He puts down his cup. “Just for what?”
“For the opportunity to demonstrate your flair for irony.”
He lifts his chin as if he were addressing a large gathering. “I’ve come to clear up a misunderstanding, Joanne. You see, I still have some friends in the profession. Yes, in spite of the ingratitude that characterizes writers, in spite of their vague ‘sense of the fundamental decencies’—”
“Douglas, you’re not in one of your classes.”
“Let me finish, Joanne. Certain things must be said. They must be said here, in this house where Ray’s spirit is hovering.” (He settles himself comfortably in his armchair.) “My intention is to reveal the person I really am.”
“God help us!”
He lets it go. “What else have I done all these years? ‘Know me, know the tales I tell.’ That’s what every one of my stories whispers to its readers.”
“Your stories?”
“I was the Captain of the Storytellers, if you remember.”
I say nothing. I content myself with smiling.
He moves forward in his chair and puts on an afflicted air. “Joanne, please, I’d like you to stop telling anyone who’s willing to listen that I ‘butchered’ his short stories. That’s not what I did.”
“No, to hear you talk, you only rewrote them.”
I’m conscious of the pink patches on his neck.
“Improved them,” he says, correcting me.
“What does it matter?”
He sees that I’m going to remain inflexible. A sigh escapes him. I pour myself more tea and say, “I understand you’ve started a magazine.”
“The Chrysalis. We have a print run of ten thousand copies.”
“For you, that’s starting over from scratch.”
“Ten thousand,” he repeats, as if I’ve insulted him.
“Great,” I say, with a silent prayer for him to leave.
As he doesn’t move, I summarize: “So: Your friends have informed you that I’m spreading rumors. You’d like me to put an end to that. And in exchange, you’ll stop saying you rewrote Ray’s short stories.”
“Exactly,” he says, scratching his wrist.
“I see things differently.”
He looks daggers at me.
“I’m going to republish his stories.”
“What?”
“The way they were before the butchery. I’m going to publish them all.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m the executrix.”
“A disastrous decision—”
“People will judge for themselves. They’ll be able to compare the two versions.”
“You don’t have his versions. There isn’t anything left of what he wrote.”
“Of course there is. You sold your archives to two universities.”
“The manuscripts are illegible. Everything’s crossed out in heavy black ink.”
“I’ve hired some experts. They’re going to decipher everything.”
“You want to destroy my work.”
“Your work? Butchering Raymond was your work.”
The patches on his skin have turned red. “All right,” he says, getting to his feet.
As he remains standing there, I say, without looking at him, “I think we’ve examined all sides of the question.”
He turns and takes a step toward the door. Then he makes an about-face and says, “Let me raise one point, Joanne. What if the stories from before the ‘butchery,’ as you call it—what if they turn out to be disappointing? What then?”
I don’t say anything. I gaze at him steadily.
“Let’s say people read my version and his and compare the two. What if those readers come to the conclusion that I made the stories better, that I transformed them into masterpieces, which they weren’t? What if the whole world starts thinking that way? What will be left of Raymond then?”
I remain silent.
“A terrible responsibility, Joanne.”
He feels my resolution wavering.
I gather my strength. “I know what I’m doing.”
“In that case—”
He opens the door.
“But don’t say ‘butchery.’ Don’t say I butchered his stories.” At the instant when the door shuts, I think I hear him say, “I loved him too much to do that to him.”
But the wind chimes drown out his words.
JOANNE
The harbor’s twenty minutes from here. Nevertheless, I seem to hear its sounds. The seagulls circling the moored freighters. The ropes and cables slapping the masts. And a young woman’s voice. She’s in a telephone booth in front of the closed bar, trying to get someone to come for her. She can’t understand how they could forget her, how they could leave her alone in the harbor, where the lights are going out. She’s sobbing, and it wouldn’t take much for her to climb into a boat and cross the strait. The next day she’d wake up in the country on the other side. A new harbor, a new life.
The Drink That Did Him In
“If there’s one thing people appreciate about him, it’s that nothing goes to his head.”
That was the remark you’d hear most often when the subject of the conversation was Max.
His way of laughing for no reason, his schoolboy jokes, and his perennially childlike mug made those who knew him willing to forgive him for anything.
And he had a lot of things to be forgiven for.
His last joke had consisted of dying prematurely, not long after turning fifty.
All we could do was gather and grieve for him, with the dazed, groggy looks of people brought together by the death of a loved one. And yet our faces, sad as they were, sometimes broke into smiles. For nobody was as funny as he was. No one could make us laugh as much as Max.
The funeral had taken place around three o’clock. A buffet was served at our house afterward, and now almost everyone was gone. Only four of us were left on the veranda.
We’d retreated out there so we wouldn’t have to clean up right away. Bottles, half-empty glasses, and plates with the remains of food littered the living room. With Fred and me on the veranda were Anne and Victor, our best friends.
A soft summer night was beginning to fall. The chairs we were sitting in, the coffee table and the bottles scattered on it, the empty cage that used to hold my in-laws’ nightingale (I’d opened the cage that morning and let the bird escape)—all the wicker furniture took on a gray hue in the shade of the veranda.
We hadn’t turned on the lamp with the Japanese lampshade or the strings of lights around the windows. It was as if we were trying to connect with Max, to communicate with his spirit, in the darkness.
Max was a writer. Thanks to his books, his spirit would remain among us. Yes, as long as there were people to read his work, Max would live on amid the shadows.
I was saying that to myself when Anne came back from the living room with several bottles. Some of them were nearly full.
She put down the tray.
“You want to get us drunk,” Fred said.
“In homage to Max,” I said.
Victor looked at me. He seemed not to understand.
Anne told Fred, “If you two don’t drink with Iris and me, you’ll just wind up sorrier.”
“We’re not so depressed,” Victor said.
“A better homage to Max would be not to drink,” said Fred, grabbing a bottle of red wine.
He poured himself some. Victor held out his glass, saying, “I never saw him drink.”
“That’s true,” Anne said. “Max stopped before I met you.” She turned her attention to a bottle.
Victor looked at me. “He drank like a fish?”
“Let’s say he had a lot of fish potential.”
That got some loud laughs. It was getting darker and darker. I couldn’t make out Victor’s features, but it seemed to me he wasn’t sharing in our hilarity. His tone of voice was curt, staccato.
Victor’s an optician. His shop in the center of town is deco
rated in psychedelic style to attract a young clientele. There’s a display of fantasy frames on a tall rack near the door. That sort of thing isn’t Victor’s cup of tea, but they sell like hotcakes. Anne was the one who came up with the idea.
One of the bottles still held a little Scotch. I gulped down a last swallow of wine and poured the whiskey into my glass.
“Max had so much potential he almost died of it.”
“It was ten years ago,” Fred said to Victor. “The doctors told him if he didn’t stop drinking, he was signing his own death sentence.”
“No kidding.”
I looked at Anne. I was surprised she’d never told Victor about that.
They’ve been married for five years. We four and Max had often had dinner together. But Anne had her reasons for not wanting to delve too deeply into the subject of Max.
The two of them had carried on an affair as passionate as it was destructive.
Their excessive consumption of alcohol (they had something like a ménage à trois, with whiskey as the third member of the household) had necessarily led to disaster.
They spent several nights in jail cells. Anne even got her driver’s license taken away permanently. She’s never told Victor anything. He thinks she doesn’t know how to drive.
Although disaster suited Max—as a writer, he made good use of it—Anne began to think about her future. At the age of thirty-nine, she decided to settle down. She left Max and met Victor. Or maybe she met Victor while she was still with Max, nobody knows for sure.
Anne got pregnant pretty quickly. Melody and Lucy, gorgeous twin girls as blond as their mom, will be nine next month. The only times Anne saw Max again after her marriage to Victor were when she came to our house.
Victor finished his glass. Fred offered to refill it. We had enough booze to stay drunk for a week. In the darkness of the veranda, nobody complained.
Anne and Victor were on the sofa. I had the impression they were holding hands. Fred was sitting on the other side of the table. I thought about moving my chair closer to his so I could stroke him, but I spotted a second bottle of Scotch and poured myself another drink instead.
The stridulations of the crickets resounded from the garden. I saw shapes moving in the shrubbery. I listened. Silence fell amid melancholy and drunkenness. I thought we’d just achieved serenity. Was Max’s passing filling us with mortal thoughts? Putting the fugitive nature of life in the forefront of our minds? At that moment, death seemed to me no more appalling than the flight of a bird that seizes its chance when you open the door of its cage.
Suddenly Victor bawled out, “He didn’t look like it, your Max, but he clung hard to his scrap of existence, right?”
His voice sounded full of bitterness. I looked at Anne. Her body was rigid.
By scooting forward on my chair, I could see they weren’t holding hands. Their fists were clenched and their arms pressed tightly against their sides.
I remembered that during the interment, Anne hadn’t stayed next to Victor. She’d moved two steps behind him.
He spoke into the silence: “He gnawed on his little life like a bone, didn’t he?”
I expected to see Anne shrug her shoulders. Instead she buried her face in her hands.
Fred drawled, “Vic, it’s not very charitable to talk about a dead man like that.”
Vic had his legs crossed, and he shook his free foot like someone losing patience.
Anne made a clucking sound. “You know he doesn’t like to be called ‘Vic.’ ”
Victor said “Max” between his teeth, as though trying to grind up the name.
“Hey, Iris?”
“What?”
“Are you drunk?” Fred asked, searching for my eyes.
“No indeed.”
I stood up. Dizziness immediately overcame me. The floor was slipping away under my feet. I held on to my chair.
Then I turned on the lamp. When he saw the light, Fred cried out in relief.
Anne whispered to Victor, “You’re really an asshole. He never had anything against you.”
“How did he do it?” Victor lashed out in reply. “Why wasn’t he jealous of me? Because he had no reason to be, that’s why.” And he flung his glass onto the coffee table.
His black hair, which had taken a turn for the worse while we were sitting in the dark, was falling to one side of his head.
“No quarreling!” Fred said, reaching to stabilize a bottle he’d knocked off balance.
I steadied it before it could fall to the floor.
Anne had taken off her eyeglasses, a pair with an electric-blue frame that Victor had reluctantly ordered for her. She threw the glasses on the table. “What an asshole you can be! I mean, what an asshole!”
“My name is Victor,” he said. His cheeks looked scarlet.
“Did I say ‘Vic’?”
“Victor,” he repeated, challenging her with his eyes.
I moved past Fred to turn on the lights around the windows. They weren’t working. I must have shut off the current with the wall switch.
My legs wobbled. I’m not very big; two glasses of Scotch are enough to give me vertigo. I went back to my chair and sat down.
Fred turned to me. “Darling, would you mind getting us a pitcher of water? With lots of—”
He interrupted himself. He’d just seen the cage. His eyes were half closed. He squinted even more, and his mouth contorted bizarrely.
I thought, What a stupid mouth my husband has.
“Where’s Gottfried?”
It took me a few seconds to register the name. Then, in an excessively cheerful voice, I said, “I didn’t tell you what happened this morning? Gottfried flew off.”
“Flew off?”
“The bird’s name is Gottfried!” Anne said. “That’s hilarious.”
“I don’t find it funny,” Victor growled.
He sounded so stuffy I burst out laughing. Anne thought I was laughing with her. “Hilarious …” she said.
She slid limply to the pale straw mat that covered the floor. Tears welled up in her eyes.
Fred got to his feet. “Iris, don’t tell me you’ve lost Gottfried.”
“It’s Max’s fault.”
“Aha!” said Victor, as if he’d caught him in the act.
“A dead man’s fault?”
“Frigging Max!” Anne whispered.
The effluvia of alcohol invaded the veranda. They made the air sticky. I suppose I was as red as Fred and Victor.
Only Anne, who was keeping her eyes fixed on the floor, looked pale. From time to time, mocking spasms shook her body. “Gottfried, where are you?” she trilled between hiccups.
Fred was waiting for my answer. “I thought about Max all morning.”
“What does that have to do with Gottfried?” Fred asked, his eyes flashing.
Anne squealed, “Gottfried!”
“Let her explain herself,” Victor said, as if we were in the midst of an interrogation.
“Look at this,” Anne said indignantly. “The men are ganging up on the women!”
“That has nothing to do with it,” Victor grumbled.
The glass Anne was bringing to her lips muffled her reply, which was “Shut up, Vic. Don’t let ’em push you around, Iris!”
Fred was still glaring at me.
“When I opened the cage to feed Gottfried, he was standing on his trapeze, stiff as a board. So stiff I wondered if he might be dead. I tapped on the cage, I flicked it—”
“ ‘Flicked it’?” Fred repeated, round-eyed.
“Dumb broads …”
“Don’t let ’em push you around, Iree.”
“I gave the bars a few taps to wake him up.”
“But he wasn’t sleeping! Gottfried never sleeps!”
“Gottfried was biding his time,” Victor said.
“In any case, he didn’t budge. At all. I thought maybe he’d wake up for food. I went back to the front of the cage, opened it, and picked up the bowl of birdseed. Then
I shook the bowl through the open door.”
“The open door!”
“I must have been thinking about Max. Yes. That was it. I was remembering his poem about a nightingale. Or maybe a robin, I can’t remember. Anyway, just at that moment, Gottfried flew out and disappeared.”
“He has to be somewhere! He has to be somewhere nearby!”
Fred started turning round and round, as if the bird had just escaped.
“Come back, Free-dee!” Anne screamed at the top of her voice.
“You’ll never see him again,” Victor opined.
“My mother’s nightingale!” Fred was searching everywhere on the veranda.
Beyond the sofa where Victor sat, sipping his wine at brief, regular intervals, the garden was breathing the night.
That morning, without hesitating an instant, the nightingale had leaped into the greenery. He hadn’t let himself be distracted by seeds.
I put my hand on Fred’s shoulder. I said, “It’s not so serious, my love.”
“Spoken like a dumb broad,” Victor said.
I shot a look at him. He smoothed his hair with his free hand and kept his eyes away from mine. With his other hand, he was shaking his glass and splashing drops of wine on his yellow shirt. A yellow shirt for Max’s funeral, I thought.
Fred’s moaning was beginning to exasperate me. “That’s enough, Fred,” I told him. “Your mouth is stupid.”
“What?”
“I’m sure she did it on purpose, that stuff with the bird. Yeah. I think she wanted to let it go back to nature.”
Anne struck Victor on the knee. He smiled broadly.
His words had inflamed Fred. He came close and jumped down my throat.
“You never had any respect for my mother! And now that she’s dead, you … you want to get rid of her things. You want to liquidate Mom.”
Hilda, Fred’s mother, had died in April. He wasn’t getting over it. As for me, I’d never felt much affection for her, a bitter woman who’d fire off barrages of reproaches with a satisfied smile on her face.
“Nice little trick,” Fred said, drinking straight out of the bottle. “With Max as your accomplice. Doesn’t surprise me.”
“I thought you were friends.”
“Max was my friend. But he was also a first-class son of a bitch.”
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