Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar Part 8

He wrote up a sales slip while the kid tapped the keys a couple of times more and looked down doubtfully at the machine. There was something off in its rightness and precision, an old and familiar antagonism gone, a testiness his fingers wanted to feel. He missed the adversity of typing across a platen pitted like a minefield, the resistance of the querulous keys that would bunch and clog. Drummond had seen this before. The kid wasn't ready to say it yet, but half of him wanted the jalopy touch of his broken Olivetti back.

"It's different," he said.

"What's the plot of your novel?" Drummond said.

"It's hard to explain," the kid said.

"Well, is it sci-fi?" he asked. "Romance? Detective thriller?"

Somewhat sn.o.bbily, the kid said, "It doesn't really fit any of those categories."

Pete laughed. Drummond felt the entire length of the day settle in his bones. He said, "Take the machine back and monkey with it. See how it feels. Give yourself some time to get used to it."

"I don't know," the kid said.

"Look," Drummond said. "I kept all the old parts. I could restore it back to broken in ten minutes. Or if you don't like the way it works just throw it on the floor a few times. But first give it a fair chance." He pushed the handwritten bill across the counter.

"Can I pay you tomorrow? It's been a slow day."

"Sure," Drummond said. "Tomorrow."

Drummond and the boy boarded the bus and took their usual seats on the bench in back. Drummond wore an old snap-brim hat with a red feather in the band and a beige overcoat belted at the waist. He pulled a packet of salted nuts from the pocket, sharing them with the boy as the bus made its way slowly through the rush hour. His wife had taken their old green Fiat wagon, and Drummond sometimes wondered if he was supposed to feel foolish, letting her keep it. But he didn't really mind riding the bus, and during the past few months he and the boy had settled into a routine. They ate a snack and read what people had written during the day, and then, as they crossed the West Seattle Bridge, the boy would time the rest of the trip home, praying and telling the decades of his rosary.

"You want some?" Drummond asked, holding out the sort of small red box of raisins the boy liked. The boy shook his head indifferently, and Drummond slipped the box back into his pocket.

The boy pulled out the sheets of paper he'd taken from the typewriters. For the most part the sentences were nonsensical, the random cras.h.i.+ng of keys, or the repet.i.tive phrases people remembered from typing cla.s.ses. But some were more interesting, when people typed tantalizing bits of autobiography or quoted a pa.s.sage of meaningful philosophy. The boy slumped against the window and shuffled through the fluttering sheets while Drummond, looking over his shoulder, followed along.

"Now is the time for all good men."

"The quick brown fox jumped over."

"G.o.d is Dead."

"zrtiENsoina;ldu?/ng;'a!"

"Tony chief Tony Tony."

"Now is the time now."

"Jaclyn was here."

"That interview didn't work out so great," Drummond said. The bus rose, crossing over the Duwamish River. A ferry on the Sound, its windows as bright as ingots of gold, seemed to be carting a load of light out of the city, making for the dark headlands of Bainbridge island. Drummond wondered if the boy would like a boat ride for his birthday, or maybe even to go fis.h.i.+ng. His father had kept his tackle as meticulously as he had kept his typewriters, and it was still stored with his cane rod in the hall closet. After a trip to Westport or a day on the Sound, his father had sharpened his barbs with a hand file and dried and waxed the spoons and aught-six treble hooks until they shone as brightly as silverware. n.o.body Drummond had ever known did that. Even now, a year after the old man's death, his gear showed no sign of rusting.

Drummond opened the bottle of lotion and squeezed a dollop into his palm. The lotion was cold, and he ma.s.saged it between his hands until it warmed to the touch.

"Give me your hand," he said to the boy.

He rubbed the boy's hands, smoothing the dry, dead skin between his fingers, feeling the flaking scales soften between his own hands.

"Your birthday's Monday," Drummond said.

Pete laughed.

"Any idea what you'd like?"

"No," the boy said.

Theresa would probably call home on Pete's birthday. She'd always been good that way, calling or writing nice thank-you notes to people. For months Drummond had expected his wife to have a realization, although he was never sure what she'd realize. When they had eloped during his senior year-her soph.o.m.ore-she was six months pregnant and beginning to show. She had never had a real honeymoon or even, she had told him bitterly, a real life. The boy had been a tremendous, bewildering amount of work for a girl of sixteen. Drummond supposed that at forty-one she was still a young woman. Now that she was gone, he found most of his social life at church. He was in charge of the coffee urn, and he picked up pastries from a bakery on California Avenue whose owner was an old crony of his father's. He enjoyed the hour of fellows.h.i.+p after Ma.s.s, mingling with people he'd known all his life, people in whose aging faces he still recognized the shortstop from Catholic Youth ball or the remnant of a former May Day queen's smile. There was one particular lady he thought he might consider asking out on a possible date when the time was right.

The rain falling against the roof of the bus and the warm amber light inside were familiar. Drummond capped the lotion and put the bottle away. He turned down the brim of his hat anxiously and, checking his watch, realized it was still early. He wanted to stop by the corner store before it closed; he needed to pick up a frozen pizza and some pop and ice cream for dinner. As the bus wound around Alki Point, he looked again at his watch, a Hamilton pocket model, railroad grade, which he wore on a silver fob slipped through his belt. Resting in his palm, it had that satisfying heft well-made things often have, the weight falling just right. It had been his father's, and before that had belonged to his grandfather, an engineer for the old Great Northern. They'd never had to change the initials on the case, and the center wheel traveled four thousand miles, round and round, in the course of a year. His grandfather had told him that, and now Drummond often saw the image of the elderly frail man as he wound the stem in the morning.

"Tomorrow's Sat.u.r.day," he said. "I've got some catching up to do.

"But Monday," he said, "I'll take the day off. How'd you like that? We'll do something, just me and you.

"You'll be twenty-five years old.

"Twenty-five years," he said.

Almost by way of acknowledgment the boy nudged his gla.s.ses up the bridge of his nose. Drummond fitted his old snap-brim hat on the boy's head and looked at him. But his face, reflected in the yellow gla.s.s, had already faded into its cryptic and strange cloister. His heavy purple lips were shaping the words to a prayer and the rosary was ticking in his lap as the maroon beads, one by one, slipped through his fingers.

"I love you," Drummond said, expecting the boy to laugh, but he only rested his head against the seat and looked out the window at the gray city going by.

Nicholas Delbanco.

THE WRITERS' TRADE.

Mark Fusco sold his novel when he was twenty-two. "You're a very fortunate young man," Bill Winterton proclaimed. They met in the editor's office, on the sixteenth floor. The walls were lined with photographs, book jackets, and caricatures. "You should be pleased with yourself."

He was. He had moved from apprentice to author with scarcely a hitch in his stride. It was 1967, and crucial to be young. One of the caricatures showed Hawthorne on a polo pony, meeting Henry James; their mallets were quill pens. They were swinging with controlled abandon at the letter A.

Bill Winterton took him to lunch. They ate at L'Armorique. The editor discoursed on luck; the luck of the draw, he maintained, comes to those who read their cards. He returned the first bottle of wine, a Pouilly Fume. The sommelier deferred, but the second bottle also tasted faintly of garlic: the sommelier disagreed. They had words. "There's someone cooking near your gla.s.sware," Winterton declared. "Or you've got your gla.s.ses drying near the garlic pan."

He was proved correct. The maitre d'hotel apologized and congratulated him on his discerning nose. The meal was on the restaurant; they were grateful for Winterton's help. This pleased him appreciably; he preened. He spoke about the care and nurturing of talent, the ability to locate and preserve it. Attention to detail and standards-these were the tools of his trade. This was the be-all and end-all, the alpha and omega of publis.h.i.+ng, he said.

Mark began his book in college, in a writing cla.s.s. His father came from Florence and told tales about the family-the Barone P. P. who thought he had swallowed a sofa, the pa.s.sion for clocks his aunt indulged obsessively, the apartment in Catania where they sent the younger sons. Of these characters he made his story, fas.h.i.+oning a treasure hunt: the grandmother from Agrigento whom the northern cousins spurned, the legacy she failed to leave but set her children hunting. He borrowed his father's inflections: his ear was good, eye accurate, and the book had pace. He completed a draft in six months. Then the work of revision began.

Bill Winterton was forty-five and given to hyperbole. He had been a black belt in karate in Korea; he had known Tallulah Bankhead well, and Blossom Dearie; he had heard Sam Beckett discourse on Jimmy Joyce. He drank and lived in Rhinecliff and was working on a novel of his own. Mark's book was slated to appear the second Sunday of July. "That's the first novelist season," Winterton informed him. "Coming out time for the debs. We want to get attention while the big boys are off at the beach. Not to worry . . ." He flourished his spoon.

Mark worked that summer in Wellfleet, at a bicycle rental garage by the harbor; he also served ice cream. He spent long hours clamming at low tide. He liked the brief defined conviviality of work, the casual commerce with strangers. He rented the upstairs apartment of what had been a captain's house. "Everybody was in whaling," said his landlady, Mrs. Newcombe. "All the men in Wellfleet." She meant, he learned later, in 1700. Her house had a large widow's walk, and furniture and ornaments from the China trade.

He was sleeping with the daughter of a real estate agent in town. Bonnie returned from her soph.o.m.ore year at Simmons to find the local boys inadequate; they whistled and hooted at tourists, and lounged on the Town Office steps. They made peace signs and shouted "Flower Power!" and wore ponytails. They went drag racing on the sand and pa.s.sed out drinking beer. She was small and blonde and sweetly submissive and had hazel eyes. Her father would kill her, she said.

Mark had read that writers lived along the ponds. He saw them on Main Street, buying papers or fish, wearing beards. He watched them strolling on the dock, wearing caps at jaunty angles, smoking pipes. He heard them at The Lighthouse, conversing over coffee, and at the public library, where they donated books. He told himself he too would be a man with a mission, aloof.

His room had a view of the dock. He had a double bed with a board beneath the mattress and bra.s.s bars painted white; he had a chest of drawers and a rolltop desk beneath the window. He organized the pigeonholes, the stacks of twenty-weight paper, the marmalade jar full of pens. The paraphernalia of habit codified, that summer, into ritual observance. He made himself strong coffee on a hot plate; he bought a blue tin cup. He played solitaire. This permitted him, he felt, to stay at his desk without restlessness; it engaged his hands but not attention. He could sit for hours, dealing cards.

He wrote his pages rapidly, then rewrote at length. The little ecstasy of correction, the page reworked if a syllable seemed inexact, or missing, the change of a comma that felt consequential, the tinkering and achieved finality: all this was new to Mark. He recited paragraphs aloud. He read chapters to the mirror, conscious of inflection, rhythm, emphasis. He blackened the blank pages with a sense of discovered delight.

Mrs. Newcombe's parlor shelf had Roger Tory Peterson and Songs the Whalemen Sang. An ancestor had figured in Th.o.r.eau's Cape Cod. She owned The House of the Seven Gables in a leather-bound edition; she had instruction books on quilting and Just So Stories for Little Children and The Fountainhead. He loved the smell and heft of books, the look of endpapers, the crackle of pages and literal flavor of print. He loved the way words edged against each other, the clas.h.i.+ng, jangling sounds they made, the bulk of paragraphs and linear austerity of speech. He recited lines while driving or at Fort Hill gathering mussels; they formed his sh.o.r.eline certainties while he watched the tide. A phrase like "sh.o.r.eline certainties," for instance, seemed luminous with meaning; it served as his companion while he shuffled cards.

At Columbia he argued philosophy and baseball with his suite mates; he ate spareribs at midnight and went to double features at the Thalia and New Yorker and took his laundry home. His thesis had been focused on Karenin and Casaubon-the stiff unyielding husbands in Anna Karenina and Middlemarch. There were parallels, also, between Vronsky and Ladislaw, those weak romancing men. The question most urgently posed, he wrote, is how to live a life alone when urged by a secular power to succeed, a secular temptation to accede-or, as Lewis Carroll put it, "Will you, won't you join the dance?"

We each have known conviction, the sudden flush of rightness; Mark came to feel it then. His book had a blue cover and its t.i.tle was handsomely lettered. A bird ascended-framed by temple columns-from the sea. The stages of production grew familiar. But that his work would be transformed-that strangers in another town would take his words and reproduce them-this careful rendering in multiples provided his first sense of public presence, the work existing elsewhere also. We grow used to the private response. When someone speaks our name we a.s.sume we are nearby to hear. We answer questions asked; we find ourselves aroused by provocation, flattered by flattery, angered by insult-part of a nexus of action and talk. But his career, he understood, was in the hands of strangers-someone who might read the book to whom he had not handed it, someone who might help or hinder from an indifferent distance. The recognition startled Mark. He was the master of his soul, perhaps, but not the captain of his fate. He was reading Joseph Conrad and could recite Henley's "Invictus"; such comparatives came readily to mind.

"I don't know you," Bonnie said.

"Of course you do."

"No. Not any longer."

"I haven't changed," he said.

"You're changing. Yes, you are."

She turned her back to him. It was beautiful, unblemished; he traced the white ridge of her spine. She s.h.i.+vered.

"I'll only be away three days."

"You won't come back."

"Of course I will."

"I mean you won't come back to me." She fingered the pillow.

"Make up something for your parents. That way you could come along."

"No."

"We'll figure something out."

"I wanted to be at the party. I'm so proud of you. A publication party. I did want to celebrate."

"You'll be there anyhow," he lied. "You go with me where I go."

"'Parting is sweet sorrow . . .'"

"'Such sweet sorrow,'" he corrected her. Mark flushed at his involuntary pedantry and-to counteract the rightness of her accusation-pressed her back down in the bed. She was all the more exciting when she cried.

His parents had scheduled a party. They were proud of his achievement and would celebrate on publication day. They lived in Rye, New York. His father took the train to Manhattan, working for an import-export firm. He dealt in bristles, hides, and furs; he placed orders for Kolinski, Chunking 2 1/4, Arctic fox, and seal. They were moderately prosperous and happy, they told him, to help. His job at the bicycle shop was therefore part time, a gesture; he drove an MG. It was British Racing Green, a graduation gift. "From here on," he promised his mother, "I'm enrolled in the school of real life."

She thought this phrase enchanting. Much of what he said enchanted her-his p.r.o.nouncements on fas.h.i.+on, for instance, his sense of the cartographer as artist, mapping the imagined world from its available features. She had two vodka martinis every afternoon at five; he joined her on the porch.

"My son the poet," she said.

"Except it's fiction, Mom."

"You'll always be a poet." She swallowed the olive intact.

His mother liked occasions. She was not sociable and did not attend parties herself. But she welcomed the caterers' bustle at home, the porch festooned with lanterns, the garden sprouting tables and white plastic chairs. She gave birthday and anniversary parties, graduation parties, wedding parties. The house was large. She felt less lonely entertaining, she explained; they should put the place to use. She asked him for a guest list six weeks in advance.

He listed friends from Columbia, his editor, the publicity woman, his cousin, a cla.s.smate from high school who was an all-night D.J. His father invited business a.s.sociates; his mother included the children or parents of friends. She disliked a party at which everyone knew everyone; a party ought to take you by surprise.

She made a habit of p.r.o.nouncements, and then repeated them. One such repeated a.s.sertion had to do with variety, the spice of life, the way ingredients invariably vary. He humored her. He had come to recognize his parents needed humoring; his father's politics, for instance, had to be avoided when they met. His father admired Judge Julius Hoffman. He wished the judge had thrown the book at those impertinent Chicago-based conspirators; he was afraid of Hoffman's leniency, he said. He trusted Mark. He knew his son refused to bite the feeding hand.

On the Sunday of the party, he drove from Wellfleet to Rye. Trucks rumbled past at speed. He reached the Sagamore Bridge in a sudden cloudburst and pulled off the road to raise the convertible top. Tugs whistled in the ca.n.a.l; Mark saw the line squall receding. His book was coming out that day; he would celebrate that night. He opened his s.h.i.+rt to the rain.

There was much weekend traffic; he made New London by ten. He wondered if the tollbooth tenders worked eight-hour s.h.i.+fts. They would take coffee breaks. They would bring a heater with them in winter, soft drinks in Styrofoam cups; they would have portable radios for music and the news. They would have a grandson in Spokane. This grandson played the drums. Mark was learning to provide corroborative detail for his characters: birthday parties, a distaste for lima beans, a preference in socks. "Make a catalogue," his writing teacher had advised. "Make it on three-by-five cards. Know everything you can. Tell yourself the person despises lima beans. Try to decide if she likes snow peas or string beans better, and if she wears a girdle, and if she sleeps soundly at night."

He took the turnoff after Playland and reached his house by two. It was a sprawling half-timbered slate-roofed structure; there was a three-car garage. His mother met him at the kitchen door. "Congratulations," she said.

"I made it," Mark said, stretching. "Six hours on the nose."

"It's a wonderful review."

"What is?"

"You didn't know?"

He shook his head.

"A beautiful review," she said. "In this morning's Sunday Times. I thought they would have told you."

"No."

"They must have planned to make it a surprise. It's wonderful. You'll see."

The pantry was filled with salads. There were trays of deviled eggs. The review was prominent, and generous; he had heard of the reviewer, and she made much of his book. "Cla.s.sic and unmannered cadences," she wrote. "Fidelity of mind and spirit, a tale told with economy and grace." The novel avoided those pitfalls young writers so rarely avoid; she hailed "an auspicious debut." His mother clapped her hands. "They've been calling all day long," she said. "We tried you up in Wellfleet but you'd gone already. Everyone who's anyone reads the Sunday Times."

We all have been a.s.sessed in public, whether by report card, hiring, or review. Our system incorporates rank. We are used to reading how we've done, what we are doing, and in which percentile. But this was new and newly exciting-far more so than the notice in trade journals earlier. He had never heard of the Library Journal or The Kirkus Reviews prior to their praise. To read himself described as "brilliantly inventive," "persuasively original," was a "heady, yet heartfelt experience": he took his duffel to his room, and then he showered and changed.

His parents knew an author who wrote children's books. Ernest the dog was anything but earnest-was, in fact, mischief itself. Ernest got into and barely escaped from trouble; he was a cross between a dachshund and Dalmatian-known as a dachmatian to his friends. Mark, nine, disliked the books. His parents thought them cute, however, and gave him Ernest in the Monkeyhouse, Ernest Goes to Boarding School, Ernest and the Alligator Swamp. There were elaborate inscriptions from the author for his birthday, for Christmas, or when he was sick. Ernest had a pal called Busy Bee. They helped each other out-when Ernest was being chased by the men from the dog pound, for instance, Busy Bee distracted them: when Busy Bee was slated for the honeymill, Ernest picked the lock.

One day the author came to lunch. His name was Harold Weber, and he had a big white beard and was completely bald. Like one of his own characters, he wore a blue velvet vest. His wife, who died three years before, had been Mark's mother's cousin; they kept distantly in touch. Harold Weber drove a Lancia; his father admired the car. "This is your biggest fan," he said, presenting Mark. "He knows Ernest Goes to Boarding School by heart. And The Frying Pan and Fire. It's his favorite."

That November had been bl.u.s.tery: the last dark leaves of the j.a.panese maple beat at the bay window. Branches blew past. His father said, "Let's have a fire," and a voice from the chimney said, "Wait!" "What's that?" his father asked. "Wait, won't you?" called the voice. "I have to get my family out first. We fell asleep."

Mark approached the fireplace and put his ear to the wall. "h.e.l.lo, little boy; what's your name?" He turned to his parents, shocked. "I've got it-you must be Mark. Ernest told me all about you. You're his favorite person on all Echo Lane." Then the voice changed register, grew gruff. "h.e.l.lo, Mark. How've you been? Tell them not to start that fire till I get Busy Bee out."

Harold Weber leaned against the mantelpiece. He was smiling; his mouth moved slightly, and his Adam's apple worked. Yet the voice came from the chimney, not where he stood beneath it. Mark said, "You're doing that," and Harold Weber bent, shaking his bald head, raking his beard with his fingers, looking up the fireplace and saying from what seemed like the window, "He's not."