“Yuh. It sure doesn’t look like much. But at the time it was like — well, like I was inspired, like.”
“I don’t understand it at all.”
“Why don’t we go upstairs and have a drink?”
“What about the horse?”
“We’ll throw him down a bunch of carrots.”
They went upstairs and talked over how Burt Dee, 44 years old, semi-alcoholic, potbellied, short-sighted, mired in poverty, who in his palmy days in Hollywood ten years ago had been an overpaid hack and who now was, according to his exagent, a burned-out hack — how Burt Dee could sit down at an ordinary typewriter in an ordinary mood, and write a horse; and nothing they could think of threw any light on the why or the how. It was just something that had happened.
She said, “Do you think it’ll happen again?”
“Who knows?”
She poured them another drink. “If a horse, why not a suitcase full of money? Or an ocelot coat? You once promised me an ocelot coat.”
“That was in the good days. They ran out before I got to an ocelot coat.”
“You drank too much.” She nestled a little closer to him on the battered couch — something she hadn’t done in a dog’s age. “Try to write a suitcase full of money. Or an ocelot coat.”
He smiled vaguely. “Why not?”
“Now?”
“No, I got to be by myself when I write. I can’t have a horse staring at me.”
“Tomorrow then.”
“All right. But it may never happen again.”
He got rid of the horse the next day — one of his barfly friends gave him $20 and came by in a rented stake truck and took the horse away as a present for a niece or someone; and Burt gave Lila the $20 and said, “Well, we got something out of it, anyway.”
She said softly, “Go down and write a suitcase full of money.”
“I’ll try.” He had little or no faith that anything would come of it. He roosted on his stool at the desk in the cellar and started to type, trying to think big money. He started a tale about a millionaire and worked a half hour or so, but nothing happened, and somehow he knew that nothing would. He wadded what he had written, tossed it into the wastebasket, and went back upstairs.
She looked at him eagerly, and he shook his head. The light went out of her eyes, and she sighed. He said, “I guess it’ll never happen again. It was just some crazy fourth-dimensional thing.”
“Well, here’s a third-dimensional thing.” She showed him what the mail had just brought — a notice of intent to foreclose on the house.
He had a drink. He had another. A perception came to him blindingly: “I can only write tangibles.”
“What was that?”
“It just came to me. I can’t write intangibles. Money is an intangible.”
“Since when?”
“Money’s paper. It’s a value. I can’t write values. I can only write tangibles.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t either.” But he flew down to the cellar and started to crank out dialogue. The words came sputteringly, as usual. Then suddenly, as yesterday, he went into overdrive: he felt the same exhilaration.
Something was happening, he was writing something, he did not know what. His fingers flew over the keys like Paderewski’s, there was no reality, there was no sense of time, he was nothing, he was omnipotent, he was nowhere, he was everywhere...
He leaned back on his stool, gasping, spent. He knew he had written something. An ocelot coat? He looked around. There it was. But not an ocelot coat.
“Lila!”
She came bounding down the stairs.
“There.”
“My God!”
It was a polar-bear rug.
She whispered, “It’s beautiful!”
“Uh huh. Not ocelot, but — on the right track.” He stroked the noble glass-eyed head. “These cost a fortune. I know a guy who’ll give me $500 for it, cash, no questions asked.”
He paced, and at length turned a shining, somewhat red-nosed face to her. “This thing, whatever it is, I’ve got a feeling it’s going to stay with me. I can write tangibles. Anything I want.”
Not quite. There were days when he wanted to write a new suit, a zebra-striped couch, a deep freeze, and all he could write was a monogrammed soap dish.
He found that a certain amount, just the right amount, of liquor in the system was one of the keys to success. Too much, and things went haywire; too little, and nothing came off. Experiment gave him pretty much the formula. The ocelot coat, which he wrote in the third week after the horse, was without a flaw.
Through his barfly connections he was able to unload the various things he wrote, and at good prices — good for the customers, who asked no questions, and good for himself and Lila. Their standard of living began to climb; they got the deadly finance companies off their backs, and refurnished the house. The liquor cabinet was full of the best.
One terrific day Burt, with a strong feeling, moved everything in the cellar off against the walls, so he had a large clear space, and set his mind on a Rolls-Royce... What he wrote was a Falcon, last year’s model, but a white station wagon with red-leather seats, nothing to complain of; the pink slip and this year’s license tabs were in the glove compartment. He got some of his barfly friends who wouldn’t shoot off their mouths to help him remove part of the cellar wall, and they got a ramp in and drove the car out into the back driveway.
Three months after the horse Lila had lost her stringy defeated look, put on 25 pounds, and developed an imperious way of striding into a jewelry or fashion shop and demanding the best. She also developed a yen to partake in the social ramble.
“I want us to join the country club.”
She also desired to change his image. “You shouldn’t hang around those miserable saloons. People see you drinking with hod carriers and cab drivers and assume you’re just another low-down person.”
“Well, I’m just a hack who writes things.”
“I want to see you always shaved when you go uptown.”
“Why?”
“I’m forming new friends now. I don’t want them to think you’re peculiar.”
He gazed at her, and said slowly, “You’ve changed.”
“Certainly I’ve changed. Money changes a person. If it didn’t, what would be the use of it? I want you to change too. I want you to get a rich man’s outlook.”
“We’re not rich.”
She smiled sleekly. “We will be. Keep writing things. I want everything we used to have, and then some. I deserve it, for putting up with so much. I demand it. It’s my right.”
“I’ll do my best.” And he added, watching her as she strode out, “You were a good wife, Lila.”
More months passed. Lila met people of means. They sat around in the living room, and below them, in the cellar, which Burt insisted be left as it had always been, he roosted on his stool and wrote things. He would appear at times among them, but they didn’t pay much attention to him — he was just Lila’s husband. Lila told her friends he was in creative selling. That sufficed. Nobody especially wanted to know anything more about him.
He had to do a lot of contact work, unloading the things he wrote, and the more they had the more Lila seemed to need. It got treadmilly. It wasn’t the way he had pictured it. In Swinny’s bar they said, “Burt, you look all drug out. Why’n’t you relax?”
“Can’t.”
“You’re working yourself to death. Whatever work you do.”
“I write things.”
“Well, you don’t want to work yourself into the grave.”
Lila said, when he came home one afternoon, “This is Yvonne. She’s our new cook-and-maid.”
“Did we really need one?” But he looked again at Yvonne, and thought, yes, indeed, they had always needed a small dark saucer-eyed French cook-and-maid.