The Complete Stories (65 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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The story concerned a Mr. L. E. Vogel, a sarcastic, self-centered, although not thoroughly bad-natured middle-aged writer with a clubfoot, who wore in summertime a white suit, the pants of which dripped over his heels, an old-fashioned straw hat, and the same yellow knitted necktie, day after day. He was a short man with a loud laugh that embarrassed him, and he walked a good deal though he limped. One summer he had taught at a writers’ conference in Syracuse, New York. There the writer had fallen for a college girl chambermaid at the hotel he had lived in during his two weeks of lecturing. She had slept with him for kicks after learning he had published two novels. Once was enough for her, but Vogel, having tasted young flesh, was hooked hard. He fell in love with the girl, constantly sought her presence—a blond tease of twenty—with solemn offers of marriage, until she became sick of him. To get him off her back she arranged with a boyfriend to enter his room with a passkey and give him a bad time. Vogel, soaking in his afternoon tub, heard someone shout, “Fire, everybody out!” He climbed out of the bath, was grabbed by the arm and shoved into the hall by the boyfriend, who pulled the door shut after him and disappeared down the stairs. The naked writer wandered like a half-drowned animal in the huge hotel hall, knocking at doors that were slammed in his face, until he found an elderly lady who handed him a blanket to cover himself and phoned the manager for a key to his room. Vogel, heartbroken that the girl had done this to him—he understood at once she had contrived the plot and for what reason—packed and left Syracuse a full week before the conference had ended.
“Poor Vogel swore off love to keep on writing.”
End of “Travails of a Writer.”
Arriving home, Eli Fogel dashed a white pitcher of daffodils to the kitchen floor, and kicked with his bad leg at the shards and flowers.
“Swine! Have I taught you nothing?”
Incensed, humiliated to the hilt (the story revived the memory; he suffered from both), Fogel, in a rare rage, cursed out Gary, wished on him a terrifying punishment. But reason prevailed and he wrote him, instead, a scalding letter.
Where had he got the story? Probably it was rife as gossip. He pictured the girl and her friend regaling all who would hear, screaming over the part where the hairy-chested satyr wanders in a wet daze in the hotel hallway. Gary might easily have heard it from them or friends of theirs. Or perhaps he had slept with the girl and she had confided it directly. Good God, had
he
put her up to it? No, probably not.
Why, then, had he written it? Why hadn’t he spared Fogel this
mortification, though it was obvious he had not expected him to find the story and read it? That wasn’t the point; the point was he had not refrained—out of friendship—from writing it. So much for friendship. He detested the thought that the boy had sucked up to him all summer to collect facts for the piece. Or possibly he had heard the story and been tempted by it, Fogel hoped,
after
the White Mountain conference. He had probably harbored the “idea” during the summer but did not decide to write it until he got back to San Francisco, where he went to college. All he had to do was salt the anecdote with some details of appearance, a few mannerisms, and the tale was as good as written, acceptable at once for publication in the college quarterly. Maybe Gary had thought of it as a sort of homage: this good writer I know portrayed as human being. He hadn’t been able to resist. After a summer of too much talk of writing he had felt the necessity of having something immediately in print, no matter what. He had got it down on paper almost wholly as received. It invented nothing, in essence a memoir once removed.
When he felt he had regained objectivity, Fogel sat at his desk facing the landlady’s garden behind the house and, dipping his fountain pen into black ink, began a letter to Gary: “I congratulate you on the publication of your first story although I cannot rejoice in it.”
He tore that up and on another sheet wrote:
 
Your story, as is, signified little and one wonders why it was written. Perhaps it represents the desperate act of one determined to break into print without the patience, the art—ultimately—to transmute a piece of gossip into a fiction; and in the process, incidentally, betraying a friend. If this poor thing indicates the force and depth of your imagination, I suggest you give up writing.
L. E. Vogel, indeed! Yours truly, Eli Fogel.
P.S. Look up “travail.” It’s an experience not easy to come by.
 
After sealing the letter he didn’t send it. We all have our hangups, Fogel thought. Besides, life isn’t that long. He tore it up and sent a Picasso postcard instead, a woman with six faces sitting on a chamber pot.
 
Dear Gary, I read your story in
SF Unicorn.
I wish I could say it was a good story, but it isn’t, not so good as the ones I read last summer that you couldn’t get published. I wish I had had your opportunity to write about L. E. Vogel; I would have done him justice.
 
He received, airmail, a four-page, single-spaced letter from Gary.
To tell the honest truth I was kind of anxious about my writing. I couldn’t finish a story for months after the W.M. conference, and without doubt took the easy way out. All I can say is I hope you will forgive and forget. Once I reread the story in the
Unicorn
I prayed that you wouldn’t see it. If I have hurt our friendship, which I truly hope I haven’t, I am willing to try to do better if you have the patience. I would like to be a better friend.
Also I recently read in an article about Thomas Wolfe that he said it was all right to write about other people you might know, but it’s wrong to include their address and phone number. As you know, Mr. Fogel, I have a lot to learn about writing, that’s for sure. As for what you could have done with the same material, please don’t compare your magnificent powers with my poor ones.
I enclose a picture of my latest bride as well as one of myself.
 
In the envelope was an underexposed snapshot of a long-haired brunette in briefest bikini, sitting on a blanket by Gary’s yellow guitar, on a California beach. Resting back on her arms, she stared distantly, certainly not happily, at the birdie; lost, as it were, to time and tide. She looked worn, cheerless, as though she had been had, and was, in her own mind, past having. She seemed to understand what she had experienced. She was, for Fogel, so true, lovely, possible, present, so beautifully formed, that he thought of her as a work of art and audibly sighed.
Gary, the hero himself of the other, overexposed colored snap, probably taken by the discontented lady herself, wore white bathing trunks, prominent genitals, and a handsome sunburned body; spare, dark, leaner than he was when Fogel had seen him last. His eyes staring blankly at the camera contradicted the smile on his face. Perhaps he was not looking at the unhappy lady but through her. The youth darkened in bright sunlight as the beholder beheld, or was Fogel prejudiced?
On the back of his picture Gary had scrawled, “You may not recognize me so well. I’ve changed, I’ve lost weight.”
“What do you mean ‘bride’?” Fogel wrote in the postscript of his reply forgiving Gary. He had urged patience in writing. “If you push time, time pushes you. One has less control.”
“Not in the married sense,” Gary explained when he appeared in person in Fogel’s flat, in dungaree jacket and field boots, wearing a sixday growth of beard after driving practically nonstop across the country in a new secondhand station wagon, during the winter recess. He had brought his guitar and played “Ochi Chornye” for Fogel.
They were at first stiff with each other. Fogel, despite good will, felt distaste for the youth, but by degrees relented and they talked exhaustively. The older man had, more than once, to set aside the image
of himself dripping along the hotel hallway before he could renew affection for Gary. The guitar helped. His singing sometimes brought tears to the eyes. Ah, the human voice, nothing like it for celebrating or lamenting life. I must have misjudged his capacity to relate, or else he does it better. And why should I bear him a grudge for his errors, considering those I make myself?
It was therefore freer talk than they had engaged in last summer, as though between equals, about many more interesting matters than when Gary was hastily taking it down to preserve for humanity. Yet as they conversed, particularly when Fogel spoke of writing, the youth’s fingers twitched as though he were recording the older man’s remarks in an invisible notebook, causing him later to say, “Don’t worry if you can’t remember word for word, Gary. Have you read Proust? Even when he remembers he invents.”
“Not as of yet, but he’s on my list.”
There was still something naive about him, though he was bright enough and gave the impression that he had experienced more than one ordinarily would have at his age. Possibly this was an effect of the size of his corpus, plenty of room to stuff in experience. Fogel was at the point of asking what women meant to him, but it was a foolish question so he refrained; Gary was young, let him find his way. Fogel would not want to be that young again.
The youth remained for three days in the small guest room in Fogel’s rent-controlled flat in the three-story brick house on West Ninth Street. Gary one night invited over some friends, Fogel adding two or three former students, including Miss Rudel. A noisy crowded party flowered, especially pleasurable to Fogel when Gary sang, strumming his guitar, and a young man with a thin beard and hair to his shoulders accompanied him on a recorder. Marvelous combinations, inventions, the new youth dreamed up. The guests played records they had brought along and danced. A girl who smelled heavily of pot, dancing barefoot, kissed Fogel and drew him into the circle of her gyrations. The steps weren’t so hard, he decided, really they were no steps, so he pulled off his shoes and danced in his black socks, his limp as though choreographed in. At any rate, no one seemed to notice and Fogel had an enjoyable time. He again felt grateful to the youth for lifting him, almost against his will, out of his solitude.
On the morning he left, Gary, bathed, shaved, fragrantly lotioned, in white T-shirt and clean cords, tossed a duffel bag into the station wagon and stood talking on the lowest stoop step with Fogel, who had come out to see him off. The writer sensed Gary was leading up to
something, although he was ostensibly saying goodbye. After some introductory noises the youth apologized for bringing “this” up but he had a request to make, if Fogel didn’t mind. Fogel, after momentary hesitation, didn’t mind. Gary said he was applying for admission to one or two writing centers in universities on the West Coast and he sort of hoped Fogel would write him a letter of recommendation. Maybe two.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Hey thanks, Mr. Fogel, and I don’t want to bug you but I hope you won’t mind if I put your name down as a reference on other applications now and then?”
“What for, Gary? Remember, I’m a working writer.” He felt momentarily uneasy, as though he were being asked to extend credit beyond credit earned.
“I promise I’ll keep it to the barest minimum. Just if I apply for a fellowship to help me out financially, or something like that.”
“That seems all right. I’ll consider each request on its merits.”
“That’s exactly what I want you to do, Mr. Fogel.”
Before the youth drove off, Fogel was moved to ask him why he wanted to be a writer.
“To express myself as I am and also create art,” Gary quickly replied. “To convey my experience so that I become part of my readers’ experience, so, as you might say, neither of us is alone.”
Fogel nodded.
“Why are you writing?”
“Because it’s in me to write. Because I can’t not write.” Fogel laughed embarrassedly.
“That doesn’t contradict what I said.”
“I wouldn’t want to contradict it.” He did not say Gary remembered his summer notes perhaps better than he knew.
The youth thrust forth his hand impulsively. “I’m grateful for your friendship as well as hospitality, Mr. Fogel.”
“Call me Eli if you like.”
“I’ll certainly try,” Gary said huskily.
Several months later he wrote from the Coast: “Is morality a necessary part of fiction? I mean, does it have to be? A girl I go with here said it does. I would like to have your opinion. Fondly, Gary.”
“It is as it becomes aesthetic,” Fogel replied, wondering if the girl was the brunette in the bikini. “Another way to put it is that nothing that is art is merely moral.”
“I guess what I meant to ask,” Gary wrote, “is does the artist have to be moral?”
“Neither the artist nor his work.”
“Thanks for being so frank, Mr. Fogel.”
In rereading these letters before filing them, Fogel noticed that Gary always addressed him by his last name.
Better that way.
In two years Fogel lost four pounds and wrote seventy more pages of his novel. He had hoped to write one hundred and fifty pages but had slowed down. Perfection comes hard to an imperfectionist. He had visions of himself dying before the book was completed. It was a terrible thought: Fogel seated at the table, staring at his manuscript, pen in hand, the page ending in a blot. He had been blocked several months last fall and winter but slowly wrote himself out of it. Afterwards he loved the world a bit better.

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