A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [83]
Her tummy felt squiggly. She made a pitcher of margaritas, which she never did when drinking alone. As she licked the salt around the top of the glass, her forehead broke into tiny droplets of perspiration. Now came unfettered fright.
The level in the margarita pitcher lowered.
Quinn knew something was awry when he arrived a few hours later. Rita was slightly listing, and their kiss was punctuated with salt.
“I’m a couple of drinks up on you,” she said. “How did the meetings go?”
He related the business of the trip. Dinner was sitting on the floor before the fireplace at the coffee table and afterwards, a sink into soft pillows with softer sax over the hi-fi.
Rita appeared misty-eyed, hardly taking her eyes off him. Quinn loved what he saw. It seemed that they were unable to pass each other without some kind of touch. Painted-on leather pants, bare midriff, an open blouse knotted under her breasts, glowing lipstick. He watched her clear the table…
“Quinn,” she said, meandering to her desk. “I’d like you to read my pages. I realize some of them look like they were written between the sheets. Look, I think I might need some help.”
Quinn was about to go into his standard evasion, but on this night the air had something different drifting on it.
“I’d be scared to death,” he said.
“Scared of hurting me? Scared of rejecting me, telling me I stink? Mal has played that game with me for years.”
“Rita, it isn’t as though Mal was telling you that you made the bacon too crisp, try to get it right the next time. Writing has been at the center of all your longings most of your life. I don’t have the proper credentials. I don’t want to screw around in a place I have no right to be.”
“I’ve heard all that before,” she said with a tart edge rising in her voice.
“Don’t be pissed at Mal for wanting to protect you from his ignorance. He was smart not to make that kind of mistake. Damned if I want to sit in judgment of you.”
“You’re both convincing. Frankly, I think you’re copping out. Between you and Mal, you’ve read every piece of literature written since the Middle Ages.”
“That doesn’t make me an expert.”
“Who is an expert? Christopher Christopher? I’ve reached that stage where anyone with a license to steal is a self-promoting prick in business to keep the wannabes coming back for one more writers’ conference. Quinn, do you know what it’s like making a submission for publication? You’re dead, rejected before you put it in the mail. ‘Your story is wellwritten but doesn’t fit our needs,’ signed ‘The Editors,’ who will remain nameless.”
“Rita, nobody forced you into writing.”
“Thanks, I really appreciate that. I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve been doing this since I was nine. I need a break. Mal takes my work to the literature professors on campus. ‘Shows a lot of promise, but needs work.’”
“Haven’t you just answered your own question? What professors at the University of Colorado, or all the universities in Colorado, have published anything of major note in the past fifty years?” Quinn argued.
“I want a straight answer. I want to hear coldturkey truth from one person of literary integrity. Just one person. If I can’t get that from my husband, who can I get it from?”
Rita would not be deterred. She had drawn the line, and Quinn had to cross it.
“Are these the pages?” he asked. “All right, but I wish to hell I knew better about what I am doing.”
He knew enough.
Some of her earlier poetry had danced and leapt and was filled with cunning and grace and metaphors. Down through the years, as each new piece of non-poetry grew longer, it strayed. She was unable to organize the work, keep it under the central command of the writer. The dialogue came from pickled talking heads, not people of wit and observation.
There was a list of commonplace pitfalls, no sense of when a sentence could be expanded into a paragraph or a chapter shrunk