Страница 46 из 90
Lionel had left him sufficient money to cover meals and gas for his motor scooter while the family was gone. In March, Jon had totaled the used car his dad had given him, and Mona was adamant about not replacing it. Fine with him. He went back to tootling around on the Vespa his dad had bought for him his freshman year. As the end of school approached, Jon asked if he could use his father’s old Olivetti typewriter for summer school, but Mona said she needed it for one of the girls. Jon had to suppress a smile. When it came to sheer predictability, the Amazing Mona was a champ.
He cruised garage sales that weekend until he came across a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter with a manual carriage return. He paid fifteen bucks for that and then stopped at the hardware store and bought four gallons of paint. For the two years he’d been living in his aerie above the garage, he’d been content to leave it in its original bare and shabby state. Now he saw it differently. Three dormer windows looked out on the ocean and the sharply slanting eaves made the rooms feel garretlike, perfect for a writer in residence.
He painted the walls a dark charcoal gray, close to black, in part to a
For the larger of the two rooms he’d found a deep, down-filled easy chair-another garage sale acquisition, this one for twenty-five dollars, with a reading lamp thrown in. He moved his desk under the middle window, placed his typewriter in the center, and laid in a supply of paper, carbons, typewriter ribbons, and white-out. Once everything was arranged, he sat there for four days, drinking coffee and staring at the view. During his preparations, he was brimming with ideas. Now that he was ready to go to work, his mind was blank.
He wrote the occasional paragraph, but he spent most of the time thinking about Walker. He couldn’t figure out why Walker was so successful with girls while he remained so out of it. Walker had had a string of girlfriends his senior year. Two of them Jon found attractive, but neither one would give him the time of day. It was always “ Walker this, Walker that.” Their only purpose in talking to Jon was to ask how Walker felt about them. Having heard Walker trash both in private, Jon wondered if they’d lost their tiny minds. Walker treated girls badly. He ignored or snubbed or insulted them. He’d date them, screw them, and break up with them. Given the tears and upsets and phone calls and public scenes, they were totally smitten, absolutely gaga about him. Jon detached himself, mystified by the unspoken rules underlying love, flirtation, passion, and sex.
Just to feel like he was doing something, he went into his father’s study and pulled out a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. He took it back to his desk and typed out the first two chapters. He liked the plain, choppy feel of the prose, but transcribing someone else’s work didn’t spark inspiration. While he liked the language, he wasn’t co
He had to laugh at himself. He hadn’t written a word and he was already suffering writer’s block. Just to shake himself loose, he closed up shop for the day and broke into a house four doors down. The owner was a Hollywood producer who spent the occasional weekend in Horton Ravine. Jon knew their habits because the couple had come to a number of di
In the master bedroom, at the back of a closet, Jon came across a wooden box. There was no lock on it and when Jon opened it, he found a handgun. It was a Mauser HSc.380 ACP. He took it out of the box and hefted it in his hand. Pasted in the lid of the box there was promotional material in German and English that he read with interest. The pistol was a double-action, all-steel small-frame automatic with checkered walnut grips. Very cool. According to the pamphlet, the gun had open, fixed recessed sights, a positive thumb safety, a magazine safety, and an exposed hammer for additional safety. Jon tucked the gun in his waistband and helped himself to a box of ammunition. Maybe he’d write about a crook who carried a gun just like it. He returned the empty wooden box to the back of the shelf where he’d found it. Chances were the guy wouldn’t pull the box out to check. He’d assume the gun was where he left it.
Back in his garage apartment, Jon took a few minutes to decide where to hide the Mauser. He finally went into the bathroom and unscrewed the plumbing-access panel. He wrapped the gun and ammunition in an old towel and pushed it into the gap on the right, snug against the underbelly of the tub. He returned to his desk feeling fresh and renewed. Again, he raided his father’s study, this time taking out William Faulkner’s Light in August. Typing the first ten pages taught him something about the power of language in the hands of someone utterly in control. Faulkner was extravagant, while Hemingway was spare. The stylistic differences seemed appropriate to the tale each was trying to tell. While Hemingway stripped away, Faulkner painted layer on layer, using long, lavish sentences. Neither narrative voice was natural to Jon, but at least he was begi
Jon had a stack of Playboy magazines, dating back to the first of the year. The girls all had perfect bodies, but they seemed brainless to him. What difference did it make how big their tits were when the girls themselves were shallow, egotistical, and self-involved? Yeah, right. Like he’d really turn one down as unworthy of him. Since he didn’t have a prayer of meeting any of them in real life, he might as well enjoy the illusion of them as lush, sensual, and available. Leafing back through the January issue, he got sidetracked by a Ray Bradbury short story called “The Lost City of Mars” and after that, the second part of a new Len Deighton spy novel called An Expensive Place to Die. Now he’d seen two more writers with entirely different literary effects.
His first few stabs at fiction were erratic, prose that fell flat and ideas that died in half a page. The problem, as he saw it, was that he had nothing to draw on. He’d done a lot of reading, but he didn’t have firsthand experience at much of anything. The only job he’d had was the unpaid babysitting he’d done for the Amazing Mona. Weekends, he caddied at the club, but aside from the intelligence gleaned, it was mostly step-and-fetch-it stuff-cleaning club heads and humping golf bags up hill and down. He’d had no travel adventures, no athletic triumphs, no physical challenges to overcome. Well, the latter wasn’t quite true. He’d been a fat boy and he remembered how shitty that was. He thought it best to avoid stories about prowlers lest he seem too well informed.
He wrote part of a short story based on a notion he had about a kid contaminated by radiation, who turned into a zombie and infected his entire family before his dad shot him dead. He ran out of steam in the middle of that one because he couldn’t think where to go with it. He wrote a mawkish essay about loneliness that struck him as fu