The Long-Legged Fly

Chapter One

I still hear from Vicky, almost every month: long, chatty letters about what she’s doing, new friends and books, seeing The Big Sleep for the first time in Paris, discovering Faulkner, a trip to Russia. She even went back for a visit to the orphanage where she grew up. Still moving through the world with eyes wide, holding on to every fugitive moment of it.

Cherie had started working full time as a nurse’s aide just before Vicky left, and took over the apartment lease. Then she worked her way through nursing school. I don’t hear from her too often, but she’s doing fine-nice home outside Lake Charles, a hardworking guy who loves her, two kids that look a lot like Jimmi in the photos she sends every Christmas. At least for Cherie, the best part wasn’t over.

I stayed at Verne’s a few weeks, moved out to a furnished room (mutual decision), moved back in (mine). I was getting ready to move out again (we got along great as long as we didn’t live together) when I had an accident-the accident consisted of turning my back on a guy I’d just leaned on, hard, for money he owed the loan company-and Verne said: Don’t be silly, stay here.

For a while, in short, life was as complicated as that sentence you just read.

Laid up in bed with a concussion and cracked ribs, more or less just to relieve boredom, I wrote a book called Skull Meat, about a Cajun detective in New Orleans. Just lay there and spun it out, making it up out of whole cloth, improvising wildly, throwing in whatever came to me. The publisher paid me three thousand for it. Then, when it sold okay, he offered me five thousand to do another with the same character, and that one took. We got reviews in major papers, foreign sales, even a movie option. (The books are very popular in France, Vicky tells me.) Some critics started talking about me in the same sentence as Chandler, Hammett, Macdonald and Himes; they shouldn’t have, because those guys are way out of my league, but they did.

I don’t make a lot of money really, but with a book every year or so I’m able to pay the rent, buy what I need, stay out of debt and off the streets.

You write three or four hours, which is about all you can handle and stay sane, and then there’s still most of the day ahead of you. I tried reading Proust and the whole of Chekhov, awful TV movies, afternoon matinees at two dollars, avocational drinking. Finally I signed up for courses at Dillard and finished my B.A. Now I teach one or two days a week, just filling in, French mostly, an occasional writing course. I do it mainly because it’s fun, not for the money, and I learn far more than any of my students. As you get older you need some way of staying in touch with the young, something to keep your head working and turning, something to plow up rooting presumptions, new faces, new crops.

Verne and I found an old house just outside the Garden District with a slaves’ quarters behind, and that’s where I work. I have a stereo and lots of blues records out here, a filing cabinet, a desk with cubbyholes, another desk for the typewriter, a few books, and not much else. Roaches, of course. I turn on lights at night and the desks go from black to white.

I was eighty pages into a new novel, The Severed Hand, wondering if my crazy Cajun was about to beat someone up or get beaten up in a bar scene. I had on Cajun music as I often did while writing these books, hoping that wild, droning pulse might somehow work its way into what I was writing. Nathan Abshire sawed away at “Pinegrove Blues” on his accordion, a song he recorded under various names, at least once as “Ma Negresse.” I looked back through the manuscript and found that Boudleaux had been beaten up two chapters ago, so I figured it was time for him to win one. A character in the book was pretty clearly based on Blaise Cendrars-hence the title. I wondered if any reviewers or critics would pick up on that. I also wondered if other writers (because I didn’t know any) played such games to get themselves through their books.

The phone rang and went unanswered for some time, so Verne had to be out. I picked it up, leaning over to lower the volume of the music (felt more than heard now) and said “Yes?”

“Lew? Jane.” A brief pause. “Janie.”

The past leapt like a toad into my face.

“I’m very sorry to bother you, and I know you’d probably rather hear from just about anybody else but me. But I was wondering when you last heard from David.”

“Three, four months at least. A postcard with bored-looking gargoyles; he was in Paris. The back of it was covered with that tiny handwriting of his, all about people he’d met, things and places he’d finally seen after reading about them for so long. He was even thinking about staying on in Europe once his sabbatical was done.”

“And nothing since?”

“Nothing.”

“Is that usual? I mean, I don’t know how regularly you two traded letters after you started keeping up with each other.”

“Not unusual, at any rate. Several months of absolute silence, then a ten-page letter; that seemed often to be the pattern between us.”

I reached over and turned the music off. A grasshopper strolled obliquely across the outside of my window, legs finding no difficulty with the smooth glass.

“I assume that something’s wrong, Janie, else you wouldn’t have called me, not after all these years.”

“I don’t know, Lew. That’s the worst part. But David wrote me almost every week, on Sundays usually, and I haven’t heard anything now for over two months.”

“Where is he supposed to be?”

“Somewhere between Rome and New York.”

“You have an address for him?”

“The last one was just poste restante to a post office in Paris. He was supposed to let me know.”

“Seven-five-oh-oh-six?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the same one I have, then. Have your letters been returned?”

“No.”

“Then he, or at least someone, is probably getting them. Or forwarding them, anyhow.”

“Someone?”

“Janie. It’s probably nothing; you know that.”

“Yes. But I have bad feelings about it. And it’s halfway across the world, Lew, almost like another planet. I had to call you, to talk to someone. It took a long time to get up enough courage.”

“You don’t talk to your husband?”

“My husband stopped listening years ago. More recently, he stopped being here. There’s a number I can call if I absolutely have to see him about something.”

“And you accept that?”

“Like I have a choice? I’m probably still nineteen or twenty to you, Lew, young, attractive-attractive as I ever was, at least. But the truth is I’m almost fifty and can’t think of much reason to get out of bed most mornings. I’m fat, my hair’s falling out, my teeth are awful. I was never really pretty. Now I’m worse than plain. No man can ever know what that means.”

“Maybe a man who’s loved you can. Give me a number.” She did. “It may be a while.”

The grasshopper had completed its tour and disappeared. I walked out into sunlight and sat on a bird- bespattered bench under one of the trees. Slowly sunlight gave way to evening. Slowly the toad became only history, and bearable.

Chapter Two

I went inside and called Columbia University, reaching the English department without too much trouble (after all, in most universities we’re dealing with bureaucracies aspiring