35
All at once, Cliff had a breakthrough. I didn’t know what set him off, but something had. He’d been suffering with a terrible bout of writer’s block, until one day I came home from the office to find him writing furiously, sheaves of paper strewn around him as though a tiny bomb had gone off. It was like a scene out of a play or a movie: The frustrated artist suddenly finds inspiration and, looking half-mad, begins to churn out his vision as quickly as possible. I gasped and clapped my hands together.
“Shall we celebrate?” I asked.
“I’ll go for it,” he said, meaning the bottle of wine. “I want to see as much of this in type as soon as possible. Do you mind?”
“Oh.” I hesitated, comprehending. “Sure. Here.” I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my pocketbook and handed it to him, hoping he wouldn’t spend it all. He dashed out to go around the corner to the liquor store and I did my best to gather the pages strewn about the floor and put them in order. By the time he came back I’d gotten the Smith Corona set up on the card table, all ready to go.
“Is it—”
“A novel? You’re goddamned right it is,” Cliff said, grinning. “I knew it was just a matter of time before I started one, and here we are!” Standing over by the kitchenette, he struggled a bit with the bottle he’d bought and a loud POP! sounded as a champagne cork flew up and ricocheted off the ceiling, nearly putting the sole overhead lightbulb out. He poured a generous dose of the golden bubbly liquid into a mug and I reached a hand out, assuming this was for me.
“Ah-ah,” Cliff chided, shaking his head. “Let’s get the typing done first. It’s important that it’s typed up in tip-top form.”
I looked at him. “All right,” I said after a short pause, not wanting to start an argument. I understood he’d been blocked for quite a while and was likely letting his excitement get the better of him. And more than anything else I was excited for him. I gathered up the pages of longhand and tapped them into neat alignment on the card table. I checked to make sure the typewriter ribbon was in good shape, rolled a clean sheet of paper into place, and tapped the carriage return lever to move the roller all the way over to the right.
“And off we go!” I said, winking at Cliff. He grinned even wider and took a heavy swig from his mug.
“Eden old girl, it’s too soon to say, but I really think I’ve done it!”
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear it, Cliff.”
I began typing. He sat there drinking and watching as I worked. I took my time, typing with painstaking care and reading as I went along. The story was a little disjointed and I couldn’t quite follow the plot. It appeared to be, I realized with a tiny cringe, a novel of self-examination narrated by a young man during his college years. A few times I checked to make sure I’d put the pages in the right order. I knew Cliff’s composition was in its early stages and I didn’t want to discourage him. If, down the road, he wanted my help, I would gladly give it to him. I was proud to realize my job at Bonwright and even my stint at Torchon & Lyle had already sharpened my editorial eye.
“Where did this sudden inspiration come from?” I asked, pausing to roll another sheet of paper into the typewriter.
“My lovely wife,” he said, leaning over my shoulder to kiss the nape of my neck as I resumed typing. “She encourages me.”
“That’s awfully nice of you to say.”
“I tell you, I’m on a tear, Eden! I’ll have this done in a matter of weeks, and then I’m gonna get a book deal, I can taste it!”
He was getting ahead of himself but I didn’t want to say so. I’d seen lots of young writers fall into this trap. Some of them had the imaginary book tour all planned out before they’d even finished the first chapter.
“Say,” Cliff continued, snapping his fingers, “I’m going to talk to Gregg Carns about the amount of the advance he got, just to get an idea of the ballpark I’d be in.”
“Now?” I asked, slightly alarmed to think he was about to go out for the night and leave me to type his pages alone. Gregg Carns was an acquaintance of ours. He was a hipster who lived in the Village and who it was rumored had gotten a sizable advance for a novel about a group of junkies who drive cross-country to Frisco. It had sold very well, and one reviewer called him the voice of our generation. But with every royalty check, the odds of him ever writing a second book slimmed exponentially as he fell deeper and deeper down the bottle.
“No, no,” Cliff said, smiling and kissing me on the cheek. “Don’t be silly. Tonight we’re celebrating, just the two of us. And I want to be here when you finish typing so I can read it over. I’ll find Gregg tomorrow and ask him.”
I typed, Cliff read, and eventually I was able to get a couple of sips of champagne before it was all gone. It was late when we finally went to bed, but we were both full of joy and made love with a voracious, exultant hunger. I woke up exhausted in the morning, looking a little wan as I dressed for the office, but I hardly cared. Cliff was writing and that made him happy, and that was all that mattered.
• • •
When I came home from work the next day, I worried the spell would be broken—that Cliff’s sudden inspiration might turn out to have been a fluke. But I found him very much in the same way as the day before. And just as I had the day before, I gathered up the whirlwind of papers scattered about the floor and set about typing them up, the only difference being Cliff drank beer instead of champagne as he watched me.
After a week or so of this routine, Cliff had accrued a fairly sizable stack of manuscript pages. He was getting restless. The beer gave way to whiskey, and the main topic on Cliff’s mind slipped more and more from writing to getting published.
“Listen, Eden,” he said one Sunday afternoon, “an idea has occurred to me and you’re not going to be on board with it right away, but I want you to hear me out because I think it would be beneficial to both of us, and what’s a marriage about if both people don’t benefit?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said. He sat me down and explained his proposition. His father was one of the most literary editors in all of New York, he pointed out, and who else should Cliff work with but an editor exactly like that? The problem was his father was prejudiced against him.
“I’m not sure I can fix that, Cliff,” I said as gently as possible.
“But that’s where you’re wrong, Eden old gal. You can fix it. You can slip My Old Man my manuscript and tell him it’s an anonymous submission. Then, when he goes bananas for it, you can reveal who wrote it. It’s genius!”
“Oh . . .” I said. I demurred. The manuscript, I knew, was not ready. Mr. Nelson would not go bananas for it, but I couldn’t tell Cliff this. It would devastate him, and worse: I knew it would break something between us I knew I would never be able to fix. “I think,” I said hesitantly, “I’d better stay out of this. It might confuse things. And things are awfully confusing as it is . . .”
“You’re just being selfish.”
I blinked. “Selfish?” I repeated, thinking to myself that a selfish girl wouldn’t pay the bills while her husband stayed at home.
“After all, it was my tip about my Old Man that got you the job. I gave you a leg up on the competition; the least you could do is give me the same. It’s not like I’m asking for anything immoral . . . An anonymous submission isn’t a very big favor, at that! You know, you’re awfully high and mighty for a girl who goes around lying about her name. What would My Old Man say if he knew about that, I wonder?”
Hearing this threat, a cold shock of betrayal went through me and my heart skipped a beat. I was speechless.
“I don’t understand why you won’t do this for me, Eden,” he continued. “Do you want to hold me back? You and I both know you lied to get that job, and I haven’t told a soul, have I? No, I’ve been a very good husband to you. I deserve this!”
I stared at him in disbelief. It was terrible, awful: We were having our first true fight. “Let’s not argue,” I started to say, but it was too late. He could see I wasn’t going to do it, and that had thrown him into a state of outrage. Cliff picked up a desk lamp—the only other source of light besides the pathetically dim overheard bulb—and smashed it on the floor. Then he ran out of the apartment and slammed the door with tremendous force.
I picked up the pieces of the lamp and threw them in the rubbish pail. I spent the remainder of the evening reading manuscripts in the eerie quiet that followed in the wake of the sound of the lamp being smashed, the door being slammed. Cliff didn’t come home until four o’clock in the morning. He climbed into bed stinking of booze. We both rolled on our sides and slept with our backs to each other.