My other guests included my sister and her sons, my eldest daughter’s husband, a few of my students, several women with whom I had been in a book club for the last fifteen years. Ricky looked around; I could feel him adding up my life and registering it in his bloodshot eyes.
I took him over to meet Danny and then said: “Let’s go sit on the swings and talk.” We crossed the brilliant green of the grass to the swingset where my daughters used to play. Ricky was wearing a gray wool business suit, his bony frame almost lost inside its wide shoulders. He swung slowly back and forth, sitting on the splintery wood seat, his hands clutching the rusty chains. He talked, looking forward, into air.
“My son Bobby is the one who invited me out to California. He made it big-time,” Ricky said, and laughed.
“Is he in movies?” I asked.
“Not exactly. He dove into a city pool in Philly and broke his spine. Now he’s in a wheelchair for life. I got him a sharp lawyer who brought a deep pockets lawsuit against the city. Bobby was awarded a million and a half bucks, enough to take care of him the rest of his life and, if I play it right, take care of me, too. My other kids don’t talk to me, so Bobby is my salvation.”
“But why is he in California?”
“He’s in a fantastic halfway house out here — the best in the world for paraplegics. Bobby gets all kinds of services, I even bring my laundry over there and he’ll get it done for me free. And he’s got enough extra pocket money to pay my rent till I get a job.”
“What a terrible thing to happen to him.”
“No, just the opposite. He was a beach bum, a loser. Now he’s got it all together, the whole future taken care of. I think he’s relieved. He can use his arms — he plays wheelchair basketball. He lifts weights. He gets counseling, he gets his meals served. Sometimes I wish I could change places with him. But no, I’m back at square one, looking for a job again.”
“No more phone company?”
Ricky made a strangling noise in his throat. “I’m going to write my novel, Janet. Finally. I’m going to get it together before I die. If I can sit in on your class, I figure it will start my motor again. You probably teach something like the way Alvord taught us. That old magic. Maybe I can feel that excitement again. I’m counting on it, it’s my last hope.”
“Do you ever hear from Alvord? Did you stay in touch?”
“In touch! I lived with him for a year in Florida when I was really down and out. He took me in, told me he loved me like a son. The trouble was he didn’t feed me, Janet. He offered me a place to stay on that farm of his, and then all I could find to eat in the house was Campbell’s soup. One day he actually hid the bacon from me. So I took his truck into town with some money of his to get some food, but I’d been drinking again and I totaled it. He told me I had to leave, gave me fifty bucks and a train ticket back to Philly. But he was a pain, anyway, preaching to me all the time about being a man, taking responsibility for my kids. I swear, the man was a genius but he’s losing it, Janet. He’s in his eighties now. He used to think I walked on water.”
“We all did.”
“That’s why I came to live near you. You’re the only one on earth who really knows my genius.”
I didn’t actually count, but I had the sense Ricky ate at least five hamburgers, and as many hot dogs. He hung around the food table, his mouth going, not talking to anyone, but looking at my women friends, their faces, their forms. He looked my daughters up and down — there was no way to stop him. At one point he came to me and said, “Your daughters are really beautiful. All three of them. They have your soul in their eyes.” I wanted to distract him. I asked him how often he saw his son. He said, “As often as I can; he gives me CARE packages. I don’t have much food in the new place.”
After our guests left, I packed up all the leftovers for Ricky: potato chips, lukewarm baked beans, the remaining coleslaw, a package of raw hot dogs and buns to go with them, a quarter of a watermelon, lettuce, and sliced tomatoes, even pickles, even mustard and ketchup.
“Listen, thanks,” he said. “You’re a lifesaver. You don’t know how lucky I feel to have found you again. Could I ask you one more favor, though? Would you mind if I came back tomorrow and used your typewriter? I need to write a letter to apply for a job. Someone gave me a tip about a job being night watchman in a truck yard. All I would have to do is sit in a little shed and watch for thieves. I figure I could write all night if I get it.”
My reaction was instinctive. I knew I didn’t want him back in my house again. “Why don’t you let me lend you my electric typewriter? I use a computer now, so I won’t need it for a while. I do love it, though — it’s the typewriter I wrote my first novel on.”
“Then maybe it will be lucky for me. I’ll guard it with my life.”
“Okay, give me a minute, I’ll go put it in its case.” I left him standing in the living room with my husband, but I heard no conversation at all — not even ordinary chatter. I could see why Danny was unable to think of a single thing to say to him.
Ricky finally left, laden like an immigrant — bags of food, paper, carbon paper, envelopes, stamps, my typewriter. He stuffed it all into the trunk of an old red car.
Danny and I watched him drive away. He didn’t wave — he tore from the curb like one possessed.
“Funny guy,” Danny said.
“I don’t think we know the half of it,” I told him.
I found Ricky’s O. Henry prize story and had thirty photocopies made for my students. At the start of class I distributed the copies and told my students that at 7:30 a guest was arriving, a writer of unique skill and vision, a man we were honored to have visit our class. I warned them about the pitfalls of the writer’s life, how one could not count on it to earn a living, how so many talented writers fell by the wayside because of the pressures of ordinary life. This visitor, I said, a very close friend of mine from the past who had missed what you might call “his window of opportunity,” hoped to join our class and work as hard as anyone in it. “He had a whole life in between, doing something else he had to do. All of you are young, at the start of your first life, and if you really want this, this is the time to do it.”
When Ricky arrived at my classroom, it was almost nine o’clock. He apologized, saying the bus had been late. He was wearing a red V-necked sweater, and looked less cadaverous than at the barbecue, but still much older than his years. He seemed elated to find that a copy of his story was on every desk, and when one of the students asked him how he got the idea for it, he said, simply, “I had thought many times of murdering my brother.”
By then, we were already in the midst of having another student read his story; I told the class that next week we would discuss Ricky’s story.
I nodded for Harold to go on reading; his story was about a day in the cotton fields of Arkansas, and how the men, women, and children picking cotton on a burning hot day reacted when the truck that delivered them failed to leave off drinking water. When the last line had been read, Ricky spoke out in the exact tones of our teacher, Alvord.
“It comes alive on the last page, finally, you see, because it uses all the senses. Since a crying baby can seduce a reader from the very death of Hamlet himself, the writer must bring everything to life. And you do, young man! You do!”
The class was silent, and then a few students applauded Harold and then everyone did — till his embarrassed smile lit up the room. I announced that we would take our usual ten minute break. When the class had filed out, I thought I would find Ricky waiting to talk to me about my students, to tell me how the class had seemed to him, if it would suit his purposes. But he left the room without a glance in my direction, and when I looked out into the hall, I saw him in deep conversation with one of my students, a young woman. When the class reconvened, neither of them returned for the second half.