But he had not had a nervous breakdown.
‘I’m okay,’ he insisted again, speaking gently. He had discovered an amazing and rather touching thing about Amy some years before: if you spoke to her gently enough, she was apt to believe you about almost
anything. He had often thought that, if it had been a species-wide trait, like showing your teeth to indicate rage or amusement, wars would have ceased millennia ago.
‘Are you sure, Mort?’
‘Yes. Call me if you hear any more from our insurance friend.’
‘I will.’
He paused. ‘Are you at Ted’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you feel about him, these days?’
She hesitated, then said simply: ‘I love him.’
‘Oh.’
‘I didn’t go with other men,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’ve always wanted to tell you that. I didn’t go with other men. But Ted … he looked past your name and saw me, Mort. He saw me.’
‘You mean I didn’t.’
‘You did when you were here,’ she said. Her voice sounded small and forlorn. ‘But you were gone so much.’
His eyes widened and he was instantly ready to do battle. Righteous battle. ‘What? I haven’t been on tour since The Delacourt Family! And that was a short one!’
‘I don’t want to argue with you, Mort,’ she said softly. ‘That part should be over. All I’m trying to say is that, even when you were here, you were gone a lot. You had your own lover, you know. Your work was your lover.’ Her voice was steady, but he sensed tears buried deep inside it. ‘How I hated that bitch, Mort. She was prettier than me, smarter than me, more fun than me. How could I compete?’
‘Blame it all on me, why not?’ he asked her, dismayed to find himself on the edge of tears. ‘What did you want me to do? Become a goddam plumber? We would have been poor and I would have been unemployed. There was nothing else I could fucking do, don’t you understand that? There was nothing else I could do!’ He had hoped the tears were over, at least for awhile, but here they were. Who had rubbed this horrible magic lamp again? Had it been him or her this time?
‘I’m not blaming you. There’s blame for me, too. You never would have found us … the way you did … if I hadn’t been weak and cowardly. It wasn’t Ted; Ted wanted us to go to you and tell you together. He kept asking. And I kept putting him off. I told him I wasn’t sure. I told myself I still loved you, that things could go back to the way they were … but things never do, I guess. I’ll -‘ She caught her breath, and Mort realized she was crying, too. ‘I’ll never forget the look on your face when you opened the door of that motel room.
I’ll carry that to my grave.’
Good! he wanted to cry out at her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear It!
‘You knew my love,’ he said unsteadily. ‘I never hid her from you. You knew from the start.’
‘But I never knew,’ she said, ‘how deep her embrace could be.’
‘Well, cheer up,’ Mort said. ‘She seems to have left me now.’
Amy was weeping. ‘Mort, Mort – I only want you to live and be happy. Can’t you see that? Can’t you do that?’
What he had seen was one of her bare shoulders touching one of Ted Milner’s bare shoulders. He had seen their eyes, wide and frightened, and Ted’s hair stuck up in an Alfalfa corkscrew. He thought of telling her this – of trying, anyway -and let it go. It was enough. They had hurt each other enough. Another time, perhaps, they could go at it again. He wished she hadn’t said that thing about the nervous breakdown, though. He had not had a nervous breakdown.
‘Amy, I think I ought to go.’
‘Yes – both of us. Ted’s out showing a house, but he’ll be back soon. I have to put some dinner together.’
‘I’m sorry about the argument.’
‘Will you call if you need me? I’m still worried.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and said goodbye, and hung up. He stood there by the telephone for a moment, thinking he would surely burst into tears. But it passed. That was perhaps the real horror.
It passed.
39
The steadily falling rain made him feel listless and stupid. He made a little fire in the woodstove, drew a chair over, and tried to read the current issue of Harper’s, but he kept nodding off and then jerking awake again as his chin dropped, squeezing his windpipe and producing a snore. I should have bought some cigarettes today, he thought. A few smokes would have kept me awake. But he hadn’t bought any smokes, and he wasn’t really sure they would have kept him awake, anyway. He wasn’t just tired; he was suffering from shock.
At last he walked over to the couch, adjusted the pillows, and lay back. Next to his cheek, cold rain spickle-spackled against the dark glass.
Only once, he thought. I only did it once. And then he fell deeply asleep.
40
In his dream, he was in the world’s biggest classroom.
The walls stretched up for miles. Each desk was a mesa, the gray tiles the endless plain which swept among them. The clock on the wall was a huge cold sun. The door to the hallway was shut, but Morton Rainey could read the words on the pebbled glass:
HOME TEAM WRITING ROOM
PROF. DELLACOURT
They spelled it wrong, Mort thought, too many L’s.
But another voice told him this was not so.
Mort was standing on the giant blackboard’s wide chalk gutter, stretching up. He had a piece of chalk the size of a baseball bat in his hand. He wanted to drop his arm, which ached ferociously, but he could not.
Not until he had written the same sentence on the blackboard five hundred times: I will not copy from John Kintner. He must have written it four hundred times already, he thought, but four hundred wasn’t enough.
Stealing a man’s work when a man’s work was really all he had was unforgivable. So he would have to write and write and write, and never mind the voice in his mind trying to tell him that this was a dream, that his right arm ached for other reasons.
The chalk squeaked monstrously. The dust, acrid and somehow familiar – so familiar – sifted down into his face. At last he could go on no longer. His arm dropped to his side like a bag filled with lead shot. He turned on the chalk gutter, and saw that only one of the desks in the huge classroom was occupied. The occupant was a young man with a country kind of face; a face you expected to see in the north forty behind the ass end of a mule. His pale-brown hair stuck up in spikes from his head. His country-cousin hands, seemingly all knuckles, were folded on the desk before him. He was looking at Mort with pale, absorbed eyes.
I know you, Mort said in the dream.
That’s right, pilgrim, John Kintner said in his bald, drawling Southern accent. You just put me together wrong. Now keep on writing. It’s not five hundred. It’s five thousand.
Mort started to turn, but his foot slipped on the edge of the gutter, and suddenly he was spilling outward, screaming into the dry, chalky air, and John Kintner was laughing, and he 41
– woke up on the floor with his head almost underneath the rogue coffee table, clutching at the carpet and crying out in high-pitched, whinnying shrieks.
He was at Tashmore Lake. Not in some weird, cyclopean classroom but at the lake … and dawn was coming up misty in the east.
I’m all right. It was just a dream and I’m all right.
But he wasn’t. Because it hadn’t just been a dream. John Kintner had been real. How in God’s name could he have forgotten John Kintner?
Mort had gone to college at Bates, and had majored in creative writing. Later, when he spoke to classes of aspiring writers (a chore he ducked whenever possible), he told them that such a major was probably the worst mistake a man or woman could make, if he or she wanted to write fiction for a living.
‘Get a job with the post office,’ he’d say. ‘It worked for Faulkner.’ And they would laugh. They liked to listen to him, and he supposed he was fairly good at keeping them entertained. That seemed very important, since he doubted that he or anyone else could teach them how to write creatively. Still, he was always glad to get out at the end of the class or seminar or workshop. The kids made him nervous. He supposed John Kintner was the reason why.