Her voice got more and more bitter. I poured myself another one and grabbed a handful of peanuts. She didn’t take her eyes off me.
“I am convinced that you are a great writer. Can you get that through your head at least?”
“Listen, don’t start up again with that. I’m tired. Being a great writer is not going to put food on the table. I think you’re working too hard on that thing. It’s giving you delusions of grandeur.”
“But God! Don’t you see that someone like you shouldn’t have to stoop? Don`t you understand that you don’t have the right to do that?”
“Hey, Betty… you gone nuts?”
She grabbed me by the lapels. I almost spilled my scotch.
“No, it’s you who’s nuts! You’re not with it at all! It makes me sick to see how you spend your time. What’s wrong with you? Why won’t you open your eyes?”
I couldn’t help sighing. The crummy day just wouldn’t end.
“Betty… I’m really afraid you think I’m someone I’m not.”
“No, stupid! I know who you are! I just didn’t know you were so thick! I’d rather see you out just walking around, gawking, anything-that would be normal. But instead you go out and deaden your mind with a bunch of sinks, and you think it’s very cool…”
“I’m doing a little fieldwork in human relations,” I said. “I’m trying to store up a maximum of infor-”
“Oh, cut the bullshit! I’ve already said that I want to be proud of you, to admire you, but I think the idea really bugs you! I think you’re doing all this to annoy me!”
“No, I’d never do anything to annoy you.”
“Well, it seems that way to me, I swear. I mean, Jesus, try to understand. You don’t have time to do a hundred different things with your life. Don’t think you’re going to get out of it with a few witty remarks. You’d be better off facing it once and for alclass="underline" you’re a writer, not a plumber.”
“How can you tell the difference?” I asked.
We glared at each other across the table. She looked like she was ready to slit my throat.
“You’re going to give me a lot of work,” she said. “Yeah, you probably will-but for now there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m warning you, I’m not going to give in. I’m telling you it bugs me to live with a guy who comes home at seven o’clock at night, plops his toolbox on the table and sighs: ‘THIS REALLY GETS ME DOWN!’ How do you think I feel when in the afternoon I’m completely absorbed in your book and the telephone rings and some creep asks where you are because something just went blooey in his toilet bowl? I can almost smell the shit! How do you think I feel when I hang up? Some hero…”
“Look, I think you’re going overboard. I think it’s a good thing that there are plumbers. I can tell you I’d rather do that than work in an office.”
“Lord, don’t you understand anything? Don’t you see that with one hand you’re pulling my head out of the water and with the other you’re dunking me in again?”
I was going to tell her that it was a good metaphor for life in general, but I didn’t. I just nodded and poured myself a glass of water and went to drink it looking out the window. It was almost dark out. The writer wasn’t very sharp, and the plumber was dead. It was after this conversation that I started slowing down. I tried at least not to work in the afternoon, and things changed right away. Permanent good times came back between Betty and me-we recaptured the flavor of peaceful days, we winked at each other again.
The plumber had trouble getting up in the morning after the writer had gone to bed at three o’clock. He had to be careful not to wake Betty up-to heat the coffee without his face falling in it. He yawned, unhooking his jaw. It was only when he set foot on the street that he started emerging. The strap from his toolbox sawed his shoulder in half.
Betty was sometimes still sleeping when he came home. He would jump in the shower, then wait for her to wake up, smoking a cigarette at her side. He would look at the paper piling up next to the typewriter, listen to the silence, or play with a rolled-up pair of panty hose at the foot of the bed.
By the time Betty woke up the writer was deep in a session of self-introspection, a small dreamy smile on his lips. Usually they fucked, then had breakfast together. It was the good life for the writer. He felt just a bit tired, that was all, and when the sky was clear he liked to take a nap on the terrace, listening to the noise coming up from the street. The writer was cool. He never worried about money. His brain was empty. Sometimes he asked himself how he had ever managed to write a book-it seemed so far away now. Maybe he’d write another one someday, he couldn’t really say. He didn’t want to think about it. Betty asked him the question once, and he told her that he just might, but it made him uneasy for the rest of the day.
When he got up the next morning, the plumber had a serious hangover. He waited until his client turned around, then threw up in the shower stall. It gave him the willies. Sometimes he hated that fucking writer.
8
Before we knew it the evenings started getting cooler, and the first leaves fell from the trees and filled the gutters. Betty went to work on my last notebook and I continued to putter around here and there to earn enough money to keep us going. Everything was fine except that now I found myself waking up at night, eyes wide in the dark, brain burning, squirming around in bed as if I’d swallowed a snake. All I had to do was reach out my arm-I’d put a new notebook and pencil right next to the bed-but this song and-dance had been going on for two days, and no matter how I racked my brain I couldn’t come up with the slightest new idea. Nothing came out at all-but nothing-so every night the big writer went down for the count. He had lost his muse’s phone number, the poor jerk; he’d even lost his desire to call, and he didn’t even know why.
I tried to convince myself that it was a case of temporary constipation. To shake things up a little, I started doing some electrical work in the afternoons. I replaced wires, installed junction boxes, put in switches with dimmers for atmosphere-all the way up at night, then down to just a glimmer to fuck in. But even with all the puttering I felt my soul dragging. I had to stop regularly to down a beer. Only when evening came on did I start to feel better-almost normal. Sometimes I was downright joyful, the alcohol helped me through. I’d go up to Betty and bend over the typewriter:
“Hey, Betty, no use wearing yourself out-I got nothing left inside, my balls are gone…”
I thought this was funny as hell. I gave the top of the machine a good punch.
“Let’s go,” Betty said. “Out. Go sit down, and stop screwing around. You’re talking like a jerk.”
I sank down in an armchair and watched the flies fly. When it was warm I’d leave the terrace door open and toss my empty beer cans outside. The message I heard inside was always the same: where? when? how?-but I was having trouble finding a buyer for my troubled soul. I wasn’t even asking for much, just two or three pages would do the trick, just something to get me started. I was sure that all I had to do was start. I had to laugh, it was all so stupid. Betty shook her head and smiled.
After that, I would start making dinner and my worries would go out the window. I’d do a little shopping with Bongo. The fresh air woke me up. And if I started going a bit off the deep end again while cracking an egg or grilling a leek, it didn’t really matter-I would just look forward to sitting down to eat with the two girls, and try to be as lively as they were. I’d look at them talking, sending sparks back and forth in the living room. Usually I would get into sauces-the girls said I was a genius with sauces-they always cleaned their plates. People also said I was a genius as a plumber. And as a fly fucker-how did I stack up there? After all those years of peace, I was perfectly within my rights to wonder what was happening to me. It was like trying to restart an old locomotive, overgrown with weeds. It was terrifying.