The Horse You Came in On

by Martha Grimes

  It was embarrassing to have to flag someone down at the end of her two-to-three-hour writing stint, and she marvelled that anyone believed that she had “somehow got her foot caught up in the damned bike chain,” or was in the process of playing some wacky game or winning a bet with a colleague.

  In a funk she sat back down heavily, wondered if the swivel chair might just be too comfortable for her, might be molded a little too much to the contour of her back. She recalled reading a comment by some writer, probably a sportswriter or someone else who had a column and a deadline: if somebody held a gun to your head, you’d write. Ellen closed her eyes and imagined someone was holding a gun to her head, but it didn’t help. Of course, it had to be a real gun, that was all.

  She slid down in the chair and pulled up her heavy Aran sweater, arranged it around her head, and sat thinking about the Man in the Iron Mask. If he had been a writer, what would the conditions have been? What would the poor booby have done if he’d been a nail biter, like she was? In this guise she rose and made her way blindly over to the window, arms outstretched against obstacles in her path, felt the cold panes beneath her fingers, stood there. Could anyone see her, down there on the walk? She sighed and pulled down the sweater and chewed at the hangnail on her thumb. Then with her back flush up against the wall she pretended she was Fortunato. If Fortunato had been a writer, imagine the sort of arrangement Montresor would try to negotiate with him! Not a paragraph, Fortunato? What? A sentence, surely! No? Ellen raised her arm and pulled it back: thwack! Another brick splatters home.

  She dragged herself back to the chair, sat down in a slouch, and picked up the pen. Put it down again. She was so hungry.

  She had tried locking the chain to her ankle in her apartment, but it didn’t work because nothing she could find to wrap it around was heavy enough to work as a restraining force. She reminded herself of someone intent on suicide looking for a stout beam or heavy hook to toss the belt or rope across. And she had wound up several times dragging furniture by her foot—the heavy wing chair, even a dark Jacobean chest that she’d been sure would have stopped a mule team in its tracks—to get at the key so she could leave and go to the Horse or the Pizza Palace. Even after she had anchored the chain to the stove, there had been enough play in it to reach the telephone, and she’d got the pizza delivered. And it just barely reached to the door. The delivery kid was fascinated. She’d told him she had the lead in Les Mis. He’d believed it.

  It wasn’t that she couldn’t write because she didn’t like Sweetie. She loved Sweetie. She liked her plain dresses, her pleated skirts and pastel cardigans, her simple hairdo, her clean face.

  Why would anyone want to drive her mad? But Ellen wasn’t sure that anyone did want to. She bent her head back over the chair, wondering how far she could lean back before she fell.

  She stared up at the fluorescent lighting fixture, the shadowy carcasses of dead moths caught within it. Then she leaned forward and wrote:

  Sweetie’s head was bent over the white candy box.

  The trouble was: it was in this second story, the one she was writing now, that Lily was receiving letters from someone she didn’t know and had even, yesterday, got a box of candy. Ellen closed her eyes. Forget Lily for the moment.

  Sweetie didn’t know what kind of candy it was.

  She was afraid to open the box.

  Ellen stopped and leaned back. There was something ominous about the box of candy. She put her head in her hand, rubbed at her temples in a benighted-old-woman gesture that she disliked. No, she decided. The box of candy is just that. What is ominous is the way in which Sweetie sees it.

  Poor Sweetie. Ellen bit her lip, put the heels of her palms against her eyes, pressing them into the sockets. Something awful was going to happen, something truly awful. Had happened. And was now working itself out. It had happened at the end of Windows, but Sweetie did not know what her role was to be. That was the source of the dread.

  The box was covered in a satiny white paper and tied with purple velvet, a wide, generous band of cloth, not some stingy length of narrow ribbon. Sweetie pulled at the end. The big bow unraveled, almost voluptuously.

  Ellen’s thumb and forefinger rubbed together, felt air, felt the width of velvet. Red, it should be. Not purple, red. Why? Red, because purple seemed too weighted with meaning and the ribbon means nothing but itself.

  She watched as Sweetie removed the lid. Inside were two layers of little fluted cups arranged in neat rows. There was no candy. Sweetie picked up one of the cups and inspected it carefully. Ellen wrote:

  There never had been.

  She returned the fluted cup to its position and looked at the neat rows, empty of chocolates. Sweetie closed the box and remembered Maxim saying: “They left notes on my plate, by my glass, in the bowl on the table. The notes said: cheese, wine, fruit. It was because I’m a writer and I should have been able to dine on empty air and drink the memory of wine. They thought it was a laugh. They did not know it, but they might well have been right. The material world falls away. Listen: what if what happens is precisely what doesn’t happen? For instance: you cut the paper doll from the surrounding paper and there is the empty space, the doll-outline. It is a perfect match—perfect. Then which is which and which is real?”

  “Oh, but that’s sophistry. I hate talk like that.”

  “No. They are not separate. The outline belongs to the doll. The doll only appears to be wrenched from its place. Dress the paper doll in its paper clothes. It makes no difference. It only mimics its true self; a shabby imitation; a mutilation, a static echo. Do you see?”

  Ellen put down her pen and stared at the wall. She thought about the dreadful Vicks Salve. The mutilation of Sweetie. The murder of Sweetie. No. According to Maxim, it was impossible. Impossible.

  Then she thought of Beverly Brown’s Poe story. Maxim would say this too is impossible. Only Poe could write a Poe story. Anyone attempting to copy him would leave fingerprints—mental fingerprints all over the pages. It couldn’t be avoided. To write Poe you had to be Poe.

  II

  A face behind the frosted glass of the office door.

  Before she could get at the key, the door was opening and the shadow on the glass turned into Melrose Plant.

  “Well, well,” he said, taking in the chain around her ankle.

  Coolly, she asked him, “Would you mind handing me that key?” She nodded toward the filing cabinet. “On top there.”

  He looked from her to the filing cabinet and looked back. They looked at one another for a few seconds, locking eyes.

  “Please. The key.” Her tone was full of condescension, as if she’d been waiting for ages for her page, her messenger, her locksmith, her lackey Melrose, to appear.

  He found the key, handed it to her, waited for an explanation. Finally, bent down to the lock at her ankle, she said, “I had to see how it felt, didn’t I?”

  “ ‘It’?”

  “Felt for the character in my book. He was once on a chain gang. In Louisiana.” The chain came off. She sat back, staring at air. “He was one of David Duke’s guys. Neo-Nazi.” She looked up at the ceiling. “He murdered . . . someone,” she mused.

  “Why is there a chain wrapped around your foot?”

  “I just told you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  She tried to untangle the end of the chain. “Instead of the Q and A I could use a little help.”

  Melrose was enjoying himself. He didn’t move. “A Louisiana chain gang somehow doesn’t strike me as a proper mise-en-scène for Sweetie and Maxim.”

  “It can’t be two o’clock yet.” With this convenient change of subject, Ellen finally unwound the chain and plunked it by the typewriter.

  “According to my watch, it is almost precisely that. There is, however, no way to verify that by university time, as the clock on the wall is covered.” He did not wait for the answer he knew he was not going to get anyway.

  “Then I’m through!” she said
happily. “Writing, I mean.”

  “Oh! That’s what you were—what the hell?”

  The sound was deafening. Melrose dropped his books; Ellen lunged for the cabinet, yanked open the drawer, and fumbled out an old double-belled alarm clock. She smashed the plunger in and tossed the clock back in the drawer. Then she picked up her jacket. “It’s two o’clock.”

  “Why . . . ? Oh, never mind.” He helped her on with her leather jacket and asked, “How is Sweetie?”

  “Good as can be expected, I guess.” She gathered up her old leather bag and hooked it over her shoulder. “Given her situation.” She slid her door keys from the desk.

  “I hope it’s no worse than Maxim’s.”

  • • •

  On the way to the cafeteria, Ellen did not answer any of his questions about either Windows or her manuscript, regarding the answers as superfluous outside the scope of the book. She asked, “You see what I mean about Vicks Salve’s book? You see the similarity?”

  “Painfully obvious. Clearly, she plagiarized.”

  Ellen pulled at his sleeve, eager. “Did you figure out a way to whack her yet?”

  Melrose smiled. “I have an idea. It’s excellent.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t thought it through yet.”

  She walked backwards, gazing at him beseechingly. Given all of her problems, Melrose thought, she had a wonderfully untroubled expression—pristine and childlike. A few students were lounging on benches and even on the grass, enjoying the sunshine in spite of the cold.

  “Let me mull it over a bit.” He held up Windows. “Won’t you please answer one question? Who murdered Maxim? It wasn’t Sweetie, was it?”

  “What makes you think he’s dead?” They passed through the double doors of the cafeteria. “I hope they’re not out of pull-aparts.”

  “What makes me think he’s dead? Oh, I expect because he’s lying crumpled on the floor with blood oozing out of his body and a knife nearby. That aroused my suspicions.” He followed her over to the counter, through the tables and a scattering of late lunchers.

  Ellen didn’t comment; her chin was nearly resting on the top of the glass display case as she looked at the rows of doughnuts, buns, and pastries. “I don’t see any pull-aparts. I’ll have a cheese Danish.” Sitting on top of the case were several small boxes of candy; they were for sale. She frowned.

  The black woman behind the counter scooped a large pastry onto a white plate and looked at Melrose.

  “Just coffee for me.”

  “Don’t you want a cherry Danish? They have good ones here.” Ellen indicated the cherry Danish, and the woman put that one on a plate also and slid it across to Melrose.

  As cups were clattered into saucers, he said, “Are you telling me Maxim isn’t dead?”

  Ellen hugged the bun to her chest as her eyes ranged over the room for a table. “Not exactly. Oh, hell, there’s Vlasic. Ignore him.”

  “That should be easy, since I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  He followed her, wedging between pushed-out chairs and rucksack-laden tables, wondering how someone could be lying in a pool of blood and “not exactly” dead. Well, it was useless. Clearly, Windows was not the sort of mystery served up by Elizabeth Onions.

  Ellen was nodding her head in the direction of a middle-aged man with sparse hair, a sharp nose, and a thin, sinewy dancer’s body. “He’s an ass.”

  “A successful ass? Your department reeks of success.”

  “To hear him tell it. And he’s not in the same department. He teaches English; I’m in the seminars program. I think he’s published a couple of pamphlets, maybe a book, nothing spectacular. Obscure poetry.”

  “What’s his name, did you say?”

  “Vlasic. Alejandro, he wants people to believe. I call him Alex. He hates that.”

  Vlasic did not look as if he were too eager to share any of the writing limelight, certainly not with a colleague who had proven herself infinitely more successful than he, but he braved it out by smiling widely and booming out her name. Melrose was surprised at the operatic quality of his voice. He would have expected something reedier.

  “Hullo, Alex.”

  Vlasic flinched slightly as Ellen went on to introduce Melrose as an authority on the French Romantics, which he modestly denied, and Ellen contradicted the denial.

  The two girls sitting at Vlasic’s table turned their heads in concert. They were wearing peasant skirts and shapeless blouses. One was wearing hoop earrings the size of tires; the other had a long scarf coiled around her hair. They were dark and looked like gypsies.

  “How’s the new book coming?” Vlasic’s smile was about as insincere as a smile could get.

  Ellen’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t blink. “Okay.” She cut her Danish into symmetrical little wedges.

  “Smoothly, hmm?”

  There was something annoyingly sleek about the man. Melrose thought at any moment he might curl up and purr.

  “No problems.”

  “We’ve just been discussing the creative process.”

  “The what?” Her expression was bland.

  One of the gypsies leaned toward Ellen and said, as if she were uttering prophecies, “What worries me is not so much that I don’t have the talent, but that I don’t know if I want to make the sacrifice.” Here she made a pretty gesture of putting the beringed fingers of one hand to the tag end of her scarf, pulling it across her cheek. “I don’t know if I have the nerve, to be truthful, to lay myself bare.” Her thin, high laugh was flutelike. “I don’t know if I’d be able to make the kind of commitment it takes. It really worries me.”

  “It’d worry me too.” Ellen chewed on a wedge of cheese Danish, pulled over an empty chair, and plunked her feet on it.

  The gypsy looked uncertainly at Vlasic and tried a new tack. “It must be deeply satisfying to achieve recognition for something you’ve worked on so long and so hard. It must be wonderful to have molded, sculpted your feelings so that others can share them, to have crystallized some part of the psyche and projected it.”

  “Oh, I dunno. Any fool can write,” said Ellen.

  Melrose loved it; he was thinking how well Ellen and Joanna the Mad would get on.

  “Ha!” bellowed Vlasic theatrically. He brought his hand down on the table and rattled the cups in their saucers. “Ha!”

  Ellen regarded him without expression. “It’s true. Even he could do it if he tried.” She jerked her thumb in Melrose’s direction.

  Relegated to the company of writing idiots, and feeling no comment was necessary, Melrose merely inclined his head. No one, however, seemed interested in the scribblings of this particular idiot; their eyes did not gather him into the company.

  The first gypsy was obviously unhappy in the thought that her sights might be set on something any fool could do. “You’re too modest.” Her voice was much deeper than her friend’s, throatier. When Ellen didn’t help her by denying or affirming this assessment, she continued. “I’ve read Windows.” There was an infinitesimal pause as she waited to be congratulated for her trouble. Again, Ellen didn’t respond, so she plowed on. “It’s incredible how there could be such narrative thrust in a piece of writing where such a reductive use is made of symbolism, where prose has been stripped to the bare bones.”

  Ellen merely lit a cigarette.

  Now the one pulling at her scarf took over with her tremulous uncertainties. “It’s being motivated that worries me. Motivated to get up every morning and face the blank page . . .”

  “You could always sleep in.”

  The girl discounted this with a little laugh. “It’s being able to stick to it, to commit yourself to a piece of writing that may never speak to anyone else, to—” she paused, perplexed over what further sacrifice might be necessary—“work for years and be able to write nothing but commercial fiction. What reward could keep me going through all of that?”

  “Money.” Ellen considered the crust of Melrose
’s cherry Danish. She dropped it back on the plate.

  Again, Vlasic let out a snort of laughter. “You know the percentage of writers who can live on their earnings?” No one answered, so he told them. “Less than two percent.”

  Melrose considered abandoning his writing career.

  • • •

  Outside again, Melrose said, “How could you stand listening to that nonsense?” They walked against the flow of students escaping from classrooms into the more aromatic and filling environs of the cafeteria.

  “Vlasic’s students all talk that way. They can’t help it. They’re all little Vlasics.”

  They walked on for a few moments in silence, and then Ellen stopped and said, “You know what Maxim just told Sweetie?”

  “What? No, I don’t. The last time I saw Maxim he was lying in a pool of blood. So how could he just have told Sweetie anything?”

  “Maxim told Sweetie that if you cut out a paper doll—this is a metaphor, understand?—if you cut out a paper doll, to what does the empty space, the outline, then belong? And does the doll then exist without its outline?”

  “That’s metaphysical s—”

  Ellen interrupted, nodding. “Sophistry. That’s just what Sweetie said.”

  “Metaphysical shit is what it is. And would you stop talking about Maxim and Sweetie as if they were back there in the cafeteria having coffee?”

  “Oh, don’t be simple.”

  Ellen was pouting, as if he’d just insulted her very best friends. Very possibly, he thought, they were. He held his tongue. It wasn’t easy.

  “I’m thinking about literary theft.”

  “The redoubtable Vicks Salve?”

  “I was at first, yes. Then after what Maxim said—”

  Melrose heaved a huge sigh, hoping it would register, but Ellen ignored it.

  “—I started in thinking about this Poe manuscript. A person can’t copy style; it would be like trying to paint the real colors of a rainbow, and there are too many incomparables of atmosphere and air that go to producing a rainbow. It’s like that with style. The whole thing’s going to have a strange, stuttering quality. Beverly Brown would leave her mental fingerprints all over the pages.”