Friends (3 page)

Manuscripts come back and I continue to write. I finish another story collection in a year and my fourth novel in two years. The fourth novel continues where the trilogy left off, so I now not only have another novel to send around but also a tetralogy. Comments come back with my manuscripts. I start a new novel. Royalty checks from the early promising works of mine have stopped coming in. Anthologies that carried my early stories are now out of print. I am out of money. Utility companies are threatening to shut off my
gas, lights and phone. My landlord says tough as he knows life has been for me over the past ten years, he'll have to have my six months back rent or throw me out. I'm evicted. A city marshall breaks down my door and takes all my furniture and clothes away to sell for whatever he can get from them to pay back part of my rent. I try to keep my typewriter but two of the marshall's assistants pull it out of my hands. A locksmith puts new locks on my door and laughs when I ask for a set of the new keys. I'm left with several shopping bags of my manuscripts and what's in my pockets.

I sit on the front stoop of the building I lived in. The mailman comes, doesn't see my name on the letterbox anymore and drops a few envelopes of returned manuscripts on my lap and says goodluck. A woman brings me a sandwich and glass of water and says “I've heard you typing for years across the air shaft and wondered what you were writing—term papers for university students, hate letters to the mayor—but never figured it for fiction till the mailman just told me it was. I've always admired creative people in all fields and they have to eat no matter how much they're nourished by their pursuits, isn't that so?”

“They also need a place to live and work in, so would you please by any chance have a spare room for free for a couple months till I really get back on my feet?”

“That I think would be carrying my support for the arts a little too far,” and when I tell her I'm not hungry for her food now though do thank her for it, she takes the plate and glass home with her, leaving the sandwich in one of my shopping bags.

Night comes. I suddenly get a good idea for a short story. I take a pen and pad out of my pocket and begin writing it. A policeman pulls up in a car when I'm halfway through the story and says the landlord and a few tenants and neighbors complained about my sitting on the stoop for so long and
looking a bit seedy with all those bags and my worn work clothes, so I'll have to move.

I cross the street and sit on the sidewalk curb and finish the story. It's the first story I've written entirely by hand in twenty years. I tried to keep the writing neat and pages clean but it still doesn't look too good. The pen ran out of ink and when I continued to write the story by pencil, lead smudges along with my fingerprints soiled several pages.

I take one of the envelopes from my returned manuscripts, cross off my name on the front and write the name and address of a popular magazine and put the story in it and drop it in a mailbox. It probably won't get there without stamps and if it does and the magazine pays the postage due on the envelope rather than handing it back to the mailman, it probably won't get accepted, but you never know. The magazine might think it the best story I've sent them and give me a good deal of money for it and a contract to get first look at every story I write for the next few years. It's happened to other writers who have placed stories in that magazine and I never thought their work was any better than mine.

Suddenly an idea comes to me. The streetlight's bad where I sit and the weather's gotten windy and cold, so I find a quiet-enough bench at the bus terminal and begin a new novel that has no relationship to the last four. I write all night and the following day, nibbling on my sandwich sparingly to keep away debilitating hunger for as long as I can, and think this novel might end up being the best one I've written so far.

Friends

They're sitting at a bar. Floyd says “I have to tell you something, now that you brought up Gabe—something you might not want to hear.” “What, that he doesn't like it that I didn't like his novel?”

“He told me about it. It hurts him very much. Not that you didn't like it but that you dropped him cold right after it was published, without even writing him about the book when he sent you a copy.”

“He stole parts of it from one of my novels. I once—do you know the story?”

“He never mentioned anything about it. He just feels you couldn't face it or something that he got a book out before you, and because you still haven't published one, it's still bothering you.”

“Listen. He was once over my place for dinner with his girlfriend Pearl.”

“Pearl. Boy, that name brings back memories. Floods. But what happened?”

“He lived downtown then—well, still does, but at that time a block away from White Nights Press. So I asked if he'd drop my manuscript off—my novel
Flowers
, which was new then but I've since trunked.”

“That's right. She got married, to a doctor, has a kid, Gabe said.”

“Did she? Pearl? Anyway, I didn't want to send the novel
fourth class—it could take two weeks in this city—and first class would cost a few bucks.”

“So he took it to them for you.”

“Eventually. But that night, around two a.m., I couldn't believe it, phone rings—”

“Gabe calling saying how much he likes your novel.”

“He told you?”

“No, that's just the way he is and always has been. Gets a manuscript, starts reading—can't keep his hands off it, really—and if it's good, and I'm assuming yours was, and he's too tired to finish it but wants more time to—a few hours after he wakes up the next day when he's supposed to be bringing it to the publisher, let's say. That what happened?”

“Truth is, he didn't even have to call me about it. He could've brought it to them the day after the next—what would be the difference? It'd still be getting to White Nights earlier than it would if I sent it by mail.”

“But he was trying to give you confidence. Trying to say—saying it for all I know—and you must have been flattered and felt good and so on he called, even if he woke you up—that he likes it, he, another writer, and so much so that he's asking for more time so he can finish it—time when he would normally be writing himself.”

“Sure he liked it and needed more time. Liked it enough to steal from it and needed more time to photocopy or type parts of it. Not whole paragraphs and sentences. But two or three characters and several ideas and scenes, all changed a little, and a lot of dialogue changed even less—but distinctive dialogue, not hello and goodbye dialogue; but idiosyncratic dialogue.”

“That he never said. None of it.”

“Of course not. Why would he?”

“Still, why didn't you at least say thanks for the complimentary copy of his book? ‘Congratulations'—after all, it
was his first published book—and that you were reading it. Then, maybe some day later after you had really done some comparison research on the two novels, taken him up on the parts you thought he swiped.”

“You still don't see why I dropped him cold?”

“I see, I see, from your perspective, but you don't know what you did to him. And the guy's in such awful physical state that I also don't want to see him emotionally hurt. I in fact want to see him emotionally built up. But maybe, to be fair to both of you, the important thing to ask you now is how much time elapsed between his taking your manuscript to White Nights—I assume they weren't that interested in it if it was never published.”

“I said so, they rejected it, not even a peep. Just ‘Thanks very much'—not even saying they'll be glad to look at my next novel if there's one, which editors usually say. Now I don't care—then I did. I don't even know if I like it anymore, and I've stolen parts of it, consciously or unconsciously, out of it myself.”

“Any of the parts that you say ended up in Gabe's book?”

“Some, and also the idea that he took from my novel. Put it into another novel. But there I said sentence for sentence what Abe, a character who's very much like Gabe, took from the narrator's manuscript, which the narrator then had to trunk. That novel was sent all around too.”

“White Nights see it?”

“Sure. Also the same editor Gabe had at his publisher, but if he recognized anything, he never said it. But what do you think I should do with Gabe now? After four years of not talking to him since he sent me his book, I should write him about it, give him a call, apologize?”

“It'd be nice. And without saying you thought he stole from your novel. Anyway, by this time you should just forget that.”

“No, I couldn't write or call him about that book. It still sticks in my throat.”

“Want another drink?”

“I think I've had it.”

“Dave,” Floyd says to the bartender, “another for me, a fresh soda in back; I think he's finished. —So, do me a favor and yourself one too. He's more than just sick. He's deteriorated pitifully in the last two years. By the way he looks and what someone said the doctors say about him, he isn't going to last another year. He's too weak most days to leave his apartment and some days to leave his bed. He's living off Welfare and Medicare and what money the writing organizations give him from their emergency funds. But still trickling out his fiction—not getting any of it published—and some articles for the
Voice.”

“I've seen them. Throwbacks to the Fifties and Sixties.”

“He's only writing them for money and to keep his name in print, so he'd mostly agree with you. But call him, don't write. Say you just read his book a second time and realize what a shit you've been about it all these years. You don't have to explain. Just talk about how good's his book. He's been carrying this sore for a long time and it'll make him happy. And you know, outside of what you say he did to you, I've never heard anything but the best things about what he's done for others.”

“I don't have a copy. I gave mine away after I read it.”

“So what? All I want you to do is praise. Call him now, in fact. From the phone over there. While I drink, you call. He loves your work, you know.”

“Does he? What's he looking for, another of my unpublished manuscripts?”

“Don't be mean. He likes your work a lot and feels lousy you still haven't a book out. And he's done what he could for you—without telling you and despite your silence; even
wrote several book editors in your behalf, he said. That was nice of him. Most writers don't go out of their way for other writers like that—you've said so yourself.”

“He sort of owes it to me, no? Because I'd say fifty pages of that six-hundred-page book of his had some of my stuff in it—that's why I stopped sending my novel around. I thought anyone who had read his book—”

“Not many did, so little chance of that.”

“But if someone had, he'd have said he'd read something like this before—parts of it—and word might have got around that I plagiarized Gabe's book and then no publisher would have looked at my work again.”

“You got them down as too scrupulous. Anyway, it's over, past—illness makes it over if anything—so call him now, because if you don't, you never will. What do you say?”

“I hate that he's so sick, but calling him still isn't easy.”

“Come on.”

“Okay.”

He goes to the back and dials Gabe's number. Gabe answers weakly. “It's Will, Gabe—long time no talk and all that—but how's it going?”

“How's it going? Will who? Not Taub.”

“The same. Haven't changed my name.”

“Well I'll be. I thought you were dead.”

“You mean you wished I was dead.”

“Actually, I knew you weren't and of course I'd never wish it. Floyd says he keeps running into you—I bet it was he who told you to call.”

“Truth is, that's true. You know me—could never tell a lie. He said you weren't feeling too good, which I'm very sorry about—I hate to see anybody I know sick—so I'm calling. Look, he also said something I'm not supposed to say to you—”

“That I was angry you never wrote me about my first
book. That it hurt me.”

“Right. Listen, I'm sorry. If you can keep this a secret between us two—meaning, not tell Floyd I said this, because he'll only think I was trying to hurt you again, which I'm not, believe me, I'm not—I didn't write you then because I was mad as hell at you for lifting certain scenes and dialogue and even two characters from my own novel
Flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Come on, you know the one. The novel I asked you to bring to White Nights because you lived around the corner from them then. And you called up that night—early in the morning, really—”

“Oh yeah. But you thought I stole from that piece of crap? You've got to be mistaken. If I'm going to steal from something—”

“‘Crap'? You called me at two or three in the morning—it's what I'm talking about—and said you loved it—loved the first hundred pages of it, at least—as much as anything you've read of anyone's in the last ten years—and could I give you another half day to finish it.”

“I said that? Bull. It's true I started to read it—on the subway home that night. I was with Pearl—remember Pearl?”

“Floyd said she got married and had a kid.”

“Sure she got married. To a rich man—the kind she always wanted, the whore. I hope she's unhappy. Not the baby, but just she. She's a bitch—was, is, always will be.”

“I thought she was kind of nice. Almost too good for you, if you want to know what I felt then. Too good for me too, if I can be—”

“Too good for anyone. A goddamn snob. Good riddance to her forever. I've known ten better women since. Prettier, better, smarter—everything. But about your piece of trash
Flowers
, if that was its title. So that's what you must tell
people why you cut me off flat. Well let me tell you, baby, I read twenty pages of that manuscript on the subway home—if you ever see that bitch Pearl again, ask her. She'll corroborate, if she hasn't also become a liar, that I thought it trash then and wanted to toss it out the train window—even made believe I was going to and she had to grab my arm to stop me—not that I'd go that far. You would have killed me. But I read about twenty pages and told her that anyone who could write this badly will never be able to write well in his entire life. And I still think it. Your work since—what I've seen of it in small magazines—stinks. God only knows why they print it. Just tells me what I've thought all along about them—the little magazines have no taste, it's all in and who you know and the rest of that crap.”