The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [22]
“I told you you’d—”
“It’s unbelievable as a flood in the desert. I read it from cover to cover and it’s the worst piece of shit I ever read in my life.”
She stepped back and gaped at him as if he were exposing himself in Washington Square.
“It’s phony all the way through,” he went on doggedly. “Either the biography on the back cover is so much crap or he walked through the war wearing a blindfold. Not to mention the cotton in his ears. Nobody ever talked like that, nobody ever thought like that, nobody ever felt like that—”
“Now just who the hell do you think you are?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you!” Her voice was pure Bronx now. “You were there in all the mud and blood and so that means you know it all, huh? A man produces a work of art and all you can do is knock it.”
“If that’s a work of art—”
“I suppose you could do better?”
“If I couldn’t,” he said, “I might as well jump off a bridge.”
“Oh, people like you make me sick to my stomach. You could write a better book than Moby Dick and you could paint better than that idiot Picasso and what the hell did you ever do?”
“I couldn’t paint better than Picasso. In the first place nobody could and in the second place I couldn’t paint a floor without getting paint on the ceiling.”
“So what gives you the idear you could write better than—”
“I don’t know about Moby Dick,” he said. “I never read Moby Dick, and if you think a lot of it I don’t think I want to. I just—”
“What do you know, anyway?”
“I know there’s no r in ‘idea.’ And I know I could write better about the war than that moron I read last night.”
“So go,” she said. “So do it.”
So he did it.
It took forever. He thought it would take him a month, maybe two at the outside. He bought a typewriter and a box of paper and put a sheet in the the typewriter and typed “1.” on top of it. Then he skipped few lines and typed “Chapter One.” He lit a cigarette, took two puffs, put it out, skipped a few more lines, and started pecking at the keys.
He wrote for a week, then took a job, trying to work nights on the book, but after a day’s work he couldn’t concentrate sufficiently to write well. So he established a pattern, working for a week or ten days, then writing for as long as he could make his money last. He taught himself to cook spaghetti and lived on it. He found a furniture mover who would hire him whenever he ran out of money and who would throw all the overtime work his way that he could handle. He could clear a hundred dollars in a week’s work, and he learned to make that hundred last out the month.
His mother wrote him a letter every week. She had married her dry cleaner and they were thinking about living in Florida, but Ruth was pregnant and she wanted to be there for the delivery. Ruth’s baby was born and his mother was living in St. Petersburg before he typed “The End” at the bottom of page 784. He looked at the two words and wondered what in hell to do now.
He spent four hours getting drunk and ten hours sleeping. He got up and took the 784 pages to the girl’s apartment. She had moved out four months earlier and he had trouble getting her new address from the building superintendent because he didn’t know her last name and the super’s English was minimal. They worked it out finally and he found out that the girl was living on West Thirteenth just the other side of Sixth. He went over there and rang her bell. She didn’t recognize him. He was thinner, pale from working indoors, and he had a full beard because shaving was a waste of time and nobody cared what a part-time furniture shlepper looked like.
He put the manuscript in her hands. She looked at it and at him and asked what the hell it was supposed to be.
“It’s not a better book than Moby Dick,” he said. “I read that one since I saw you and I’d know better than to try to top it. But it’s the best I can do.”
“It’s you,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
“I thought maybe you’d look at it.”
“Listen, I’m no authority.”
“You sounded like one last time.”
“I wondered how come I never saw you after that. I figured you left town.”