I tried for a look that said, It means nothing to me , but what I wanted to do was close my eyes and suffer. Jesus, I thought… oh, man ! That book is simply not to be found. Stories like that are what make up the business. A dealer in photography hands a pretty ragamuffin a thousand-dollar book, so desirable it’s almost like cash, and all because he hasn’t taken the time to learn the high spots of modern fiction.
The waitress brought our food. Eleanor reached for the salt and I saw the scar on her wrist. It was a straight slash, too even to have been done by accident.
At some time in her past, Eleanor Rigby had tried to kill herself, with a razor blade.
“So,” she said, in that tone people use when they’re changing the subject, “where were you heading when I shanghaied you in the rain?”
“Wherever the wind blows.”
“Hey, that’s where I’m going! Are you married?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ever been?”
“Not that I can remember. Who’d put up with me?”
“Probably one or two girls I know. D’you have any bad habits?”
“Well, I don’t smoke.”
“Beat your women?”
“Not if they do what I tell them.”
She laughed. “God, a nonsmoker with a boss complex. I may marry you myself. Don’t laugh, Mr. Janeway, I’ve lived my whole life on one whim after another. Have you ever been at loose ends?”
“Once, I think, about twenty years ago.”
“Well, I live that way. My whole life’s a big loose end. I go where the wind blows. If the natives are friendly, I stay awhile and warm myself in the sun. So where’s the wind blowing you?”
“Phoenix,” I said—the first place that popped into my mind.
“Oh, lovely. Lots of sun there—not many books, though, from what I’ve heard. I’d probably have to work for a living, which doesn’t thrill me, but nothing’s perfect. How would you like some company?”
“You’ve decided to go to Phoenix?”
“Why not, I’ve never been there. Why couldn’t I go if I wanted to?”
She was looking right down my throat. She really is like Rita, I thought: she had that same hard nut in her heart that made it so difficult to lie to her.
“What do you suppose would happen,” she said, “if we just turned around and headed south. Strangers in the night, never laid eyes on each other till an hour ago. Just go, roll the dice, see how long we could put up with each other.”
“Would you do that?”
“I might.” She thought about it, then shook her head. “But I can’t.”
“Ah.”
“I’ve been known to do crazier things. I’ve just got something else on my agenda right now.”
“What’s that?”
“Can’t talk about it. Besides, it’s too long a story. My whole life gets messed up in it and I don’t think you’ve got time for that.”
“I’ve got nothing but time.”
“None of us has that much time.”
She was feeling better now, I could see it in her face. Food, one of the most intimate things after the one most intimate thing, had worked its spell again. “Oh, I needed that,” she said. “Yeah, I was hungry.”
“I’m glad you decided to stick around.”
“Sorry about that. I just have a bad reaction to that song.”
“I think it’s a great song.”
“I’m sure it is. But it gives me the willies.”
“Why would it do that?”
“Who’s to say? Some things you can’t explain.”
Then, as if she hadn’t been listening to her own words, she said, “I’ve got a stalker in my life.”
She shook her head. “Forget I said that. I’m tired…at the end of my rope. Sometimes I say things…”
I stared at her, waiting.
“Sometimes he calls me and plays that song.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“I know him by sight, I don’t know his name. Obviously he knows mine.” She shivered deeply. “I don’t talk about this. But you’ve been such a dear…I can’t have you thinking I’m crazy.”
“Have you called the cops?”
She shook her head. “Cops don’t seem to be able to do much with people like that.”
“If he’s harassing you on the phone, they can catch him. The time it takes to trace a call these days is pretty short; damn near no time at all.”
“So they’d catch him. They’d bring him in and charge him with something minor, some nothing charge that would only stir him up.”
“How long has he been doing this?”
She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “Not long, a few weeks. But it seems like years.”
“You can’t put up with that. You’ve got to protect yourself.”
“Like…get a gun, you mean?”
I let that thought speak for itself.
She sighed. “I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
The strange thing was, I believed her.
“Do you have any idea what he wants?”
“I think I know what he wants. But just now I would like to please change the subject. Let’s get back to happy talk.” She cocked her head as if to say, Enough, already . “Those wet clothes must feel awful.”
“I’ve been wet so long it feels like dry to me. What was that guy’s name?”
“That’s more like it. His name was Richard Farina.”
“Is his book worth anything?”
“Mmmm, yeah,” she said in a singsong voice. “Hundred dollars maybe. I wouldn’t kick it out in the rain.”
The waitress came and left the check.
Eleanor looked at me hard. “So tell me who you really are and what you’re doing. I mean, you appear out of the night, kindness personified, you walk into my life when I’ve never been lonelier, you’re going where the wind blows but you don’t have a change of clothes. What are you running away from?”
“Who said I’m running away?”
“We’re all running away. Some of us just don’t get very far. Yours must be some tragic love affair for you to run with only the clothes on your back. What was her name?”
“Rita,” I said, suddenly inspired. “It’s funny, she was a book person, a lot like you.”
“No kidding!”
“The same only different.” I fiddled with the check. “She’d love that story you told me.”
“The book world is full of stories like that. Books are everywhere, and some of them are valuable for the craziest reasons. A man gets put on an Iranian hit list. His books go up in value. A guy writes a good book, a guy writes a bad book. Both are worth the same money on the collector’s market. A third guy writes a great book and nobody cares at all. The president of the United States mentions in passing that he’s a Tom Clancy fan and suddenly this guy’s book shoots into the Hemingway class as a collectible. And that president is Ronald Reagan , for God’s sake. Does that make any sense?”
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
“It defies logic, but that’s the way it is today. People latch onto some new thing and gorge themselves on it, and the first guy out of the gate becomes a millionaire. Maybe Clancy is a master of techno-babble. Do you care? To me he couldn’t create a character if his damn life depended on it. You watch what I say, though, people will be paying a thousand dollars for that book before you know it. Then the techno-babble rage will pass. It’ll fade faster than yesterday’s sunset and the focus will move on to something else, probably the female private detective. And that’ll last a few years, till people begin to gag on it. Meanwhile, it takes a real writer like Anne Tyler half a career to catch on, and James Lee Burke can’t even find a publisher for ten years.”
“How do you learn so much so young?”
“I was born in it. I’ve been around books all my life. When I was fourteen, I’d ditch class and thumb my way into Seattle and just lose myself in the bookstores. So I’ve had six or seven years of good hard experience. It’s like anything else—eventually you meet someone who’s willing to show you the ropes. Then one day you realize you know more about it than your teacher does—you started out a pupil, like Hemingway with Gertrude Stein, and now you’ve taken it past anything the teacher can do with it. And it comes easier if you’ve had a head start.”