The Plot (6 page)

“How can you resist the invitation? You had the song earlier, here is the wine——” He straightened himself and bowed again, toward Ethel. “Wine, woman, song—what else could you want, dear boy?”

Wine, woman, song. Ethel's gasp, her hand jerking, meant that Jamey had hit below the belt with that one. Louis saw Ethel's belt, cinched too tight around her ample waist, making the flesh bulge over and below it, and this, as usual, made him even sorrier for her. “That's right, wine, woman, and song—who could ask for anything more?” She wanted him to stay; she needed him to stay; he would stay for her sake and for the interview. This sensation he had of being sucked into something terrible was preposterous. Louis assured himself that the preposterous sensation derived from the preposterousness of his remaining here as a “reader”; from the preposterousness of Jamey himself. Jamey was preposterous as hell. “My pen is mightier than the sword”—the sword … the sword … In Louis' mind his arm raised itself, his fist clutched the sword, the raised arm descended, the sword plunged—into what? Whom? Preposterous! He dismissed the vision, for staying was worth the purely dollars-and-cents gamble. It was the best chance he had of making some quick money so that he could take his mother away from the old man. It was the best chance he had, and it wouldn't hurt anyone.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was a perfect morning; outside, a steady, a temperate, a tiny breeze kept blowing from the river so that it was cool in the shade, warm in the sun. Outside, small yellow butterflies, now yielding to the wind, now opposing it, flew and lighted, flew and lighted. At twelve, noon, Jamey called Louis to his room and placed a book in his hand. “Begin at the first chapter, please.” He sat in his long chair. “Arrange the sun, Ethel, and then leave us.” He took off his monk's robe and dropped it on the floor. This time Jamey's bathing trunks were green silk; except for these and the suède sandals, he was naked. Over the elastic of the trunks, the loose flesh lapped on his belly; his eyes seemed sunken, his skin dry. “Please sit over there where I can see you when I wish to.” He noticed Louis' eyes on his belly, and his small mouth tightened. “If you keep your eyes on the book, you will not need to look at me, dear boy.”

“I beg your pardon.” Louis examined the book. “Naturally, Thoreau.”

“Dear Henry David, yes.” He folded his hands over the loose flesh of his belly, his fingers trying to hide the folds, it seemed, kicked off one sandal so that he could feel the cool of the tile floor under his foot, and closed his wrinkled eyelids. When he heard Louis' fine voice begin on the first sentence, he smiled with pleasure.

An hour later, he interrupted, holding up the small hand, frowning. “You skipped a sentence, dear boy!”

“To test you, Mr. Vaughn.”

“Jamey, please! Jamey! Why did you wish to test Jamey?”

“I was certain you knew it by heart. Why read it if you know it by heart?”

“I am reading it for you, dear boy. I want you to learn Henry David's lesson. I am your spiritual father. I am guiding you.”

“Thanks.”

“Not at all. Henry David will teach you how few the really good things are. Jamey knows!” He giggled. “It is not only Jamey's genius that you covet, you covet the gauds, the frills—money!”

“Yes, I want money. Filthy lucre. Jamey, will you let me do an authorized interview?” His head was pounding.

“No.”

“Why not? Why not?” Ethel was right. She was right.

“You don't know enough of Jamey yet. Do you think I am transparent so that you can see through me at once?”

“Will you let me do it if I stay here a little longer?”

“We shall see, dear boy.”

His mother used to say that all the time: “We shall see, Louis; we'll see.”

“Why do you look like that, dear boy?”

“I was thinking about my mother. She's sick—she has——”

“Don't go on! You made me feel a graveyard wind, just then, and an old man doesn't want to feel that wind.”

Louis, frowning, thought again that. Ethel was right.

“Dear boy, do you think I shouldn't value life any more? Is that why you're frowning? I do value it. It is more precious now that you are here, Louis.” He reached out and his hand touched Louis' knee.

Louis stood up. “Cut it out,” he said, then he felt that this was rough on Jamey, who had meant nothing by the touch, who had meant affection and sympathy by it. He laid his own hand on Jamey's shoulder, asking to be forgiven, and Jamey turned his head and smiled at Louis, and signaled him to continue reading.

Louis said to Ethel, “He wants me to be Thoreau. He wants me to live, like Thoreau at Walden, on nine dollars a year.”

She smiled sadly: Mother knows best.

Jamey was having his nap. Ethel and Louis were walking in the garden. Louis broke off a switch of oleander and hit out with it, hit the oleander bush, the azalea bush, wanting to destroy them, at the same time as he took in their fragrance and color, their beauty. “I don't think I can sit around letting the wisdom of the ages be stuffed down my throat.”

“Please wait. You promised me you would wait a little!”

He misinterpreted the anxiety on her face. “You're terribly lonely here, aren't you? Why do you stay?”

“I don't know. Here I am, I guess.”

“That's no reason.”

“All right. Do you know what salary Jamey pays me? I get three times as much as I could get anywhere else—at least three, and board and food found. I have no expense at all.” She blushed because she did not want Louis to know that this new dress which she had commissioned Joseph Reas to pick up from the best shop in Charleston was bought for Louis' sake. “Except clothes, of course. This dress, for example, do you like it?”

“It looks fine,” he said, closing his eyes, pretending the sun was too strong, but wishing he had the courage to tell her to stick to tennis clothes, to functional clothes. “You were telling me about your munificent salary.”

“It is munificent. It would have to be, whipping girls come high in this day and age. But it is high, and I've saved most of it, Louis.”

“Good for you,” he said, getting farther away from her, hoping to ward off what he suspected was coming.

Ethel followed to where he was. She plucked at the live oak, pulling off a piece of the bark. “Louis, I could give you money for your mother. I sympathize so deeply, Louis! I know what it is not to have champagne bubbles in your life—fun. Can't I give you the money to buy her some soft things?”

“I can't tell you how much I appreciate your——Hell, that sounds so stiff, Ethel, and this is going to sound worse. I can't take your money. I know the spirit in which you're offering it, but I don't think I could make my mother comfortable on a soft bed you paid for by taking Jamey's gaff. Thanks, anyhow. I can think of a lot of things I shouldn't do but would do—for money, right now—but taking your money isn't one of them.”

“What would you do?” She felt the pressure of his fingers on her shoulder. “Are you—are you trying to tell me …?”

He removed his hand, stared at his fingers, wondering if she could be right. He stared at his fingers as if they were the little legs of the Ouija-board stool that moved without your conscious volition, indicating, perhaps, your subconscious desires. What had the pressure on Ethel's shoulder indicated that he would do? And then he saw Robert Montgomery's fingers around the old woman's throat. That damned movie was becoming his King Charles' head—it appeared everywhere, in everything! “I'm just trying to tell you that I can't take your money, Ethel. I'll get it somehow. Why shouldn't I? It's simple.” He laughed, rather too raucously, for he had been disturbed. “You just study yourself carefully, take yourself apart, say to yourself: What have I got that all the others haven't?—and use that something. You just say to yourself: What kind of mousetrap can I make better than anyone else? You make it, you catch your mouse; you're all set.”

“You're all set.” She did not say aloud how much Jamey resembled a mouse, with his bright beady eyes, the way his sentences flicked like a mouse's tail, his tiny paws. Her tongue touched her lips surreptitiously; she began carefully, “Please sit down, Louis.” There was a marble seat in the bend of the path under a
Magnolia grandiflora
tree just past its flowering; the ground here was littered with bruised and browning petals. Ethel stirred them with the point of her shoe. “I know how you can use what you have that other people haven't got.”

“No kidding? And just what is that something I've got that no one else has?”

“You know. You told me. You know. About Jamey, about being able to imitate.” She glanced in back of them, but she could not see the house or the great curved window of Jamey's study gleaming in the sun like an all-seeing eye. “Louis, I've never shown you Jamey's notebook, have I?”

He sat next to her, leaned toward her. “Now it's my turn; you know you haven't.”

“I know I haven't; yes. I was waiting for you to—to start, Louis. Jamey's always worked with notebooks, jotted down plots, skeleton plots——” Her breath caught and she laughed nervously. “I mean
bare
plots. You know. This is the one notebook he hasn't used up. There are a few plots there he'll never use.”

“Too bad.” He turned away from her, saw the way the point of her shoe was grinding the fragile fallen petals into the ground. “That has nothing to do with me.”

“Louis, Jamey won't use those plots, he's too lazy, too uninterested. He won't do them; why should he work any more? Louis, if I tell you Jamey's idea for a story and you write it, it would show if you're as good a literary mimic as you said you were.” She was aware of the way her excitement had made her perspire; she hoped Louis couldn't notice it. “It would be fun, wouldn't it, Louis?”

He rubbed his face with his hand. “Fun? Who are you kidding?” Who am I kidding? He thought: This is it; this is why I have had that feeling of being dragged into something. The tip of her shoe had made a depression in the ground. The dead petals were buried in it, in a shallow grave.

“Maybe you're not as good as you must be; if you did it, I could tell. Jamey told you I knew about writing. I do know, I do know, Louis.”

Louis realized that she kept saying she knew and he kept saying he knew, but not what she knew, what he knew. Without explicit speech, they were certainly building something between them. He said, to test her, “And if it's any good, I'll read it to Jamey.”

“That's an idea, and if you're good enough he'll simply have to give you that interview. So you'll do it, Louis?”

“Why not?” Why not? “It's just what Jamey would call a lark.” It is not a lark. “Ethel, let me see the notebook. Let's not talk about it until I see the notebook.”

He had asked her who she was kidding; he had asked himself who he was kidding. He knew that he was acquiescing to something more than a joke, that they were not teacher and pupil, that she was not merely setting him an exercise to pass or fail him, but that they were conspirators. When Ethel knocked on his door and brought the notebook to him, she brought him at the same time a letter from his mother. It reminded Louis of how much he wanted to help his mother, of how Jamey would not even admit her sickness or her need. He concentrated on that until, reading Jamey's notes, he could think of nothing but them.

Louis did not fool himself. This was Jamey's plot, this was certainly Jamey's plot, and therefore this was plagiarism—although just an exercise; what interested him was that he could not have plagiarized anyone else's plot. Louis told himself that a story has to be a writer's in order for him to do it well, certain plots to certain authors; that this is an inflexible rule, as rigid as blood types. If the idea had not been his type, Louis told himself, if it had not immediately possessed him, taken over his imagination, if his fantasy had not immediately grasped it and built on it, he could not have done it. His having written the story was, in a way, its own justification. Because the bond between himself and Jamey was real, Louis was in Jamey's house; because it was so strong he spent all his free time the next three days and nights working on the story, and, this was equally true, having it work on him, in him, around him, so that he lived in it rather than in the room in Jamey's house.

He had the manuscript in his pocket giving him confidence in himself, confidence in the strength of the relation between himself and Jamey, when he boldly asked Jamey for a loan of a thousand dollars. “When I sell something, I'll pay it back with interest. I'll give you an I.O.U. Will you stake me, Jamey?”

“Dear boy, no! You're certainly not up to that interview; why, you don't know Jamey at all. He
never
stakes writers. He believes it is bad for them, doesn't he, Ethel?”

She looked at Louis. “That's right.”

“Make an exception. I've got to have money, Jamey.” The story had proved his right to be called Jamey's spiritual son. Son and heir. He was confident that one of these days he'd hit, but his mother couldn't wait. “This is very important, Jamey.”

“Dear boy, you're being fed and slept.”

“The money's not for here.”

“To go away, then?” Jamey shook his finger at Louis, as if reproving an irritatingly dense child. “But I want you here; why should I send you away? Two for his nobs, Ethel.” Tonight Jamey and Ethel were playing cribbage; when the game was over, on his way out of the room, as Jamey passed the chair on which Louis was sitting, he dropped his hand on Louis' hair, ruffling it. “May tonight spare you the frightful dreams of youth,” he said.

When the door closed after Jamey, Louis pulled the manuscript of the story out of his pocket and flung it on Ethel's lap. “A lot he knows about the dreams of youth!”