Scissors (23 page)

A year has passed. And I still haven’t started to live again.

What sustains me is my mission. To make his work known. I can’t imagine a lovelier task. Do I say that because
I have no choice? It fell to me. Sometimes the best thing that can happen is to have no choice.

Every day I find stories among his papers. As if he were still here, still writing. And of course, that means I have decisions to make. To make alone. This story, for example. It could be the first chapter of a novel. Unless I take out the last few pages and stop the story at the moment when Iris rejoins the others inside the house.

If I cut it off at that point, it becomes a short story. Its title could be “The Drink That Did Him In.”

What do you think about that, Ray?

The idea that Douglas is going to enter this house fills me with a strange excitement.

I feel like the torero we saw in Mexico. When the moment for the deathblow came, Ray didn’t want to look. “You have too much heart,” I said, teasing him. The crowd roared. He kept his hand over his eyes.

Me, I kept mine wide open.

JOANNE AND
DOUGLAS

When I open the door, a draft of air comes in with him. The wind chimes, five silver tubes, panic more severely than usual.

Douglas looks over at them.

“They come from Uzbekistan,” I tell him.

“You can also find them not far from my apartment.”

It’s Douglas, no doubt. His thin lips strike a line through the lower part of his face. His eyes transfix from a distance.
His long silvery locks fall to his shoulders and give him a semblance of style. But Douglas isn’t a dandy. The purpose of his linen clothes is not to soften the contact between the world and him, it’s to make the contact between his clothes and his skin bearable. The perimeter of his affection spreads no farther than that.

I show him to a seat in the living room. When I come back from the kitchen with tea and cakes, he’s contemplating the oblique panel that opens to the sky. It’s as though he wants to drink the light. His movements are slow and stiff. I feel like I’m receiving a Sioux chieftain. I notice his wide belt, as tanned as his skin. When you get close to him, you breathe in a smell of leather mixed with an aggressive, repellent scent. A bouquet of glass and metal.

“What are these?”

“Lemon and poppy seed.”

He inhales and takes a cake. “Ray told me you were an excellent cook.”

He doesn’t remember having dinner at our house. Nonetheless, he did, three or four times, when Ray was still seeing him. I attribute his forgetfulness to age.

In a neutral tone, I say, “You didn’t come to his funeral.”

“Is that a reproach?”

“No, just an observation.”

“Ray and I …”

He doesn’t finish his sentence.

I pour out the tea and say, “I can’t believe it was a year ago already.”

“Was Marianne there?”

He asks the question with the greatest naturalness.

“Yes, with their children. And their grandchildren.”

“So you two got married? Just before?”

I put down the teapot. “Before what?”

“Before it was too late.”

“What are you insinuating?”

“Nothing, nothing at all. You’re his last wife. Nothing wrong with that. And now you’re his …” He pauses for a few seconds and then finishes his sentence, enunciating each syllable. “… literary executrix.”

“I hate that word.”

“Which one?”

“ ‘Executrix.’ ”

“You like the power.”

“I’m carrying out his wishes.”

“Which you alone seem to know.”

I shrug my shoulders. He raises his cup.

His Siouxish features do not relax. He makes no sound as he drinks. Is he really swallowing? He must think I want to poison him.

“You haven’t made such a long trip just for that, have you?”

He puts down his cup. “Just for what?”

“For the opportunity to demonstrate your flair for irony.”

He lifts his chin as if he were addressing a large gathering. “I’ve come to clear up a misunderstanding, Joanne. You see, I still have some friends in the profession. Yes, in spite of the ingratitude that characterizes writers, in spite of their vague ‘sense of the fundamental decencies’—”

“Douglas, you’re not in one of your classes.”

“Let me finish, Joanne. Certain things must be said. They must be said here, in this house where Ray’s spirit is hovering.” (He settles himself comfortably in his armchair.) “My intention is to reveal the person I really am.”

“God help us!”

He lets it go. “What else have I done all these years? ‘Know me, know the tales I tell.’ That’s what every one of my stories whispers to its readers.”

“
Your
stories?”

“I was the Captain of the Storytellers, if you remember.”

I say nothing. I content myself with smiling.

He moves forward in his chair and puts on an afflicted air. “Joanne, please, I’d like you to stop telling anyone who’s willing to listen that I ‘butchered’ his short stories. That’s not what I did.”

“No, to hear you talk, you only rewrote them.”

I’m conscious of the pink patches on his neck.

“Improved them,” he says, correcting me.

“What does it matter?”

He sees that I’m going to remain inflexible. A sigh escapes him. I pour myself more tea and say, “I understand you’ve started a magazine.”

“
The Chrysalis
. We have a print run of ten thousand copies.”

“For you, that’s starting over from scratch.”

“Ten thousand,” he repeats, as if I’ve insulted him.

“Great,” I say, with a silent prayer for him to leave.

As he doesn’t move, I summarize: “So: Your friends have informed you that I’m spreading rumors. You’d like me to
put an end to that. And in exchange, you’ll stop saying you rewrote Ray’s short stories.”

“Exactly,” he says, scratching his wrist.

“I see things differently.”

He looks daggers at me.

“I’m going to republish his stories.”

“What?”

“The way they were before the butchery. I’m going to publish them all.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I’m the executrix.”

“A disastrous decision—”

“People will judge for themselves. They’ll be able to compare the two versions.”

“You don’t have his versions. There isn’t anything left of what he wrote.”

“Of course there is. You sold your archives to two universities.”

“The manuscripts are illegible. Everything’s crossed out in heavy black ink.”

“I’ve hired some experts. They’re going to decipher everything.”

“You want to destroy my work.”

“Your work? Butchering Raymond was your work.”

The patches on his skin have turned red. “All right,” he says, getting to his feet.

As he remains standing there, I say, without looking at him, “I think we’ve examined all sides of the question.”

He turns and takes a step toward the door. Then he makes
an about-face and says, “Let me raise one point, Joanne. What if the stories from before the ‘butchery,’ as you call it—what if they turn out to be disappointing? What then?”

I don’t say anything. I gaze at him steadily.

“Let’s say people read my version and his and compare the two. What if those readers come to the conclusion that I made the stories better, that I transformed them into masterpieces, which they weren’t? What if the whole world starts thinking that way? What will be left of Raymond then?”

I remain silent.

“A terrible responsibility, Joanne.”

He feels my resolution wavering.

I gather my strength. “I know what I’m doing.”

“In that case—”

He opens the door.

“But don’t say ‘butchery.’ Don’t say I butchered his stories.” At the instant when the door shuts, I think I hear him say, “I loved him too much to do that to him.”

But the wind chimes drown out his words.

JOANNE

The harbor’s twenty minutes from here. Nevertheless, I seem to hear its sounds. The seagulls circling the moored freighters. The ropes and cables slapping the masts. And a young woman’s voice. She’s in a telephone booth in front of the closed bar, trying to get someone to come for her. She can’t understand how they could forget her, how they could
leave her alone in the harbor, where the lights are going out. She’s sobbing, and it wouldn’t take much for her to climb into a boat and cross the strait. The next day she’d wake up in the country on the other side. A new harbor, a new life.

“If there’s one thing people appreciate about him, it’s that nothing goes to his head.”

That was the remark you’d hear most often when the subject of the conversation was Max.

His way of laughing for no reason, his schoolboy jokes, and his perennially childlike mug made those who knew him willing to forgive him for anything.

And he had a lot of things to be forgiven for.

His last joke had consisted of dying prematurely, not long after turning fifty.

All we could do was gather and grieve for him, with the dazed, groggy looks of people brought together by the death of a loved one. And yet our faces, sad as they were, sometimes broke into smiles. For nobody was as funny as he was. No one could make us laugh as much as Max.

The funeral had taken place around three o’clock. A buffet was served at our house afterward, and now almost everyone was gone. Only four of us were left on the veranda.

We’d retreated out there so we wouldn’t have to clean up right away. Bottles, half-empty glasses, and plates with the remains of food littered the living room. With Fred and me on the veranda were Anne and Victor, our best friends.

A soft summer night was beginning to fall. The chairs we were sitting in, the coffee table and the bottles scattered on it, the empty cage that used to hold my in-laws’ nightingale (I’d opened the cage that morning and let the
bird escape)—all the wicker furniture took on a gray hue in the shade of the veranda.

We hadn’t turned on the lamp with the Japanese lampshade or the strings of lights around the windows. It was as if we were trying to connect with Max, to communicate with his spirit, in the darkness.

Max was a writer. Thanks to his books, his spirit would remain among us. Yes, as long as there were people to read his work, Max would live on amid the shadows.

I was saying that to myself when Anne came back from the living room with several bottles. Some of them were nearly full.

She put down the tray.

“You want to get us drunk,” Fred said.

“In homage to Max,” I said.

Victor looked at me. He seemed not to understand.

Anne told Fred, “If you two don’t drink with Iris and me, you’ll just wind up sorrier.”

“We’re not so depressed,” Victor said.

“A better homage to Max would be not to drink,” said Fred, grabbing a bottle of red wine.

He poured himself some. Victor held out his glass, saying, “I never saw him drink.”

“That’s true,” Anne said. “Max stopped before I met you.” She turned her attention to a bottle.

Victor looked at me. “He drank like a fish?”

“Let’s say he had a lot of fish potential.”

That got some loud laughs. It was getting darker and darker. I couldn’t make out Victor’s features, but it seemed to
me he wasn’t sharing in our hilarity. His tone of voice was curt, staccato.

Victor’s an optician. His shop in the center of town is decorated in psychedelic style to attract a young clientele. There’s a display of fantasy frames on a tall rack near the door. That sort of thing isn’t Victor’s cup of tea, but they sell like hotcakes. Anne was the one who came up with the idea.

One of the bottles still held a little Scotch. I gulped down a last swallow of wine and poured the whiskey into my glass.

“Max had so much potential he almost died of it.”

“It was ten years ago,” Fred said to Victor. “The doctors told him if he didn’t stop drinking, he was signing his own death sentence.”

“No kidding.”

I looked at Anne. I was surprised she’d never told Victor about that.

They’ve been married for five years. We four and Max had often had dinner together. But Anne had her reasons for not wanting to delve too deeply into the subject of Max.