Maybe the doctor had been making a joke; but now it didn’t seem funny. If anything, finger loss seemed a real possibility.
When Hannah had told Richard what the doctor had said, her husband had grown gloomy: “Think what rotten luck might happen to us if you do that, Hannah. It’s a symbol of our union—of your commitment to me. We can’t just chuck a thing like that because of inconvenience. What’s it mean if you can be that cavalier about something so important to us?”
Thinking of her doctor’s remark about losing a digit, Hannah realized she was now in a cold sweat. She twisted at the rings but they wouldn’t budge. Her finger was throbbing, hurting at the tip with her trapped and now elevated pulse.
She sat up carefully, not wanting to wake Richard.
The thing to do was to get a bucket and visit the ice machine outside. But the door was self-locking and Richard, slightly drunk and still dressed, had fallen asleep with the room key in his hip pocket. Sprawled on his back on the concave mattress as he was, well, there’d be no getting at that damned key.
Hannah struggled up with one arm, keeping her swollen ring finger pointed straight up, hoping gravity would pull down some of that blood and loosen the rings’ grip on her finger. She grabbed the ice bucket and a copy of the Hemingway Review, and used the latter to bar the door from locking.
Barefoot on the cold concrete, she walked to the ice machine set up in a common breezeway facing the parking lot, her breath trailing frostily behind her.
She filled the bucket with ice and shoved her hand in, shivering at the shock that sent through her entire body. Cursing in Gaelic, she headed back to her room. Her finger was numb and yet burning there among the ice cubes.
She stutter-stepped.
There was a car parked in front of their room; in her frenzy to get ice, she’d missed it the first time she’d passed it by. Of course the car parked there was nothing in itself.
It was the man sitting inside that car at this early morning hour that scared her.
In the darkened interior of a battered green Impala, the glowing orange butt of a cigarette jittered from a dashboard ashtray to a pair of waiting lips.
In the faint orange glow, Hannah saw: dark-framed glasses and gaunt, wind-burned cheeks; a high forehead and the deep “v” of a black widow’s peak.
She swiftly slid back into their room — trying not to give the impression of having seen him in the car; trying not to look like she was running, which was very much her impulse.
Hannah kicked the Hemingway Review loose and quickly closed the door, slamming home the deadbolt with her elbow.
Richard was still asleep, snoring softly now. That man out there? What the hell was he doing?
Still focused on their spy, Hannah edged into the bathroom and closed the door.
She flipped on the light, took a deep breath, then drew her finger from the ice. It seemed a little smaller, but still black.
She worked on her finger with soap and tugged and twisted at the ring. It gave a little, but still wouldn’t pass over the knuckle. She opened a jar of Vaseline and slathered that on her finger.
Slowly, painfully, she twisted the first ring loose from her finger.
The second took another minute of slow, painful twisting to free, then it was done.
Thank God.
She looked at her finger, turning from black to red now. The skin at the base was olive green, already bruising. But the pain from the swelling was better. She sat on the edge of the bathtub for a few minutes with her finger in the ice bucket, trying to take the swelling down that much faster.
She thought about the man parked outside. What did he hope to see at this hour? Well, no way he was a scholar. She was right about that.
Hannah rose and placed the bucket in the sink.
Her urge was to wake Richard and force him outside—make him confront his “fellow academic” sitting outside their room at two in the morning, staring at their door.
Instead, she wiped off the petroleum jelly, then she scooped up her rings and placed them in her makeup bag. She’d probably get grief in the morning when Richard noticed they were no longer on her hand.
But then, maybe he wouldn’t notice. She sensed, sometimes, Richard looked through her rather than at her now.
Hannah turned off the bathroom light and slipped back out into the main room. She edged to the window and pulled the shade back a crack. The man was still out there, smoking in his car and staring at the room like something might happen.
Frightening….
The light suddenly came on behind her, silhouetting Hannah in the window.
The man in the Impala sat up straighter and extinguished his cigarette. Hannah quickly closed the drape.
Richard said, “Hannah? What’s wrong? Jesus, stop creeping around. I need my sleep.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, making sure the curtain closed flush. “Turn out the light. It’s nothing. I couldn’t sleep. That’s all.”
“The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.”
— William Faulkner
7
THE THIRSTY MUSE
Hector turned up his sports jacket’s collar against the needle-sting rain and, head down, trotted out to his ragtop ’57 Bel Air. He turned up the heat and twisted the knob for the wipers.
He drove around downtown Ketchum, tooled around the sidestreets, wondering how Hem had settled for this outback, mountain town after the tumult of Chicago. After Paris and after all the cities of Spain…after Venice and Key West and Cuba. Papa always wanted to live close to water, but there wasn’t even a decent lake close by. There were no buildings more than three stories tall. No cultural center, not a single downtown bookstore.
But then Hector thought of his own home in New Mexico. Hector’s big, stucco hacienda sat on the sometimes muddy, sometimes dusty banks of the Rio Grande, hard up against the Mexican border.
La Mesilla was hardly the Paris of the American Southwest.
Hector squinted into the rearview mirror. The black sedan was still back there. Might be Andy, but the silhouette seemed wrong. Too tall; too gaunt. That aquiline nose in profile—it could be Creedy. It had been so many years since he’d last seen the bastard. If Creedy was lurking around, there was the possibility he might have changed so much Hector might not even recognize him. Another unsettling prospect….
Shrugging off a chill, Hector turned onto Sun Valley Road and began the climb up the sloped road to the lodge. He checked the phosphorescent hands of his Timex: late. Hector was no kid anymore: He should be in bed. He should be resting up for the trip to the Topping House to meet with Mary.
He locked up his Chevy and turned his collar up again, squinting against the rain and trotting across the parking lot to the warm paneled comfort of the lodge’s lobby.
Hector held the door for a couple stepping from a cab. The woman was pretty and blond and looked eight or nine months pregnant.
A man slid out behind her. He was significantly older…a drinker’s gut; glasses and thinning, graying hair. The man took the woman’s hand and placed another hand familiarly at the base of her spine. Hector arched an eyebrow: a couple. And the man—something a bit bohemian about him, a bit careless. Hector scented “scholar.” He held the door for the couple and smiled at the pretty mother-to-be who smiled back, a bit uncertainly, a bit distractedly. But it was a very nice smile.
Hector recognized her then: He’d pulled over the other night to offer them a ride, but had been waved on by her companion. Louse—making his wife walk like that when she was so far gone with child. Crummy son of a bitch.
Hector followed the man and woman into the lodge and watched them get in the elevator. He heard the man say to the young woman, probably in answer to a question, “That was Hector Lassiter, the keynote speaker. He writes mysteries. Some of them are actually surprisingly good. I mean, as those things go.”<
br />
Mysteries? Hector shook his head, slicked back his wet, graying-brown hair, and headed for the bar.
***
The lounge was cozy; low lights and a big fire crackling. Some soft music played on the sound system—“Where or When.” Best of all, the coast was clear: no eggheads, academics, or “scholars” in sight. The bartender, recognizing Hector said, “Hey, Mr. Lassiter. What’ll it be?”
Hector was working on a book partly set in Key West and in Cuba…his own roman à clef. “I’m feeling nostalgic, Dave,” Hector said. “You know how to make a mojito?”
“This is skiing country,” Dave said, smiling. “That’s a tropics drink. But I like to stay practiced. Yeah, I can make one of those. Have to be just one: we’re shutting down, soon.”
“Then make me three, would you? Trying to get a little writing done. Missed my daily word count because of all these damned scholars and their busybody questions. Missing the daily word count is bad luck. And I’m also humping against a deadline.”
Dave winked. Dave was a fan of Hector’s—they had established that early in their still young but sacred barkeep/ customer relationship.
The bartender said, “You sit over there in that corner, Mr. Lassiter, where you can’t be seen from the lobby. That door there is self-locking. Just let yourself out when you’re finished. If you need more than the three mojitos, just leave a note for me on the spike there by the cash register and I’ll see your room is billed.”
Hector winked. “Dave, it’s now official: you are my favorite reader.”
“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”
— H.G. Wells
8
THE THREAT
In preparation for his meeting with Mary, Richard had finished his morning’s composition and read several essays in three copies of The Review covering Hem’s Idaho years—articles he had set aside for reading once he had reached Ketchum.
He finished up by listening to an audiotape of a BBC-produced biography of “The Life.” One of the surviving white hunters during the last, ill-fated African safari had said in reference to Hem’s suicide: “He was going down a path which I think no man can follow until the end of his own life. He was dying inside—I don’t think there is any doubt about that. He was suddenly a sad man. Very, very depressed.”
Richard flicked off the tape recorder. He saw his wife’s blue notebook. He opened it and read the short story she’d composed the day before—all the while listening to be sure the water was still running in the shower.
As always, he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It was beautifully written—he knew good prose when he read it. And Hannah’s holograph was astonishingly fluid. Apparently written in a single pass, it went on for pages without corrections, additions or subtractions. No hesitation marks in the sense of false starts or aborted sentences.
Characterization? Story arc? Well, he could see the value in Hemingway’s work well enough when it was first pointed out to him as an undergraduate, but pressed, Richard would have to confess he’d read precious little fiction other than Hemingway’s in the intervening years.
And up against Papa’s macho, egocentric and laconic, hyper-lean prose, Hannah’s supple and sometimes relatively florid passages perplexed Richard.
He finished and replaced Hannah’s notebook as he had found it just as she turned off the shower.
Richard reached in his pocket and pulled out the vial again, turning it in the light through the window. During what passed for a meeting between them—hardly more than a few whispered words in a drugstore parking lot—the man said all he had to do was put the potion in the Widow Hemingway’s drink. Mary would answer any question put to her with just a little of the stuff inside her, the man said.
Richard had taken the offered vial from the man’s outstretched hand like it was radioactive. Uncertain, he’d asked, “What is it, exactly?”
“We haven’t given it a name yet,” the man had said, smiling. “You might call it ‘truth serum,’ but there’s really no such thing. But you want a particular answer? You’ll get it all right. You want to know if Mary shot Papa? Give the old bitch some of that stuff and then put the question to her.”
Then the man had handed Richard a fistful of hundred-dollar bills.
Hannah cracked the bathroom door to let out some of the steam; Richard quickly hid the vial.
***
Her back to the door, Hannah carefully slipped back on her rings. Her finger had returned to normal size and she’d decided just to watch her hands now—stay alert to signs of swelling in order to avoid a repeat of the other night’s near disaster. She wanted to bring up the man hiding outside their room—force Richard to see something strange was going on around them. But this was his big day—his first meeting with Mary, a rendezvous he’d spent years preparing for.
Hannah rubbed his chin. “You’re getting scruffy. Don’t forget to shave again.”
Richard shook his head. “Oh, that’s on purpose. Decided to grow it out. I’ll shave when I finish my first draft. For luck, you know?”
Hannah was dubious. She ran the back of her hand over her husband’s stubble. “There’s quite a bit of white in there, darling. May make you look older than your years.”
Richard shrugged. Muttered, “Eh…”
He was also wearing his untucked Cuban shirt again…khaki slacks with brown loafers. He’d brushed his hair straight back and it fell rather long at the collar. Faux Papa.
She saw the shot glass and bottle on the nightstand. He followed her gaze drifting to the table and said, “Girding for battle with the old bitch and I don’t want you putting your mouth all over me for doing that, right? Hem rarely faced Mary before his morning’s first drink after an early bout of writing, so why should I be any different? Only way to handle this old witch is three-sheets-to-the-wind. If accounts of her drinking are remotely right, I’ll still be a while catching up.”
Hell, he intended to arrive at the Topping House drunk as a lord—go into this critical first meeting the well-oiled hunter and set the tone up front. Show that wicked and maybe murderous old bitch who was boss. And drunk was the only way Richard could find the edge to slip the old woman this strange potion given him by the man.
Hannah’s jaw tightened. She bit her lip, thinking about possible arguments back that might point out to Richard the stupidity of going into his first meeting looking like some lush.
Richard rose and poured himself another shot of whiskey, drank it and smacked his lips. “That’s the stuff,” he said. “Still, not sure there’s enough Giant Killer in the world to prepare me to meet this goddamn woman.” He watched Hannah for a reaction; expected some outraged retort.
Hannah just looked at him, then, her jaw almost dropped as he began boxing with his own shadow on the wall. After that he dropped to his knees and then began a series of push-ups. After four of those—stopped at an abortive fifth dip—he struggled back up; pressed his hand to his spinning head. He poured another shot and stared at Hannah again: There were two of her now. “Aren’t you going to lecture me?”
Hannah, shook her head, went back into the bathroom to finish brushing out her hair. In the mirror, she saw Richard’s notebook on the bed behind her. Maybe the clues to where they had gone wrong hid somewhere between the lines of all that minutia on Hemingway. Maybe its pages also traced the trajectory of their faltering relationship.
She searched her own face in the mirror. She didn’t quite recognize herself—her face fuller now because of the pregnancy…her cheeks always a bit flushed. She looked again at the notebook on the bed.
Richard said, “I’m going to go walk around for a while. Try and pick up more of the vibe of this place. See if I can’t find one or two of Papa’s old watering holes the tourists haven’t ruined yet.”
Hannah took a deep breath and nodded. Even if he ended up in some bar, it was good Richard was going now. Hannah realized she’d increasingly begun to analyze hi
m, systematically examining him; to pick Richard apart just as they used to take apart characters in short stories in her undergraduate fiction-writing classes. Everybody sitting in a circle and deliberately deconstructing every facet of the man on the page.
But this man was her husband, not just some character in one of her stories.
And the sad fact was, Hannah wasn’t sure Richard could sustain deep character analysis like that.
***
Hannah sat in a chair, biting her lip and restlessly fingering Richard’s notebook.
Deep down, she knew she needed to get out, while she still could get away relatively unscathed. Before she had to stand by as abused witness to Richard’s seemingly inevitable self-destruction.
But run to what? To where? Her current situation was far from ideal, even stifling in some ways, but at least now she was part of something that touched on the literary life. Richard at least afforded a sense that words on a page, and the person who creates them, can be the most important thing in the world. Of course Richard would never put it that way—never really see it that way—but it was implicit in his trade.
And she was so very alone without him.
Far from home, far from family. She’d wanted to leave that Scottish village and reinvent herself…chase the artist’s way. Hannah had found herself a man who made his living with words, a man who studied one of fiction’s great wordsmiths, but this man she had married was, at bottom, another version of her father…controlling, alcoholic…probably violent.
She opened Richard’s notebook, browsing over some passages here and there. She mulled over Richard’s assertion that scholarship was necessary to creativity; that true artists owed a debt to their best critics. More than that—the notion that writers and critics really existed in a symbiotic relationship, writing back and forth as they reacted to each other’s vision. Two sides of the same coin, in a sense.
She paused, rereading a long note Richard had written to himself in the margins—one that unsettled Hannah.
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