“Which is to say forget it, if that’s all I am to you, or will be.”
“I don’t think that’s all you are to me.”
“You don’t think.”
I chose my words carefully. “I can’t tell you that I’m absolutely certain of anything. I am pretty sure I don’t want you just because I’m desperate for somebody to talk to.”
I was surprised to hear myself say this. She sighed.
“That came out wrong,” I said.
“No, it didn’t. It was the truth.”
“I guess.”
“Move closer,” she said. “Just a little.” I gave her several feet of space, and she took my hand in both of hers. They were cold. “I was watching Rear Window,” she said. “Get it rolling, would you?”
With my free hand I picked up the remote from the coffee table and turned on the set. It took a moment to find PLAY in the parking lot of buttons, and then I hit it.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
We watched it straight through without speaking. Jimmy Stewart had just started spying on the glum songwriter. The taste of Hunan beef still simmered on my tongue. At some point Susan’s hands began to move over mine, and our fingers entwined and pulled apart, tested each other while we watched.
When it was over, I picked up the remote and turned off the TV. I could hear her breathing. She slid into my arms and I lay back, and then she lay back, half-on, half-off me on the thin cushions. We kissed, and kissed again.
“If you break my heart, Mix,” she told me, the ends of our noses flattened against each other, “I swear I’ll beat the living shit out of you.”
“It’s a deal,” I said.
More kissing. My hand found her back, the place where her T-shirt had pulled from her shorts and exposed a bare inch of skin. She let out a breath.
“Bedtime,” she said.
Delighted, I said, “Right.”
twenty-nine
Afterward we seemed far from finished. We stayed very close, saying nothing, finally sleeping, then waking, then trying it all again, and despite the typical trappings of pleasure, I didn’t feel like what we’d done had resolved anything. We had crossed over into something new, and though the border patrols hadn’t gotten us there were still miles of rough terrain left to navigate. Lying in Susan’s arms, I extended the metaphor, adding rattlesnakes and scorpions, undercover immigration agents and idle rednecks with sawed-off shotguns, until Susan absently began stroking my hair and I let my brain shut mercifully down.
It was too late to take the bus home, so I stayed. We went out to eat, and came back to Susan’s apartment exhausted and happy, two things I had not been simultaneously for a long time. It was strange trying to fall asleep on a new bed, with a new and unfamiliar presence, and we stretched and rolled and yanked on the sheets until I felt raw. At some point we simply gave in and stopped moving, almost too tired to speak.
Almost. “Tim,” she said. “There’s a reason I haven’t been calling you. Besides this, I mean.”
I made an encouraging sound. In my half-dream, her words took on shapes and bobbed in the haze of sleep.
“It’s Ray Burn. Your meeting with Ray Burn.”
“Whaboutit?”
“He tried to back out. He said he didn’t want to see you, but I talked him back into it. You’re meeting next Wednesday.”
I pulled myself out of the haze and sat up. Moonlight spilled across the bed. The clock radio quietly buzzed beside me. “Why didn’t he want to see me?”
“He said there was no reason to bother you until you were completely ready.” She was lying on her back, watching the ceiling, which was cracked and bubbled from years of leaks. “But I think…I think he was thinking it would be easier to pull the rug out from under you if he never actually met you. He didn’t say that; that’s just my impression.”
I could feel it all falling apart. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m not saying anything. I mean…the thing is, Burn is a very bland guy, not too smart, and he doesn’t need to be doing this cartoon thing. He’s got old money. He just does this for a hoot. So he is very impressionable when it comes to cartoons. If somebody shows him something or tells him about someone, and the person doing the showing or telling is…confident, you know, has a little spark, then he’ll start believing everything that person says.” She sat up too, and put her hand on my knee. “He’s, you know, tabula rasa.”
“I saw Ken Dorn at the conference. He told me he’d met with Burn.”
“Yeah, well, Ron Burn, the old boss, liked Dorn. He thought Dorn was a wit. So Ray sees Dorn if Dorn wants to be seen.”
“And Dorn has a ‘little spark’?” I said, incredulous.
“Well, no. But Dorn has gotten to him, and Dorn also is trying to make you look bad. Besides, Dorn is the bargain cartoonist, so…”
“So I’m history.”
“No. You’re meeting with Burn, remember?” She turned to me and took both my hands with hers. “Tim, if you want this, you can go into the meeting and wow him. I know you can.”
I shook my head, wondering if it was all even worth it. “Did you hear about what happened at the conference?”
“Your panel discussion? Yeah.”
“Dorn set me up, you know.” I told her about the overalled hayseed and the transaction out by the dumpster. “If he really wants it, he’s going to get it.”
“Not if you don’t want him to. Remember, you’re the one who’s supposed to get it. As far as I know, the lawyers haven’t been able to get around that.”
I pulled my hands away and lay back. “I didn’t want any of this to begin with.”
She waited a long time before saying, “Including me.”
“No, not including you.”
It was hard to cheer up again after that. We slept, and in the morning ate breakfast together, but there hung between us some general dissatisfaction, something both of us felt but were powerless to repair, either in ourselves or in the other. Susan offered to drive me home, but I refused. “It’s your day off. You should enjoy it however you want.”
She said, “Will you call me?”
“And vice versa.”
“Sure.” We hugged. “Did we do the right thing?” she asked me, from over my shoulder.
I brought her face around to mine, looked her in the eyes, and said “Twice,” which was, thank God, exactly what was needed for a change.
* * *
I tried to do two days’ work in one afternoon. It didn’t go so well. I figured if I pushed myself I could be finished by the time I got hungry, but instead my dinner — a Custard’s Last Hot Dog and an A&W float — proved to be a dinner break, and I was back in the studio by six-thirty, the hot dog still somersaulting inside me. Despite my best efforts, the FF characters would not yield to the pen. I took half an hour to add to my pool of gags and replaced a few of the old, half-assed ones with the new. I was supposed to have six roughs for Wurster by tomorrow morning, and it was pretty clear I wouldn’t accomplish this with any degree of technical mastery.
It was well after dark when Pierce got home. I heard the car pull in, then his footsteps across the driveway gravel and the grass. The studio door was wide open, but he knocked on it as if it were shut. “Tim?”
“Hey,” I said, looking up. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the middle distance, a sign I was too tired to be working.
He stepped in. He was dressed in a T-shirt of mine and a pair of shorts cut off from our father’s pants, and he hugged himself against the cool of the night. “I’m back.”
“No kidding?”
He smiled. “Huh huh huh.”
“How’s the lady?”
“Gilly’s cool. We picked cranberries. She’s a real green thumb.”