âTheyâre coming out to pay us a visit.â
âThe hell they are.â
âThey can stay upstairs.â
âThey can shit. Thatâs where I work. Now, listen, I donât want any trouble about your friends. Things are tough enough around here without a couple of phonies coming out here.â
âThey have to go to Hollywood. They only want to stop and say hello.â
âHello for a week? Write and tell her Iâm working. Iâve got to get to work and you know Iâll never be able to with them around. It takes time to get ready to work and youâre always arranging for something to happen that will stop me from ever getting ready.â
âCanât they come for just a
little
visit? Sheâs my best friend and heâs such a great man.â
âSheâs a bore and heâs a bore.â
âI never see anybody out here. Just the people you know. None of my people.â
âYour people stink. Your sister was here for ten days a month ago. Two months before that your mother and father were here. Now donât try to make me put up with these two, too.â
âO.K. Iâll write and tell her the kids are sick, but I think youâre mean.â
âThe kids arenât sick. Tell her Iâm working. Sheâll understand.â
âI canât be rude.â
âItâs not rude to tell the truth. I
am
working. Weâre broke. Iâve got to see about getting hold of some money.â
âO.K., Iâll tell her youâre working.â
âNow, donât fool around the way you did about your sister. Donât have her drop in on us and then give me a long explanation about how you must have misdirected the letter telling her not to come because she hadnât received it, and now, as long as she was here, we couldnât turn her away. Donât do anything like that again. That was a dirty trick.â
âShe didnât get the letter.â
âIf she didnât, you didnât write a letter.â
âYou saw me mail the letter yourself.â
âThen you didnât tell her not to come. You told her something else. Maybe you told her to pretend that she hadnât gotten the letter. All I know is that we agreed that you would write and tell her not to come because I was working, and then a taxi came up to the house and there she was with six suitcases all the way from New York. No more of that.â
âO.K.â
âJust take care of your kids and let me see if I can start writing again.â
âI miss my people.â
âYour kids are your people now.â
He went out and up the stairs and back to his work-table, but it was no use, he had no heart for the work, he had been fighting the idea of abandoning it for days, and now he knew it was abandoned. Heâd worked eight days for nothing. It was the tenth or eleventh job he had abandoned in ten or eleven weeks. Well, he would have to start again and this time see that it was not a false start. But when he tried to think what would not be a false start, he could think of nothing that wouldnât, everything would be a false start, anything anybody might do would be a false start, there was no such thing as a true start.
He took the envelope with the snapshot in it, put a match to it, and tossed it into the fireplace. Then he got the cheque out of the other envelope and put it in his wallet to have when he went to the bank.
Chapter 12
The way things were, he wished his profession wasnât writing, but that was silly, writing
was
his profession, it had always been his profession, only now he didnât want to write, didnât want to try to write, never reached his work-table eager to see what he had written the previous day, the way it had been in the old days, all he wanted was money because he always needed money, maybe if he had enough of it once and for all, enough to pay his debts, and buy a
Shannon McKenna
César Aira
Hafsah Laziaf
Sheri Anderson
Megan Abbott
V. K. Powell
Diane Duane
Selena Kitt
Kit Tunstall
William Goldman