"Now Hollywood wants to buy one of his books, not the Gilles de Rais, the one we thought would be a sure shot, Bury All Towers, but another one, this tiny little novel about a man on death row awaiting execution and another who comes out of a ten-year coma, been out of print twelve years at least. Ray doesn't have an agent and asked me to negotiate the contract for him, which I did. But then all of a sudden Ray stopped answering his mail. We call, this man who seldom steps outside the trailer, rolls from bed to the kitchen counter where he works and back to bed, with time out maybe for a sandwich and three pots of coffee, he's never home. I send telegrams-no response. Meanwhile the producer's calling us up two, three times a week. We tell him we're on top of it, naturally.
"Sorry. I've rather torn into it here, haven't I? Forever leaping into things. Always saying sorry too, come to think of it. Mother was an actress. Grand entrances all her life. And spent most of her life apologizing, trying to explain away her regrets.
"What she really was was one of the first rock-and-rollers, sang background for an awful lot of those late Fifties, Dell Shannon, Dion, Brian Hyland things. But all her life she insisted on actress, which was the way she'd started out."
Don and I waited. New York seemed to have run down.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gardner," I said.
Don grunted. I could have told you within inches, just from the sound, where he was. "Guess I better get on downtown. Shift changes in a couple hours and we're half a dozen men short as usual." He'd been put on the desk while recuperating from a near-fatal gunshot, kept there because with him at the helm, for the first time in years the shipfoiled to run aground. He hated it. "Later, Lew."
The door fanned open and shut to the sound of recycling laughter.
"You're not up to this, I need to leave, just tell me," Gardner said.
"Company's appreciated. No extra points for distance, though."
"Distance is easy. A thing I'm good at."
"We all have our strengths."
Was there, then, another rusde of wings at the window? A sound like LaVerne's satin dresses or gown.
"People out there in the lobby watching, whatsit, Days of Our Lives" Gardner said. "Doctors playing back tapes they'd made secredy months ago when everyone believed Sylvia was dying and husband Dean sat there day after day telling her 'all the things I've never told anyone.' Now Sylvia's made this miraculous recovery and it's-organ chord-Truth Time. My mother used to watch that show."
"Lots did. And still do."
"Not exactly Dostoevski or Dickens."
"Not even Irwin Shaw."
"But it's all we have. What we live with."
I listened to my visitor's foot drag towards the window. He pulled the window open. I was surprised this proved possible in such a building. But yes, there were sudden new tides of air, smell, sound.
"Maybe what people are starting to say, is true. Maybe what those like myself do, everything we believe in-literature, fine music, fine writing, the arts generally-maybe none of that matters anymore. We're digging up ruins. Quaint as archaeologists."
"I assume your Mr. Amano doesn't write soap operas."
Gardner laughed. "Actually, now that you mention it, he did for a while a few years back. Paid the rent, bought groceries, kept (as he said) slim body and slimmer soul together. Not something he wants remembered. And they were exceedingly strange soap operas.
"But I've gotten astray of any point, haven't I? Sorry.
"There's that word again.
"Mountain and Mohammed time, I finally decided. Flew in from New York, picked up a rental car and drove out to Kingfisher Mobile Home Park. The door to fourteen-D was open, naturally. Ray told me he had no idea where the key was. TV on inside, sound turned down, some old movie, flickers of light. Four plates, rinsed but far from clean, stacked by the side of the sink. Carry-out cartons in the trash, also a package of chicken a writhe with maggots beneath the wrapping. Dozen or so empty beer botdes lined against the back wall by the sink. Books everywhere."
"And no writer."
"No writer." For some reason I imagined Gardner's fingers moving about independently as he spoke, seeking phones to dial, yet-unbreached manuscripts, a desktop with objects wanting rearrangement, and thought of Nerval's disembodied hand, Cendrars's main coupee, Beast with Five Fingers. "I went immediately to the police, of course.
They didn't want to hear about it. When I insisted, they filled out report forms. Told me there wasn't much they'd be able to do beyond getting this information out. I sat there drinking bad coffee and not doing the one thing they most wanted me to do, which was to go away. So finally they offered a private detective's number, said maybe I'd want to get in touch with him."
"A. C. Boudleaux." Achilles. Ah-sheel.
"The same. I finallytrack him down to this cafe the size of a railroad car on the edge of town, built out over water like steaming green soup. Looks like the place's been around long enough for Longfellow to have sat in there writing Evangeline. Boudleaux listens, then tells me 'No pun intended, but I'm swamped.' Gives me your number. 'Missing persons, you won't find anyone better.' When I call the number Boudleaux gave me, a young lady answers, tells me you're here."
"Given the circumstances, I don't see how I can help you, Mr. Gardner."
"Of course. But the circumstances were exacdy what I didn't know. Now I don't know why I've gone on so about all this."
When he stood I sensed a change in light. Something moved towards me. His hand again. I found it, shook.
"Good luck to you, Mr. Griffin."
"And to you."
He went out the door. Not much by way of sound out there now. Hall lights bright like a sea around the dark, dark island of his form.
That night Laverne stopped by on her way to work with a cassette player and a recording of black poets reading their work.
"Something I thought you might like, Lew."
I did. And must have listened to it thirty or fortytimes over the next several days. Something about being cut off from the visual world made that tape so much more real to me, so much more substantial. I began living in those words and voices-living through them.
LaVerne had heard the album, from a New York label that put out a steady stream of Southernfieldrecordings, folk music by aging Trotskyites and suburban youngsters, klezmer, polka, at a client's home.
"Thanks."
My arms went out and she was there, in them.
"You smell good."
"I won't for long. Seven at night and it still has to be a hundred degrees out there."
"You could take the night off."
"And do what? You just get yourself well and come home. Then I'll take the night off. Maybe several nights."
"You mean like a date?"
"Yeah." Whenever she focused on something close, her eyes seemed to cross. It gave her face a vulnerable, softly sexy look. Broke my heart every time. I couldn't see her then, but I knews he was doing it. 'Yeah, like a date, Lewis."
She stretched out on the bed beside me, smoothed her dress back under her. Neither of us spoke for a while.
I don't remember this, of course. Verne told me about it later, some of it. The rest, I imagined into place.
"It's been a while since we did this, Verne."
Turning, she tucked her head against my arm. I felt the warmth of her breath on my chest as she spoke.
"I miss you, Lew. Miss you sometimes even when you're there. But I miss you a whole lot more when you're gone."