A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [84]
What about the prerequisites? Writing required both enormous motivation and enormous drive. Rita had only enormous desire.
The baffling part of it was that lesser writers had succeeded. Rita could glow in spots. Some writers were ready to cut off their arms and legs for the title of writer. Was it possible she could rally her gifts, enhance them, and then make the commitment to enslave herself at the typewriter?
Perhaps Rita’s life and Troublesome Mesa and her beauty and her father had all been too perfect to arouse a bit of rage. Rita had been too protected, and her craving for expression could only carry her through a half dozen verses of a psalm.
Quinn set down the Venice pages deep in the night. He was dog tired, too tired to be intelligent about it now.
Rita had fallen asleep atop the bed, adrift in self-deprecation. She was curled up tightly, her perfect hair askew and an odor of tequila lingering. Rita couldn’t drink worth a damn. She had tipsied out.
Jesus, Quinn wondered, what was she making him do?
Rita’s eyes opened slowly, and the first thing Quinn saw was her fear. “Hi,” he said, patting her hair.
“I’ll take a shower,” she said.
“It’s almost five o’clock,” Quinn answered. “I flew in late, remember? I’m dead tired. Push over, let me on the bed.”
Quinn pressed his backside into her tummy and she wrapped her arm over him in a favorite sleeping pose, but she could sense his eyes were open and Quinn always knew when she was staring at him from behind.
“I need to hear it, Quinn,” she pressed.
“I loved you this morning more than I loved you yesterday, and I love you now more than I loved you earlier tonight. Isn’t that what really matters?”
“And with three you get egg roll!” Quinn felt the violent jerk of the comforter being flung off as she ripped it away from him. Quinn rose on an elbow as the end table lamp blared on. Rita stood over the bed, disheveled and rocking back and forth. Obviously, she had been awake and seething to a boil.
“It’s actually very good,” he said. “I don’t want to go into it point by point until I have a few hours’ sleep and can get my thoughts together.”
“Liar!”
“There’s some fine writing there,” he said. He closed his eyes. “But most of it stinks!”
It was not Rita standing before him but a pained, contorted creature who had pushed herself beyond the edge. In that single instance of truth Rita heard what she had avoided for a decade and a half.
“It’s not the end of the earth,” Quinn said.
Lord, he’d never seen her like this! She was an angry Gypsy, disconnected from herself. “Two things, two things, just two things,” she hissed. “That was all I wanted. I wanted to write, and I wanted to be perfect for you. I’m neither.”
“Let me hold you, darling.”
“No, you can’t hold me anymore.”
“Rita, get a grip—”
“I wanted to be perfect for you, Quinn. I was not perfect. Do you know what I mean?”
“How could you be? We were never promised to each other. You grew to be a woman while I was gone. I know you must have had lovers. It doesn’t matter now.”
“I thought,” she moaned, “that by becoming a great writer, you’d forgive me for my imperfection. I’m neither.”
Rita moaned low, all that beauty fallen into wreckage. “I did what I did in the hope you would learn and be jealous and pay attention to me. I did it to anger you. I did it…”
“What?”
“Carlos and I.”
The pain of his head wound came alive, and he fought for his feet and staggered around the room. Her sobs were loud and followed him until he turned to her and pushed her away.
Rita heard the screen door slam.
Vroom…vroom, vroom, vroom. The Jeep screamed away.
Chapter 21
DENVER—EARLY 1980s
Bloody secrets! Bloody lies! The church, the ranch, his parents, the whole goddamned valley seemed to conspire.
This was far worse than losing Greer Little. Greer never betrayed him. He had seen truth in Rita. But what the hell, Quinn thought, he had been away at El Toro Air Base