When I read the news item – STUDENT FATALLY STABBED IN PORTLAND
RESTAURANT -I told my wife I was going out for a milkshake. I drove out of town,
parked, and cried for him. Cried for damn near half an hour, I guess. I couldn’t have done
that in front of my wife, much as I love her. It would have been pussy.
34
‘I’m a writer now, like I said. A lot of the critics think what I write is shit. A lot of the
time I think they are right… but it still freaks me out to put those words, ‘Freelance
Writer’, down in the Occupation blank of the forms you have to fill out at credit desks and in doctors’ offices. My story sounds so much like a fairytale that it’s fucking absurd.
I sold the book and it was made into a movie and the movie got good reviews and it
was a smash hit besides. This all had happened by the time I was twenty-six. The second
book was made into a movie as well, as was the third. I told you – it’s fucking absurd.
Meantime, my wife doesn’t seem to mind having me around the house and we have three
kids now. They all seem perfect to me, and most of the time I’m happy.
But the writing isn’t so easy or as much fun as it used to be. The phone rings a lot.
Sometimes I get headaches, bad ones, and then I have to go into a dim room and lie down
until they go away. The doctor says they aren’t true migraines; he called them
‘stressaches’ and told me to slow down. I worry about myself sometimes. What a stupid
habit that is … and yet I can’t quite seem to stop it. And I wonder if there is really any
point in what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to make of a world where a man can get
sick playing ‘let’s pretend!.
But it’s funny how I saw Ace Merrill again. My friends are dead but Ace is alive. I saw
him pulling out of the mil parking lot just after the three o’clock whistle the last time I
took my kids down home to see my dad.
The ’52 Ford had become a ’77 Ford station wagon. A faded bumper-sticker said
REAGAN/BUSH 1980. His hair was mowed into a crewcut and he’d gotten fat. The
sharp. handsome features I remembered were now buried in as. avalanche of flesh. I had
left the kids with dad long enough to go downtown and get the paper. I was standing on
the corner of Main and Carbine and he glanced at me as I waited to cross. There was no
sign of recognition on the face of this thirty-two-year-old man who had broken my nose
in another dimension of time.
I watched him wheel the Ford wagon into the dirt parking lot beside the Mellow Tiger,
get out, hitch at his pants, and walk inside. I could imagine the brief wedge of country-
western as he opened the door, the brief sour whiff of Knick and Gansett on draught, the
welcoming shouts of the other regulars as he closed the door and placed his large ass on
the same stool which had probably held him up for at least three hours every day of his
life – except Sundays – since he was twenty-one.
I thought: So that’s what Ace is now.
I looked to the left, and beyond the mill I could see the Castle River, not so wide now
but a little cleaner, still flowing under the bridge between Castle Rock and Harlow. The
trestle upstream is gone now, but the river is still around. So am I.
THE BREATHING METHOD
1: The Club
I dressed a bit more speedily than normal on that snowy, windy, bitter night – I admit
it. It was 23 December, 197-, and I suspect that there were other members of the club who
did the same. Taxis are notoriously hard to come by in New York on stormy nights, so I
called for a radio-cab. I did this at five-thirty for an eight o’clock pick-up – my wife raised
an eyebrow but said nothing. I was under the awning of the apartment building on East
58th Street, where Ellen and I had lived since 1946, by quarter to eight, and when the taxi
was five minutes late, I found myself pacing up and down impatiently.
The taxi arrived at 8.10 and I got in, too glad to be out of the wind to be as angry with
the driver as he probably deserved. That wind, part of a cold front* that had swept down
from Canada the day before, meant business. It whistled and whined around the cab’s
window, occasionally drowning out the salsa on the driver’s radio and rocking the big
Checker on its springs. Many of the stores were open but the sidewalks were nearly bare
of last-minute shoppers. Those that were abroad looked uncomfortable or actually pained.
It had been flurrying off and on all day, and now the snow began again, coming first in
thin membranes, then twisting into cyclone shapes ahead of us in the street Coming home
that night, I would think of the combination of snow, a taxi, and New York City with
considerably greater unease … but 1 did not of course know that then.
At the corner of 3rd and Fortieth, a large tinsel Christmas bell went floating through
the intersection like a spirit
‘Bad night,’ the cabbie said. “They’ll have an extra two dozen in the morgue tomorrow.
Wino Popsicles. Plus a few bag-lady Popsicles.’
‘I suppose.’
The cabbie ruminated. ‘Well, good riddance,’ he said finally. ‘Less welfare, right?’
‘Your Christmas spirit,’ I said, ‘is stunning in its width and depth.’
The cabbie ruminated. ‘You one of those bleeding-hear liberals?’ he asked finally.
‘I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might tend to incriminate me,’ I said.
The cabbie gave a why-do-I-always-get-the-wisenheimers snort… but he shut up.
He let me out at 2nd and Thirty-Fifth, and I walked halfway down the block to the
club, bent over against the whistling wind, holding my hat on my head with one gloved
hand. In almost no time at all the life-force seemed to have been driven deep into my
body, a flickering blue flame about the size of the pilot-light in a gas oven. At seventy-
three, a man feels the cold quicker and deeper. That man should be home in front of a
fireplace … or at least in front of an electric heater. At seventy-three, hot blood isn’t even
really a memory; it’s more of an academic concept.
The latest flurry was letting up, but snow as dry as sand still beat into my face. I was
glad to see that the steps leading up to the door of 249 had been sanded — that was
Stevens’s work, of course – Stevens knew the base alchemy of old age well enough: not
lead into gold but bones into glass. When I think about such things, I believe that God
probably thinks t great deal like Groucho Marx.
Then Stevens was there, holding the door open, and a moment later I was inside. Down
the mahogany-panelled hallway, through double doors standing three-quarters of the way
open on their recessed tracks, into the library cum reading-room cum bar. It was a dark room in which occasional pools of light gleamed – reading-lamps. A richer, more textured
light glowed across the oak parquet floor, and I could hear the steady snap of birch logs in
the huge fireplace. The heat radiated all the way across the room -surely there is no
welcome for a man or a woman that can equal a fire on the hearth. A paper rustled – dry,
slightly impatient. That would be Johanssen, with his Wall Street Journal. After ten years, it was possible to recognize his presence simply by the way he read his stocks. Amusing
… and in a quiet way, amazing.
Stevens helped me off with my overcoat, murmuring that it was a dirty night; WCBS
was now forecasting heavy snow before morning.
I agreed that it was indeed a dirty night and looked back into that big, high-ceilinged
room again. A dirty night, a roaring fire … and a ghost story. Did I say that at seventy-
•Jiree hot blood is a thing of the past? Perhaps so. But I felt something warm in my chest
at the thought … something that hadn’t been caused by the fire of Stevens’s reliable,
dignified welcome.
I think it was because it was McCarron’s turn to tell the :tale.
I had been coming to the brownstone which stands at 249 East 35th Street for ten years
– coming at intervals that were almost – but not quite – regular. In my own mind I think of
it is a ‘gentleman’s club’, that amusing pre-Gloria Steinem antiquity. But even now I am