Adios, Scheherazade

Actually, I considered it a good thing when he told me about it. “You can stay,” he said. “I know you have to get the book done. But I’ve been setting this chick up for a month and tonight’s the payoff.”

We tested, and my typing can’t be heard anywhere else in the apartment with the office door closed. So I’m in here, and Rod is out there feeding some girl a dinner he prepared himself, and after that he’s going to seduce her. He knows in advance he’s going to seduce her, and I know it, and the girl probably knows it too. Nothing like that has ever happened to me, and it never will. So look who’s writing sex novels.

Yeah, and look who doesn’t have to write sex novels.

My two hundred bucks a month is nothing to Rod now, you know that? I mean the money he gets every month for my using his pen name. That’s only twenty-four hundred dollars a year, less agency commission, leaving two thousand one hundred sixty dollars a year. Two thousand dollars a year. He’s making forty, maybe more. My two thousand doesn’t mean a thing to him.

I wonder what really happened out there on Long Island this afternoon. He won’t talk about it, he won’t even make jokes about it. The idea of Rod not making jokes, particularly about people like Birge and Johnny, is mind-shattering.

I think they pushed him around a little. On the left side of his face there was what looked like a faint bruise, near the cheekbone, as though maybe he’d been slapped there or something.

Why does that give me pleasure? It does, and I know it’s small-minded of me, but it does.

Just as it gives me pain that he read the chapters. All of them, not just the one about Paul. He read them out at the house, in between ringing me on the phone.

He thinks I’m flaking out, I know he does. I can see him torn about it, too, wanting to go in two opposite directions at the same time. Part of him still thinks of me as a friend, and feels sorry for me (which makes my skin crawl) and wants to help me (which is fine by me), but another part of him thinks of me as a loser, somebody on the chute, somebody he shouldn’t get his life snarled up with. He himself is a winner, he’s proved that by now, and whereas winners will pal around with all sorts of people before they become winners, once it’s established what they really are they tend to club together and leave us also-rans out in the cold.

Not that I blame him for it, I don’t. I hate him for it, but I don’t blame him for it.

I wish I was nineteen again, we were in college again, he wasn’t a winner yet and I wasn’t a loser yet and Betsy didn’t exist yet and nobody had ever even heard of sex novels. That’s what I wish.

We left one thing out in our calculations, by the way, Rod and I, when we locked me up in here like a virgin in a wall. There’s no head. I pissed out the window a little while ago, but what if I have to crap?

Don’t walk down 9th Street tonight, that’s all I can say.

I am going back to Brock Stewart. Enough digression.

From outside, the diner looked warm and comfortable and inviting. Steam misted the windows, softening the light within. There were no cars parked on the gravel out front, but the tall neon sign by the road was already flashing:

FOUR

CORNERS

DINER

EAT

Brock pushed open the door and went in, and the air inside was so moist you could almost swim in it. He grinned and shook his head and shut the door, then went over and sat at the counter. From the inside, the light was much brighter and harsher and more glaring than it had seemed through the fogged-up windows as he’d crossed the highway.

At first, he thought the place was totally empty, as empty as my mind. I am pushing at myself as though I was shoving a sack of mashed potatoes up a hill. My mind just doesn’t want to concentrate, I can’t force myself to think about Brock Stewart and the diner and all that garbage at all, not at all.

That diner sign got me four lines, though. Did you notice that? We sex book writers aren’t happy with a book until we put a couple of good space-consuming signs in it.