“Neither am I.”
“Does it get easier? That’s a good question. I don’t think it gets better. But in a way it does get easier. Because you learn things. You learn how to handle it. And it doesn’t hurt as much.”
She had taken his hand in both of hers. Now she squeezed it hard. They sat awhile in silence before heading back toward the house. He was happy, very happy, and very close to tears.
On the way back she said, “You got me out of my mood. I just wish—”
“What do you wish?”
“Oh, that I thought more of myself. I don’t think I’m a very terrific person.”
“I think you’re an utterly terrific person.”
“Well, you have to. I’m your daughter.”
He said, “If I weren’t your father, and if I had a daughter, I would give anything to have her turn out like you.”
She began to cry. He took her in his arms and held her close. She looked up at him, beaming through her tears, “You always know just the right words,” she said. “You ought to be a writer, you know that?”
The book didn’t stink.
He gathered up the manuscript, squared its edges, set it on the desk top. He had read it carefully all the way through, expecting to hate it, and it simply wasn’t awful. It was taut, spare. The characters sounded real. The scenes had life.
But it wasn’t quite right, either.
He lit a cigarette, leaned back, watched the smoke crawl toward the ceiling. This reading, he decided, had been worthwhile. He knew what was wrong with the book. It was possible that the book’s flaw was not what had mired him on its hundred and nineteenth page, but he knew that the resolution of that flaw would be enough spur to get him going again. If he could figure out what to do about it.
The book was thin. There wasn’t sufficient substance to it.
It was, very simply, the story of a woman’s life as shown in the three years before and two or three years after the death of her husband. Other parts of her life would be included in flashback and reminiscence, so that the book in total would present the woman’s entire life.
Was she a remarkable woman? He did not know that yet, and would learn only by writing her story. But he did know that her life was not remarkable. He did not know all its details — these would emerge as he wrote — but he knew that she was born on an Eastern Pennsylvania farm, went to New York to be an actress, married a boy who was killed in the war, took a second husband shortly after the war’s end. Her second husband was an advertising man in New York, who then took a job with a Philadelphia agency. They moved to a suburb of Philadelphia, had a daughter, grew toward middle age in a marriage that was neither good nor bad.
In the book’s first chapter the husband suffers a coronary thrombosis and lives through it. Over the next several hundred pages he would have two more coronaries, the last of which would kill him. And after that — well, he knew very little of what would happen after that. If the book took proper form, he would know the story’s ending when it was time for him to write it.
Somehow it lacked dimension, and he did not know exactly how or why.
A little later he put part of it together. Part of the problem — it was the wife’s story, but it was the husband who was doing the dying. So in a sense she was along for the ride, but you never saw him from the inside, never saw him except through her eyes. And yet it had to be that way; she absolutely had to be the viewpoint character.
He sat for a long time, turning the problem over and over in his mind and looking for ways out of it. His fingers never went near the keyboard, and “119.” stared back at him, along with the musings he had typed on it earlier. But he did not mind. He was working now whether he put anything on paper or not. His mind was on his work. While he looked for solutions to the problem he found various scenes sketching themselves out, heard in his mind exchanges of dialogue which would fall into place as the book progressed. He didn’t write them down. He had learned over the years to let them stay there, tucked somewhere in the cupboard of his mind. Some would be bad ideas, superfluous scenes that would only pad the script. Some would be inconsistent with the ultimate plot. The worthwhile ones would stay alive and would drop into place when the time came. When he emerged from the den, late in the afternoon, the problem itself remained unsolved. It was the man’s story and had to be, and the woman’s eyes had to be the window to his soul. He could write it that way. He could sit down and finish it, with no more worries about blocking. But there ought to be a better way.
Perhaps he’d know it the next morning. Sleep often solved that sort of problem. Unless it was too much disjointed by cliffs and ledges and endless flights of stairs.
Karen was in the living room. She said, “Mrs. Kleinschmidt said to call her when you wanted dinner. I said you might want to eat out, but she said to call her and she’ll cook for you.”
“What time is it?”
“A little after seven.”
“That’s at least four hours later than I would have guessed. I thought it was the middle of the afternoon.”
“You must have gotten a ton of work done. Should I call her or what? She made supper for the two of us, but I’ll keep you company.”
“I may just go get a hamburger. I’m not very hungry. What I am is thirsty.”
“You sit. I guess I know how to mix them.”
She brought him a drink and sat down across from him, waiting for his approval. He sipped, smiled. “El Exigente is satisfied,” he said.
She heaved a great sigh of mock relief, then drank some of her own drink. “It must be a great feeling,” she said.
“What must?”
“To be so involved with something that you lose all track of the time.”
“Oh, it is. Even if I didn’t write a word today.” He smiled at her expression. “The book had a problem,” he explained. “I spent half the day figuring out what it was and the other half looking for a way to solve it.”
“And you did?”
“No, but I will. I’m seeing it the right way now.”
“I can’t wait to read it.”
“Have you ever read any of my books?”
“All of them. Does that surprise you?”
“You never said anything.”
“Well, you never asked. And I never knew what to say or anything, so I didn’t.”
“I wonder if I ever thought of you reading them. I don’t think so. Isn’t that strange. Well? Pretty bad, huh?”
“I think they’re wonderful.” Such a heavy feeling in his chest. “I can’t judge books. I’m not that kind of a reader. All your books — I get completely wrapped up in them until it’s as if I’m not reading. I’ll think about trying to know you through your books but I just get caught up in the story and — Daddy? Did I say something wrong?”
Of course. That was the way to do it. The husband’s life, seen through other eyes. But not just the wife’s. The wife’s and the daughter’s.
The two women in his life. The two points of reference from which the man’s life could be triangulated and transfixed.
Of course. Two women knew him, and in the two ways in which a woman might know a man. He would have to scrap a great deal of what he had written. Most of it could be reworked, at least. But it would work. It would work beautifully, and if he handled it properly it would do a great deal more than reveal one man’s life.
It might be... important.
“Daddy?”
“You just solved my problem.”
“I did?”
“You damn well did.” He was standing, his drink abandoned on the coffee table. “I’ve got the whole opening now. I have to start over on page one but it’s all, right there.”