And that would be it until lunchtime, when he’d wander into the kitchen, look at whatever Janis had left him to heat up, and then phone for a pizza because he didn’t cook. Todd was a man who’d always rather someone else did it for him, and now he was waiting for Janis to come home and tell him how his marriage was going to end.
* * *
Janis came home toward the end of Todd’s second beer, which was just as well. If she’d come home during the third beer, conversation—rational conversation, anyway—would have been risky. Todd tended to get angry after beer in the afternoon.
Janis saw the two beers and decided to keep it short.
“Did she call?” she asked.
Todd thought about pretending he didn’t know who Janis meant. Then he thought again, and said, “Yes,” as briskly as he could.
“Good,” said Janis. “Then you know where we stand.”
“I suppose so,” Todd replied. He had no idea in fact where either of them stood, but he was going to let Janis do this for him, and so he kept his answers short.
“This house belongs to me, you know that,” Janis said. “You’re at fault in this situation, I guess you know that too.”
Todd said nothing.
“Any lawyer will tell you that you’ve got no chance of turning this around in your favor, so I wouldn’t waste your breath or your money.”
“We’ll see,” said Todd, and wondered why he’d said it.
“Fine, and good luck with that,” said Janis. “Now. I want you out of here, for reasons already stated. You can have six weeks to get your stuff together and get moved out of here. After that, I’ll pitch it.”
Todd turned around at that.
“Six weeks is plenty of time, Todd,” Janis said.
“Okay,” said Todd.
If Janis was disappointed at Todd’s lack of response, she didn’t register it. Instead she turned and left the room.
“You fucking cow,” Todd whispered to his beer.
* * *
Todd’s response to his wife’s advice was to ignore it. The very next day he went to see Pete Fenton, the man he called his lawyer. Pete wasn’t really Todd’s lawyer, but a few years back he’d advised Todd on a contract Todd had been offered by a vanity publishing company (he’d told Todd it was a piece of crap, but Todd signed it anyway, and then the company went bust), and Todd had been impressed by his frankness and his low rates.
Pete wasn’t pleased to see Todd, who he remembered without fondness, but he’d had an appointment make a late cancellation and it was a shame to waste the slot, so here they were, Pete telling Todd how it was, and Todd not being very happy with how it was.
“She’s got me by the balls,” Todd said.
“Others might see it differently,” said Pete. “Your wife’s character appears to be spotless. The sole difficulty a judge would have with her testimony is staying awake during a description of Janis’s day. Whereas you—”
Pete’s large hands spread.
“You’re a heavy drinker, you have affairs, you contribute nothing to the marriage… it’s a tough one. Even forty years ago, when a husband could do pretty much what he liked, you’d have had trouble fighting this one.”
Todd said, “But it’s a no-fault divorce, right? I don’t mean there is no fault, I admit my failings… I mean, if she’s not going to take me to court, then it’s a fifty-fifty split. Isn’t it?”
Pete almost laughed. “A fifty-fifty split of what? Janis owns the property outright and pretty much everything else. Your half, if you can call it that, is whatever you can get in the back of a van.”
“So you’re saying I don’t have much of a chance?” “I’m saying you have no chance at all, Mr. Milstead. The only way you could fight this is if you had a great deal of money.”
Pete looked at Todd. He knew the answer to his question already but what the hell, he was going to get some enjoyment out of this.
“Do you have a great deal of money, Mr. Milstead?”
Todd’s defeated headshake almost made Pete Fenton feel sorry for him.
* * *
The Volvo was parked at an angle to Scully’s Bar, blocking the sidewalk. Inside Scully’s Bar, Todd was also parked at an angle, trying to stay on his bar stool without holding on to it. He was explaining to the barman for perhaps the third time why life had conspired against him to such an extent.
“It’s because I’m a real man,” he announced. The barman ignored him, choosing instead to wipe something. “She’s scared of that, you see,” Todd continued. “She knows there’s something inside of me, something good, something real strong, and she’s scared of letting it out.”
“Maybe you should go home and write about it,” said the barman.
Todd frowned at him.
“How do you know I’m a writer?”
“You told me,” said the barman. “But seriously. Everybody’s got a novel inside them.”
“I know I do,” Todd said, and giggled. “A big one, too. A bestseller.”
“Well, like I say, go home, get some sleep, and when you wake up, write it,” the barman said.
“I can’t,” said Todd. “It’s not mine to write.”
“You’re not making any sense,” the barman said. “Time to go.”
Todd looked at his diminished store of dollar bills. He scooped them all up, dropped some coins back on the counter, and picked himself off the bar stool.
“Real man,” he announced to the empty bar and left.
* * *
Todd’s journey home was packed with incident. He ran one red light, drove down a street closed for building works, crushed a bike that someone had left on the sidewalk, and parked in a neighbor’s drive before realizing his mistake and reversing back into his own.
After he’d managed to find both his door key and his front door, Todd let himself into the house and collapsed onto the sofa and then, as it was made from an untextured leather-like substance, slid off again onto the rug. He remained there in a sort of crumple until two o’clock in the morning, when cold and cramp woke him and he was able to get up and make his way to the spare room.
* * *
The next morning, Todd waited until he heard Janis’s car drive away (he imagined her reversing past the Volvo, which was parked half on the lawn and half on the drive) before deciding that he should stay in bed an hour or two more.
Ten minutes later, Todd was out of bed and into his clothes.
* * *
Sometimes Todd surprised himself with how methodical he was. Right now he was surprising himself to an extraordinary extent, as he pulled out folder after folder of writing. Once he’d got all the folders down, pastel blue and pastel pink and pastel red, he got on a chair to reach up to the top of the bookshelves and brought down two boxes marked JUVENILIA. Then, just to make sure, he went through every drawer in the desk.
Todd was pretty sure he had everything out. He stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by folders and boxes.
“My fucking career,” he said, and got down on his knees.
* * *
Everyone needs an audit, whatever they do for a living, and Todd’s personal audit was way overdue. He methodically opened folders, reunited pieces of paper with other pieces of paper, put stories with other stories, and then did the same with the boxes. When he’d done that, he made a pyramid of all the manuscripts, notebooks, and bulldog-clipped writings. It was less than six inches high. Todd, who’d started writing when he was seventeen and was now hitting forty, worked it out. Half an inch a year, and most of that written before he was thirty.
Todd sat down in the middle of his career and started to read.
* * *
None of it was any good. None of it was finished, for a start: there were novels that were one or two chapters long, there were short stories that were so short they were barely paragraphs, there were movie treatments which were three pages long but neglected to mention what the story or characters were… and there was a play. Todd
could barely bring himself to read the play, but it seemed wrong to single it out for special treatment, so he dove in. After three pages, he went to get a drink. After six more pages, he got another drink. Eight pages later, the play ended, halfway through a speech by a character called The Fisherman, and Todd was so glad that he had to get another drink.
He piled it all back up again. Then, after a moment’s thought, he slid the lot into a waste bin. He took a box of matches, lit a match and dropped it in. His career took flame (for the first time, Todd thought wryly) and Todd sat there, bathed in the hot glow of his own failure.
After a while, the fire went out. Todd stuck the bin under a faucet and tipped the contents into the yard. Then he fetched a bottle of whiskey and Janis’s sleeping pills into his study and set them down next to his yellow legal pad. He set the whiskey and the pill bottle on his left and the pad and the pen on his right, then took a dime from his packet
“Okay,” he said to the dime. “Heads for my right hand, tails for my left.”
Todd flipped the dime into the air. It leapt toward him and went down the top of his shirt.
“Motherfucker,” said Todd, and fished the dime out.
He flipped it again, this time slapping it down onto the back of his other hand. He looked at it. Tails.
Todd wasn’t a brave man. “Best of three,” he said. “And I’m saying the first one was heads.”
He flipped again. He looked. Heads.
“Dame Fate is a kind mistress,” said Todd, inaccurately. He pushed the whiskey and the pills to one side, thought again, grabbed the whiskey and took a swig from the bottle. Then he picked up his pen and—for the first and only time in his life—wrote from the heart.
I have no money and no talent, Todd scribbled. He looked at what he’d written. It was harsh, but fair. He wrote again.
I need money. This was true. He wrote again but I have no talent. I can’t write.
Todd had never looked into his own soul. It was exciting, like looking over Niagara Falls. He examined every nook and cranny of his being, seeing himself naked on a wheel like the Leonardo da Vinci drawing of the cross-looking guy. Todd inspected his soul from every angle, and it wasn’t good. He stole a glance at the pill bottle again.
Todd Milstead, who had an opinion for every occasion and an occasion for every opinion, found that he had nothing. Now what? he wrote and put the pen down. He looked at the pill bottle. He swiveled in his swivel chair and looked at the Steinbeck portrait dedicated to Beverley. He gazed at the window, through which the sun, improbably, was now coming up.
“A new day for some is a new beginning,” he intoned. “But for others it is the appearance of the jailer, bringing bread and water and fresh hurt.”
Where the hell had that come from, thought Todd. He remembered almost at once: the fucking book. He started laughing; how fantastically useless it was he had managed to retain a very complete memory of something that didn’t exist. Like a man dreaming a film in perfect detail that had never been made, or someone waking up to find a fully formed melody in their head, just waiting to be…
Todd sat up straight. That was it. Just waiting there. Just waiting to be written down. He’d read in Playboy about the Beatles song, “Yesterday,” and how Paul had dreamed the song, or some shit, and spent a year humming the tune to people and asking them if they’d heard it before, until he realized that nobody had and the song was his, all his.
I don’t have a fucking year, thought Todd. He reached for the legal pad again. Then—why waste time?—he pushed away the pad and took the cover off the typewriter. He ripped out whatever crap was in there, slipped in a fresh sheet, and began to write.
ALL MY COLORS
by Todd Milstead
Chapter One
The hardware store was empty. Jimmy the store clerk was clearing away some boxes when he noticed the woman standing at the counter. She was in her early thirties, good-looking with blonde hair and wearing a blue print dress.
“Can I help you?” Jimmy asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to buy a hacksaw.”
TWO
Billy Cairns woke up sweating. This wasn’t a big surprise—Billy always woke up sweating. Sometimes he woke up sweating because he’d been drinking the night before, and sometimes he woke up sweating because he hadn’t been drinking the night before. But today was different. Today Billy was sweating through his ancient pajamas because he’d had a dream.
Normally Billy paid no heed to his dreams. In a decade when people were always being told in self-help books to follow their dreams, Billy was an exception. He would no more follow one of his dreams than he would follow a serpent with the face of his father who wanted to eat him; coincidentally, this was one of Billy’s recurring dreams. And in a decade where dreams were constantly being scanned for meaning and dissected for their relevance, Billy had no need for interpretation. He knew exactly what his dreams meant. They meant that his subconscious hated him.
Last night’s dream had been no exception. Or rather, it had started out as no exception, being the usual parade of Bosch-type living torsos, many-eyed bartenders and childhood friends in awkward sexual positions, but all of a sudden it had shifted somehow. Like a TV picture which has been flicking between random stations with lots of static and incoherent images but then settles into a program and stays there, the dream had become—for the first time since Billy’s childhood perhaps—stable. A story even an old rumpot like Billy could follow.
Not that it was a reassuring story.
* * *
Billy found himself in a library. It was a huge place, with shelves piling up into the—the clouds? That couldn’t be right. The library was domed somehow, and even the dome part had shelves going up, and each shelf was crammed with books. There wasn’t an inch of wall that didn’t have a shelf full of books leaning against it. Billy knew, he didn’t know how, that every book ever written was here. If he’d been able to, he could have climbed a ladder and found books from every era of human history, from medieval manuscripts to Egyptian scrolls to Babylonian clay tablets. Billy even had a feeling that Moses’ two tablets of stone were in here somewhere, along with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Canterbury Tales and—Billy suspected—the manuscript for Billy’s own unfinished novel, which he’d lost, along with everything else he owned, ten years ago in an apartment fire.
Once, Billy would have loved to spend a lifetime in this library, pulling out volumes of Dickens and Thackeray and Ginsberg to his sober heart’s content. But now, even though it was a dream, he just wanted to get out. There was something claustrophobic about the place. No windows, he noticed, while the book-lined dome seemed to loom over him like a monster made of spines.
Billy was about to look for an exit when he saw the counter. It seemed sensible to him to approach the counter and ask the person behind it for help. So Billy approached the counter, and as he did so, he noticed that there was someone already there, engaged in conversation with what he presumed was the librarian. As he got closer, he recognized the someone. It was Todd. Todd didn’t see Billy, perhaps because he seemed het up about something, which was about as surprising as Billy’s waking up sweating.
“You must have it!” said Todd.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the librarian who wasn’t dressed much like a librarian, being clad in overalls with a pencil behind his ear. “We do not have the book you are requesting.”
As Todd went redder and redder in the face, Billy realized he knew the librarian from somewhere.
“Be with you in a moment, sir,” said the librarian.
“No rush,” said Billy, and felt foolish.
Todd still hadn’t noticed him, a fact that Billy was relieved about. Todd in a fury was never a good thing.
“Why not?” Todd shouted. “Why don’t you have the book?”
The librarian smiled and gestured around him.
“Because this is a hardware store,” he said.
Todd looked around. Billy
did the same. The librarian—and Billy now saw he wasn’t a librarian at all, he was the clerk from the hardware store—was right. The whole place was full of saws, and ladders, and boxes of nails and screws. There were tin kettles, and steel buckets, and a strong odor of linseed oil. It was a hardware store all right.
“You haven’t heard the last of this!” Todd bellowed—and Billy marveled how, even in a dream, Todd behaved entirely true to type—and he stormed off toward the outside world.
The store clerk turned to Billy. “Sorry about that,” he said.
“No problem,” Billy found himself saying.
“Now,” said the store clerk, “how can I help you?”
He smiled, and his teeth were the teeth of a hacksaw. They glinted, gray and steely, in the light of a bare bulb.
* * *
Billy screamed and woke. He turned on his bedside lamp and fumbled on the floor by the bed for the glass of Old Times he’d left there the night before in case of emergencies. His hand caught something else, knocked the glass over and sent it skittering across the floor. Billy cursed, and looked at his hand. It was bleeding after coming in contact with whatever it was he’d touched on the floor.
He put on his glasses and peered over the side of the bed. On the floor, amongst the dust bunnies, was a shiny new hacksaw blade.
Billy screamed again.
* * *
Todd woke with a start. His neck hurt like hell. He opened his eyes and was surprised to find himself in his office, sitting at his desk. He stretched, and as he did so, his eye fell on the neat pile of pages next to the typewriter. Todd picked up the pile and riffled through it. There were close to thirty pages here, neatly typed and, even at a cursory glance, clearly written with a sense of flow and direction that most writers would envy. Todd wasn’t sure whether he should be feeling envy or not as he was the person who’d written these pages. Although in another, equally real sense, he wasn’t.
All My Colors Page 3