Small Town

“Sometimes I wonder. But yes” — he indicated the big oak desk at the side of the room, the computer, the big dictionary on its stand, the rack of briar pipes — “I’m a writer.”

“Have you had anything published?” It was Slaughter who asked, and he must have rolled his eyes in response, because the man said, “I’m sorry, was that a stupid question?”

“Well, maybe a little,” he said, and softened the remark with a grin. “I suppose there are people who’d call themselves writers without having published anything, and who’s to say they don’t have the right? I mean, look at Emily Dickinson.”

Reade said, “Friend of yours?” and Creighton looked at him and couldn’t say for sure if the guy was playing him.

“Nineteenth-century poet,” he said. “She never published anything during her lifetime.”

“But you have.”

“Six novels,” he said. “Working on number seven, and the only thing that sustains me on days like this is reminding myself they were all like this.”

“Tough going, you mean.”

“Not every day, some days it’s like turning on a faucet. It just flows. But every book had days like this, and a couple of them had whole months like this.”

“But you make a living at it.”

“I’m forty-seven years old and I live in one room,” he said. “You do the math.”

“Just the one room,” Reade said, “but it’s got some size to it. Plenty of landlords’d throw up a couple of walls, call it a three-room apartment.”

You could stick a plank out the window, he thought, and call it a terrace.

“Good neighborhood, too. Bank and Waverly, heart of the West Village. Gotta be rent stabilized, huh?”

Meaning You couldn’t afford it otherwise, he thought, and he couldn’t argue the point. Free market rent on his apartment would be well over two thousand a month, and probably closer to three. Could he afford that? Maybe once, before the divorce, before the sales leveled off and the advances dipped, but now?

Not unless he gave up eating and drinking and — he patted his shirt pocket, found it empty — and smoking.

“Rent controlled,” he said.

“Even better. You’ve been here a long time, then.”

“Off and on. I was married for a few years and we moved across the river.”

“Jersey?”

He nodded. “Jersey City, walking distance of the PATH train. I kept this place as an office. Then we bought a house in Montclair, and I didn’t get in as much, but I hung on to it anyway.”

“Be crazy to give it up.”

“And then the marriage fell apart,” he said, “and she kept the house, and I moved back in here.”

“They always get the house,” Slaughter said. He sounded as if he spoke from experience. He shook his head and walked over to a bookcase, leaned in for a closer look at the spines. “ ‘Blair Creighton,’ ” he read. “That’s you, but on the bell it said John Creighton.”

“Blair’s my middle name, my mother’s maiden name.”

“And your first name’s John?”

“That’s right. Some of my early stories, I used J. Blair Creighton. An editor convinced me to drop the initial, said I was running the risk that people would mistake me for F. Scott Fitzgerald. I, uh, took his point.”

“I don’t know, it sounds good with the initial. What’s this, French? You write books in French?”

“I have enough trouble in English,” he said. “Those are translations, foreign editions.”

“Here’s one in English. Edged Weapons. That’s like what, knives and swords?”

“And daggers, I suppose. Or words, metaphorically.” It was interesting, observing them at it. Did Slaughter really think he wrote in French, or was he playing a role, lacking only the ratty raincoat to qualify as a road-company Columbo? “It’s a collection of short stories,” he explained. “Presumably, they have an edge to them.”

“Like a knife.”

“Well, sure.”

“But you have an interest in knives, right? And swords and daggers?”

He was puzzled until he followed Slaughter’s gaze to the far wall between the two windows. There was a cased Samurai sword, a Malayan kris with the traditional wavy blade, and a dagger of indeterminate origin with a blade of Damascus steel.

“Gifts,” he said. “When the book came out. Edged weapons to go with Edged Weapons, so to speak.”

“They look nice,” Reade said, “displayed like that.”

“The book’s working title was Masks,” he recalled, “but we changed it when we heard that was going to be T. C. Boyle’s collection, or maybe it was Ethan Canin. Whoever it was, he wound up calling his book something else, too. But one way or another I was a sure bet to wind up with something to hang on the wall.”

“You see masks all the time,” Reade said. “These here are a little more unique.”

Something was either unique or it wasn’t, there weren’t gradations of it. It was an error his students made all the time, a particularly annoying one, and he must have winced now because Slaughter immediately asked him if something was wrong.”

“No, why?”

“Expression on your face.”

He touched the back of his neck. “I’ve been getting twinges off and on all day,” he said. “I must have slept in an awkward position, because I woke up with a stiff neck.”