+ Not a total loss. Salvage some and cut. Can’t hope to get it all right first draft. Foolish. I need advice and not just clumsy condemnation.
Looking through the window he shook his head and smiled. Nothing like the writer’s mind. Ever foolish ever optimistic. The lit parlor folks might actually be better than Madame’s group. Jacob Welsh in particular; an odd man but concise in his criticism never cruel; leaving that to antimatter Yermak. Perhaps Yermak would not be there, though they seldom came separately.
The bus stopped a block beyond the wine ranch and lit parlor and he stood under the cool fringe curtain sky, watching a golden line of reflected sunlight cross the boulevard. He blinked at the wall of the combs and the single mirror slab sunbright in that wall, pointing directly at him, specked suddenly a self image as a spotlighted rabbit condemned to the warrens. So lost and ignorant of the forces that moved him, silky only in the drunk of his blindness; sobriety bringing somber awareness and pain. He itched to record that but shook his head again and grinned at the solid seating of this fresh urge to write.
Lit parlor folks could not unbalance him. He would be prepared this time as he had not been at Madame de Roche’s; he would fit his cogs to the available machine.
The wine ranch was closed, reason not given in the terse electric stat sign pasted to the old glass door. Dont be roughed, it blinked. We’re gone to be people today. Come later; when? He recognized the cadence of Goldsmith; had Goldsmith written it for them, years back? Or was he obsessively finding Emanuel everywhere?
Race is like acid in a tight metal groove; we etch. Hope? That had been Goldsmith ten years ago, shuddered by life. They had gone to the wine ranch the day he had written that, Richard and Emanuel, drinking sad conviviality with the wine, Richard enjoying the poet’s low energy camaraderie. A misplaced love affair or some casual rejection by the world of publishing Richard could not recall which bringing Goldsmith down to a peaceful sad calm and a need to lean on Fettle. The distance of fame and achievement had narrowed to practically nothing between them; Richard had felt sympathy, human instinct to help a down fellow. Goldsmith had written that poem on a statkin after shaking the separated foodcrumbs to the floor. Thirty lines of dismay at the river flush of humanity’s ignorance of its selves.
Fettle watched the sign blinking, moving.
They had ceremoniously paid the waiter twenty cents for the statkin and taken it back to Goldsmith’s apartment. Goldsmith had lived on Vermont Ave in the shade then, not the rising combs. He had mounted the statkin in a picture frame and recorded it before the ink flaked off. For years he had kept the blank statkin framed and called it “a quantum criticism, God bushing all our weak expressions.”
Richard walked the short distance to the Pacific Arts Lit Parlor, saw through the long apricot glass window a small crowd of patrons and members. No sign of Yermak; but there was Welsh. He entered and paid his admission to an arbeiter dressed to resemble Samuel Johnson, took a vacant stool at the long oak bar now tended by compassionate Miriel, a partial transform with minkfur instead of hair on her crown and a stud of gleaming scales on each cheek. Daughter of the proprietor Mr. Pacifico, known by no other name.
“Miriel,” he said confidentially, revealing the manuscript and slate. “I’ve had a hitch of invention after a long desuetude. I’m out of a rut but I need critique.”
“We’re not doing litcrit or readings this hour,” Miriel said, but she sympathied his sad eagle and touched his arm with goldcapped fingers. “Even so, when the urge is on, who can deny? I’ll call a circle. You’re writing? How wonderful! That’s breaking the block of years, isn’t it, Mr. Fettle?”
“Many years,” he said. “Since.”
She watched him with large warm brown eyes minkfur wrinkling his way. Despite her sympathy he saw her more as a large rat than mink. Miriel leaned over the bar and addressed the others, particularly Welsh.
“Patrons, patrons,” she said. “We have here a friend out of a rut, new work in hand. Mr. Welsh, can we get a circle together, special?”
Jacob Welsh turned to eye Fettle, surprised. Smiled. Glanced at the five other patrons for their approval; Fettle knew none of them. They all agreed, literary charity.
Yermak entered the door just as Richard began reading his manuscript. He joined the circle without a word but his expression said all and did not change as Richard read through the beginning to the middle, voice sonorous and steady.
the hours of simply being not who I am but what I am. Postures
assumed every day even when there are no visitors. It creeps into
my poetry as well; a dullness like a poorly soldered joint. That’s
it; I cannot connect with the proper influx of current, for I am
badly joined to this life, and the join is crumbling every day.
“Poetry as current,” Yermak said under his breath. “Good, good.”
Richard could not tell whether he was being sarcastic; with Yermak it hardly mattered. What he liked he despised for being likable. Welsh raised an eyebrow at the youth and Yermak returned an acquiescing smile. Richard read to the end, lowered the slate and pages, mumbled something about not quite having it right and needing suggestions. Looked around the circle with his wounded eagle eyes. Yermak stared at him with a shocked expression but said nothing.
“This is truly you,” Welsh said.
“It’s very odd,” Miriel said from behind the bar. “What are you going to do with it?”
“What I mean to say is this must be you, it’s certainly not Goldsmith,” Welsh continued.
“I’m—” Richard stopped himself. + Work must stand alone.
“It’s good,” Yermak said. Richard felt a rush of warmth toward the youth; perhaps there was something in him worthwhile after all. “It clicks and slims as fable. I’d wrap it in a longer work, a litbio.” Yermak raised his hands to paint a scene, staring up at his spread fingers with reverence. “Bio of a nonwriter, struggling violently to understand.”
Richard saw the blow coming but could not withdraw fast enough. Yermak turned to him and said, “You’ve given me great insight. Now I scope. I know how your type thinks, R Fettle.”
“Patrons—” Miriel said.
“You’re a lobe sod at heart. You’ve hidden too long in the shadow of his wings,” Yermak said.
“Please be kind,” Welsh instructed without conviction.
“Goldsmith’s wings are dusty and lice ridden, but they still fly. You have never flown. Look at yourself—writing on paper! An ostentation, an affectation. You can’t afford sufficient paper to write anything significant, but you write on it anyway—knowing you’ll never write much. No soaring.”
“He’s right there,” Welsh said. The others did not participate; this was dogfight not litcrit and they found it amusing but repellent.
“When Goldsmith falls to Earth, you have to stand outside his shadow, see the sun for the first time, and it dazzles you.” Yermak’s tone was almost sympathetic. “I scope you, R Fettle. Dammit, I scope us all through you. What an affected and ignorant posse of lobe sods we all are. Thank you for this insight. But I ask you, in all sincerity—do you insee Goldsmith as slaughtering to improve his poetry?”
Richard looked away from him. +Back home. Lie down and rest.
“I can almost believe that,” Yermak concluded, badger faced. “Goldsmith might be that cranked.”