Foul Matter (26 page)

“No ending” could mean the manuscript lacked a chapter, or one page, or even one paragraph. A longish paragraph it would have been, too. But it had never gotten written. In the deep drawers of a dresser upstairs were manuscripts. There were other manuscripts, each with some fatal flaw (Saul thought). He was vague about them with his friends.

He looked at the manuscript pages sitting beside the typewriter, anchored by a paperweight of cobalt blue Murano glass he’d bought in Venice. He liked the color and egg shape. It held down the top pages that otherwise might have blown away in a breeze through the window. The growing stack of pages was a comfort to Saul. The stack was substantial, a good two or three inches. There would be only one more chapter, possibly long, but probably short. How he knew this without knowing the substance of that chapter, he couldn’t say. Except that he knew its nature; he knew its ethos. He just didn’t know its form in words. There was a chance that the end would become clear in the course of that chapter. The end, he believed, was always there, there since he’d written the first chapter. The problem was something within himself that prevented him seeing the end.

He removed the last page and read it:

And why—? And why—? Saul looked at this, shook his head, returned the page to the stack and the paperweight to the pages. It was harrowing. The form he had used for the entire story was harrowing, and difficult. Its movement was backward, last to first. He had started at the end, that is, at what one would normally suppose to be the end. This character who had traveled to that most ambiguous city, Venice, and who was uncertain of her destination had begun—or had appeared to, rather—at the beginning as a woman strongly grounded, rooted in small-town life, marriage, kids. A reversal had occurred.

He looked out of the window and poured himself a brandy. The bottle was on the desk. He thought about Ned. He wondered, not for the first time, how their friends could attribute qualities to Saul that were much more clearly Ned’s. The reclusiveness, the vulnerability, the confidence, the almost naïve disdain of reviewers—all of these were Ned’s virtues (for Saul saw them as virtues) and not his own. No, it wasn’t he who would occupy the high room in the ivory tower; it was Ned. Of course, if he said this to Ned, Ned would tell him he was nuts.

And then there was all of this business at the publisher’s. He wondered about what Sally said she’d overheard. There were probably a dozen different explanations. But Saul knew Bobby Mackenzie was ruthless. He’d do anything to get a book or a writer. It was the reason Saul had refused to go with Mackenzie-Haack, though his then-agent had pushed to move him there. She had defended this by saying it was because Mackenzie-Haack was “a better house, more literary, more prestigious. It wasn’t (she’d said) the money.”

“You’re an agent; they’re a publisher. It’s always the money.” Had she even felt the sting of that rebuke? Probably not; agents didn’t appear to think they ever got rebuked. She continued to press for Mackenzie-Haack. He dropped her.

He returned to the wing chair. He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket, remembered he’d smoked the last one, and pulled over the silver cigarette box. He didn’t really use it and thought the cigarettes in it now must be stale. There were a number of articles in this room he would never have chosen for himself—that embroidered fire screen, for one—but he kept everything in the same place as his mother had done, and she had done it for the same reason, he was sure, for he could remember her admonishing him sometimes after he’d picked something up and returned it to another place (“That’s your aunt Livvy’s special pillow, so put it back in her chair, dear.”).

The sense of loss made him wince. Don’t go there, he told himself, then realized the expression was the title of Paul Giverney’s new book. He’d seen it that morning on Tenth Street when he’d stopped by the Barnes & Noble near the square. More power to him, Saul thought. Fame and money. He wondered how much the lack of money shaped what a writer did, how good his books turned out to be. There had to be some effect. He was lucky to have as much as he needed. But, then, one could argue he’d have been better off without money; that might have pushed him to finish the book.

Don’t go there.
He thought about Pittsburgh. He picked up the phone at his elbow and then put it back. Saul went to the bookcase across the room, pulled out a Pennsylvania travel guide. (Rarely did he travel, but he had guides to everywhere.) He thumbed up Pittsburgh accommodations and found the Pittsburgh Hilton, which he then called. Yes, a Mr. Isaly was due in tomorrow and did he want to leave a message? No, no message. He hung up. When he read the description of the Hilton, it didn’t surprise Saul that Ned had chosen it; it was located on the Point where the rivers come together.

Saul took the guidebook to the wing chair, pausing to pour himself another small measure of brandy. He sat down and thought about the men in suits, the “two suits,” as he came to know them. Why did they keep turning up?

And would they, he wondered, turn up in Pittsburgh?

Saul looked at the book, got the number again, called the Hilton a second time, and made a reservation.

Like the woman in his story, Saul wasn’t sure precisely where he was going, or why.

W
hen he was a boy, there was one snowless winter when he dreamed all of the time about snow—daydreams and night dreams. He saw himself crouched on the window seat in the living room of their house, staring out at a hill that fell away at a perfect angle for sledding or else those round aluminum dish things a kid could position himself on to go twirling downhill, or even on the old rubber tires that served the same purpose. He would crouch in the window seat and imagine the hill with its fine icy crust that cracked under the first bit of pressure. He did not remember the house so well as the hill and the steps up to the house, a few more than the neighboring house on one side and a few fewer than the one on the other for the houses also flowed uphill. Pittsburgh was a city of hills. Snow mounded on these steps and they lost their sharp outlines. He would wake up in the early morning, only the rim of the sun risen and casting a cold bluish light across the snow. He could look out of his bedroom window, right over the porch. From up there he could see the steps better, the tantalizing smoothness of the mounds he would be the first to disturb.

As he sat there, in his mind’s eye, from the dark behind him he heard a voice, probably his mother’s.
“What are you doing, Ned?”

The only answer if you didn’t want what was in your head to blow away with words was “Nothing.” If you went ahead and said, “I’m sledding,” you’d have her in there right away saying,
“There’s no snow, how can you?”
It was hard enough to do it in your head without somebody’s coming along and saying you couldn’t. That was him; that was winter.

All of this went through Ned’s mind as he waited for a cab on the concrete island of the Pittsburgh International Airport. He was so taken up in this dream of snow that he didn’t think that the two men behind him should have looked familiar.

“Christ! It’s dropped ten degrees just standing here,” said Karl.

“Where’s the fucking cabs? They got a hundred lines of them at Kennedy.”

“It’s not New York. Pittsburgh’s a pretty small city as cities go. Philly, that’s three, maybe four times as big as Pittsburgh.”

“Philly is? I never knew that.” Candy gave Karl an appreciative look. “Hey, you’re wound, K. You must have been researching.”

“Nah. It’s just stuff you pick up. Here’s a cab, thank God—Hey! Hey! You see that? That bitch muscled right into our cab.” As her cab drew away, she gave them a tiny smile and a shrug. Candy and Karl gave the cab a slap.

The next cab was taken almost before they could register the fact it was their turn. “Get that! Did you see that guy take our cab?” said Candy.

“What guy?”

Sally didn’t care; she’d seen worse than those two in New York. If it had been New York, those two would probably have shot her. But where had she seen them before?

The black-and-white cab behind her was now pulling abreast of this cab and going on ahead. When the driver asked her where to, she said, “Just follow that black-and-white cab up there.”

“Follow it?”

He was trying to meet her eyes in the mirror as if they would prove or disprove Sally’s intentions toward the black-and-white cab were honorable. “Yes, that’s what I said.” Why was she bothering to explain to a cabbie? “It’s my friend and I got separated from him in the airport.”

The driver was still trying to engage eye contact. “Your friend?”

Sally felt like taking a swing at him with her carryall. He was, at least, following the cab as he was attempting to wrest the story out of her about her relationship with that cab ahead. “My fiancé.”

The driver laughed. “And he just takes off and leaves you standing there? Jesus God. You sure you want to marry the guy? You had a fight on the plane, I bet. I bet you and him—” and he went on, making up a story for his own amusement.

Was everybody on God’s green earth a fledgling writer?

When the next cab pulled out of the line and stopped, Candy gently shoved an old lady out of the way, said excuse me ma’am, we got this emergency, and the two of them climbed in.

“Pittsburgh Hilton.” They’d got it right away when they started phoning up hotels. This was not sheer coincidence; Candy and Karl worked on the supposition that anyone would choose the hotel the two of them would choose.