Hot Night in the City

'If you're accusing me of not staying awake nights, pondering the hidden implications of the weight and size of your attache case, then I plead guilty. And I assure you that— O-oh! Wait a minute! I get it. You've written a novel! And you want me to help you get it published, as conscience money for giving you the sack. Don't believe that crap about everybody having a novel somewhere inside them, Plimsoll. There are two kinds of people in the world: the storytellers and the audience members. And you, Plimsoll? You're an audience member. You are, in fact, the prototypic audience member. No, I don't want to read your manuscript. I'm not interested in the refined wordsmithery of someone who, has never lived, never sinned, never loved!'

'Oh, I have loved, sir,' she said, as she carefully evened the pages of the manuscript by tapping them on her desk.

'No! Don't tell me! Plimsoll in love? It's an image as arousing as a hip bath in ice water. And what poor bastard was the recipient of this uniquely modest gift?'

'You, sir.'

'Me?'

She drew a shallow breath. 'But that's neither here nor there. What I want you to do now is to read at random from this material. I think you'll find it very—'

'Me? You've been in love with...?' His eye fell on the top sheet of the manuscript. 'Wait a minute! What's going on here? This is my work!' It was indeed two drafts of his latest novel: his own, full of X-ings-out and penciled marginalia, and Plimsoll's neatly typed copy. She had evidently disobeyed his instructions to burn his originals after copying them, to protect his reputation as a natural stylist whose first draft was practically galley perfect—a facet of the Griswald myth that he had not originated, but one he perpetuated.

'Now, Matthew, why don't you sit down and read through some of this manuscript while I make us—'

'Matthew?'

'—while I make us a nice pot of tea.'

'I don't drink tea!'

'Well, I'll make some for myself, then. No, on second thought I'll have a glass of your excellent burgundy.'

'My burgundy?'

'Just read the manuscript, Matthew. Whatever limitations you may have as a man of compassion, I have complete faith in you as a critic.'

While Plimsoll sat at her desk, sipping the wine, her long legs crossed at the ankle, Matthew read, scanning at first with impatient irritation; but his frown deepened as he read with growing—and chilling—fascination. She had made many small deletions and adjustments, an adjective pruned here, a more precise verb substituted there, no one change significant in isolation, but in the mass they made a lean paragraph out of one that had been merely thin, or converted a redundancy into evocative foreshadowing, or transformed the obscure into the ambiguous. He could not quite put his finger on the overall change brought about by her culling and honing, but it had to do with increased celerity. If a minute spent reading his original draft were taken as a norm, compared, for instance, to a heavy, eighty-second minute spent wading through Faulkner's glutinous word-bogs, or stumbling through Henry James's involute parentheticals, then Plimsoll's revision could be said to have swift, light, forty-second minutes. In sum, what the world recognized as the Griswald style existed in Plimsoll's copy and was absent from his original.

He set the manuscript down and stared out the window, his eyes defocused, his stomach cold. For years he had half-known, if never really faced, the fact that he lacked most of the qualities he admired in his characters. He had never really been devoted to the political causes he so pugnaciously espoused, he was too wrapped up in self to care about the anonymous Wad; even his love-making was based more on tactic than emotion; and as for his much-vaunted physical courage? He had climbed those mountains with the aid of guides; he had shot those lions with a backup man covering him with a Holland and Holland; he had made sure he was often photographed, rough and unshaven, with guerrilla fighters, but he had written his famous war coverage at secondhand, closer to hotel comforts than to battlefield dangers. For years he had admitted to himself that if he were not a good writer, he was nothing at all. And now...

'I think I know what you're feeling, Matthew,' Miss Plimsoll said softly.

'Do you? Do you really? What a consolation it is to realize that Plimsoll knows how I feel.'

'This is something you must understand. I could not have written those novels and stories alone. It's you who have the creative imagination, the experience, the sense of pain and laughter, the pantheon of unique and fascinating characters.'

'I'm delighted to have contributed a little something.'

'Yours is the voice. I am merely the interpreter. What you lost during the Great Drought was merely... style. And that's the only thing I have provided: just style. Please don't feel miserable, Matthew. We have been a team for some years now, a belle equipe, but it's always been you who possessed the inspiration and the dynamic energy, and I've admired those things in you... loved them, actually.'

'I don't want to hear about it,' he said wretchedly.

'I know this is unpleasant for you. You've never been exactly avid to face the truth about yourself. So it's inevitable that this truth comes with pain... as it comes to the heroes of our novels.'

He reached forward and rubbed his palms along the sides of his battered old typewriter in a kind of tactile farewell.

'I was content with my invisible role,' she continued. 'I even cherished helping you the more for the knowledge that you were unaware of it, and happy to be so. And I had every intention of going on like that forever. But I have seen something growing in your attitude towards me for the past month or so.' She smiled thinly. 'You're nothing if not transparent, Matthew.'

'Please don't call me by my first name.'

'But I've always called you Matthew... to myself. I've known for some time that you were steeling yourself to be rid of me. At first I was sorely stung by the unfairness of it. But then I realized that you were as helpless in this as you are in other things. You've been a slave to your image for years now, and getting rid of me would have been yet another service demanded by that image. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, for your good as well as mine.'

'I don't want to hear about any of this. Nothing matters anymore. It's all over. I suppose you intend to do an expose? 'Matthew Griswald's Secret Collaborator'? You'll make a bundle with it. It's the kind of scandal the journalists salivate over.'

'Nothing could be further from my mind, Matthew.'

'What is on your mind, then?'

'I propose that we continue our association.'

He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, with chary mistrust. 'You're saying that you're willing to go on just like before?'

'Well... not just like before.'

'Ah! I knew it. What is it you want?'

'I have reached an age when one must consider one's future.'

'So it's money.'

'Security rather than money. Our mutual security. Which I believe would best be assured if we were to marry.'

His eyes widened. 'Marry? You and me?'

'Your shock is not terribly chivalrous, Matthew. It's a solution I've considered in moments of reverie for many years.'

An almost unthinkable possibility grew in Matthew's mind. 'You are speaking of a marriage of convenience, aren't you? A marriage that ensures your financial future and gives you the social advantages, the parties, the media events, and all?'

'Actually, I don't foresee all that many parties. They're not good for your health, to say nothing of your work habits. And I must tell you that I have no intention of entering into un mariage blanc, a sham union confected for purely financial reasons.'

'Whoa. Let me get this straight. Are you saying that we—that you and I would...?'