A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [80]
where your land begins.
Its infinite shadows like fingerprints
of the moments I have stood beside it
confusing your arms with its firm extended branches,
the deep cedar color of your skin,
the bark white corners of your eyes,
the sap which in unnatural light fills them,
runs down the ordinary roughness of wood,
your unshaven cheek.
For the first time, this night,
I stayed longer to watch you walk
toward the lit windows of your cabin
saw your two halves split at the roots:
wood and flesh
bark and skin
the veins of dried leaves the greener veins
across your wrists.
You never knew
but we fell asleep together
half of you beside me,
the other half locked behind a lit window,
all silent until the dark noisy grass woke us,
rousing itself with thoughts of
its own fallen dew.
“God,” Quinn whispered. “Her stories? Have you ever read them, Mal?”
“She read to me once in a while, or used to. I never wanted to be in judgment of her. Suppose she has no talent. I don’t want to be the one to reject my daughter. Quinn, I’ve seen enough of her writing to know she isn’t going to make it. I’ll be there to pick her up when the realization comes to her. I’m a mediocre artist. I get through by being a Mexican tit man. I fart around with this modern bullshit because nobody, critics or clients, knows what it is but wouldn’t dare say so. You can’t get away with my shit as a writer.”
“Mal, no sale. You’re great.”
“He’s great,” Mal said, pointing at an original scribble by Van Gogh.
That night Quinn’s letters from Rita came out of his sea trunk. There were well over a hundred of them. Seen from letter to letter, their continuity was soon understood. Not exactly veiled words of love, but more of missing him as a part of the mountains. Nothing about boyfriends or her own growing maturity. She let the photographs do the talking.
Quinn had gotten one of two monkeys off his back. The resurrection with his parents was a great blessing. The other? Greer Little. He clung to a diminished, unreal thread. Hadn’t Rita done the same thing? The women who loved Marine gunners were plentiful, but…
Quinn was puzzled by his own soul opening up. He didn’t know if he loved her and wouldn’t know until they stood face to face.
Quinn quivered every time he thought of Rita. All the way to the upstate New York Writers Conference, he sighed constantly. A powerful uncertainty it was whose moment of truth had come.
In the splendiferous woods bordering Lake George, the great old novelist Christopher Christopher held forth for ten weeks in the summer for serious aspiring writers. Ten weeks to feed the dream.
One had to go back a bit to remember Christopher’s last great novel. He had outlived his mediocre talent but knew the whens and hows. He became a legend.
Actually, did old Christopher have any masterpieces? His name wove in and out of a generation of magnificent American writers, from the expatriots in Paris between world wars or in Pamplona, where he chased the bulls with Hemingway. Hadn’t he actually been a cub reporter who got an interview with Hemingway and after Papa’s death became a Hemingway “close friend” and aficionado. He wrote of visits to Cuba to arm-wrestle Papa. Never happened.
What about Sinclair Lewis? Christopher Christopher’s New Yorker portrait of “Red” was certainly quintessential. Of course, not that many things had been written about Sinclair Lewis.
Christopher Christopher really made his big hit in American literature with an article for Esquire entitled “Chrysler Airflow—The Great American Car.”
A broadway producer of zingy revues thought it had a catchy ring to it—The Great American Car. He named one of his annual follies after it, and eight hundred performances later, Christopher Christopher was made for life.
These days he was an American icon (who once had tossed a chilled martini into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s face). Now thatched with wild silver hair, he held forth at Lake George with a dozen “master