Brock Stewart hefted his suitcase and watched the red taillights of the car disappear down the road, headed due north into the mountains. Cold mountains. Wintry mountains.
“Go on, lady,” Brock said under his breath. “That country’s too cold for me. And it’s too cold for you, I can guarantee you that. I can guarantee it, you won’t like the cold nights up there.”
She had been fun, an unexpected bonus on this trip, but now that the lady fleeing her husband was out of sight she was quickly out of Brock’s mind. He looked around at where he was, trying to decide what to do next.
And so am I.
Oh, come on. It’s Brock Stewart time. I hate this, I swear I do, I hate these fucking interruptions all the time. Get out of here, Ed, it’s time for the hitchhiker chapter.
You see, I figured I’d skip over the Beth chapter and go straight to Chapter 3. Do the hitchhiker, have him meet another woman, sex scene, take that woman into Chapter 4, and so on. Then, when the book was done, I could go back and write Chapter 2, it would be less emotional a problem for me by then. At least that’s the way I had it figured.
I’ve had second thoughts about the baby-sitter. I sat here for a while thinking about the beginning of the chapter. I even had a name for her, I called her Donna Warren, and I gradually began to see that it wouldn’t work out, I’d be painting myself into a corner even if I did manage to write a chapter about the baby-sitter, because the two characters just aren’t that connected, Paul and the baby-sitter, and there’s no way to get a whole book out of the two of them.
I seem to have millions of ideas for Chapter 2’s that I can’t write. That’s why I decided to go ahead and do a Chapter 3 and maybe even finish out the book, leaving Chapter 2 until last.
And now I can’t even do Chapter 3. And I have to. If I have any last chance at all, this is it. Rod says he will call Samuel tomorrow, and he says he thinks he can talk Samuel into taking the book one day late, on Friday instead of on Thursday, but it won’t do any good unless I write the hitchhiker chapter right now.
All right. I’m going to write it, that’s all. I’m going to go back to it as soon as this paragraph is done, I’m going to repeat the last usable paragraph I wrote and then I’m going to continue with Brock Stewart until I’m done. And if I drift away again I’ll come back again. I don’t care if this chapter takes a hundred pages to write, fifteen of them are going to be concerned with Brock Stewart. And when I’m done, all I have to do is retype.
What the hell, I can’t leave this room anyway, not for several hours. I’m stuck in here, because of Rod and—
No. I said I was going back to Brock, and I am.
She had been fun, an unexpected bonus on this trip, but now that the lady fleeing her husband was out of sight she was quickly out of Brock’s mind. He looked around at where he was, trying to decide what to do next.
He’d gotten out at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere, and with night falling fast the place had a really bleak and empty look. There was a gas station on one corner and a diner diagonally opposite, but the other two corners were just fields, and more fields stretched away on all sides toward the horizon, broken here and there by small copses of trees.
There was no traffic at the moment. Brock hefted his suitcase, thought things over, and decided a hamburger might be a good idea for next. He ambled across the road toward the diner.
From outside, the diner looked warm and comfortable and inviting. Steam misted the windows, softening the light within. And after a while I begin to hate all these descriptions.
That’s all I do, month after month, is describe things. If I’m not describing sexual congress I’m describing some mist-windowed diner. Or a bedroom. Or an office. Or a street. Or a car. Description description description, and who gives a shit?
You see, Brock’s going into the diner and it’s going to be empty except for this young girl behind the counter.
I don’t even want to talk about it.
Outside, it’s really taking place. Beyond that door over there. That’s why I have to stay in here. If she stays the night, I’m locked in here till tomorrow sometime. Rod said she’s unlikely to stay the night, but I feel pessimistic.
Actually, I considered it a good thing when he told me about it. “You can stay,” he said. “I know you have to get the book done. But I’ve been setting this chick up for a month and tonight’s the payoff.”
We tested, and my typing can’t be heard anywhere else in the apartment with the office door closed. So I’m in here, and Rod is out there feeding some girl a dinner he prepared himself, and after that he’s going to seduce her. He knows in advance he’s going to seduce her, and I know it, and the girl probably knows it too. Nothing like that has ever happened to me, and it never will. So look who’s writing sex novels.
Yeah, and look who doesn’t have to write sex novels.
My two hundred bucks a month is nothing to Rod now, you know that? I mean the money he gets every month for my using his pen name. That’s only twenty-four hundred dollars a year, less agency commission, leaving two thousand one hundred sixty dollars a year. Two thousand dollars a year. He’s making forty, maybe more. My two thousand doesn’t mean a thing to him.
I wonder what really happened out there on Long Island this afternoon. He won’t talk about it, he won’t even make jokes about it. The idea of Rod not making jokes, particularly about people like Birge and Johnny, is mind-shattering.
I think they pushed him around a little. On the left side of his face there was what looked like a faint bruise, near the cheekbone, as though maybe he’d been slapped there or something.
Why does that give me pleasure? It does, and I know it’s small-minded of me, but it does.
Just as it gives me pain that he read the chapters. All of them, not just the one about Paul. He read them out at the house, in between ringing me on the phone.
He thinks I’m flaking out, I know he does. I can see him torn about it, too, wanting to go in two opposite directions at the same time. Part of him still thinks of me as a friend, and feels sorry for me (which makes my skin crawl) and wants to help me (which is fine by me), but another part of him thinks of me as a loser, somebody on the chute, somebody he shouldn’t get his life snarled up with. He himself is a winner, he’s proved that by now, and whereas winners will pal around with all sorts of people before they become winners, once it’s established what they really are they tend to club together and leave us also-rans out in the cold.
Not that I blame him for it, I don’t. I hate him for it, but I don’t blame him for it.
I wish I was nineteen again, we were in college again, he wasn’t a winner yet and I wasn’t a loser yet and Betsy didn’t exist yet and nobody had ever even heard of sex novels. That’s what I wish.
We left one thing out in our calculations, by the way, Rod and I, when we locked me up in here like a virgin in a wall. There’s no head. I pissed out the window a little while ago, but what if I have to crap?
Don’t walk down 9th Street tonight, that’s all I can say.
I am going back to Brock Stewart. Enough digression.
From outside, the diner looked warm and comfortable and inviting. Steam misted the windows, softening the light within. There were no cars parked on the gravel out front, but the tall neon sign by the road was already flashing:
Brock pushed open the door and went in, and the air inside was so moist you could almost swim in it. He grinned and shook his head and shut the door, then went over and sat at the counter. From the inside, the light was much brighter and harsher and more glaring than it had seemed through the fogged-up windows as he’d crossed the highway.