Desperation

They had been in contact more since he’d quit drinking (but still always by phone or by letter; both of them seemed to know, even without discussing it, that meeting face to face would put too much pressure on the fragile bond they had forged), but in some ways these sober con-versations had been even more dangerous… not acrimo-nious, but always with that possibility. She wanted him to go back to Alcoholics Anonymous, told him bluntly that if he didn’t, he’d eventually start drinking again. And the 2 drugs would follow, she said, as surely as dark comes after twilight.

Joh

“John Cheever isn’t writing much these days,” Terry replied. “I think you know why, too.”

Terry could be irritating, no doubt about that.

it was three months ago that she had given him the great idea, tossing it off in a casual conversation that had rambled through what the kids were up to, what she was up to, and, of course, what he was up to. What he had been up to in the early part of this year was agonizing over the first two hundred pages of a historical novel about Jay Gould. He had finally seen it for what it was—warmed-over Gore Vidal—and trashed it. Baked it, actu-ally. In a fit of pique he had resolved to keep entirely to himself, he had tossed his computer-storage discs for the novel into the microwave and given them ten minutes on high. The stench had been unbelievable, a thing that had come roaring out of the kitchen with quills on it, and he’d actually had to replace the microwave.

Then he’d found himself telling Terry the whole thing. When he finished, he sat in his office chair with the phone pressed to his ear and his eyes closed, waiting for her to tell him not to bother with resuming the AA meetings, that what he needed was a good shrink, and in a hurry.

Instead she said he should have put the discs in a casse-role dish and used the convection oven. He knew she was joking—and that she thought at least part of the joke was on him—but her acceptance of the way he was and how he behaved still felt like a cool hand on a fevered brow. It wasn’t approval he got from her, but approval wasn’t what he wanted.

“Of course you never were much good in the kitchen,” she said, and her matter-of-fact tone made him laugh out loud. “So what are you going to do now, Joh

“Not the slightest.”

“You ought to write some nonfiction. Get away from the whole idea of the novel for awhile.”

“That’s dumb, Terry. I can’t write nonfiction, and you know it.”

“I know nothing of the kind,” she’d said, speaking in a sharp don’t-be-a-fool tone he got from no one else these days, least of all from his agent. The more Joh

“Oh. The so-called American Heart Essays. Right. I didn’t forget em, Terry, 1 blocked em out. Rent-payers after the last of the Guggenheim dough was gone; that’s basically what they were. They’ve never even been collected.”

“You wouldn’t allow them to be collected,” she re-torted. “They didn’t fit your golden idea of immortality.”

Joh

“You there, Joh

“I’m here.”

“I always know when I’m telling you stuff you don’t like,” she said brightly, “because it’s the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody.”

“Well, I’m here,” he repeated heavily, and fell silent again, hoping she would change the subject. She didn’t, of course.

“You did three or four of those essays because someone a—cked for them, I don’t remember who—”

Amiracle, he had thought. She doesn ‘t remember who. “—and I’m sure you would have stopped there, except by then you were getting queries from other editors. It didn’t surprise me a bit. Those essays were good.”

He was silent this time, not to indicate disinterest or disapproval but because he was thinking back, trying to remember if they had been any good. Terry couldn’t be 2 trusted a hundred per cent when it came to such questions, but you couldn’t throw her conclusions out of court with—‘ out a hearing, either. As a fiction-writer she’d been of the “I saw a bird at sunrise and my heart leaped up” school, but as a critic she had been tough as nails and capable of insights which were spooky, almost like telepathy. One of the things that had attracted him to her (although he supposed the fact that she had the best breasts in America back in those days had helped matters along) was the dichotomy between what she wanted to do—write fiction—and what she was able to do, which was to write criticism that could cut like a diamond chip.

As for the so-called American Heart Essays, the only one he could remember clearly after all these years was Death on the Second Shift.” It had been about a father and son working together in a Pittsburgh steel-mill. The father had had a heart-attack and died in his son’s arms on the third day of Joh

Other stuff started to come back to him—titles, mostly, things like “Feeding the Flames”

and “A Kiss on Lake Saranac.” Terrible titles, but… fourth-largest volume of letters.

Hmm mm.

Where might those old essays be. in the Marinville Collection at Fordham. Possible.

Hell, they might even be in the attic of the cottage in Co

Something began to nibble at the back of his mind.

“Do you still have your scoot, Joh

“Huh.” He barely heard her.

“Your scoot. Your ride. Your motorcycle.”

“Sure,” he said. “It’s stored at that garage out in West-port we used to use. You know the one.”

“Gibby’s.”

“Yeah, Gibby’s. Someone different owns it now, but it used to be Gibby’s Garage, yeah.”

He had been blind—sided by a brilliantly textured memory: he and Terry, fully clothed and petting like mad behind Gibby’s Garage one afternoon in… well, a long time ago, leave it at that, Terry had been wearing a pair of tight blue shorts. He doubted if her mother would have approved of them, God, no, but he himself had thought those discount-store spe—2 cials made her look like the Queen of the Western World. Her ass was only good, but her legs… man, those legs had gone not just up to her chin but all the way out to Arc-turus and beyond. How had they gotten out there in the first place, among the cast-off tires and rusty engine parts standing hip-deep in sunflowers and feeling each other up. He couldn’t remember, but he remembered the rich curve of her breast in his hand, and how she’d gripped the belt-loops of his jeans when he cried out against her neck, hauling him closer so he could come tight and hard against her taut belly.