking to those two men about? They were the two who’d lately started coming to Swill’s. Who in hell were they? They were turning up everywhere. All of this was so confusing. On top of this, she could have sworn she’d seen Saul in Schenley Park.

In the mirror over the bar, Clive saw Ned sit down in a booth in the corner. There were three small tables embraced by the shadows for people who didn’t care to sit at the bar. Guests occupied the other two tables also. No, just one table. He could have sworn there was a man sitting at the third table when he’d first looked . . . but it must have been just a mess of shadows he had seen.

And wasn’t this just like Ned Isaly? Sit in this gray area, be only half there, which was nearer the truth than not. Fugue state. Writer’s coma. Or whatever the hell it was that had writers legging it out of this sorry old world alone, yes, but aloneness had never before looked so tempting. Maybe there was a parallel world where characters were like the several of them in Schenley Park, more or less exposed “to a divining eye.” Clive shook his head. Christ, he must be drunk if he was quoting Emily Dickinson. With his fourth Scotch sitting sunnily before him—Bobby’s contract goons must have bought a round—Clive settled in to imagine a writer’s day and found he couldn’t. He couldn’t get any further than a cup of coffee by the notebook or typewriter. He couldn’t get past the blank page. He felt his shoulder gripped and an unwelcome voice exclaiming, “Clive, man!”

Dwight Staines. Oh, hell. Since Candy and Karl both greeted Dwight he would now have to introduce them since Dwight could not get through an encounter unless everyone present knew he was a best-selling author.

“Monumentally best-selling author,” said Clive, while Dwight pretended a humility he neither felt nor could stick to.

“Hey, we read your book—”

Clive seriously doubted it. He turned away as Dwight droned on. He must be the writer laymen imagined: talking constantly about what you wrote, and why, and how (pen and ink? typewriter? computer?), talking constantly of your experiences, admonishing your rapt pupils to write write write.

God! Don’t tell them that! Tell them their chances of getting published were less than zero; tell them getting an agent was almost as impossible, since agents wouldn’t take on unpublished writers (a catch-22 dilemma that had always delighted Clive). Clive was always being cornered at cocktail parties by round young people who seemed to think one word from him would be the open sesame to publishing. “Where,” they would ask, “should I send it?” To which Clive would reply, “Into the great beyond and the sweet hereafter.” He loved the uncertain looks this reply called up. The unconvinced would keep it up: “No, but where?” “Nowhere, not a chance, nil, nix, zero.” They were greatly offended, either because he hadn’t offered to read what they’d written (or had an idea to write) or because they’d been caught out in their fantasy: editor likes it, publisher buys it, reviewers love it, fame and fortune follow.

The total lack of understanding of what writing was about never ceased to astonish Clive. No one would have expected a plumber, an electrician, a mechanic to proceed along the lines these wannabe writers did. Imagine a mechanic saying, “Hey, I’m gonna take this Porsche apart” without knowing the difference between a steering column and a brake pad.

A person like Ned Isaly (Clive surprised himself by thinking). Ned, who sat over there in the shadows with his notebook, whose thoughts were anywhere but here in the bar of the Hilton, who did not think of best-seller lists or six-figure advances, who was lucky enough—good enough, that is—to have an editor like Tom Kidd, who himself didn’t think of these things, who didn’t press notions of money and fame on his writers and who didn’t encourage them to seek them, who never spoke of promotion or publicity. These things were not Tom’s job.

Unlike Clive, who acquired books—an “acquisitions editor” (an appellation that should shame him into speechlessness). Some of the books he acquired, he edited “lightly.” He did not edit with ease; he hardly edited at all other than to speak in relatively safe generalities. The trouble was (and he could not recall ever admitting this) his belief in himself was very frail; he was simply not good enough to take a manuscript and improve it. That’s why he’d assigned himself to best-selling drivel, Dwight Staines drivel. He was at least bright enough to know what was wrong with Dwight Staines.

Clive took another sip of his drink. Behind him Dwight was still going at it, hammer and tongs, talking about his new book. Candy and Karl were both talking about collaborating on a book and Staines was giving his pithy advice on that subject.

At the same time, on the other side of Dwight, Blaze Pascal was getting up with her book and her cigarettes. She walked over to Ned’s table.

(“Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.” What was all of this poetry about? And who was Helen? Helen of Troy? Or someone who had simply wandered in off the street to sit in his mind? An enormous, empty room, except for the one chair—Queen Anne?—she sat in. She simply sat.)

What was Blaze doing? He could not hear what she said, but he did know she was offering Ned a book—that is, Clive assumed it was Ned’s book
Solace
that she was asking him to autograph. Ned reached over with his pen and signed it and smiled. She kept on standing there talking to him. Good manners must have dictated that he ask her to sit down, which she did. Another round of drinks was ordered.

She refused to meet Clive’s eye. “Refusal” was what he wanted to think. Actually, she probably wasn’t aware that he was staring at her. What was she up to? What was she doing? What she was doing was, apparently, picking Ned up.

Sally looked up from her magazine and saw Ned and the woman with red hair walking through the lobby, moving in her direction. Quickly, she raised the magazine to cover her face. She’d been sitting here ever since Ned had gone into the bar. She’d been sitting here for what felt like hours. Bored, she had gotten careless of anyone’s recognizing her.

As they passed, Sally could see the redhead was carrying a copy of
Solace.
Ned, Ned! Surely you didn’t fall for that cheap trick! That “would-you-please-autograph-this?” ploy! But they were standing by the bank of elevators, both of them, obviously going somewhere together and the somewhere that the elevators could take you was up. Sally did not know what to do. Probably she would just go upstairs and order through room service.

Clive had left the three sitting at the bar just after he’d watched Ned and Blaze walk out. He had no idea why Blaze thought this particular approach was needed by way of “keeping an eye on him,” but it certainly met the criteria, he supposed. He got off the elevator and walked down the corridor lit by tiny lights that made it look almost as if dusk were settling in. Clive caught a flash of blond curls when a head poked out of a door as if checking on the cause of some disturbance. Down farther, a hand adjusted the DO NOT DISTURBsign and he thought he saw a flash of red hair. At the far end of the hall (which gave onto another corridor), the man in the cashmere coat came out of a room and disappeared around the corner.

Sweet Christ! Were they all on the same floor? Even the same corridor? Had the clerk, in her madcap way, kept them all together?

His watch told him it was nearly ten. How could that possibly be? How in the world had he spent all of that time in the bar, and not happily, either? He ordered coffee and a
croque monsieur
from room service, undressed, and fell into bed. The waiter came and left as in a dream. Dipping into sleep and coming out again and dozing off again, he wondered if he could stay awake long enough to eat the sandwich.

He heard singing.

It wasn’t that the voices were loud; rather that the voices were the cutting kind that slid as easily through doors and walls as a knife through butter. Clive was glad he’d left before the fraternity party began. The voices drew closer, nearing his door. So Dwight, Candy, and Karl must be up here, too.

As they passed Clive’s door they even threw in a little harmony, as if to say to him, What the crap difference does it make if we can’t write? We can
sing
!

N
ed stood outside of another Isaly’s, the small store set within a line of other small stores—a bookshop, a Tru-Value hardware store, two little dress shops—wondering if he wanted another pistachio ice cream cone and then wondering if that’s what he ate when he was eight years old. Probably not. His taste probably wasn’t adventure-some then; probably he stuck to chocolate or maybe cherry. But he didn’t remember.

He wished he hadn’t been so careless of the past. You always started too late saving things, collecting things, keeping a journal. His parents had died within a year of each other and he was orphaned. Everyone made sure he was aware of this particular disgrace, as if he’d been careless with his parents as well as with the past and now look what happened. Beneath the arrangements of sad expression, he had felt their disapproval.

What Ned remembered of his childhood was not love, but solace for the lack of it and solace had come in many forms. Even though he couldn’t have seen them, there were Forbes Field and Jackie Robinson and Stan Musial, his bat unwinding like a snake; there was Panther Hollow and East Liberty; there was dawn smog, afternoon smog that darkened the whole city at noon—no, this could not possibly have been his own memory but memory in a picture in a book. But still there had been wonderful, unbreathable Pittsburgh!

And there was the occasional visit to his well-to-do relations in Sewickley. They were very proud and very severe and they kept servants. They were the Broadwaters and were referred to in that way as if “Broadwater” were a fiefdom. Ned remembered the dining-room table and the buzzer beneath it by which Isabel Broadwater would summon the maid, who would appear with the next course. He especially recalled that dinnertime when the buzzer had been pushed following the soup, but no one had come with the lamb. Isabel Broadwater’s thundery demeanor refused any of the diners’ going out to fetch it. Suddenly the cook appeared wringing her hands to tell her mistress the dire news that the maid had died: as she had been carrying the lamb she had slipped down to the floor. “And the lamb?” Isabel Broadwater had asked with a raised eyebrow.