Bag of Bones

When she spoke, her lips moved against the most sensitive part of me.

There were a pair of cotton shorts between us and that was all. “Ve haffvays off making you talk,” she said. “I’ll just bet you do,” I said.

I at least made a stab at the ritual on the day I finished All the Pay from the bp. It felt hollow, form from which the magical substance had departed, but I’d expected that. I didn’t do it out of superstition but out of respect and love. A kind of memorial, if you will. Or, if you will, Joha

She wasn’t just in Ireland this time. My office at the lake is tiny, but has a view. The office in Derry is long, book-lined, and windowless. On this particular evening, the overhead fans—there are three of them—were on and paddling at the soupy air. I came in dressed in shorts, a tee-shirt, and rubber thong sandals, carrying a tin Coke tray with the bottle of champagne and the two chilled glasses on it. At the far end of that railroad-car room, under an eave so.steep I’d had to almost crouch so as not to bang my head when I got up (over the years I’d also had to withstand Jo’s protests that I’d picked the absolute worst place in the room for a workstation), the screen of my Macintosh glowed with words.

I thought I was probably inviting another storm of grief—maybe the worst storm—but I went ahead anyway… and our emotions always surprise us, don’t they? There was no weeping and wailing that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of loss—the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.

I poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up.

“I’m done, Jo,” I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. “So that’s all right, isn’t it?”

There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that’s worth repeating—there was no response. I didn’t sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.

I drank the champagne, put the glass back on the Coke tray, then filled the other one. I took it over to the Mac and sat down where Joha

She took the paper, started to tear it up, then changed her mind and stuck it in the hip pocket of her jeans, instead.

“No paragraph indent,” I said, “this continues.” Then I keyboarded the line I’d been holding in my head ever since I got up to get the champagne. There was a whole world out there; Cam Delancey’s wine-tasting was as good a place to start as any.

I stopped, looking at the little flashing cursor. The tears were still prickling at the corners of my eyes, but I repeat that there were no cold drafts around my ankles, no spectral fingers at the nape of my neck. I hit omx/twice. I clicked on ENTEM I typed The End below the last line of prose, and then I toasted the screen with what should have been Jo’s glass of champagne.

“Here’s to you, babe,” I said. “I wish you were here. I miss you like hell.” My voice wavered a little on that last word, but didn’t break. I drank the Taittinger, saved my final line of copy, transferred the whole works to floppy disks, then backed them up. And except for notes, grocery lists, and checks, that was the last writing I did for four years.

My publisher didn’t know, my editor Debra Weinstock didn’t know, my agent Harold Oblowski didn’t know. Frank Arlen didn’t know, either, although on more than one occasion I had been tempted to tell him. Let me be your brother. For Jo’s sake if not your own, he told me on the day he went back to his printing business and mostly solitary life in the southern Maine town of Sanford. I had never expected to take him up on that, and didn’t—not in the elemental cry-for-help way he might have been thinking about—but I phoned him every couple of weeks or so.

Guy-talk, you know—How’s it going, Not too bad, cold as a witch’s tit, “Yah, here, too, IOU want to go down to Boston if I can get Bruins tickets, Maybe next year, pretty busy right now, Iah, I know how that is, seeya, Mikey, Okay, Frank, keep your wee-wee in the teepee.

Guy-talk. I’m pretty sure that once or twice he asked me if I was working on a new book, and I think I said-Oh, fuck it—that’s a lie, okay? One so ingrown that now I’m even telling it to myself. He asked, all right, and I always said yeah, I was working on a new book, it was going good, real good. I was tempted more than once to tell him I can’t write two paragraphs without going into total mental and physical doglock—my heartbeat doubles, then triples, I get short of breath and then start to pant, my eyes jel like they’re going to pop out of my head and hang there on my cheeks. I’m like a claustrophobe in a sinking subma-tine. That’s how it’s going, thanksjr asking, but I never did. I don’t call for help. I can’t call for help. I think I told you that.

From my admittedly prejudiced standpoint, successful novelists—even modestly successful novelists-have got the best gig in the creative arts. It’s true that people buy more CDS than books, go to more movies, and watch a lot more T. But the arc of productivity is longer for novelists, perhaps because readers are a little brighter than fans of the non-written arts, and thus have marginally longer memories. David Soul of Starsky and Hutch is God knows where, same with that peculiar white rapper Vanilla Ice, but in 1994, Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Norman Mailer were all still around; talk about when dinosaurs walked the earth. Arthur Hailey was writing a new book (that was the rumor, anyway, and it turned out to be true), Thomas Harris could take seven years between Lecters and still produce bestsellers, and although not heard from inalmost forty years, J. D. Salinger was still a hot topic in English classes and informal coffee-house literary groups. Readers have a loyalty that ca