committee meetings. Molly and I owned sixteen properties, a total of forty rental units. At any given time, we might be required to clean a place or give it a facelift. We might shop a new property or unload something for the right price. Once a week or so, I could count on meeting her in town for some kind of business: leaky faucets, replacing furnaces, laying tile, meeting with bankers or our lawyer. That fall was no different. There was always something. Afterwards we would have dinner and once even took in a movie.
Weekends we stayed close to the farm or went with Lucy to her races. In September we began roughing out an apartment for Lucy on the third floor. She was looking at a couple different schools, one in Texas, the other in Oklahoma, both offering rodeo as part of their intercollegiate athletic competition, but there would be summer vacations, and, ultimately, Lucy planned to come back and live on the farm, for a while at least. She was even toying with the idea of going professional once she had completed an undergraduate degree in equestrian studies. The other option, the one I had gently put forward, was an advanced degree in veterinary science. We had a good school only a couple of hours away, so the apartment would get plenty of use for quite a few years.
We were in no hurry though. We wanted Lucy downstairs until she turned eighteen. Besides, we had spent five years getting the house in shape. This was the last step, and we took it almost with a sense of leisure.
Sometimes Molly and I would reflect on the inevitable feeling of getting old, even though she had not turned thirty-four and I was still three winters from the dreaded forty. We made a joke of it, but I think it bothered both of us. Lucy was almost gone. We had raised her.
We had built our lives from the ground up, and though we were not in the financial league of Walt and Barbara Beery, we had accomplished everything we had set out to achieve. While that created a sense of satisfaction, we both also felt, I think, a nagging sense of what now ?
Our success had come with a great deal of planning and careful risk assessment. As with most fortunes, however, the bulk of it arrived unexpectedly. In our case it came as a result of the death of Molly’s aunt.
After years of refusing Doc’s attempts to get her to sell Bernard Place, Doc’s sister left her share of the farm not to her brother but to Molly. Doc, realizing Molly would be no more cooperative than his sister, deeded his share of the farm over to Molly. At the time Molly and I were scrambling to acquire property, wrangling contracts from distressed sellers and juggling rental income against a formidable array of mortgage and contract payments. Rather than sell off part of the two hundred acres, tantamount to a mortal sin among the landed gentry, Molly used the property value to leverage more favourable bank loans. With the increased cash flow, she then began to work a series of trade-offs and sales until we found ourselves the proud owners of three small apartment buildings and several very decent old homes in town, Victorian treasures we rented out with extreme discretion.
Over the next five years Molly was certainly active, but her greatest energy she devoted to the old mansion Doc McBride had wanted to raze ever since he moved his family off the farm. Now, with even that almost finished, Molly found herself at loose ends. My fate was no better. Though I had been a part of Molly’s professional ambitions, the extra hand a good carpenter needs on any given project, my real passion had always been writing. With Jinx published I was not certain what I wanted to do next and so was marking time.
If someone had told me that September my world was about to turn upside down within the next couple of weeks, that my job, my marriage, my freedom, and finally even my life were all about to come into jeopardy, I probably would have laughed. My fate, as I understood it, was set in stone. I was going to get old with Molly. Molly might take the leap she longed for and start building houses instead of renovating them, but essentially neither of us expected or planned on much excitement.
The irony is that even then our world had begun to break apart. We just didn’t know it.
‘It’s a big one,’ Walt Beery told me one morning not long after I had agreed to look at his son’s novel.
The size of the box he set down on my desk told me I had made a mistake. Seeing my expression, Walt laughed cheerfully. ‘ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was about this length before it was edited, David!’
I thought about complaining. I didn’t have time to read two or three thousand s, but all I did was smile. The minute he was gone I set the box on my file cabinet and tried to forget it. I was not even tempted to look inside.
It soon became invisible. I knew it was there, of course, just waiting for me, but I learned to avoid looking at it, my good deed to do, my debt of friendship.
Sometimes, when I sat alone in the office, my back to it, I tried to convince myself that I could skim the entire opus in fifteen minutes and be done with it.
Then I would look at the tape holding the box together and decide it would take fifteen minutes just to get the thing unpacked. Methodical man that I am, I told myself to open the box and then have a go at actually reading it later. It wasn’t a bad idea, but I could never quite summon the energy to cut the tape.
What finally moved me to read it was a run-in with Buddy Elder. He and Johnna Masterson had presented copies of their short stories at the end of the third full meeting of my night class. The following week they were each treated to a sixty-five minute critique from the class. Johnna Masterson went first. She had written a story about a teenage girl’s sexual awakening called
‘Sexual Positions.’ It was the sort of thing that should have come out badly but was, in fact, one of the funniest things I had ever read.
The technique she employed was reminiscence, the older and wiser woman recalling earlier times, whether real or imagined I could only guess. The encounters showed men and boys in a painfully comic light as they came forward to test young ‘Joan’s’ virtue.
It was difficult for the class to evaluate the piece because it was, like Johnna Masterson herself, perfectly put together, and it was the first story we had evalu-ated, so they had no idea what kind of stuff they were going to see later. A few people blundered into it, as people will, suggesting changes that would either kill or spoil the humour. Others wanted extraneous details explained, like about how the kid who had started necking with Joan got his feet stuck in the sunroof of his father’s Lincoln. That was, like, practically impossible! Shouldn’t she explain that a little? There was a bit of incredulity at an aborted attempt (ending with CPR) to perform cunnilingus in the deep end of a public pool. There were those who wondered if Johnna might be taking the wrong approach, making fun of some very serious stuff, those who wanted more, those who wanted less.
Poor Johnna took every comment down, nodding at the worst of it and inevitably doubting her own genius.
I waited for the praise until I got impatient. No one wanted to say it was great stuff, and finally I let them have it. If the story worked, then tell the writer it worked! Finally a couple of people admitted it was pretty funny. At the break I had the urge to make a run for the exit, but I forced myself to return. Buddy’s story was next, and I was prepared to enjoy the ensuing slaughter of his inflated ego.
I was disappointed. Suddenly the class decided I wanted them to be nice, so we listened to insipid praise for one of the nastiest short stories I’d ever had the misfortune to read. Technically, it was not a weak story. Buddy Elder had a certain skill. What he lacked was humanity. His story, ‘Lap Dance’, detailed the lust of a sixty-something prof named Ward obsessed with a stripper named Dee Dee. It was supposed to be a send-up of the old Blue Angel, I suppose, but the culminating scene in the front seat of the professor’s Volvo was nothing short of cruel, especially as the old man lost his erection the moment the girl consented.
I said very little throughout the love-fest. Toward the end, however, I made a few pointed remarks about the cruelty. Several people jumped to Buddy’s defence.
It was funny!
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘it was shit.’
Workshops are not supposed to go like this. The prof expresses an opinion but never shoves it down everyone’s collective throat. Certainly, criticism never falls to the level of insult. Profs will sometimes use a bit of the old Anglo Saxon to inspire the nostalgic thrill of academic freedom, but never-ever do they assault a student’s best effort with such language. The moment I said it, I tried to get some ground back, but it was too late. Just an opinion, I said, no better or worse than anyone else’s. Everyone, including Johnna Masterson, looked uncomfortable. Except Buddy.
Buddy had the bright flushed cheeks of a young man who has just been slapped with a glove.
After class he walked away without a word, but the following morning he was knocking on my office door.
The duel at sunrise. What transpired between us had a certain complexity, befitting, I think, our brief, uneasy history. Buddy affected indifference as he sat down on the other side of my desk. He would have me believe he was
