by Daniel Stern
He’d told me about the loud arguments with the manager—after which they were sure he’d never come back again—but there he was, round-faced, smiling, and ready to go again. Time after time. Finally, they give in. He didn’t have to use talk of legal action or anything like that. He used his stubborn will. It was all he needed. They got the idea, at last, that he wasn’t ever going away, wheelchair, grubby battered briefcase, and all. At the end of it they gave him a house charge account.
I was having my own taste of Gideon’s will. Every time I thought a revised chapter was all set he’d come back at me, again. I would do the changes we’d agreed on—sometimes whether I agreed or not—and he’d take them home and brood. Then, another round of comments in the margin of the manuscript: needs sharpening … t’aint funny … whose POV(point of view)? … klutzy … That was one of his favorites. I didn’t want to ask Gideon so I asked Kim what it meant. She’d had an affair with a Jewish soldier in Kyoto.
“It’s Yiddish,” she said. “Slang. I think it means lumpy or heavy-handed.”
“That figures,” I said. I never mentioned it to Gideon.
It was a tough time for me: drinking nothing but Cokes—sometimes a dozen a day—just to have some liquid going in and out. It was even tougher because Kim was home a lot. She was in training to sell cosmetics. Going to college had been her first choice, but there wasn’t enough money. Disappointment made her thirsty and she drank around the house in between training sessions. All the while I wrestled with Aspects of the Novel by this Englishman and tried to figure out what Gideon wanted of me and what I could do to make sure I wrote the novel that would change everything for us.
I’d started her off drinking in Tokyo where we met when she was only nineteen. Later in San Francisco just before I went over the edge and had to stop or die. She thought it was fun from the start—and she was still an innocent drinker, even when the bad reasons started. I was always a deadly drinker; it was never fun the way it was for Kim. For me it was salvation or damnation. And now that I didn’t do it anymore, salvation and damnation sat on the small slabs of typewriter keys and the wheels of Gideon’s metal chair.
I had been on my way back to the States to turn the last five years or so into my fortune by writing a memoir. And also to get my story organized on paper in case things got ugly. But on the way back from Saigon the last time I ran into a State Department guy—a career man getting ambivalent about the war because all his wife’s friends were. He was working on the Paris peace talks and he gave me a lift via special plane and via Paris. I had a week or so before I had to meet Kim’s plane in New York, so I went.
I had been all the hell over Southeast Asia and in Germany before that but I’d never once put a foot in France. The State Department guy’s name was Smith and he introduced me, I swear, to a guy named Jones who had this place on the Île St. Louis with an astounding view of the Seine. I was looking out at the water and wondering about things—water always makes me think about direction, looking backward or forward. Most of the time I just think about what I have to do next. It’s a good way to be until it breaks down. It had broken down in Tokyo about six months before. To show you how wrecked I was, I told a lot of it to my host, who I had just met: a square, squat bullet of a man with a cigar resting in his hand.
I had told him a lot, about how I’d gotten turned in, about Kim, about the possible criminal charges, including about how I was going to write about it all. It turned out he was interested. He thought a memoir about the business side of the Vietnam War could be a good thing to tell about. It also turned out he was the Jones who wrote From Here to Eternity—James—and he scribbled Gideon’s name and publishing house connection on a napkin.
I figured coming from a famous writer like James Jones, I would get special handling. It was special. The Gideon of those first weeks was the ideal tour of rest and recreation. He encouraged me to talk about anything at all. We made a funny pair, me strolling alongside his chair, adjusting to his pace, self-conscious. It was still a cool spring; the awful summer heat hadn’t hit yet.
I did it backwards, starting with how everything had come apart, when the money stopped and you couldn’t trust your sources any more—backwards all the way to my Navy time and before that to my kid sister killed in that stupid accident and how I’d wanted to be a doctor but nothing panned out. He knew more about me than Kim did.
Oh, yes, Gideon One was calming, reassuring. I looked forward to our meetings. He was like an older brother. He knew all kinds of special things like the location of tiny parks no bigger than alleys but usually having an imitation waterfall, tables with colorful umbrellas. We ate frankfurters and I admired the austere assurance with which he listened, in fact with which he lived his paralyzed wheelchair life.
It had been a while since I’d admitted to admiring another man.
The day before I signed the contract, he said, “Are you sorry about any of this. What you got into over there?”
“I guess so.”
“Because if you’re just pissed off at fate and other assorted government agencies the book’ll have the wrong tone. There’ll be no story.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we’ve got a story.”
In three weeks he was pushing me awfully hard to drop my true story in favor of doing it as a novel.
Gideon Two had arrived.
“Why fiction?” I asked.
“Depends what you want out of this.”
“I want to tell that story—the things I know about who made money out of the war and how they did it.”
“You mean you want to make money, a lot of money.”
“I want to straighten my life out. That’ll take money.”
“Ah, we’re getting closer,” Gideon said. “Do you think you’re going to come to trial?”
“They’re going to drop it.”
“How do you know?”
“Too many people in Georgetown would be mentioned. They’ll drop it.”
“If there’s no trial we’ll do a novel.”
I noted the “we’ll” carefully; also the assurance with which he spoke. He was still new to me. I was used to dealing with people who had secret agendas of their own.
“Easy as that?” I said.
“Nobody said it was going to be easy.”
He sketched the basic commercial facts of life with simple cynicism. Apparently the paperback rights—where the big money was—was usually modest for nonfiction. The big sweepstakes was in the paperback auctions for the successful novel. The book clubs also paid a lot more for novels. He could use some charm when he wanted to, old Gideon.
“You slipped into dialogue and a sketch of a scene,” he said, “in your outline. It felt natural. I think you can do it. With a little help from your friends.”
We were in his office, sweating and talking. It was July but Gideon always kept the air-conditioning off until you couldn’t breathe one more minute. He had to tough everything out—and you with him. That was when he whizzed by me with one strong-armed twirl of the wheelchair, pulled this little book out from under the crazy jumble of papers on his desk, and tossed it at me. It was a think book, a paperback; the corners of a number of pages were turned down. I flipped through; sentences were underlined on almost every page. Then I read the title.
I noted that the book had been easily available on his desk. I was used to noting things like that, the kind of people I’d been dealing with the last five years. This was no spontaneous idea of Gideon’s. I’d never had a chance. He’d decided I was going to do—“we” were going to do—a novel, all along.
“What’s this?” I said. As if I didn’t know.
“That’s one of the friends who’s going to help. There’s more to writing fiction than putting ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ after lines of dialogue and adding trees.” Gideon grinned; it was his cherubic grin.
“If you thought your war was tough,” he said. “Just wait!” I went to the window, slammed
it down, and turned on the air conditioner.
“Dammit,” I said. “Why the hell do we have to sweat like this. You ought to appreciate air conditioning when you have it!” Gideon was just grinning at me. He was probably used to these little slave struggles.
The night at the Cote Basque was my moment for a big rebellion. I’d learned that damned little book by heart and it wasn’t helping, it was painful. I’d gone into a kind of whirling, waking coma. A weird daytime state and sleeping badly, too; getting up all sweaty to try and write some more or reading the mysterious text. A book had not had the aura of magic for me since I’d gone to Iowa State. I would alternate reading the book and wrestling with what Gideon called my “material”—laughingly known as my life. I’d gotten a clearer vision of what I’d been doing and what it meant. It didn’t always sit so nicely. I saw myself and my friends as a bunch of ordinary Americans of no special gifts, but ambitious—a typically American situation—who fell by chance into easy ways of making money on the fringes of the war.
Payoffs to contractors, kickbacks to local officials, all the paraphernalia of corruption initiated in New York, Washington, Dallas, San Francisco—the thing about such matters is, they always come down to a courier. Unlike ordinary business, nobody puts a check in the mail. You have to habeas corpus, as my friend Jeff Wan used to say. He meant, literally, deliver the body. Or the money, or the instructions, or, as it later developed, the substances that were as good, or better, than money.
That was where we came in. Nice, ordinary, clean-cut Americans. There was Jeff Wan, an agent for Houston Tool & Die, and his wife, Lois, who was innocent for so long, of everything except our affair.
There was Wigglesworth, the academic working in communications for A.I.D. And Phan-Phen, delicate, deferential and instantly sorry he’d gotten involved with his American friends. He’d made everyone nervous about whether he’d crack and what he’d tell.
It turned out to be Wigglesworth who cracked, earning the nickname “Wiggy” in the process. Wiggy, the least likely to go the route of guilt and religious mania—he’d been a shining star at Stanford in intellectual history before coming to Tokyo. Of course once you’re outside the law you’re totally dependent on honesty and friendship. And when one of you steps outside that circle everything breaks down. Wigglesworth went first and Jeff finally blew the whistle.
In the night I’d turn from memories and manuscript, imagining the phone had rung when it hadn’t.
I would imagine it was a call from Wiggy in Washington—that the party was over, that there was going to be a grand jury and a trial. The call wouldn’t come directly from Wiggy. An official voice would say: “Is this the residence of Lewis Griswold?” And before I could answer Wiggy would get on and tell me not to answer any questions on the phone. That he wasn’t trying to get me into any trouble, but that God wanted him to tell the truth. Or I would imagine it was a call from Gideon. Both prospects scared the hell out of me.
Kim said it was the Cokes. I was drinking so many of them. She was not hip enough to be concerned about the caffeine. She said she knew an adman who worked in the Tokyo office of McCann-Erickson who worked on the Coca-Cola account and had developed an obsession. He was convinced that there was cocaine in the Coke formula. It seems the formula is a secret, still. They keep it locked up in a bank vault in Atlanta.
I didn’t believe that about the Cokes. I was just drowning in the wake of that little book and my own characters, as I now thought of them. Characters: what a way to think of the people in your life! Wiggy, who might be making bad trouble for me in Washington right then—Phan-Phen, who’d died of a burst appendix, misdiagnosed accidentally or deliberately by a doctor I was pretty sure was C.I.A.; Lois Wan, who I thought I’d loved.
In the middle of my mad nights all of them were swimming around in some swamp, not quite the reality I remembered—and would have written about if I’d done the memoir I’d planned—and not quite what Mister E. M. Forster had in mind for me through his special agent, Gideon. Page forty-seven! “The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
And where does that leave pain, treachery, and madness? The kind of craziness that makes a man like Jerry Wigglesworth, who used to be a hotshot scholar in the States, go so nutty that he gets the nickname Wiggy and ends up going from office to office in Washington, begging people to listen to his story. Or the pain I gave Lois Wan and the trouble her husband, Jeff, had given me: a round robin of hurt that had no ending.
But at 4:00 one morning I saw that Forster was saying real people experience these five conditions differently than fictional characters. Characters kept on dying, he says, God knows all my dead, like my kid sister and Phan-Phen, are still doing that. And that they don’t care that much about food or need a normal amount of sleep but keep stewing about human relationships, if that’s the way the author wants them to stew.
That sounded pretty right to me. It gave me a loony sense of freedom too, in the half-light of that tiny muggy apartment in Brooklyn Heights a few hours before the morning, to read a line like, “If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.”
But what seems so clear in the middle of the night can be a muddle in the morning. Maybe there was something in those Cokes. When I came down from my high I saw how confused I was getting between fiction and real life. And it was all a question of characters. By the time I’d re-read everything I’d written so far, allowing for a lot of struggling not to have a drink, a real drink, it was getting to be time for my afternoon appointment with Gideon. My confusion had turned into rage but it wasn’t until we were sitting at the Cote Basque, Gideon with his whiskey sour, me with my Coke, that I was able to turn it into words.
I didn’t understand too much about why things had turned out the way they had. But I knew a lot about the lower and middle levels of payoffs from stateside suppliers to the military; stuff it was hard to know about unless you’d put in your time and kept alert.
I’d done both. I knew why so many companies with special government contracts had Texas addresses. And I knew which ones had dummy addresses and, in a few cases, I knew precisely why and how much money was involved in the concealment.
I had been a small player in several big games—but I’d been a player! Four years of my life in a game I’d lost. And what brought me back was the chance to tell about it. And now it turned out, according to Gideon, that the telling of something was not such a simple matter.
“I don’t want to write a damned novel,” I said. “I want to do what I came back to do.”
“And what wonderful task is that?”
“Just to tell about it.”
“Is that all? Well, if you recall, you came to me. The door goes both ways.”
“I’m in over my head, Gideon. You and your paperback rights and book clubs …”
Gideon turned his hands palms up in innocence. “That’s life in the big city. I didn’t make the system. I’m just the messenger bringing you the news.”
My anger drained down. He could always do that to me, take the edge off. “I never even read novels much. And now, writing one … I don’t know …”
As if he could sniff my anger melting he said, “The first three chapters are terrific. Needs a little polishing, that’s all.”
“I know your polishing,” I said.
“Well,” Gideon waved his hand as if I’d expressed some trivial complaint. “Nothing comes quick,” he said, “except bad, unexpected accidents. You’re on your way. That’s what counts.”
I lightened up. “The odd thing is—I am getting into it. I don’t have any big ideas about Art like E. M. …”
“Edward Morgan,” Gideon said. “He made me break my rule. Never trust a writer who uses two initials.”
“I’ve been reading him in the wee hours of Brooklyn Heights.” I reached to hold onto feeling angry. “This crap about flat and round characters …”
“Page sixty-seven.”
“Big deal. So you’ve done this steamroller act before, with some other poor bastard, and you know the textbooks by heart …”
That was Gideon’s cue to change. Instantly he charmed and disarmed. With that same disheveled smile he sang sweet songs of writers with far less experience—hell, writers barely deserving of the name, with no experience—and how he’d nurtured their manuscripts from doubting disasters to bestsellers.
“We’re not talking,” he said, fishing the fruit salad from his drink and placing it on the saucer, “about making you an artist: no slim symbolic volume by L. W. Griswold. We’re talking about plain old Lewis Griswold developing enough craft to make a readable novel—so you can move and entertain the people who read your book while you’re giving them the information that only you can give. Got it?”
I got it all right. It sounded like a speech he’d made before to other hungry, angry amateurs who had to be kept in line.
I also noted the absence of the “we.” That sounded like progress. I stirred the lime in my coke. The fruit salad in my drink was essential to give the illusion of a mixed drink.
“A lot of the stuff you say and Edward Morgan says makes sense in the middle of the night in Brooklyn Heights—but in the morning it turns to crap in the typewriter.”
“How do you like Brooklyn Heights? A little tame after the Far East?”
“Listen, we’re grateful to have a place to stay while I’m hanging by my thumbs.” A surprise advantage. The threat of gratitude terrified him.
“Any time,” he said, waving an impatient hand. “A very small deal. Just don’t pee on the floor. My Uncle Alfred is very particular about who pees on his floor.”
The threat of sentiment had been averted. Gideon felt safe again. But just to hold onto his lead he pulled the first three chapters of my manuscript out of his briefcase. It was always right there on his lap—if you live in a wheelchair the lap becomes a kind of catch-all.