The Temple of Gold (33 page)

“How you going to do it?”

“I’m magic,” I answered and that was all. I could hear his brain working.

“How you going to do it, Trevitt? How? You really going to do it? Naw. You’re just kidding. You’re not really going to do it. I know you’re not.”

“O.K.,” I said. “I guess I’m not.”

He grabbed me by the arm. “Tell me. Go on. Tell me.”

“Just get your clothes on and we’ll go into town and find somebody.”

“Who?”

“How do I know who? Just put your clothes on.”

“What if you don’t?”

“I will. I already told you once about the law of averages.”

“O.K., Trevitt,” he said, patting me. “O.K. Great.” He was jumping around like a Mexican bean. “Terrific.” He headed for the stairs. Then he stopped. “It means we’d be AWOL.”

I started groaning.

“I don’t know,” he said. “What if we get caught?”

“Look, Kelly. Just make up your mind. I’m not going to come apart if you don’t want to. If we’re caught they’ll probably blast us with a firing squad and all your troubles will be over. So make up your mind.”

He thought on that for a while. Then he went downstairs.

We didn’t get caught. ...

All of which is, as I said earlier, typical of me. Not the taking into town part. That’s just incidental. Anyway, Kelly was killed two weeks later when he froze up holding a grenade after he’d pulled the pin. The fact that he didn’t die a virgin doesn’t really count for much in the long run.

But what is typical is the fact that I let him try suicide in the first place. Instead of plastering him one, or trying to talk him out of it, or running for the H.Q. For I have always tried to cram as much into each and every day of my life as I possibly could. Once, just as an example, I ate a pound of grass from my backyard because someone told me it was good. I got sick to my stomach and had a case of diarrhea that Doctor Gunn still talks about back in Athens whenever the subject comes up. Which I trust isn’t often. I never ate grass again, but the point is that I had done it, at least the one time, and I knew what it was like. I had experienced it. And I try for that, experience, whether it’s eating grass or watching poor Kelly make a fool of himself trying to commit suicide.

Because, as I have already put down, communication is for the birds, and we all have our own lives to lead in the same place, here, but like concentric circles, they don’t touch. So your life is yours and mine is mine and never the twain, etc.

And what follows now is mine. Put down haphazardly, more or less as I went through it, starting at the start and going to the end, which is as things should be. It might be called “my life so far,” but that wouldn’t be true, because my life so far is about as interesting as a toilet bowl. What follows is really more the people I have known as I knew them; other lives, other concentric circles that have come near to my own and, once or twice, because maybe there is a God after all, have touched my own. And if there is anything that makes life worth a hill of beans, it is those few times, those occasional moments of joy when two lives touch for just a little while, before passing on again, into their own individual paths.

William Goldman (b. 1931) is an acclaimed American novelist, nonfiction author, playwright, and two-time Academy Award–winning screenwriter whose works include the novels
The Princess Bride
and
Marathon Man
, both of which he also adapted for film.

Goldman was born on August 12, 1931, in Highland Park, Illinois, to Marion Goldman (née Weil) and Maurice Clarence Goldman, a businessman. Goldman’s older brother, James, also went on to become a successful author, playwright, and scriptwriter; his works include
The Lion in Winter
(1966) and
Follies
(1971). At eighteen, Goldman moved to Ohio to attend Oberlin College. His interest in writing was born at Oberlin, where he decided to take a creative-writing course, though his grades were poor initially. Goldman’s primary interests were poetry, short stories, and novels. He eventually became an editor of Oberlin’s literary magazine where, he later admitted, he would anonymously submit short stories that his peers unknowingly rejected. He attained his bachelor of arts in English in 1952 and went on to earn a master of arts degree in 1956 from Columbia University, where he completed his thesis on the comedy of manners in America.

Goldman began his career as a novelist with
The Temple of Gold
(1957), an account of a young man’s rite of passage, which he wrote in less than three weeks. By that point, Goldman had also found success on Broadway, having numerous plays produced. In 1960, Goldman married Ilene Jones, and the couple went on to have two daughters, Jenny (b. 1962) and Susanna (b. 1965).

In 1962, Goldman wrote his first screenplay,
Masquerade
, followed by a series of acclaimed screenplays including
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
(1969)
,
which sold for a record-breaking $400,000. Other notable scripts include
The Stepford Wives
(1975),
All the President's Men
(1976), and the 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel
Misery
. In 1985, Goldman won a lifetime achievement Laurel Award for screenwriting from the Writers Guild of America.

Despite his success in Hollywood, Goldman continued to write novels, many of which he would use as the foundations for his screenplays.
The Princess Bride
(1973), which he wrote under the pseudonym Simon Morgenstern, remains a classic both as a book and a film. Goldman’s first thriller,
Marathon Man
(1974), was also made into a film of the same name in 1976, starring Dustin Hoffman.

In addition to his novels, plays, and screenplays, Goldman also wrote a series of memoirs, including
Adventures in the Screen Trade
(1983), about his experiences as an author and screenwriter in Hollywood and on Broadway, and
Hype and Glory
(1990), which documents his stints judging the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America Pageant following the dissolution of his twenty-seven-year marriage.

Goldman has received numerous awards and accolades in addition to his two Academy Awards (Best Original Screenplay for
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and Best Adapted Screenplay for
All the President’s Men
). Three of his scripts are in the Writers Guild of America hall of fame, and
Harper
(1967) and
Magic
(1979) garnered Edgar Awards in the screenplay category from the Mystery Writers of America.

Goldman works and resides in New York City.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1957 by William Goldman

Copyright renewed © 1985 by William Goldman

Foreword and Afterword copyright © 2001 by William Goldman

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

978-1-4532-9600-4

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