Friends (4 page)

“You're just saying this because you're too damn ashamed—did I say ashamed? I mean you're too damn gutless to admit that you lifted from my manuscript. You read the whole thing all right. You had to to steal one of the characters who doesn't appear till my novel's last scene. You even stole that idea.”

“What idea?”

“That a character—an important one to the denouement of the novel—”

“Oh, ‘denouement' now. Big words from a small mind.”

“—doesn't appear till the very last scene in your novel. But whole sections lifted. Dialogue—almost word for word sometimes. The way your main character made love to his wife—every Saturday, exactly at midnight, while my main character did it every day but Sunday and exactly at eleven. And that both our couples always used the same position when they made love—yours not much different from mine—and that the girlfriend in my novel would never take off her earrings in bed while the wife in your novel wouldn't take off her stockings or socks.”

“What, you invented all the sex in the world—you invented the clock? The clock's been invented and so have all the positions and sexual peculiarities and hang-ups.”

“Listen, this phone conversation is a bust. You know what I'm saying but you're intentionally distorting it to protect yourself. I'm sorry you're ill and I hope—and this is the truth—you get well again and sooner the better, but somehow your lousy situation right now isn't enough to make me forgive you for what you did.”

“Bull and more bull. You're just angry, and are also trying to do some double number on me when you couldn't get me to admit to the first, because your own novel wasn't good enough to get published, just as none of your longer works have been. While at least one of my fat novels, which was equal in size to about three of your midgets, not only got published but by a major house. For you know damn well I never lifted anything from you. If I did take a line or word or two from the first twenty pages, then it was subconscious. But I doubt even that happened because I think everything in those first twenty pages wasn't good enough to take.”

“Again, I hope you get better, Gabe, and I'm sorry for the tough time you've had recently, but I also think you're a liar and a thief. Goodbye,” and he hangs up.

“So, how'd it go?” Floyd says, handing Will a drink. “I knew you'd need one after your call, so I ordered a brandy for you—French and straight up.”

“Thanks. I do need it. How'd it go? Okay. He sounded weak in the very beginning but then his voice got really robust. I told him I reread his book and liked it and he said thanks. But everything overall, he doesn't seem well.”

“Did he give you the business about his living another ten years but not later than that?”

“Something like it, I think.”

“He's imagining it. I've had a couple of discussions about
him with his last live-in, Cecily.”

“I don't think I knew that one.”

“You wouldn't have. She dropped him about half a year ago—moved out, they were battling all the time—but still comes over with food and things and clean laundry sometimes. She said the doctors definitely think—but I mentioned this before, didn't I?—oh damn,” and he starts crying. He wipes his eyes with his bar napkin, then his face with his handkerchief.

“Yeah, you told me. I'm sorry. I can't say the world of letters is losing a great writer—I shouldn't even talk about it that way. He's a good writer and once was very good, but the world in general is just, well, losing a very nice guy, mostly. Whatever, it's just awful when someone so young–”

“It's disgraceful. A cure will be found for his disease-you'll see-two to three years after he goes. It happened with my sister and it'll happen to him. To Gabe, right?” holding up his glass. “To Gabe Peabody, a hell of a good writer—
still
, I think; even with the crap he has to produce, it's still better written than most anybody's—and let's face it, one of the most decent courageous guys around.”

“I can drink to that.” They drink.

“Then it's all straightened out with him?”

“Straightened out? Sure. Well. Listen, Floyd, why am I lying to you? Lie to you, lie to everybody—I just ought to stop. I called Gabe with good intentions, but once I heard his voice and we started talking, I got upset about what he did with my manuscript then. So I—”

“You didn't. Brought it up? You told him off?”

“That's what I did. I called him a thief and worse. But do you know what he had the balls to tell me?”

“You're a bastard, do you know that? For do you realize how sick he is? Kicking the goddamn guy like that when he's so far down?”

“Listen, I know Gabe too and I thought he'd appreciate the truth more—or just what I was thinking more—the grudge I've held—than some b.s. about how much I liked his book. But you know what he said about my manuscript? That he never—”

“I don't want to hear. Dave,” he yells to the bartender. “Please, I have to go. Will a twenty take care of it?”

Dave nods. Floyd puts two tens on the bar, gets his coat off the hook behind them and heads for the door.

“Well, I just don't think an illness, no matter how severe—” Will's saying to Floyd's back. “Oh, maybe if he was on his deathbed,” but Floyd's out the door.

Will grabs his coat and runs after him. He catches up with him a half-block away. “Listen to me, Floyd—I told Gabe the truth, the truth, because the issue has been with me a long time. Because my gripe I thought was as big as his—that he stole and didn't apologize. Even bigger. That I didn't write him was the least of what I wanted to do then. I wanted to sue him. Did for a couple of years. I wanted to turn him in to every writing organization there was. You don't know—you're not a writer—what it's like to write something for two-plus years and then have some guy—a friend—copy from it left and right and make your manuscript useless.”

“You could have rewritten and changed the parts you say he took from. So it would have taken awhile. But it would have saved the manuscript and for all you know, made it better. Anything can stand more work.”

“He took the best parts. I would have had to change the whole tone or something. He took the spirit out of that novel or just out of me. Whatever he did, I just couldn't go back to it.”

“Maybe then, but now?”

“Now it's old stuff to me. I'm doing other things in other
ways—I couldn't imitate that style anymore. That's what happens.”

“You say. Maybe you should get over the idea that you can't. Anyway, you know your business, but what I want from you right now is to call him. That's right—don't look at me as if I'm nuts. There's a booth there. If the phone's working, call him and apologize. Even if you don't mean it—though you should—say you're sorry. You lost your head, you didn't mean what you said, you realize he didn't steal from your book. Maybe a line here, a word there, but so what?—and you were just drunk or something before. Not ‘something'; you drank too much tonight and said those things out of some drunkenness or some blind rage against something else that's been bothering you, but it wasn't what you know is true.”

“He'll know you put me up to it. I already told him you told me to call him to say what a great book he wrote—”

Floyd swings at him, grazes his forehead, lunges at him again with his arm cocked but Will steps back and walks the other way, saying with his back to Floyd “It's just what I always thought about life. Not always but for a long time. People don't want to—oh the hell with it.”

“Of course they don't in certain situations, you idiot,” Floyd shouts. “You bastard. You goddamn pitiless sonofa-bitch and your goddamn pitiless truth. Sure, keep walking, but no wonder your writing smells.”

Will goes into the bar, says to Dave “If you think you don't want me in here because of the commotion I made before, tell me and I'll go.”

“No, it's okay. Only don't get so loud again if you don't mind. Brandy?”

“Right. A double. Not the expensive kind Floyd ordered; just the house stuff.” He drinks two doubles, turns it all over in his mind several times. Maybe I was wrong. No, I was
right. Stealing from an unpublished manuscript is bad news—unforgivable if the person who stole it doesn't acknowledge it. I should call him. He should have called me. Ages ago. But I gave away Floyd's secret. So what's he complaining about? I made him look like an even nicer guy to Gabe. But Gabe's dying, Floyd says. Maybe he is. Let's say he is. No, he is—everyone says he is. They say I wouldn't recognize him even if I made an appointment to meet him someplace and he showed up at the exact spot at the right time. That he's lost maybe thirty pounds and he was always thin. All right. I did the wrong thing. I couldn't control myself. That's how I am. No, that's not good enough. Floyd was right about everything. I have to apologize to him when he gets home. Call him in five minutes. And Gabe. Call him and apologize for everything—say you were drunk—and then call Floyd and say you called Gabe and apologized just the way he asked you to.

He goes to the phone, calls Gabe. Gabe says “Yes?”

“Listen, Gabe, it's Will.”

Hangs up. Calls back. “Gabe, don't hang up. I apologize. I was drunk. I'm a schmuck. I didn't mean what I said at all. I was mad about some other things and took it out on you. This woman I was seeing—she dumped me. I've been bitter and depressed about it for weeks and have been dumping on everyone since because of it.”

“Whew. Nice excuse. You're a writer. Writers usually have good excuses. I should know. I've got good excuses too when I need them—to me, to the people I'm excusing myself to. Fine. I accept your apology. I accept it because I'm not a big grudgeholder and because it took a lot to call back. Floyd obviously pressured you into it, but it still took a lot.”

“Floyd won't even speak to me now. He tried to slug me after I told him what I told you. But literally—threw a punch.”

“Really? That's very flattering. Floyd's a good guy; you and I, we're not such good guys. Hey, I think we should talk more, Will, but now^ not the time. You want to have lunch soon?”

“Sure, when? Why don't you come to my place? I'll make us something.”

“I can't get around much.”

“I'll send a cab and pay for it too. Call it part of my apology.”

“You'd do that? My old pals are really coming through for me tonight. But you're so apologetic, so guilty. Never saw you like that.”

“That's right, I am. But I'll do it. I want to forget what happened. Let's say we worked it out. Have we?”

“I think this phone conversation has done something to that effect.”

“Then, and I'm saying this in all sincerity and without any animosity, admit to me something too. You stole, didn't you?”

“If I said yes, just to see what you'd say, I know you'd call me the worst names going. You're wily and changeable like that. But I'll say yes, I did steal, just to see what you'll say.”

“No, the truth. Say it without those added things. Did you or did you not steal from
Flowers?
And not just a few words or sentences from it. I'm talking about whole characters and parts. You read the whole thing. You had to have.”

“I read twenty, at the most thirty to thirty-five pages on the subway as I said. And skip-reading. You're asking too much to think anyone could read it any other way or read more.”

“Look, I'm not going to prosecute or hold you to it after this call. It's all over. My novel's junked. I just want to know for my own satisfaction.”

“And I've told you. If it doesn't satisfy you, what can I say?”

“Forget the lunch invitation.”

“Think I would have come even in a chauffeured-driven car? You'd put poison in the food. For both of us. You're suicidal. You hate life because you can't write and you've never really been published and so you want to take everyone with you.”

“You didn't call that night, right, to say how much you loved the first half of my novel? What did you call for—to put me off-guard?”

“What are you talking about again that I called? You're crazy, baby. See a doctor,” and he hangs up.

Will calls Floyd and says “Floyd, it's me, give me a few seconds, but you know Gabe's out of his head, don't you?”

“No I don't,” and he hangs up.

Will calls back and says “It's me again, I shouldn't have said what I did, but do you have Pearl's number?”

“Haven't I made it clear? I don't want to talk to you.”

“All right, you don't, and no doubt for good reason, but do you have her number or the name of her husband and city they live in if she isn't in the Manhattan directory and neither of them live here?”

“They live here, I don't know if she still has her old name or is in the book. But his is Charnoff, spelled the way it sounds I'd guess, a Mt. Sinai doctor, Gabe said, and since he also teaches there and has an office on upper Fifth, I'd say he lives around there too. You going to call her and make her feel like hell too?”

“You might disagree with me, but I want to know what happened with my manuscript back then, but once and for all. I just want to know how much he read and could possibly have stolen from it. If I find out in his favor, I'll apologize up and down the line to him. To him and you—a public apology if I have to—in the sky, any place, that he wasn't out of his head but it was me.”

“No you won't. Your problem is even if you find out the truth—”

“I swear it's not. Listen, I'm sorry and I know we'll be good friends again after this but probably not that soon. Goodnight.” He hangs up before Floyd can say anything else, dials Information, gets Charnoff s home number and calls. Pearl answers.