Donald E. Westlake
Adios, Scheherazade
This is for Norman Mulonet
1
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
I’m supposed to write a dirty book now. It is one-thirty in the afternoon, Fred is asleep, Betsy is at the A&P, it is the 21st day of November, the year of my God! 1967, and I have ten days in which to write Opus Number 29. In E flat. Scherzo, please.
What the heck am I doing? I put the paper in the typewriter, I typed the number 1 midway down the left margin, I quadruple-spaced, I indented five, and then I was supposed to write the first sentence of this month’s dirty book. So what do I think I’m doing? I’m sitting here typing nonsense, I’m supposed to be typing sex.
I can’t think about it, that’s the problem. I sit here and I look at the paper, the typewriter keys, the desk, the Bic ballpoint pen, the yellow Ticonderoga pencil, the round red eraser with the bushy green tail, and I wind up thinking things like how many words are in Ticonderoga. Ago. Tide. Recoating.
What kind of crap is that? It’s sex time, lust time, time to get the old cottage industry in high gear. I have till three p.m., November 30th, this year, to get this book written and delivered to Lance or it’s all over, I am up the flue, down the chute, in the dustbin and out on my ear. Lance does not tell jokes, and he does not make empty threats. “I’m sorry, Edwin,” he said, and he sounded sorry.
That was on the phone. I never see Lance except on the phone, if you know what I mean. Maybe he knows he’s more effective that way, with nothing but the calm sincere persuasive voice, the voice that belongs with the name Lance. Lance Pangle. You’d think he’d have changed the last name too. Rod says he had to keep it for tax reasons or business reasons or something like that, but I say no. I say the bastard’s too egotistical to become a pen name for himself. Maurice Pangle was horrible, and because (grudgingly I admit) the rat does have brains he knew it was horrible, he knew it would be a disadvantage in business dealings. And I can see why he didn’t keep the first name; Maurice itself is horrible, and the only name on earth it goes with is Evans, and that’s taken. So he changed his first name. Lance Pangle. The front half of a cowboy hero and the back half of his horse.
The voice invokes the front half. It is a gentlemanly trombone, the softest baritone in the world. The moods it implies are gentle, quiet, civilized. He can call out the firing squad and then say, “I’m sorry, Edwin,” and really and truly sound sorry.
“I’ll get it in on time, Lance,” I promised, and I wanted to sound determined and responsible, but I have the bad feeling I sounded like somebody already on the chute.
I’m a square peg in a round hole, that’s what it is, forgive the sexual reference. I’m no more a writer than I am an astronaut. I’m no more a writer than I am a—. (Fill in the blank with your three favorite occupations.)
Rod warned me. “Nobody can do this shit forever,” he said. “You gotta remember it’s only temporary.”
How could I pay any attention? In the first place he was saying “shit,” in my mother’s living room, with my mother sitting right there. In the second place he’d come up from New York with Sabina Del Lex, and they were staying together in the same motel room out at the Howard Johnson by the Thruway exit, and all I could do was try not to look at Sabina’s thighs. And in the third place I didn’t intend to do this shit forever.
A year and a half, that’s what I said. Rod came up to Albany in January of 1965, late in January. I got his letter the first week in January, and I wrote back and said hell yes I’m interested, and he drove up in that red MG with Sabina sometime toward the end of the month.
It was the money he kept talking about, and it was the money I was most interested in. I was a college graduate (class of ’64 gang!), and I was married, and I was living at home with my mother and working for Capital City Beer Distributors. And Betsy was seven months pregnant, which is another reason I was refusing to look at Sabina’s thighs.
I’ve had a letch for Sabina Del Lex ever since Rod first brought her up to Albany and introduced her to me. Me to her. No, since before that. When I’d seen her on TV on that General Electric clock-radio commercial, she was so obviously hot to grab that clock-radio and shove it in that I quick ran off and humped Betsy. And now here she was in my house — my mother’s house — and Betsy was just a few days from the beginning of the six weeks of nothing, and was as big as a hippopotamus anyway, and I was damned if I was going to look at Sabina’s thighs.
Where was I? Money. Rod said they paid twelve hundred dollars for one of these books. “It used to be a thousand, but Lance Jewed them up.”
Betsy said, “That isn’t a phrase, is it? Isn’t it Jewed them down?”
So I looked at Sabina’s thighs. Milky white, shadowed above. Eyes too. Gray, milky whites, shadowed above. I wondered if Rod neglected her. I hoped so. I began to fantasize: One o’clock in the morning. A phone call. Sabina. “Rod just passed out in the car, you know how he drinks, I can t do anything with him. I wouldn’t bother you, Ed, but I don’t know anyone else in Albany.”
“No trouble at all. I’ll be right over.”
Betsy: “What’s the matter, Ed?” Half asleep, sitting up in bed, blinking at me.
Me: “Rod’s passed out drunk. I won’t be long.”
Over to the motel. Sabina worried, wringing her hands. Rod lying in his vomit. I carry him into the room, undress him, put him to bed. Sabina: “Ed, I really appreciate this.”
Me: “Not at all.”
Some conversation ensues, too boring to fantasize, and we next come into focus with the two of us sitting on her bed — twin beds, right? — drinking scotch out of water glasses. She is telling me how unhappy she is. She starts to cry. I put my arm around her. She cries against my shoulder. I put my hand on her thigh, it’s so cool, so smooth, so gentle, so civilized, so absolutely insane-making. I slide my hand up to white panties. She sighs against my throat. We lie back on the bed. I’ve got a hard-on a pole vaulter would envy. We get our clothing off, she’s a tigress, she moves like an exploding mainspring, I come too soon, she says, “Is that all?”
Damn it. Why do all my fantasies turn against me? My trouble is, I never manage to get them hermetically sealed. A little reality begins to creep in, like mist under a door. Like tear gas around the edges of the mask.
I was talking about money. I’m having the same trouble concentrating on money instead of Sabina that I had that day in January of 1965 in my mother’s living room in Albany, New York, a very crappy city in which I grew up, but in which I was not born.
I was born somewhere in the South Pacific, in point of fact, on the aircraft carrier USS Glenn Miller. It was the high point of my life so far.
“When the price goes from a thousand,” Rod told Betsy, “to twelve hundred, the phrase is, he Jewed them up.” Rod always treats Betsy with exaggerated courtesy and overfull explanations, the sort of contempt you can’t call him on. Even if I disagreed with him, which I don’t.
Anyway, he then turned back to me. “You use my pen name,” he said, “so it’s a guaranteed sale. You get a thousand, I get the two hundred. Less commission, ten per cent commission. That makes your cut nine hundred.”
“To do a book a month,” I said. My mind was full of Sabina’s thighs and my need for money. I was too excited to make decisions.
“To do a book in ten days every month,” he said.
“I’ll never do a book in ten days.”