Adios, Scheherazade

Now, standing in stunned horror in front of the desk, he looked down at the open manuscript, the diary in its loose typewriter sheets open in front of him, and he saw that she had stopped reading at the point where he had described making love to his baby-sitter, an attractive young girl of sixteen, a local girl he often drove home late at night after her baby-sitting chores were done. It was true he had found her a suitable subject for his fantasies, and had ultimately described a seduction of her in his diary, but he had not been telling the truth.

It was not the truth!

He had never seduced his baby-sitter, he had never kissed his baby-sitter, he had never said a suggestive word to his baby-sitter. Never. Not once. Not in any way. And he never would have.

Beside the diary, now, he saw another sheet of paper, written on hastily in ink, and he recognized Beth’s neat crisp handwriting, though larger and somewhat looser than usual.

He picked up the paper, read the brief and chilling note:

“I am going home. I want nothing from you. I never want to see you again. If you try to come near me, my brothers will kill you.”

There was no heading and no signature, but of course neither heading nor signature was needed.

Paul stood there holding the paper in a trembling hand. He had to do something. His wonderful world was in ruins around him, his new-found delight had come crashing to earth.

He had to talk to her. He had to convince her. There had to be some way to convince her of the truth.

If he could prove to her that the seductions in the diary were false, then wouldn’t he be able to claim that the diatribes against her were also false? He would be shamefaced, he would say it was a novel he was writing, something like that. He would explain it away somehow. The important thing to do would be to prove to her that the affairs with other women had not really happened; do that, and there was still a chance.

And it was certainly provable enough. All she had to do was ask, ask any one of them. The baby-sitter, for instance, or any of the other women mentioned in this diary, just ask...

Ask? Go to the baby-sitter, go to any one of them, show her this diary, with its blunt words and pornographic descriptions, with her own name in it? He wouldn’t dare, he couldn’t do it. They might call the police, but even if they didn’t he couldn’t do it. It would be too shameful, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

There had to be some other way. Couldn’t he say to her, “Beth, think about it. I couldn’t have done it, I couldn’t have had all those affairs and slept with all those women. I’d have to be Hercules. Can’t you see that? It’s physically impossible. You were around me all those years, would I have gotten away with all that without you knowing, suspecting, becoming aware of something? Don’t you see, it has to be make believe!”

But would she listen to him? He thought of calling her, if she was going home that would have to be her parents’ house upstate, and in fact he actually turned and started toward the living room and the telephone when he realized it would do no good. Her parents would answer the phone, and she would refuse to speak to him.

Write her a letter?

She wouldn’t read it.

Go there, to her parents’ house?

Her brothers would kill him, if they believed her story, and they surely would.

What am I going to do? he thought.

What am I going to do?

2

Paul Trepless got drunk, angry, laid and maudlin, in five thousand words.

You write it, I can’t. He sits around his house, see, feeling sorry for himself and frustrated and all, and gets to drinking. Then he drives in to New York and goes to Times Square and picks up a spade hooker and pays her twenty dollars and has a very unsatisfactory fuck, during all of which the hooker gives every appearance of laughing at him and not giving a damn whether he notices or not. Also, she won’t take off her bra. So then our hero drives in his drunken state back out to his home on Long Island and begins to feel very sorry for himself, and cries himself to sleep.

And wakes up and it’s Monday morning and he’s got a fucking fuck book to write by Thursday.

I did Chapter 1, though, by God. I now have Chapter 1 and nobody can take that away from me. I also kept the garbage I wrote Saturday, but I doubt that any of it is useful.

As for the rest of it, I burned it all Friday. No, I kept a couple pages I thought I could use, like the beginning of the chapter with Dwayne Toppil and Liz, that I used part of in Paul’s flashback.

By the way, now that I have actually done a chapter we can continue our seminar on writing sex novels. Wait till I get my pointer, pardon the sexual reference.

Got it.

Now. If you will notice, not a hell of a lot happens in fifteen pages. The hero goes home on the train and his wife has left him because of something he didn’t do. Also there’s a sex scene in a flashback. Not very much. How do we manage to stretch that for fifteen pages.