“Can I read your story?”
Jacob’s tone took on a droning quality. “I assume you can, Miss Curry, ours being a nation of compulsory education. Whether you may is the point at issue.”
She shuddered. “Golly, don’t do that again. You sound too much like him.”
“Be my guest. The F is for ‘fine.’” Not bothering to open his briefcase, he’d folded the crumpled pages into a clumsy square and thrust it in a jeans pocket. Now he spread it out on the table between them.
They were in a booth at Woolworth’s, across the aisle from the gleaming counter. The store was observing Christmas hours; the buzz of customer conversation mingled with Perry Como’s crooning on the loudspeaker. Jacob drank from his cup and watched her read, one elbow on the table and the cigarette in her hand pointed toward the ceiling. She’d eaten half a chicken-salad sandwich and taken a refill on her coffee.
She read briskly, but she wasn’t just skimming. Once she paged back to look at something again, then continued without pausing. When she came to the end she drummed the pages together and returned them. Smiled.
“That bad?” He refolded and stuffed them back inside his pocket.
“It’s good. I like your hero. He knows he did wrong, but he doesn’t get all weepy and hand-wringy over it. Frankly, that was the problem I had with Hugo. I’ve never read O. Henry, so I can’t say anything about that.”
“So you agree with Tharp.”
“Gosh, no. I’d never have made the connection if you hadn’t told me what he said. How many plots are there in the world, really?”
“Six. Snow White, Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three—”
“I get you. No need to go on.”
“Good. I can’t think of the others.”
“All those stories have heroines, not heroes.”
“Tharp would just say I have trouble writing women.”
“Did you really knock him out?”
“Silly, but not out. A man isn’t as easy to KO as you see in pictures. I learned that at Fort Dix. I’m afraid to look at my old stuff. I put more guys to sleep with one punch than Joe Louis, and that was just in one story.”
“I’d like to read your old stuff.”
“Good luck. I left a trunk with my landlord. He sold the building while I was overseas and everything in it. You won’t find them at the library.” He blew on his cup, although it had stopped steaming ten minutes ago. “May I read yours?”
“I don’t have any old stuff.”
“Stop stalling, sister,” he growled.
She laughed. The counterman looked up from his polish rag. “Did you really write like that?”
“I had to. Think the black market’s risky? Try smuggling good dialogue past the editors at Goon Squad.”
“Goon Squad, really?”
“Don’t be a snob. Its sister publication was The Cultural Quarterly, which it outsold ten to one. The story, lady.” He extended his palm, wiggling his fingers.
She opened her handbag and took out a sheaf of pages bound with a paper clip. He reached for it. She drew it back. “Promise you won’t be kind.”
“Cross my heart.” He did.
She let him take it. He looked at the grade. “A-minus.”
“Tharp asked me out a couple of times. He thinks he can pry his way into my pants with a report card.”
Blushing, he signaled the counterman for a warm-up and read. Ellen plucked out a Lucky, tapped it on the pack, and lit it, sat back to smoke and hum along with Peggy Lee.
He finished and slid the story her way. “Cute.”
“Thanks for not being kind.” She scooped it up and stuck it back in her handbag. Her nostrils were pinched.
“I don’t know what else to say about a lost-dog story, unless the dog winds up getting run over. Oh, on page six you used ‘further’ when you meant ‘farther.’ I’m surprised our intrepid instructor missed that; but like you said—”
“You’re a bit of a shit, aren’t you?”
“You asked for honesty.”
“I did not.”
He sat back and finished his coffee. “What a relief! I keep hearing the girls back home aren’t the same girls I left behind. Good to hear they still don’t make sense.”
“Just how many girls did you leave behind?”
He put down his cup and counted on his fingers. “Princess Lotus, Vesta von Vix, The Moroccan Man-Eater—”
“Tharp’s right. You can’t write women.”
A female voice interrupted “White Christmas” to announce the store was closing in fifteen minutes. The buzzing on the main floor increased. The counterman rang open the cash register and began counting bills.
“What will you do now?” Ellen asked.
“I’m doing it: writing about purse-snatchings and weddings. Hoping someday they’ll coincide. A man needs ambition of some kind.”
“I think you should take your agent’s advice and write novels.”
“Paperback novels.” He already regretted having told her his professional history. “The difference between them and Muff Pistols wouldn’t buy you a seat on a streetcar.”
“Life’s what you make it, my father always said.”
“What’s he do, run General Motors?”
“He was a stevedore, until he blew out an artery at forty, unloading crates of machine parts from Cleveland. He had me primed to be the first female governor of New York. He didn’t live to see me cutting tin at Lockheed.”
“Don’t knock defense work. I keep picturing some schnook of a Jap mechanic trying to turn two wrecked Zeroes into one in flying condition, ducking for cover every time a fresh wave of tin flew over from the West.” He glanced at the counterman, who was showing inordinate interest in the watch on his wrist. “What about your mother?”
“Slinging hash at Sing Sing; no fooling. The lifers call her Ma. Makes apple pie from scratch, no cans.”
“You interest me. How’s she feel about her tin-cutting, secretarial-bound daughter?”
“‘As long as you’re happy, dear.’ I think she wants a son-in-law who’s a cross between Albert Schweitzer and J. P. Morgan. What about your parents?”
“My father died in France.”
“Fighting?”
“Food poisoning. He went there in 1919 to paint and got hold of the only bowl of bad vichyssoise in Paris.”
“Luck seems to run in your family. Mother?”
“My aunt who raised me said the influenza took her. I took her word for it; I was two. I prefer to think Mom ran away with the circus, but I’m a hopeless romantic.”
“Just a couple of orphans.”
He wasn’t really listening. “So you think I should go crawling back. ‘The Typewriter’ isn’t Saturday Evening Post material?”
“Try the Post, sure. The New Yorker.”
“And after that I’ll run for president.”
“Who said writing is the only profession where you start at the top and work your way down?”
“Whoever it was probably invented paperbacks.”