There were only five or six women in the crowd, as far as I could tell. One of them watched me as I edged through the bodies. I couldn’t help noticing her noticing me. She was in her late forties, severely weathered, staring openly as I neared her. It wasn’t till she spoke, “Billy?” that I recognized the voice. Not the face; even then, not the face. Just the voice, which hadn’t changed.
I stopped and stared back. “Dee?”
She smiled no kind of smile at all, a mere stricture of courtesy. “How are you, Billy?”
“I’m fine. How’re you? What’s happening, what’re you doing these days?”
“I’m living in Woodstock. Cormick and I got divorced; I’m doing books for Avon.”
I hadn’t seen anything with her name on it for some time. Those who haunt the newsstands and bookstores out of years of habit are like sidewalk cafe Greeks unable to stop fingering their worry beads. I would have seen her name.
She caught the hesitation. “Gothics. I’m doing them under another name.”
This time the smile was nasty and it said: you’ve had the last laugh; yes, I’m selling my talent cheap; I hate myself for it; I’ll slice my wrists in this conversation before I’ll permit you to gloat. What’s more offensive than being successful when they always dismissed you as the least of their set, and they’ve dribbled away all the promise and have failed? Nothing. They would eat the air you breathe. Bierce: SUCCESS, n . The one unpardonable sin against one’s fellows. Unquote.
“Look me up if you get to Los Angeles,” I said. She didn’t even want to try that one. She turned back to the three-way conversation behind her. She took the arm of an elegant man with a thick, gray mop of styled Claude Rains hair. He was wearing aviator-style eyeglasses, wrap-arounds, tinted auburn. Dee hung on tight. That wouldn’t last long. His suits were too well-tailored. She looked like a tattered battle flag. When had they all settled for oblivion?
Edwin Charrel was coming toward me from the opposite side of the room. He still owed me sixty dollars from ten years before. He wouldn’t have forgotten. He’d lay a long, guilt-oozing story on me, and try to press a moist five bucks into my hand. Not now; really , not now; not on top of Leo Norris and Dee Miller and all those crinkled elbows. I turned a hard right, smiled at a mom-and-pop writing team sharing the same glass of vodka, and worked my way to the wall. I kept to the outside and began to circumnavigate. My mission: to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Everyone knows, it’s harder to hit a moving target.
And miles to go before I sleep.
The back wall was dominated by a sofa jammed with loud conversations. But the crowd in the center of the room had its collective back to the babble, so there was a clear channel across to the other side. I made the move. Charrel wasn’t even in sight, so I made the move. No one noticed, no one gave a gardyloo, no one tried to buttonhole me. I made the move. I thought I was halfway home. I started to turn the corner, only one wall to go before the breeze, the door, and out. That was when the old man motioned to me from the easy chair.
The chair was wedged into the rear corner of the room, at an angle to the sofa. Big, overstuffed, colorless thing. He was deep in the cushions. Thin, wasted, tired-looking, eyes a soft, watery blue. He was motioning to me. I looked behind me, turned back. He was motioning to me . I walked over and stood there above him.
“Sit down.”
There wasn’t anywhere to sit. “I was just leaving.” I didn’t know him.
“Sit down, we’ll talk. There’s time.”
A spot opened at the end of the sofa. It would have been rude to walk away. He nodded his head at the open spot. So I sat down. He was the most exhausted-looking old man I’d ever seen. Just stared at me.
“So you write a little,” he said. I thought he was putting me on. I smiled, and he said, “What’s your name?”
I said, “Billy Landress.”
He tested that for a moment, silently. “William. On the books it’s William.”
I chuckled. “That’s right. William on the books. It’s better for the lending libraries. Classier. Weightier.” I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing softly. Not to myself, right into his face. He didn’t smile back, but I knew he wasn’t taking offense. It was a bemusing conversation.
“And you’re …?”
“Marki,” he said; be paused, then added, “Marki Strasser.”
Still smiling, I said, “Is that the name you write under?”
He shook his head. “I don’t write any more. I haven’t written in a long time.”
“Marki,” I said, lingering on the word, “Marki Strasser. I don’t think I’ve read any of your work. Mystery fiction?”
“Primarily. Suspense, a few contemporary novels, nothing terribly significant. But tell me about you.”
I settled back into the sofa. “I have the feeling, sir, that you’re amused by me.”
His soft, blue eyes stared back at me without a trace of guile. There was no smile anywhere in that face. Tired; old and terribly tired. “We’re all amusing, William. Except when we get too old to take care of ourselves, when we get too old to keep up. Then we cease to be amusing. You don’t want to talk about yourself?”
I spread my hands in surrender. I would talk about myself. He may have conceived of himself as too old to be amusing, but he was a fascinating old man nonetheless. He was a good listener. And the rest of the room faded, and we talked. I told him about myself, about life on the Coast, the plots of my books, in précis , what it took to adapt a suspense novel for the screen.
Body language is interesting. On the most primitive level, even those unfamiliar with the unconscious messages the positions of the arms and legs and torso give, can perceive what’s going on. When two people are talking and one is trying to get across an important point to the other, the one making the point leans forward; the one resisting the point leans back. I realized I was leaning far forward and to the side, resting my chest on the arm of the sofa. He wasn’t sinking too far back in the soft cushions of the easy chair; but he was back, in any event. He was listening to me, taking in everything I was saying, but it was as though he knew it was all past, all dead information, as though he was waiting to tell me some things I needed to know.
Finally, he said, “Have you noticed how many of the stories you’ve written are concerned with relationships of fathers to sons?”
I’d noticed. “My father died when I was very young,” I said, and felt the usual tightness in my chest “Somewhere, I don’t remember where, I stumbled on a line Faulkner wrote once, where he said, something like, ‘No matter what a writer writes about, if it’s a man he’s writing about the search for his father.’ It hit me particularly hard. I’d never realized how much I missed him until one night just a few years ago, I was in a group encounter session and we were told by the leader of the group to pick one person out of the circle and to make that person someone we wanted to talk to, someone we’d never been able to talk to, and to tell that person everything we’d always wanted to say. I picked a man with a mustache and talked to him the way I’d never been able to talk to my father when I was a very little boy. After a little bit I was crying.” I paused, then said very softly, “I didn’t even cry at my father’s funeral. It was a very strange thing, a disturbing evening.”
I paused again, and collected my thoughts. This was becoming a good deal heavier, more personal, than I’d anticipated, “Then, just a year or two ago, I found that quote by Faulkner; and it all fitted into place.”