Scissors (22 page)
No.
If there’s one thing
…
appreciate about him
…
nothing goes to his head
.
It’s better in the present. If Douglas were here, he’d put it in the present.
“I always tell my students, and I’m telling you, Ray: Never forget the virtues of the present.” Frigging Douglas.
I would never have thought it could be so short and so good all the same.
But there are a great many things one has no idea of.
The big day sure is sad.
I insisted on making this trip. I thought it would do him good. Which seems to be the case, but I didn’t think I’d be so sad.
Raymond’s looking mischievous. A rascal wearing a cap and gown who slips in among the professors. He’s going to be made a doctor
honoris causa
. He’ll be going home with a diploma, a fine parchment inscribed in Latin.
The trees on this campus are magnificent. How can the school afford to maintain them? Stupid question. One student’s tuition would pay three gardeners’ salaries.
I would have liked to be a student here. To walk across
these quads with my arms full of books, under the eyes of these marble statues. That looks like a stucco column, that last one. All these statues. Not many of women. Show me one that’s not Venus or Galatea, just one woman men’s eyes haven’t petrified into myth, and I could walk through their little courtyards whistling. It seems they have one of Anne Sexton’s manuscripts. I’ll go and see it after the reception.
In the airplane he said, “You’ll have to address me as ‘Doctor’ now.” I burst out laughing. He grimaced slightly and added, “Just when I learn I’m incurable, they give me a doctorate. Life has a hell of a sense of humor, don’t you think?”
We were about to land. I looked at the houses on the hillside. All of them built on the same model.
I turned to him. He went on: “It’s curious, the way life makes fun of us. But you know what? I don’t hold that against it.” He looked out the airplane window. “No, I don’t hold even that against it.”
It’s almost his turn. I should have brought a better camera. These throwaway things, you never know what they’re going to give you. They say “throwaway” without explaining that what you’ll throw away will be the photographs. There’s Ray, here he comes.
My God, how thin he is.
I’m writing a story that takes place after my death. The setting is a wake. Some people get together after the death of a friend and recollect a bunch of things about
him. At the beginning, good feelings predominate. But it all degenerates pretty quickly.
The dead guy could be me. He’s not me, of course, but he could be.
I’m taking a strange pleasure in writing this story. Having started it, I find I can’t stop. Maybe it will become a novel. I’ve written seventy-two short stories. Seventy-two little inspirations before getting my breath. Who can top that?
As for this story, I don’t want anybody cutting it. I won’t let anyone touch it. I just finished a story about Chekhov’s last hours. Joanne’s looking it over. But this story, the one that begins after my death, I’m not going to show her. It would make her too sad.
No revising, no corrections. I just hope I can finish it. In some way it’s a wager.
As long as I write, I stay alive.
He writes all day and doesn’t sleep at night. At night, his illness wakes up. He gets out of bed, gropes his way through the darkness, and shuts himself up in the bathroom. I hear him coughing in there.
He coughs hard enough to rip his lungs apart.
He says the coughing is a protest against the disease. If he stops coughing, he’s afraid his brain will take it as a signal. As if the cough said to the brain, “The body’s putting up a fight. You have to fight too.” So he puts all his energy into coughing.
My God, why does he have to go? He’s only just found his way, he’s found it at my side.
He says, “Complaining doesn’t do any good. You just have to be ready.” I pretend to be. To accompany him, I pretend to be as ready as he is.
Before going to sleep we watched
King Solomon’s Mines
. I’d never seen it before. The movie opens with the death of an elephant. I don’t know if they actually killed one or not, but the scene is grippingly real. There are sunsets and a bush fire that puts the animals to flight in a deafening stampede across the savanna. Ray was like a child, watching that.
Afterward he slept a little. I heard him talking in his sleep. He kept repeating Marianne’s name.
At eight o’clock I bring him his coffee. I say, “You talked in your sleep last night. I heard part of your dream.”
“Really?”
He examines the inside of his coffee cup.
“Maybe you remember some bits of it?”
I don’t mention Marianne. He swallows a mouthful and looks at his cup. Like he was going to find his dream there. “No,” he says. “I don’t remember anything.”
I go down to the living room and take up the poem I started last evening. No words come to me. I lay the poem aside and go back upstairs to the study.
Ray’s sitting there surrounded by his library. He’s correcting a manuscript. I don’t know which one.
It occurs to me that his little secrets are multiplying. “All right,” I say, beside myself. “This dream. What was it?”
He looks at me. Immediately I regret what I said. I start
searching for the words to apologize with. At that moment, he says, “Fine. I’m going to tell you my dream.” He taps the pages he’s correcting. “As soon as I finish revising, I’ll tell you.”
I nod my head as if he has no choice and turn on my heels.
On the stairs I hear him coughing.
When I go into the kitchen, I can’t hear him anymore.
I have doubts. I feel I’ve been horrible. I have no right to invite myself into his dreams. I bite my lips and dash back upstairs to apologize as abjectly as I can.
My footsteps pound the floor like the buffalo hooves in last night’s film.
When I stick my head through the little window at the top of the stairs, I don’t see him. His chair is empty.
I detect his respiration, his labored breathing.
I turn my head and call, “Ray!”
I’m not ready, you know.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
Colleagues, friends, enemies, there are a great many of you here, and I like to think, yes, I like to think you’ve come on my account.
I’m the star attraction this evening, am I not?
I’ve been given this trophy—it’s in the form of a spear or maybe a feather duster—in any case this thing has been bestowed on me as an award for my whole career, as if it were over. That goes straight to my heart. This spear of yours goes
straight to my heart, no joke. Oops, I’m not doing a very good job of remaining upright.
I’m very sorry to disappoint you, but my career isn’t finished. I bend but I don’t break. A number of times, I’ve been pushed out … and every time I’ve bounced back. I’ve taken my authors with me. I’d like to hear even one of you say you regret coming along.
I’m waiting to see some hands. Richard? Of course not, Richard, you’ve got every reason to thank me. Nicole? We could have done great things together, Nicole, but you went and did some very small ones with the competition. Pardon my vodka, I mean, my frankness.
And since this is a time for sincerity, since I no longer feel bound by any ties to the enterprise for which I nearly ruined the best years of my youth, to “the sprawling organization that provided me with the pittance on which I survived,” since the house is on fire and the books are going up in smoke—you will note that the editor may be sacked and removed from the fire, but who will stop the books from burning? Eh, Paul? I love your tie.
I’m fascinated by the neckties writers wear to big occasions. The perfection of a writer’s knot betrays the fact that someone else has tied it for him.
Where was I? Ah yes, frankness.
Frankness requires that I reveal the circumstances in which a writer like Raymond—are you here, Ray? Are you part of this sparkling, tie-wearing, comic gathering? If you are, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell the assembly how I rewrote your short stories. With what consummate art …
Tell them, tell them you’re my creation.
At the moment when the house is burning, when books are getting as stale as old soda water, reveal to us how a work of fiction is built.
The only trophy I’m interested in accepting is the trophy for being the greatest literary ventriloquist of my generation.
Your trophy, this double-feathered spear, I leave to you.
I already have enough things to polish at home.
*
So how was I? Did I talk loud enough? Good. At one point, I was afraid they were going to cut the mike.
More vodka, please. No. Wait. My flask. Take it out of my pocket. Not that one, that’s oil for scales.
Scales
. Shit. Nobody here speaks my language. Nobody’s equipped to understand me.
That’s a cute skirt you’re wearing. Do you say
slit skirt
? What’s the word? The exact word? I’d say
uncinched
.
Huh? What’s that you’re saying? Ray? He’s … You’re talking about Raymond? You’re fucking kidding me. It’s Raymond you’re talking about?
Shit.
