“I’m thinking of quitting this ulcer-making business,” she said, swirling the wine in her champagne glass. “I’m thinking of going back to teaching.”
“Because your stupid typewriter broke?”
“Lots of things besides, Elsa. Marella being sick, Teddy growing up, their daddy surrendering to his disease—surrendering in spite of everything he used to tell me about tackling the future head-on.”
“Get your typewriter fixed.”
“I feel like he ran out on me, Elsa. That’s a horrible thing to say, I know, but he just stopped trying. You told me he had cancer—Dr. Sam did, anyway—and he started acting like somebody confined to Death Row with no hope of pardon. Overnight he was a different person, a stranger.”
“Get your typewriter fixed.”
“Damn it, Elsa! I told you this afternoon I wanted to talk. Why are you trying to shut me up?”
Dr. Elsa rolled the burgundy in her mouth as if it were Lavoris. “I’m not a shrink, Stevie, just a small-town lady doctor who doesn’t know Sigmund Freud from Freda Stimson.” Freda Stimson ran a florist’s shop on the Alabama Road just west of town.
“You’re a friend. Friends listen, Elsa.”
“I’m listening. Besides, one way or another you’ve told me all this before. Ted was a wonderful fella who didn’t face death in a way you could admire. The last year of his life spoiled your good opinion of the previous fifteen or so you’d known him. You resent him for doing that to you, and you feel guilty for not being able to get past your resentment to the fella he was before I diagnosed his cancer.”
“Exactly.”
“A hotshot shrink in Atlanta would charge you fifty dollars for that little analysis. Then he’d ask you back for nine more sessions.”
“That’s why I asked you over, Elsa. You see through all the crap to what’s really important.”
“Get your typewriter fixed.”
“Elsa!”
“Listen, honey, you couldn’t admire Ted because he seemed to give up, right? Right. So your solution to a problem a whole lot less troublesome than his—a broken typewriter, for Tilly’s sake—is to hoist your slip up a broomstick and holler, ‘Uncle!’ Now that’s admirable, I take it.”
Stevie poked her little finger into the cheese-dip container, licked it clean, and closed her eyes against the merciless irrefutability of her friend’s logic. Right through the crap to the core of the matter . . .
Finally she said, “Fifty-two dollars to replace a cable, Elsa. I just don’t have it. Just like I can’t afford a hotshot Atlanta shrink. Even if I had fifty-two dollars, I wouldn’t give those jerks at PDE the satisfaction.”
The older woman took a prescription pad from her purse, tore off a sheet, and began writing on it with a pencil. “Here’s the address of an office-supply company in Columbus with a typewriter service in the back. Hamlin Benecke and Sons. Sam swears by ’em. He swears by anybody who’s cheap, but we knew the Beneckes socially some dozen years back. Don’t see ’em anymore except when we’ve got a typewriter problem—they sold their lakeside cottage up this way in ’70 or ’71—and it was one of their boys got that manual you was wrestling with this afternoon in something like working order. Last autumn they gave us a discount on our electric machine. I’ll give ’em a call in the morning to let ’em know you’re coming in. Tell old Hamlin you can’t afford to be kept waiting till Memorial Day to get your typewriter back, either. That okay by you, Mrs. Joyce Carol Shakespeare?”
Stevie indicated her consent by laying one hand on Dr. Elsa’s wrist.
A knock on the heavy wooden door connecting the kitchen and the unheated dining room startled both women. “ ’S all right if I come back in now?” Teddy shouted from the other side. “I’m freezing my buns off.”
V
Because of Marella’s illness, Stevie spent most of Wednesday at her desk in the den preparing a longhand first draft of a manuscript proposal she intended to submit to the Briar Patch Press in Atlanta. This company had published and successfully promoted collections of miscellaneous nonfiction by three of the columnists on Atlanta’s two major dailies, and Stevie figured that her book—she intended to call it Two-Faced Woman: Reflections of a Female Paterfamilias—would slot into this popular format as easily as a penny into a parking meter. Already she had thirty or so 750-word columns around which to assemble her own collection: pieces she had originally sold either to local newspapers or to several different specialty magazines with regional distribution. If the editors at the Briar Patch Press liked her proposal, she could expand these early columns or add to their number with a signed contract as warranty that any future work on the project would not be wasted. She desperately coveted such a contract.
As for Marella, the child had improved steadily throughout the day. By midafternoon she was begging permission to eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich (too oily, Stevie told her) and to watch a soap opera called Ryan’s Hope (equally sticky fare, Stevie disapprovingly pointed out). By way of compromise, then, the child nibbled at a package of stale Nabisco saltines and thumbed through a battered, two-year-old issue of Cosmopolitan. She also slept some more.
At 3:40 P.M. Polly Stratton, a sophomore at Wickrath County High, came in to babysit Marella until Teddy got home from basketball practice, freeing Stevie to lug her PDE Exceleriter 79 downstairs from her study and outside to the VW microbus. The machine was about the size of a breadbox, but a breadbox laden with bricks or iron ingots. Maybe, thought Stevie sardonically, returning to the den to give Polly her final instructions and to kiss Marella goodbye, Dr. Elsa can come over again this evening to treat my aching back. Then she was off.
The trip to Columbus down I-185 took only forty-five minutes, but the rush-hour traffic inside the city itself kept her from reaching Hamlin Benecke & Sons, a green brick building not far from the television studios of the local CBS affiliate, before 5:30 P.M. In another half hour they would close, and Stevie despaired of explaining her problem and having her machine repaired in so little time—even if Dr. Elsa had assured her that, before you could say, “Exceleriter’s Excellence Exceeds Every Exacting Expectation,” young Seaton Benecke could build a typewriter from the space bar up. And Dr. Elsa had so assured her.
Indeed, before Stevie could lift her machine from the passenger’s seat to carry it inside, a pudgy blond employee in white coveralls and rubber-soled shoes intervened to assist her. He had the unblemished complexion of a baby, blue eyes so bright they looked lacquered, and a nap of velvety peach fuzz on his jowls and dimpled chin.
“I’ve been expecting you all day,” he said, backing through the door of the office-supply company.
“You’re Seaton?”
“Yes, ma’am. Seaton Benecke. You’re Stevenson Crye, the writer. I read all your stuff. I even go to the library and work through past issues of the Ledger looking for your stuff.”
“Goodness,” Stevie said. No one outside Barclay had ever professed any interest, big or small, in her competent but obscure canon, and she did not know what to say. Was this dumpy, squeaky-clean youth trying to impress her? If so, what for? Dr. Elsa had supposedly been forthright in telling the Beneckes that Stevie was bringing her Exceleriter to them because of the outrageous service charges at PDE Corporation. She certainly couldn’t afford to tip Seaton for his unexpected flattery. Was that what he was futilely wangling for?
The boy—actually a man in his ambivalent midtwenties, suspended between senior-class prom and full membership in the Jaycees—led her through the stacks of office supplies (typing paper, file cards, manila folders, staples, address labels, and lots more) to an immense work area with a concrete floor and unit after unit of modular metal shelves. One of these Erector Set towers housed typewriters, a veritable parliament of typewriters, some in their dust covers, some with their insides exposed and their platens lying beside them like carbon-coated rolling pins. Each typewriter had a tag wired to its carriage or its cylinder knob. Seeing so many machines in so many different st
ates of disrepair, like bodies in the impermanent mausoleum of a morgue, Stevie feared that Seaton Benecke would place her Exceleriter on a shelf and promptly forget about it. She was surrendering her typewriter to a kind of high-tech cemetery.
“Are all these others ahead of mine?”
Seaton put her machine on a workbench and wiped his hands on his coveralls. “No, ma’am. I’ve got the cable you need. I’ll have it installed in a jiffy. You need your typewriter.”
“Don’t these other folks need theirs?” She made a sweeping gesture at the broken, cannibalized relics behind the workbench. “Is this where superannuated typewriters come to die?”
“Some people just leave them here, Mrs. Crye. Abandon them or trade them in. I fix the ones that need to be fixed.” He did not look at her when he talked, but of course he was busy peering into the guts of the Exceleriter and affixing a new ribbon-carrier cable to the element on which the type disc moved. A shock of white-blond hair fell across one eye, but his pudgy fingers went about their intricate task with unimpeded speed and deftness, a miniature screwdriver flashing spookily from the dim cavern of the machine. “I enjoy fixing typewriters for people who need them.”
An icicle of apprehension slid through Stevie’s heart. Why, though, she could not say. She probably should have asked for an estimate before letting him start work. Or was it something else? On some basic level, Seaton Benecke’s handiness and his blasé, vaguely patronizing manner intimidated her. He seemed unaware of the effect he was having on her, though, so maybe she was reading too much ulteriority into his irritating emphasis on the same word. He was a young man without much grip on others’ reactions and sensibilities. His work must often isolate him in this echo-prone typewriters’ graveyard.
“That’s good,” Stevie said belatedly, just to make conversation. “You like what you do.”
“I’d rather do what you do. I’d rather be a writer.”
By sheer dint of will, Stevie kept from laughing. She had seldom met anyone who seemed so ill-suited to the occupation. Seaton Benecke would not look you in the eye, his speech was repetitious and remote, and his awareness of his surroundings seemed limited to whatever he happened to be working on. His fingers loved her Exceleriter—she could see that—but otherwise he impressed her as having all the passion and tenderheartedness of a zombie in a George Romero flick. A cruel, uncharitable judgment, but there it was.
“You probably make more money fixing typewriters.”
“People don’t respect you, though.”
Alternating currents of guilt and self-contempt surged through Stevenson Crye. Her pudgy-fingered Lancelot apparently had enough people-savvy to assess her unspoken opinion of him, even as he gallantly rescued her from distress. She deserved to be horsewhipped. Judge not lest ye be judged, and all those other astute Biblical injunctions about loving thy neighbor without coveting his ass. Yass.
“I admire anyone who’s handy,” she said penitently, meaning it.
Seaton Benecke neither looked at her nor spoke.
“What kind of writing do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Stories, I guess. Stories about the way people go about trying to figure themselves out.”
“Psychological stories?”
Seaton Benecke shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess. I can’t do it, though. All I can do is fix typewriters. That’s as close as I get. That’s why I enjoy doing it for people who really need them.”
The same grating litany. Stevie wished that she could like the young man, but his pitiable remoteness and his doomed ambition put her off. Unless he developed some management skills before inheriting his share of the family business, he would fix broken typewriters until his retirement. That was all. Stevie could not even imagine him marrying and fathering more little Seaton Beneckes. He would probably have the same skim-milk complexion at sixty-five that he had today.
“I’m just about finished,” he volunteered a moment later. “And it’s only going to cost you ten bucks and a few pennies tax for the cable.”
“That’s wonderful. I’m delighted. I really am.”
He nodded. “You can get back to work. That’s good because I like what you do. It’s personal experiences or feature stories instead of, you know, made-up stories, but I like it anyway. All you lack is getting really deep into the way people try to explain who they are to themselves. What their most frightening worries are and so forth.”
“Sorry,” said Stevie banteringly, giving young Benecke a smile he did not look up to see. “I guess I’d rather be Erma Bombeck than Franz Kafka.”
“Sometimes writers don’t have a choice,” he countered. “But you’ll get better at it. I’ve read your stuff, and I can see it happening. You know, the personal-experience columns in the Ledger—sometimes they get close to what I’m talking about, when you exaggerate things to make them deeper, when you sort of confess your feelings.” He stared contemplatively over the top of the Exceleriter. “Deepness is what I really like. Not being afraid to write about fears and dark desires. Nitty-gritty stuff.”
“Seaton—” His first name sprang to her lips unbidden. “Seaton, most feature columnists exaggerate for humorous effect. They confess, as you call it, for the sake of pathos. That’s what I’m usually trying to do in my Two-Faced Woman series. Get people to identify. ‘Deepness’—whatever that is—well, it’s not usually what I’m after. Only sometimes.” Why was she arguing the aesthetics of writing for the popular press with this blond obsessive-compulsive? Their conversation had grown more and more surreal. “I’m grateful you’ve been following my work, though.”
Despite having told her the repair was nearly complete, he had bent to the task again. Was he dallying? Was his apparent concentration a sham? His tiny silver screwdriver whirled in his fingers like a Lilliputian camshaft.
“Is everything all right?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. I’m just giving it a special twist here. You need your machine in tiptop shape, don’t you? I’m putting a little extra in. So you’ll be able to get a little extra out.”
“Extra?”
“Free of charge.” For the first time Seaton Benecke looked directly at her. Although his expression held neither animus nor threat, Stevie was chilled by the penetrating knowledgeability of his lapis-lazuli eyes. Flustered or sated (Stevie did not know which), he finally dropped his stare, wiped his hands on a rag, and closed the Exceleriter’s hood.
“There we go,” he said. “Maybe the extra you get out—the times when your writing goes really deep—maybe that’ll remind you of me. I can’t do that really heavy writing stuff, but you and this typewriter can.”
Stevie softened again. “That’s sweet, Seaton. You’ve saved me time and money both. I’m grateful.”
At the young man’s insistence, she sat down at the machine and, to demonstrate that his repair work had succeeded, typed several lines of quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs. No more stalled typing element. No more raucous blatting. Stevie put her thumb to her nose, waved her fingers in the air, and gaily unburdened herself of her own Bronx cheer.
“That’s not for you,” she told Seaton quickly. “That’s for the jerks over at PDE.”
He smiled a bemused, feckless smile that soon evaporated. However, it did last long enough to convince Stevie that Seaton could occasionally drop in on the Real World from his fog-shrouded hideaway in Never-Never Land, and she felt much better about him. Standing at the glass counter in the front of the store writing out her personal check for $10.67, she felt much, much better about Seaton. In fact, she left a five-dollar tip for him with the office-supply company’s cashier.
On the twilight drive back home Stevie fell into playing a funny sort of game. Calling up an image of Seaton Benecke’s face, she would slide this phantom around the inside of her windshield as if it were a big transparent decal too moist to stay in one spot. Then she would try to superimpose the remembered faces of people who vaguely resembled him on the restless outlines of Benecke’s f
eatures. The headlights of oncoming vehicles played continual havoc with this bizarre game, but on a deserted stretch a few miles below the Barclay exit she succeeded in obtaining a ghostly match. Startled, she blinked. She blinked to disrupt and banish both phantasmal images.
Seaton Benecke, she had just realized, looked a great deal like the unfortunate young man who had tried to assassinate the President early in his term. This eerie coincidence probably accounted for her uneasiness in Benecke’s presence, her uncharitable first impression of him. A weight lifted from Stevie’s mind. She was pleased to have found a semirational basis for her initial antipathy toward the young man. Moreover, she was glad she had triumphed over this silly aversion before leaving his family’s store.
For the remainder of the way home Stevie thought about Marella and Teddy, her unfinished book proposal, and the money she had saved by heeding Dr. Elsa’s advice. Besides, her generous tip to Seaton had salved her conscience without unduly diminishing her savings on the repair. PDE, after all, had wanted five times as much. All in all, a highly satisfying trip.
VI
The next day, even with Marella back in school and the Exceleriter in perfect repair, Stevie’s work did not go well. She typed the first paragraph of her book proposal for the Briar Patch Press at least seven times, screwing words into and out of the tangle of her sentences as if she were testing Christmas tree bulbs and finding nearly every one of them either forlornly lackluster or completely burnt-out. Nothing seemed to work. Her proposal had no intellectual festiveness. Whoever ultimately tried to read it would conclude by tossing the whole shebang into a wastebasket.
“Yippee,” said Stevie. “What fun.”
She rolled her seventh clean sheet of paper into the machine, stopped about midway down its length, and typed a string of abusive upper-case epithets at herself:
Who Made Stevie Crye? Page 3