Nobody gets to push Todd Milstead around, he thought as he pulled into the motel parking lot.
* * *
The bedside light had given up the ghost completely, and the toilet apparently needed to take the morning off to refill its cistern, but other than that, the motel room was a home away from home. Todd dropped the divorce papers on the floor and flopped onto the bed.
The phone rang.
“Todd?”
“Janis?”
“I just wanted to thank you,” said Janis, hesitantly.
“Hey, there’s no need,” said Todd.
“No, really. You didn’t have to agree to everything.”
“I—excuse me?” Todd could feel a knot beginning in his guts. “I didn’t agree to everything.”
“Coughlan called me,” Janis said, not listening. “He said you came in, signed the papers, didn’t even want to read them.”
Todd leaned over to grab the envelope from the floor and fumbled it open.
“I just wanted—” he said, trying to turn the papers with his free hand, “—to, you know…”
“It’s so generous,” said Janis. “We thought you’d fight the alimony, what with your, you know, success, but—”
Now it was Todd’s turn not to listen. Whereas the aforesaid Todd Milstead agrees to pay the agreed portion of his income to the aforesaid Janis Milstead… said portion not to exceed… for the period of…
Todd let the papers fall.
“Oh God,” he said out loud.
“Are you okay?” said Janis.
“Yeah,” said Todd. “Never better.”
A thought occurred to him.
“Janis,” he said. “When you said ‘we’ just then…”
“Yes?” said Janis, for the first time wary.
“Who did you mean?”
Janis exhaled. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now,” she said. “I kind of think you guessed anyway.”
Todd, thought Todd, I’m shacking up with the Dyke with the Bike.
“Todd,” said Janis, “Joe asked me to marry him.”
Todd felt like he’d been hit in the head with a brick.
“Joe?” he said.
“Joe Hines,” said Janis.
“Joe Hines? Joe my old pal Hines?”
“The very same,” said Janis, and laughed. “God, he was so nervous about asking me out. He kept saying, I hope Todd doesn’t find out, and what do you think Todd is going to say?”
“Joe,” said Todd. He was all out of anything now.
“So, Todd,” said Janis, a note of playfulness in her voice. “What do you say?”
A thousand replies went through Todd’s mind. Most of them had the word fuck in them. Todd knew when he was beaten.
“I hope you’ll both be very happy together,” he said.
* * *
After a fretful hour going through the divorce papers with a fine-toothed comb, Todd gave up on looking for loopholes and instead turned his attention to wondering what the fucking fuck is happening to my fucking brain, which seemed to be a more pressing matter.
He’d seen Janis at that truck stop. He’d seen the bike, and he’d seen the woman give him the finger. Then there were Behm’s photographs. All right, there was something wrong with the damn pictures, but Behm had seen something, hadn’t he? Just like I saw something, thought Todd.
And the call from Coughlan last night. Todd was now pretty sure that hadn’t happened. Maybe it was the booze, he thought. But he doubted it.
He made a call.
“Todd!” said Nora. She sounded ecstatic to hear from him. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” said Todd. “Can’t wait to get back on the road.”
“And we are in the process of scheduling those dates for you,” said Nora, perhaps a little too quickly. “Although I must say, the book is doing so well, it seems to be quite happy without—”
Without me, thought Todd. Join the club, book.
“I’m glad,” he said. “Nora, I was kind of wondering—my situation has changed somewhat lately, and I was thinking—is there any chance I could get an advance? You know, on sales?”
“Todd,” said Nora brightly. “You’ve had your advance. Now all you need to do is sit back and wait for the royalties to flow in.”
“Yes, I know that,” said Todd, perhaps a little too tersely. “But I have certain, as I say, fresh financial issues, and…”
“Relax,” said Nora. “You’ll get your first check in April.”
“That’s months away!” cried Todd.
“Yes it is,” agreed Nora. “I’m sorry, Todd, that’s how publishing works.”
“Okay, okay,” said Todd. “There must be other ways to get money. How about movie rights?”
“We could look into that,” said Nora. “In fact, yes, that’s a good idea. That might net you a few hundred dollars.”
“A few hundred?” Todd said.
“Rights don’t really go for that much,” Nora said. “But listen, Todd, and this is something I was going to broach later…”
“What’s that?”
“How ready are you to write another book?” said Nora.
Todd was silent.
About as ready as I am to swim the fucking Pacific Ocean, he thought.
“Would that entail a larger advance?” he asked, slowly.
“As your publisher, I can say that we are in a good position regarding an advance on a sequel.”
“A sequel?”
“It doesn’t literally have to be a sequel,” said Nora. “Although people would love to know what happens to the characters.”
Me too, said Todd. He thought of a piece he’d once read about the late Elvis Presley. Asked about his new movie, Presley had apparently said, “Yeah, it’s a good script. I’d like to read it some time.”
“That ending,” said Nora, mistaking his silence for encouragement. “It’s ambiguous. And people hate loose ends.”
“A sequel,” said Todd. He was thinking fast now. I wrote the first one, didn’t I? How hard can it be? “And if I say yes, you can guarantee me some decent… a proper advance?”
“Yes,” said Nora. “You come up with the goods—and I know you can, in fact I shouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t been working away at something already—and I will negotiate an advance as big as the Ritz for you. Not that this is all about the money of course,” she added.
The hell it isn’t, Todd thought.
“Okay,” he said. “I better get to it.”
Nora rang off, and Todd leaned back in his seat.
Todd reached for his copy of All My Colors. He had it in his head, or so he thought, but every time he tried to focus on it, on the characters, or the story, it slipped away from him. Holding the book down like it was an animal that might otherwise escape his grasp, Todd tried to read it. Passages came back to him, familiar scenes, but he was damned if he could retain anything. In the end, he got out a pencil and started making notes. By early afternoon, Todd had written out—slowly, and with tremendous effort—an outline of most of the story. Now he was on the final stretch (thank God, he thought).
The last mile was, indeed, the hardest mile. Todd struggled to recall characters he’d been following for chapters, and he kept going back to earlier scenes to refresh his memory of major plot developments, but somehow, with a tremendous effort of will, he made it to the final page.
He drank some water, picked up his pencil and began to copy out the last paragraph of All My Colors.
“Helen knew then,” Todd copied down, “that if life were made up of a series of colors, then it was not, as she had believed, a spectrum of feelings ranging from empty, mindless white through bland gray to the darkest, deepest black, but something else entirely. Life, she had learned, was—and she could almost laugh at the simplicity of the idea—a kind of bright rainbow, made of colors that a child would love. Bright blues and garish yellows and furious purples. Greens and browns and, yes, blacks and whites, but al
l mixed in with magentas and scarlets and golds.
‘This is my life,’ she told herself as she walked out the door, into a new world. ‘And these are all my colors.’
The End.”
Todd put his pencil down. Is that it? he thought. Is that what the critics are going crazy for? It seemed pretty hokey, but then he’d always been what he considered a manly kind of writer. Still, it sold, and he was the guy who’d—well, it had come out of him, hadn’t it? Todd was always reading about writers and painters and musicians who’d said that they were just the conduit for great art, that it just flowed through them. Todd remembered the diaper days.
He looked at All My Colors like an adversary.
“I wrote you once,” he told the book. “I can write you again.”
CHAPTER ONE, Todd spelled out, in large penciled capitals. He missed his typewriter but it was in storage and if he went to the storage place to get it, the storage guys might ask him about the money he owed them. He underlined the words. CHAPTER ONE.
Helen walked into the bar, he wrote. Why? he thought to himself, and realized that he had no idea why Helen walked into the bar. In All My Colors she didn’t even drink. He crossed the line out. Helen walked into the diner, he wrote. But writing the word diner just made him think about Janis, and how she’d tricked him by making him think she was seeing the Dyke with the Bike and not Joe Hines, good old best buddy pal Joe who, not content with drinking Todd’s liquor, was now screwing Todd’s wife…
Todd sat up with a jolt. The piece of paper he’d been writing on was now balled up in his hands. He tossed it into a waste paper basket and started again.
By five o’clock, Todd had written precisely two words. One was CHAPTER and one was ONE.
“Fuck this,” he told both words. “I need to find a bar.”
By nine o’clock, Todd was awesomely drunk. He was trying to drink his whiskey from the shot glass without using his hands. As Todd’s head was resting on the bar at this point, and the bartender pretty much didn’t care if his clientele were alive or dead, Todd might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t become ambitious and tried to do the same with his bottle of beer. The bottle failed to connect with Todd’s mouth and spun across the bar where it frothed into the lap of a big bearded man.
“I’m very sorry,” slurred Todd.
“You’re gonna be,” said the big man, and hit Todd in the eye with his fist. Todd rolled on the floor and, after a while, climbed to his feet again, which was when the bartender asked him to leave.
It must have taken Todd a half hour to cross the road from the bar to the motel. Twice he got turned around and found himself heading back toward the bar. Two or three times the sudden presence of a truck honking down on him caused Todd to scurry back to his starting point. And once he set off too fast, tripped and saw the sidewalk coming up at him like a drawbridge being raised.
Eventually he made it to his room where, after dropping his key several times, he got himself onto the bed and passed out with the door open and his shoes still on.
* * *
The next day, Todd wrote six pages in a hungover frenzy.
* * *
The day after that, he tore them up, went to the bar, learned he was no longer welcome there, and went to the liquor store.
The day after that, Todd spent in bed. When the maid came, he hid under the blanket until she left.
This pattern repeated itself for a few more days until one morning Todd got out of bed, took all the empty bottles to a dumpster, showered, sat down at the desk and began to work.
SEVEN
It was a sunny morning in a crappy part of town as Sara walked up to the Sunset Motel’s reception desk. There was a grimy bell on the counter. She pressed it and it rang faintly.
“Help you?” said the clerk, appearing from the office.
“I’m looking for Todd Milstead,” said Sara.
“Room five,” said the clerk, and headed back into the office.
“Room five it is then,” said Sara to herself.
Sara walked around the side of the motel. The door to Room 5 was closed and she could hear the sound of the TV blaring out from behind it. She knocked hard and, a few seconds later, harder.
“Go away!” she heard Todd shout.
“It’s Sara.”
The TV sound cut out and the door opened.
“Sara?” said Todd.
Sara stepped back in surprise. Todd was unshaven. His hair was uncombed and he was wearing nothing but his underpants.
“You’d better come in,” he said.
Todd closed the door behind Sara and instantly she wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel safe—Todd looked so ill and thin that she doubted he could have harmed himself, let alone her—but that the room was awful. There was a fug of unwashed everything—unwashed clothes, unwashed dishes, unwashed Todd—and while someone had hoovered the greasy carpet, they hadn’t opened any windows or removed any pizza boxes.
But that wasn’t the worst thing. True, Sara would have been hard-pressed to pick the worst thing—it could have been that Todd seemed neither pleased nor annoyed to see her, just kind of accepting, like she was now part of the furniture, or it could have been the whole muggy gray-green atmosphere of drawn curtains and lamps with towels over them, giving the whole place an underwater look.
The worst thing was the writing.
It was everywhere. Pieces of paper, torn and crumpled and balled-up, on the floor and on the desk and on the bed. Paper, scrawled on and scribbled on, in the armchair and the closet and even the bath. Writing everywhere, on pads, on leaflets, even on the walls.
Todd looked at Sara.
“They come like that,” he said. “The words. They just come like that, in no particular order. And I can’t put them together again.”
Sara backed away a little.
“What do you mean, ‘put them together again’?”
“Like Humpty Dumpty,” said Todd. “The words. Jumbled up and messy. No use to me. I mean, look at them.”
Sara looked at the walls. They were randomly covered in words and phrases. Sometimes there was a whole sentence—SHE CLIMBED INTO THE CAR AND SAID DRIVE, JUST DRIVE—and sometimes it was just one word—HELEN or NIGHT. But it was everywhere, from floor to ceiling.
“Todd,” said Sara slowly. “What is this?”
“What does it look like?” said Todd. “No. Okay. You can’t see it.”
He scratched his armpit thoughtfully.
“Can you get me a typewriter?”
Sara looked at the walls again. I don’t think a typewriter would help, she thought.
“I just need to get everything corraled,” said Todd. “The old roundup.”
“Todd, you need to get some rest,” said Sara. “You’ve been under a lot of pressure, I know, what with the divorce and the book doing so well…”
“I don’t have time,” Todd said. “I have to write the new book. It shouldn’t take too long. The first one came out like a river.”
“I don’t know anything about writing,” Sara tried again. “But you look—Todd, you look terrible.”
Suddenly Todd’s head jerked, like someone had slapped him.
“He looked like anyone would look if they’d been him,” he said, his voice mushy like he was talking in his sleep. “He looked like his face was a diary and the diary was full of bad things.”
Todd’s expression changed. He was alert, and worried, now.
“What did I just say?” he said.
“You—I don’t know,” said Sara.
“You heard it, didn’t you,” said Todd anxiously. “What did I say?”
He turned around and scrabbled on the table for a pen.
“Todd,” said Sara. “Come with me.”
“It’s gone.” Todd was angry now. “It’s gone, it won’t come back.”
“Todd—”
“None of it comes back. Do you understand me, Sara? It comes in pieces and it goes and it doesn’t come
back. None of it comes back!”
He was staring at her now, rage in his eyes.
“I’d better go,” said Sara.
“Yeah,” said Todd. “Thanks for coming.”
* * *
Sara made it to her car without crying. She drove two blocks, then wept at a red light. When the light changed, she was still crying. Cars honked at her. She closed her eyes as they swerved around her, and drove off into the evening traffic.
She never saw Todd again.
* * *
Todd sat in his armchair, looking into the darkness. The curtains were drawn, as they always were, and he hadn’t turned the lights on, because he needed the darkness.
The darkness was the only time when Todd could see.
Todd didn’t like what he saw. There were shapes but they had soft edges. Todd knew the shapes were the book, and he knew they would get clearer, and the book would be there.
All he needed was the book to be there.
* * *
A few days later, the phone rang. Todd had difficulty finding it under the tumbleweeds of paper.
“Is that you, Todd?” a woman’s voice said.
“This is Todd,” said a rasping voice that Todd took a moment to recognize as his own.
“Todd, this is Nora.”
“Hello, Nora.”
“Nora, your publisher.”
“Hi.”
“Are you okay, Todd?”
Todd thought for a moment. There were sores on his legs, and he thought one of his teeth might be loose.
“I’m fine.”
“Oh good.”
“I’m working on the book.”
“That’s great news, Todd.”
“I’m working really hard.”
“Todd, I have some slightly puzzling news, and I wondered if you could help shed some light on it.”
The woman sounded annoyed. Todd wondered what he was doing wrong. He tried to focus.
“Todd,” said the woman. “I looked into the movie rights like you asked.”
“Right,” said Todd. “I remember now.” Someone was going around his brain, turning all the lights on.
“I spoke to your lawyers, and they were about to draw up the contract, but first they did a routine check. And Todd, you’re not going to believe this. They’d been sold already.”
All My Colors Page 19