Your narrative moved on, rediscovering Amy and Joe, and Hank Gummer, and Jack Rome. Then something happened. You got used to writing, it became a habit. You went on without realizing the consequences, until this recent crisis when you arrived at the point where you had expected to end. This was to be the moment in the preceding chapter where Sam Indigo suggests you write it down. And look—already you’ve gone beyond.
You’re faced with the crisis of stopping. Perhaps in the beginning you did not expect to get this far. But here you are, and here come the problems. If this is the end, it’s time to place the personals that will find Linda. But things have changed since you made that plan. How far away she seems now, and how far you have come. Perhaps she is not your audience after all, perhaps she never was. She wouldn’t want you anyway. How upset she would be to discover you’re not dead. Nor do you need her now that you have Dorothy. There was no Dorothy when you began, so how could you have known? While you write, Dorothy studies her lines, preparing her next role, which opens in six weeks. What would Dorothy say about Linda’s return?
The more you write, the more independent you become, standing by yourself, the less a pronoun standing for another name. You, all of you, just you and only you. You did not foresee that you might not want to stop. You have developed this good writing habit along with the accouterments and auxiliary pleasures, including rewriting, and editing, and polishing, and reorganizing, and restating, all that tinkering and fiddling with words, making things sharper, clearer, more incisive, funnier, sadder, deeper, shallower. You didn’t realize how much you would enjoy it. These supplements to the raw truth of story are to your new name what riches were to Stephen Trace, freedom to Murry Bree, goodness to Mitchell Grape.
Consider the possibility of not stopping. You could carry on the story into the period of writing chasing your tail like Tristram Shandy. You could postpone indefinitely, an endless deferral, digging more and more minutely into time, draining your substance away.
No, you must stop. The plot requires it. Call it a book, you can always write another. If not Linda, let everybody read, Sharon, Jane, Bonnie, Dorothy, Jack, David, Luigi, Sam, all the first names, those who knew you, those who didn’t. Which is to say, publish. That will solidify your name and convert you into the first person, full of ego. Readings and talk shows. And what will you do next? Your name propels another book. Continuing where this leaves off, filling the gaps unfilled in the present chapter. After that, again, What next? By then perhaps you’ll know how to tell the story in a different way, with other symbols.
But for now, time to stop, with good wishes and thanks to all of you who generously shared your second person with me. Are there loose ends that need to be tied up?
Here’s one. If you really wanted to find Linda Gregory and her children, you wouldn’t need to place personals around the country. A simple letter to the university, Department of Romance Languages, where she used to work, would suffice. They’d know where she went.
Another loose end: the rumors about Jack Rome. You hear them still, whispers that he did not die, the plane crash faked or rigged. The latest (you got this from the mechanic who was working on your BMW) was that he sails a fishing boat on either the East coast or the West coast, or else it’s the Gulf coast or if not that the Great Lakes, having the time of his life under an assumed name. A rumor like any dead rock star who refuses to die, you know.
This suggests another line of activity if you run out of writing or find yourself reduced to metafiction: become a detective like Sam Indigo. Make it your business to track down Jack Rome. Not to expose him but to join him. Go fishing with him. You could have the time of your life with him and Dorothy, incognito at sea, like your Uncle Phil.
AFTER
GREGORY
Austin Wright was born in New York in 1922. He was a novelist, an academic and, for many years, Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He lived with his wife and daughters in Cincinnati, and died in 2003 at the age of eighty.
First published in the United States in 1993 by Baskerville Publishers Ltd.
Originally published in Great Britain in 1994 by Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Ltd.
Reissued in Great Britain in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Copyright © Austin Wright, 1993
The moral right of Austin Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 020 8
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 021 5
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
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