“You’re not my type,” I said.
“We’ll see about that,” she said. “Let’s get out of here, quick.”
I got up and took off behind her, her long black hair waving in the wind like a Jolly Roger.
“Hey, Betty… is that you?” I asked. “Is that you? Hey, Betty…”
I opened a beer and sat down in a chair while she got the ice pack ready and took all the clothes off. My eye looked like a sea anemone with the flu. I’d had it up to here with her bullshit.
“I’ve had it up to here with this bullshit,” I said.
She came over with the ice pack. She sat down on my lap and put it on my eye.
“I know why you’re upset,” she said. “It’s because you got beat up.”
“Don’t make me laugh. I didn’t get beat up. I let him have a free shot, that’s all.”
“Well, it’s not the end of the world. It hardly shows. It`s just a little swollen around the edges.”
“Right, just a little swollen around the edges, she says. Barely even red…”
I looked at her with the one eye I had left. She smiled. Yes, exactly, she smiled-and against that I was defenseless. The world became insignificant. She disarmed the slightest attack. I could carry on all I wanted for show, but the poison had already reached my brain. What was this little dried-out, shriveled-up world next to her? What was anything worth next to her hair, her lungs, her knees, and all that went with it-could I ever need anything else? Wasn’t what I had something enormous, alive? It was only thanks to her that I didn’t feel like a total piece of shit. I was willing to pay any price for that. It wasn’t that I’d reduced the whole world down to Betty-it was that I just didn’t care about the rest. She smiled, and my anger disappeared like a wet footprint in the burning sun. It would always amaze me.
She put on one of the things she’d stolen and circled around me, posing.
“So… what do you think? How do I look?”
I finished my beer first. Then I sent her a valentine.
“I just wish I could see you out of both eyes,” I whispered.
11
When I received my sixth rejection letter I knew that my book would never be published. Betty didn’t. One more time, she spent two days without unclenching her teeth-mood black. Everything I tried to say was worthless. She wouldn’t listen to me. Every time it happened she would wrap the manuscript back up and send it oft to someone else. Great, I said to myself-it’s like subscribing to the torture-of-the-month club, like sipping the poison down to the last drop-but of course I didn’t tell her. My nice little novel just kept taking potshots in the wing every time it passed overhead. But it wasn’t the novel I was worried about. It was her. Ever since she’d sworn off painting the town red it bothered me to see her with no way to blow off steam.
In moments like these, Eddie did his best to lighten things up. He joked around constantly and filled the place with flowers. He sent me wondering glances, but there was nothing to be done. If I ever really needed a friend it would be him that I’d choose. But you can’t have everything in life, and I had little to give.
Lisa was also great-gentle and understanding. We all did our best to help Betty get her spirits up, but it was all in vain. Every time she’d End one of my manuscripts stuffed into the mailbox she’d look up and sigh-and off she’d go again.
As if things weren’t bad enough, it got very cold outside-icy winds blew through the streets, Christmas was on its way. In the morning, we’d wake up to a blizzard. In the evening we’d find ourselves hip-deep in slush. The city started to get me down. I started dreaming of faraway places-silent painted deserts, where I could let my eyes wander across the horizon, musing peacefully about my new novel or what to make for supper, lending an ear to the first call of a nightbird, falling through the sunset.
I knew perfectly well what was wrong with Betty. The damn novel had nailed her to the floor-tied her legs together, her hands behind her back. She was like a wild horse who’s cut his hocks jumping over a flint wall and is trying to get back on his feet. What she thought to be a sunlit prairie had turned into a sad, dark corral, and she’d never known what it was to be cornered; she wasn’t built for it. Still, she went at it with all her might-rage in her heart-and with each passing day she worked her fingers further to the bone. It hurt me to see it, but there was nothing I could do. She had gone someplace where nothing and no one could follow. During these times I knew I could grab a beer and do a week’s worth of crossword puzzles without her bothering me. But I stayed close by, just in case she needed me. Waiting was the worst thing that could have happened to her. Writing that book was surely the stupidest thing I’d ever done.
Somehow I was able to imagine what she was going through each time one of those godforsaken rejection slips poured in-all that it implied-and the better I got to know her, the more I realized that she was actually taking it rather well. It isn’t easy to let them rip your arms and legs off one by one without saying a word, just gritting your teeth. Since I already had what I wanted, it didn’t matter much to me one way or the other-it was a little like getting news from Mars. I didn’t lose sleep over it. I didn’t really make the connection between what I had written and the book that found its way so regularly into people’s wastebaskets. I saw myself as the guy who tries to unload a shipment of bathing suits on a band of freezing Eskimos without speaking a word of their language.
My only real hope, in fact, was that Betty would get tired of the whole thing, forget the writer, and go back to the way she was before: gobbling down chili in the sun and glancing at the intensity of things from the veranda, her soul serene. Perhaps it could actually come to pass. Maybe her hope would end up wilting and fall away like a dead branch some morning-it wasn’t impossible. Then some poor asshole had to go set things off again. When I think about it, I tell myself that that little nobody never even got a tenth of what he had coming.
And so they turned down my book for the sixth time, and Betty slowly started smiling again after two days of depression. The house came back to life little by little-the parachute eventually opened, and we floated gently back down to earth. The first rays of sunlight dried up our grief. I was busy brewing a pot of killer coffee, when Betty showed up with the mail. There was a letter. For some time now my life had been trampled underfoot by these fucking letters. I looked with a sort of disgust at the one Betty held open in her hand.
“Coffee’s ready,” I said. “What’s new, honey?”
“Not much,” she said.
She approached without looking at me and stuffed it down the neck of my sweater. She tapped it a few times, then turned to the window and, without a word, pressed her forehead against the pane. The coffee started boiling. I turned it off. I took out the letter. It was written on stationery with some guy’s name and address on top. Here’s what it said:
Dear Sir,
I have been an editor at this publishing house for a good twenty years, and believe me, things both good and not so good have passed through my hands. I have never seen anything, however, that compares with what you have had the incredibly bad taste to send us.
I have often written to young authors to tell them of the admiration I hold for them and their work. I have never until now been tempted to do the opposite. But you, sir, have pushed me over the brink.
Your writing for me evokes the preliminary signs of leprosy. It is with deep disgust that I am sending back this nauseating flower that you mistakenly thought was a novel.