Another glass. Now, she said, go out and get yourself drunk and, since Marcelle is not coming to do the flat, as soon as my husband comes in to hold down this dirty loge I will go upstairs and clean the place up for you to sleep tonight. Do you want me to buy anything for you? Do you want me to make breakfast? I asked her. Certainly, she said.
Give me ten francs and I’ll bring you the change. I’d make you dinner but you ought to eat out tonight. Even though it is more expensive. Allez voir des amis et manger quelque part. If it wasn’t for my husband I’d come with you.
“Come on and have a drink at the Café des Amateurs now, I said. We’ll have a hot grog. No I can’t leave this cage until my husband comes, she said. Débine-toi maintenant. Leave me the key. It will all be in order when you get back.
“She was a fine woman and I felt better already because I knew there was only one thing to do; to start over. But I did not know if I could do it. Some of the stories had been about boxing, and some about baseball and others about horse racing. They were the things I had known best and had been closest to and several were about the first war.
Writing them I had felt all the emotion I had to feel about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had rewritten and rewritten until it was all in them and all gone out of me Because I had worked on newspapers since I was very young I could never remember anything once I had written it down; as each day you wiped your memory clear with writing as you might wipe a blackboard clear with a sponge or a wet rag; and I still had that evil habit and now it had caught up with me.
“But the concierge, and the smell of the concierge, and her practicality and determination hit my despair as a nail might hit it if it were driven in cleanly and soundly and I thought I must do something about this; something practical; something that will be good for me even if it cannot help about the stories.
Already I was half glad the novel was gone because I could see already, as you begin to see clearly over the water when a rainstorm lifts on the ocean as the wind carries it out to sea, that I could write a better novel. But I missed the stories as though they were a combination of my house, and my job, my only gun, my small savings and my wife; also my poems. But the despair was going and there was only missing now as after a great loss. Missing is very bad too.”
“I know about missing,” the girl said.
“Poor daughter,” he said. “Missing is bad. But it doesn’t kill you. But despair would kill you in just a little time.”
“Really kill you?”
“I think so,” he said.
“Can we have another?” she asked. “Will you tell me the rest? This is the sort of thing I always wondered about.”
“We can have another,” Roger said. “And I’ll tell you the rest if it doesn’t bore you.”
“Roger, you mustn’t say that about boring me.”
“I bore the hell out of myself sometimes,” he said. “So it seemed normal I might bore you.”
“Please make the drink and then tell me what happened.”
The End
