Small Town

“If it goes to trial,” he said, “I’ll subpoena you, and you can read these wonderful books to the jury. I’d ask you if you know what you’re doing, but the answer is you don’t, and that’s beside the point, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make the call, and I won’t ask him to call you, I’ll tell him to call you. And you’ll owe me, which would mean I’d take you out for a nice dinner, but how can I do that if you’re in love?”

“I could never be too much in love for that,” she said. “And Maury? You don’t have to take me to dinner, either.”

“All I have to do is whistle, huh? But you’re not old enough to remember that movie. I’ll call him right now. You’re at the gallery?”

“I’m home, I didn’t go in yet.”

“Stay by the phone. I’ll make sure he calls.”

twenty-six

She was beautiful, and he’d almost let her get away.

He’d called her the minute he got off the phone with Maury. The conversation had been stilted, it could hardly have been otherwise, but it got them here, in the rear garden of Caffè Sha Sha, an Italian coffeehouse on Hudson. He’d suggested the place, then couldn’t remember exactly which block it was on, between Christopher and Tenth or Tenth and Charles. It didn’t matter; she knew the Sha Sha and said she’d meet him there.

“The thing is,” he said, “I was going to call you. Then it got a little crazy for a couple of days, and then it slipped my mind, and then it was too late to call. Do you know what I mean?”

“I thought that was what happened. But I didn’t want to phone you, that would have been awfully pushy—”

“It would have been all right.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have felt okay with it. Then I remembered Maury was representing you, and I thought, well, that’ll work. You can’t call the man himself, but how can it be a breach of etiquette to call his attorney?”

“How do you happen to know Maury?”

“We had an affair.”

“Oh.”

Her eyes held his. “A very casual now-and-then affair over a lot of years. You know, this is funny, John. I was going to say something simple, that we were old friends, and that would have been true enough, but with you I have the feeling I can say what I mean.”

The waiter broke the moment, setting their cups of coffee in front of them. Creighton waited until he had withdrawn, then said, “Maury said you read my books. I think you told me that yourself at Stelli’s.”

“I did, and it was a lie. I hadn’t then, not yet. I went home and ordered them online. I had to hunt around for some of them, but you can find anything online.”

“They’ll all be back in print before long.”

“That’s wonderful. I’m glad, but I’m also glad I didn’t wait. You’re a wonderful writer, John. You don’t need me to tell you that, and I’m not Michiko Kakutani, but they spoke to me in a very personal way.”

She talked about various books, and she remembered characters’ names, remembered scenes, and gave him something infinitely more to be desired than praise.

One of the questions writers got asked was for whom they wrote their books. The answer he usually gave was that he wrote for himself, and it sounded up to here with artistic integrity, but he’d never been entirely happy with it because it wasn’t altogether true. If it was just for himself, why bother writing it down? Why not work it all out in his mind and leave it at that? And, if he really was writing for himself, he’d have to say he was a failure at it. Because how often did he sit down with an old book of his own and read the damn thing?

No, there was someone he wrote for, but unfortunately it was a person who couldn’t exist. He wrote for the reader he himself would be if he didn’t happen to have written the book in the first place. He wrote for someone who would understand at once everything he did or tried to do, who would always know what he meant, and who would be intellectually and emotionally in tune with every word.

And there she was, sitting across a rickety little table from him. And she was gorgeous, and she was looking at him as if he were a god.

They talked. They sipped their coffee and talked, ordered more coffee and talked, sat over empty coffee cups and talked. Finally he got the check, put money on the table, and asked her what she’d like to do next.

She put her hand on his. She said, “Do you think they’ll rent us a room? If not, we’d better go back to your place.”

It was like high school or college, it was like being young again. They sat on his couch and kissed. He got hard right away, but there was no urgency to it; he could happily sit there forever, holding her in his arms, feasting on her mouth.

They were like that for a long time. Then they moved as one, disengaging. She stood up and slipped out of her blouse and skirt, and he wasn’t surprised to see that she wasn’t wearing anything under it. He was surprised, though, by the gold at her nipples, the hairless delta.

She said, “John, I’ll do anything you want, and you can do anything you want to me. Anything at all.”

Afterward he got a cigarette, asked if it would bother her if he smoked. She said it wouldn’t.