Chapter 12. December 22, Beginning.
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover
Arthur had awakened in a good mood that had dissipated before he was out of bed, but he had fought the good fight and as Lee was finishing up in the kitchen he was deciding to do something about his moodiness.
"I'm going to the Co-op pretty soon," Lee said. "I still have an hour I pledged to work there this month and want to get it done. Do you want me to pick anything up?"
"I'm low on red clover."
"I know. It's on my list."
"I'm feeling kinda wild. Give me a bowl before you go, will you?"
"You are wild," Lee said.
She took their pot stash from the mantel and put some into a pipe, then held the pipe stem to Arthur’s lips and a match to the bowl. He inhaled the entire pipeful. When he smoked he liked to take the biggest hit he could hold, preferably of the best cannabis he could find; what they had, grown locally by a friend, was excellent. Good smoke's effect on him was occasionally painful and even frightening, but he valued the high even when it was accompanied by acute intimations of mortality. He felt about cannabis as he might have felt about a visiting Zen master who sometimes freely used his stick.
"You still got the lungs, Babe," said Lee. He grinned as he held his breath, his lungs expanded, THC pouring into his bloodstream.
"Just one more," he said, aware it might be a mistake like the one he had made the day ten months ago he had begun writing Failure (he had written fifty pages in two weeks but then abandoned it). He had smoked a second pipe that day and, delighted by his thought progressions, begun to write, but in less than a minute he had felt such pain in his left arm and his chest that he had been forced to back away from his Selectric and lean over his knees. He'd tried half a dozen times in the next quarter hour to sit straight and move back in to type; when, on the seventh try, he succeeded, the words he’d wanted to write were, like so many others before them, gone, each lost line a nonexistent note in a nonexistent bottle never thrown into an imaginary sea; there were other words, though, and he had begun.
It felt time soon to begin again. He took, held, and exhaled the second hit.
"Now," he said, "will you give me my red long-sleeved shirt and brown-and-white sweater and serape and blue-and-white hat?" Lee put the pipe back on the mantel and brought Arthur his things. He put the shirt, sweater, and serape on his lap and pulled the hat onto his head.
"You're going out?"
"I am." He kissed her. "See you later, Honey."
"Later, Hon," Lee said. She watched as he descended the ramp and closed the door when he was safely down.
Arthur knew that tacit understanding and acceptance could degenerate into mere non-communication, but he appreciated it that Lee hadn't asked him why he had decided to smoke or where he was going. He knew she was curious. At the bottom of the ramp he spun in a full circle and a half, pulled in next to the house, switched off his machine, and leaned on his knees; had he not leaned forward, his field of vision would have gone all white and he would have fainted, or at least he felt as though he would have. The sun was warm despite the clouds, which were thin and see-through. It was Christmas break at the university and across the street the motel parking lot, usually packed, was almost empty.
A Better Front wasn't published so wasn't finished and, leaning on his knees by the little white house, he was thinking about it. He pushed up off his knees, pressed the throttle forward, drove around the front of the ramp carefully avoiding a shallow patch of soft sand, gained the short, not very steep, rutted driveway he used getting on and off Adams Street, and bounced into the street.
A sentence came to him in three parts, and its grace charmed him. It would be a good beginning to a novel seen through Lee's eyes and told in her words. He knew that a novel narrated by Lee Saveta was beyond his present capabilities and that the words that he was thinking were as good as lost. He almost never remembered the sentences he composed but did not immediately write down; composing them was its own reward.
At the corner he turned left onto Tyndall Avenue. As he crossed Mabel Street on Tyndall noon recess was about to end at the elementary school on his left; a pair of maybe-10-years-olds ran to the fence to watch him pass and he said hi to them. He could scarcely see, his field of vision going white again, and he stopped at the corner of Helen Street and again leaned on his knees till his vision cleared. Then he cut left up Helen a half block to De Niza, a block-long alley that paralleled and separated Tyndall and Park Avenues and connected Helen and Speedway Boulevard. Halfway along De Niza he stopped again to lean. His mood was clear and contemplative.
He thought about coffee. He realized that he had not been drinking it because of an unarticulated idea he had, probably mistaken, about how Lee liked him to live. She didn’t object to his drinking coffee! He thought with pleasure of slugging it back black and working. He thought of buying a pound now and returning home immediately, hitting the typewriter, and getting the first comer to brew him a pot, then going, going, writing for hours, a marathon spill.
He had not been writing for months, which was unusual. He would begin soon, wouldn't he? Time after time after time he had begun and each time he had failed to finish; each successive failure, he thought, threatened his ability to continue beginning anew. He thought that if he ever did succeed as a writer that his friends might say that all along they'd known that he would. He hadn't known, and he knew his friends had only guessed.
At The Market Spot at the northwest corner of Speedway and Park he bought no coffee but found a white-cover tan-back spiral notebook and a pen. When he paid for them he took off his woolen hat and asked the cashier to put his change, which he could not pick up, into it. He left the store and as he headed down the Speedway sidewalk started to put on the hat, already having forgotten he had money in it. He heard his change hit the sidewalk.
"By-bye seven cents," he said.
He wanted coffee. Mona taught Lucia and her other students to use herbs subjectively. If an herb attracted Lucia in its wild state, Mona taught, Lucia should assume that it would reveal its uses to her; if she felt well disposed toward it, it would prove well disposed toward her. Arthur thought the proposition not self-evident but trusted his desire and decided not to let his doubts dissuade him from some joe. He crossed De Niza, passed the gas station on the corner of Tyndall, crossed Speedway, proceeded a quarter of the way up the Tyndall block to an apron, and made a hairpin turn onto the sidewalk. His goal was The Bittercreek Café at the southwest corner of Tyndall and Speedway. Its door was thirty feet from the corner and Arthur, who’d never been inside, saw with satisfaction that there was no step at the entrance. He spun in circles waiting for someone using the sidewalk to come by whom he could ask for help, but before anyone passed a man came from inside and held the door for him. He buzzed between the tables to the counter and ordered coffee. The woman who took his order was blonde and attractive. Arthur was again noticing women; multitudes seemed desirable.
"Will you bring it to me?" Arthur asked. He would probably have spilled it had he tried to carry it.
"Sure," she said.
Arthur went to a table. The decor was well-matched to the Styrofoam coffee cup she brought, but Arthur didn't mind. Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was on the tape deck, the place empty, and he had a cup of coffee and a fresh notebook in front of him.
He resisted the urge to begin writing about the fact he was writing, the seductive trap of the present into which he'd fallen and fallen and fallen. He next rejected an urge to write about his frequent failures to finish what he had begun. He started jotting down chapter headings: "First Dr. Lang; Second Dr. Lang; Third Dr. Lang; The Rev. Samuels; Nine Wells; Today." He wrote in legible, or at least decipherable, longhand. He envisioned a novel which would culminate March two with or without his physical healing; any outcome could end a story that, well written--finished!--, would metaphorically realize the promised healing.
"Do you want more coffee?"
She was perhaps twenty. The pot she carried was full and steaming. He smiled.
"Absolutely."
She poured and he began to write about the Rev. Samuels. In the next two hours he had two more refills and wrote three pages. Tomorrow, he thought, finishing his fourth cup and preparing to leave, I'll write; he couldn't be sure and made no vow, but guessed. He had not heard from CETA or Vocational Rehabilitation about his newspaper job. He had only wanted it, though, because he had planned to begin writing when he got to Tucson and hadn't. Now he had.
Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 front cover