The day we arrived, while he was taking a nap, I went out and explored the neighborhood. I discovered a little bookstore behind the Trevi Fountain (I’ll go back there tomorrow and get the name of the street). A very old man wearing spectacles was the shopkeeper. I could hardly make out his eyes through the lenses, which were as thick as magnifying glasses. On a table where books were spread out in a disorderly jumble, I found a volume of Cesare Pavese’s poems. I copied out a few lines in my notebook:
Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi—questa morte che ci accompagna dal mattino alla sera, insonne …
I told myself I’d give the volume to Raymond as a present, even though he doesn’t understand a word of Italian. Poetry’s never as beautiful as it is in the languages one doesn’t know. When I realized I didn’t have enough money on me, I put the book back where I’d found it. I wasn’t actually unhappy to leave it behind, because the poem in question talks about …
And I’ve always been superstitious.
RAYMOND
I’d never have thought it could be so short. It’s true I had a premonition. I even wanted to get it over with, more than once. But I’d put that off until tomorrow. Like with drinking. For ten or fifteen years, I’d think, That’s enough. I’m stopping. I’d admonish myself: You hear, Ray? This is the last of a long line. After this one, you’re stopping. I’d pour another drink and make a silent declaration: Tomorrow, I’m stopping. I persuaded myself that each drink was the last. But there was always a tomorrow, and life would start over again.
I’ve just been told it won’t be starting over anymore.
Sometimes, when fear loosens its grip, curious thoughts arise in me. Like bubbles.
This one, for example: Good thing I write short stories. If they were novels, I’d feel I was being interrupted in the middle. There’s a novel I’ve always wanted to write, but alcohol stood in the way. Short pieces were all I could manage.
Yet I don’t want to give up on that novel. I feel like starting work on it even if I have to die tomorrow. It would be a way of protesting, a refusal to be a pushover.
Tackling a novel when you’re at the end of the road, writing the first sentence on the day you’re condemned to death—what could be more human than that?
And the bubbles expand; they become hope.
MARIANNE AND RAYMOND
“Are you in pain?” I ask him on the telephone.
“They say I’ll be in even more pain if they interrupt the treatment. But what’s the use of continuing the treatment if … What’s the use?”
“There must still be some hope. Don’t you want me to come?”
“What’s the use?”
I say it again: “Don’t you want me to come?”
“What’s the use?” he repeats.
The same words with a different meaning.
He lets a few seconds pass. Then he says, “Disease is making me a minimalist.”
“No it isn’t. You’re anything but a minimalist.”
That makes him laugh. I regret the remark instantly, because it hurts him to laugh.
We keep talking. I do my best not to make him laugh again, but once or twice I can’t stop myself.
He didn’t marry me for nothing.
RAYMOND
When my daughter was born, my father was a patient in the same hospital. One floor up. He was gravely ill. The day Marianne had the baby, he came close to breathing his last. A birth, a death. Tit for tat. He passed away a few years later.
If Leo’s wife were about to have a baby one floor down, I’d prefer not to know it. I’d be glad to hear it, but I’d just as soon not be told. Or be told later.
The truth is, at the baby’s first cry I’d have the feeling I should hurry up and complete the exchange. I’d hear the creditor knocking on my door.
Ah, I sound like I’m dead already. But in fact I’m still alive. As long as it doesn’t get into my brain, I’ll stay alive. That’s what they told me this morning. “Above all, we want to prevent it from going to your head.”
I told them not to worry. I’ve always been humble, I said. It’s true, ask your friends. They’ll say, “Whatever happens to him, nothing goes to his head.”
I’ve got my first sentence.
If there was one thing people appreciated about him, it was that nothing went to his head.
No.
If there’s one thing … appreciate about him … nothing goes to his head.
It’s better in the present. If Douglas were here, he’d put it in the present.
“I always tell my students, and I’m telling you, Ray: Never forget the virtues of the present.” Frigging Douglas.
I would never have thought it could be so short and so good all the same.
But there are a great many things one has no idea of.
JOANNE
The big day sure is sad.
I insisted on making this trip. I thought it would do him good. Which seems to be the case, but I didn’t think I’d be so sad.
Raymond’s looking mischievous. A rascal wearing a cap and gown who slips in among the professors. He’s going to be made a doctor honoris causa. He’ll be going home with a diploma, a fine parchment inscribed in Latin.
The trees on this campus are magnificent. How can the school afford to maintain them? Stupid question. One student’s tuition would pay three gardeners’ salaries.
I would have liked to be a student here. To walk across these quads with my arms full of books, under the eyes of these marble statues. That looks like a stucco column, that last one. All these statues. Not many of women. Show me one that’s not Venus or Galatea, just one woman men’s eyes haven’t petrified into myth, and I could walk through their little courtyards whistling. It seems they have one of Anne Sexton’s manuscripts. I’ll go and see it after the reception.
In the airplane he said, “You’ll have to address me as ‘Doctor’ now.” I burst out laughing. He grimaced slightly and added, “Just when I learn I’m incurable, they give me a doctorate. Life has a hell of a sense of humor, don’t you think?”
We were about to land. I looked at the houses on the hillside. All of them built on the same model.
I turned to him. He went on: “It’s curious, the way life makes fun of us. But you know what? I don’t hold that against it.” He looked out the airplane window. “No, I don’t hold even that against it.”
It’s almost his turn. I should have brought a better camera. These throwaway things, you never know what they’re going to give you. They say “throwaway” without explaining that what you’ll throw away will be the photographs. There’s Ray, here he comes.
My God, how thin he is.
RAYMOND
I’m writing a story that takes place after my death. The setting is a wake. Some people get together after the death of a friend and recollect a bunch of things about him. At the beginning, good feelings predominate. But it all degenerates pretty quickly.
The dead guy could be me. He’s not me, of course, but he could be.
I’m taking a strange pleasure in writing this story. Having started it, I find I can’t stop. Maybe it will become a novel. I’ve written seventy-two short stories. Seventy-two little inspirations before getting my breath. Who can top that?
As for this story, I don’t want anybody cutting it. I won’t let anyone touch it. I just finished a story about Chekhov’s last hours. Joanne’s looking it over. But this story, the one that begins after my death, I’m not going to show her. It would make her too sad.
No revising, no corrections. I just hope I can finish it. In some way it’s a wager.
As long as I write, I stay alive.
JOANNE
He writes all day and doesn’t sleep at night. At night, his illness wakes up. He gets out of bed, gropes his way through the darkness, and shuts himself up in the bathroom. I hear him coughing in there.
He coughs hard enough to rip his lungs apart.
He says the coughing is a protest against the disease.
If he stops coughing, he’s afraid his brain will take it as a signal. As if the cough said to the brain, “The body’s putting up a fight. You have to fight too.” So he puts all his energy into coughing.
My God, why does he have to go? He’s only just found his way, he’s found it at my side.
He says, “Complaining doesn’t do any good. You just have to be ready.” I pretend to be. To accompany him, I pretend to be as ready as he is.
Before going to sleep we watched King Solomon’s Mines. I’d never seen it before. The movie opens with the death of an elephant. I don’t know if they actually killed one or not, but the scene is grippingly real. There are sunsets and a bush fire that puts the animals to flight in a deafening stampede across the savanna. Ray was like a child, watching that.
Afterward he slept a little. I heard him talking in his sleep. He kept repeating Marianne’s name.
At eight o’clock I bring him his coffee. I say, “You talked in your sleep last night. I heard part of your dream.”
“Really?”
He examines the inside of his coffee cup.
“Maybe you remember some bits of it?”
I don’t mention Marianne. He swallows a mouthful and looks at his cup. Like he was going to find his dream there. “No,” he says. “I don’t remember anything.”
I go down to the living room and take up the poem I started last evening. No words come to me. I lay the poem aside and go back upstairs to the study.
Ray’s sitting there surrounded by his library. He’s correcting a manuscript. I don’t know which one.
It occurs to me that his little secrets are multiplying. “All right,” I say, beside myself. “This dream. What was it?”
He looks at me. Immediately I regret what I said. I start searching for the words to apologize with. At that moment, he says, “Fine. I’m going to tell you my dream.” He taps the pages he’s correcting. “As soon as I finish revising, I’ll tell you.”
I nod my head as if he has no choice and turn on my heels.
On the stairs I hear him coughing.
When I go into the kitchen, I can’t hear him anymore.
I have doubts. I feel I’ve been horrible. I have no right to invite myself into his dreams. I bite my lips and dash back upstairs to apologize as abjectly as I can.
My footsteps pound the floor like the buffalo hooves in last night’s film.
When I stick my head through the little window at the top of the stairs, I don’t see him. His chair is empty.
I detect his respiration, his labored breathing.
I turn my head and call, “Ray!”
I’m not ready, you know.
DOUGLAS
Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
Colleagues, friends, enemies, there are a great many of you here, and I like to think, yes, I like to think you’ve come on my account.
I’m the star attraction this evening, am I not?
I’ve been given this trophy—it’s in the form of a spear or maybe a feather duster—in any case this thing has been bestowed on me as an award for my whole career, as if it were over. That goes straight to my heart. This spear of yours goes straight to my heart, no joke. Oops, I’m not doing a very good job of remaining upright.
I’m very sorry to disappoint you, but my career isn’t finished. I bend but I don’t break. A number of times, I’ve been pushed out … and every time I’ve bounced back. I’ve taken my authors with me. I’d like to hear even one of you say you regret coming along.
I’m waiting to see some hands. Richard? Of course not, Richard, you’ve got every reason to thank me. Nicole? We could have done great things together, Nicole, but you went and did some very small ones with the competition. Pardon my vodka, I mean, my frankness.
And since this is a time for sincerity, since I no longer feel bound by any ties to the enterprise for which I nearly ruined the best years of my youth, to “the sprawling organization that provided me with the pittance on which I survived,” since the house is on fire and the books are going up in smoke—you will note that the editor may be sacked and removed from the fire, but who will stop the books from burning? Eh, Paul? I love your tie.
I’m fascinated by the neckties writers wear to big occasions. The perfection of a writer’s knot betrays the fact that someone else has tied it for him.
Where was I? Ah yes, frankness.
Frankness requires that I reveal the circumstances in which a writer like Raymond—are you here, Ray? Are you part of this sparkling, tie-wearing, comic gathering? If you are, I’d appreciate it if you’d tell the assembly how I rewrote your short stories. With what consummate art …
Tell them, tell them you’re my creation.
At the moment when the house is burning, when books are getting as stale as old soda water, reveal to us how a work of fiction is built.
The only trophy I’m interested in accepting is the trophy for being the greatest literary ventriloquist of my generation.
Your trophy, this double-feathered spear, I leave to you.
I already have enough things to polish at home.
*
So how was I? Did I talk loud enough? Good. At one point, I was afraid they were going to cut the mike.
More vodka, please. No. Wait. My flask. Take it out of my pocket. Not that one, that’s oil for scales. Scales. Shit. Nobody here speaks my language. Nobody’s equipped to understand me.
That’s a cute skirt you’re wearing. Do you say slit skirt? What’s the word? The exact word? I’d say uncinched.
Huh? What’s that you’re saying? Ray? He’s … You’re talking about Raymond? You’re fucking kidding me. It’s Raymond you’re talking about?
Shit.
JOANNE
A year has passed. And I still haven’t started to live again.
What sustains me is my mission. To make his work known. I can’t imagine a lovelier task. Do I say that because I have no choice? It fell to me. Sometimes the best thing that can happen is to have no choice.
Every day I find stories among his papers. As if he were still here, still writing. And of course, that means I have decisions to make. To make alone. This story, for example. It could be the first chapter of a novel. Unless I take out the last few pages and stop the story at the moment when Iris rejoins the others inside the house.
If I cut it off at that point, it becomes a short story. Its title could be “The Drink That Did Him In.”
What do you think about that, Ray?
The idea that Douglas is going to enter this house fills me with a strange excitement.
I feel like the torero we saw in Mexico. When the moment for the deathblow came, Ray didn’t want to look. “You have too much heart,” I said, teasing him. The crowd roared. He kept his hand over his eyes.
Me, I kept mine wide open.
JOANNE AND DOUGLAS
When I open the door, a draft of air comes in with him. The wind chimes, five silver tubes, panic more severely than usual.
Douglas looks over at them.
“They come from Uzbekistan,” I tell him.
“You can also find them not far from my apartment.”
It’s Douglas, no doubt. His thin lips strike a line through the lower part of his face. His eyes transfix from a distance. His long silvery locks fall to his shoulders and give him a semblance of style. But Douglas isn’t a dandy. The purpose of his linen clothes is not to soften the contact between the world and him, it’s to make the contact between his clothes and his skin bearable. The perimeter of his affection spreads no farther than that.
I show him to a seat in the living room. When I come back from the kitchen with tea and cakes, he’s contemplating the oblique panel that opens to the sky. It’s as though he wants to drink the light. His movements are slow and stiff. I feel like I’m receiving a Sioux chieftain. I notice his wide belt, as tanned as his skin. When you get close to him, you breathe in a smell of leather mixed with an aggressive, repellent scent. A bouquet of glass and metal.
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“What are these?”
“Lemon and poppy seed.”
He inhales and takes a cake. “Ray told me you were an excellent cook.”
He doesn’t remember having dinner at our house. Nonetheless, he did, three or four times, when Ray was still seeing him. I attribute his forgetfulness to age.
In a neutral tone, I say, “You didn’t come to his funeral.”
“Is that a reproach?”
“No, just an observation.”
“Ray and I …”
He doesn’t finish his sentence.
I pour out the tea and say, “I can’t believe it was a year ago already.”
“Was Marianne there?”
He asks the question with the greatest naturalness.
“Yes, with their children. And their grandchildren.”
“So you two got married? Just before?”
I put down the teapot. “Before what?”
“Before it was too late.”
“What are you insinuating?”
“Nothing, nothing at all. You’re his last wife. Nothing wrong with that. And now you’re his …” He pauses for a few seconds and then finishes his sentence, enunciating each syllable. “… literary executrix.”
“I hate that word.”
“Which one?”
“ ‘Executrix.’ ”
“You like the power.”
“I’m carrying out his wishes.”
“Which you alone seem to know.”
I shrug my shoulders. He raises his cup.
His Siouxish features do not relax. He makes no sound as he drinks. Is he really swallowing? He must think I want to poison him.
“You haven’t made such a long trip just for that, have you?”
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