Her red hair looked dull, but her eyes were dark and alert and baleful in her white face. And when she spoke, I knew that death had driven her insane.
“Give me that,” she hissed. “It’s my dust-catcher.” She snatched it out of my hand before I could offer it to her. For a moment our fingers touched, and hers were as cold as twigs after a frost. She opened the book to her place, the playing card fluttering out, and placed Somerset Maugham over her face—a shroud of words. As she crossed her hands on her bosom and lay still, I realized she was wearing the blue dress I had buried her in. She had come out of her grave to hide under our bed.
I awoke with a muffled cry and a painful jerk that almost tumbled me off the side of the bed. I hadn’t been asleep long—the tears were still damp on my cheeks, and my eyelids had that funny stretched feel they get after a bout of weeping. The dream had been so vivid that I had to roll on my side, hang my head down, and peer under the bed, sure she would be there with the book over her face, that she would reach out with her cold fingers to touch me.
There was nothing there, of course—dreams are just dreams.
Nevertheless, I spent the rest of the night on the couch in my study. It was the right choice, I guess, because there were no more dreams that night. Only the nothingness of good sleep.
I never suffered from writer’s block during the ten years of my marriage, and did not suffer it immediately after Johanna’s death. I was in fact so unfamiliar with the condition that it had pretty well set in before I knew anything out of the ordinary was going on. I think this was because in my heart I believed that such conditions only affected “literary’’ types of the sort who are discussed, deconstructed, and sometimes dismissed in the New York Review of Books. My writing career and my marriage covered almost exactly the same span. I finished the first draft of my first novel, Being Two, not long after Jo and I became officially engaged (I popped an opal ring on the third finger of her left hand, a hundred and ten bucks at Day’s Jewellers, and quite a bit more than I could afford at the time… but Johanna seemed utterly thrilled with it), and I finished my last novel, All the Pay from the 3p, about a month after she was declared dead. This was the one about the psychotic killer with the love of high places. It was published in the fall of 1995. I have published other novels since then—a paradox I can explain—but I don’t think there’ll be a Michael Noonan novel on any list in the foreseeable future. I know what writer’s block is now, all right. I know more about it than I ever wanted to.
When I hesitantly showed Jo the first draft of Being Two, she read it in one evening, curled up in her favorite chair, wearing nothing but panties and a tee-shirt with the Maine black bear on the front, drinking glass after glass of iced tea. I went out to the garage (we were renting a house in Bangor with another couple on as shaky financial ground as we were… and no, Jo and I weren’t quite married at that point, although as far as I know, that opal ring never left her finger) and puttered aimlessly, feeling like a guy in a New Yorker cartoon one of those about funny fellows in the delivery waiting room. As I remember, I fucked up a so-simple-a-child-can-do-it birdhouse kit and almost cut off the index finger of my left hand. Every twenty minutes or so I’d go back inside and peek at Jo. If she noticed, she gave no sign. I took that as hopeful. I was sitting on the back stoop, looking up at the stars and smoking, when she came out, sat down beside me, and put her hand on the back of my neck. “Well?” I said. “It’s good,” she said. “Now why don’t you come inside and do me?” And before I could answer, the panties she had been wearing dropped in my lap in a little whisper of nylon.
Afterward, lying in bed and eating oranges (a vice we later outgrew), I asked her: “Good as in publishable?”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but I’ve been reading for pleasure all my life—Curious George was my first love, if you want to know—”
“I don’t.” She leaned over and popped an orange segment into my mouth, her breast warm and provocative against my arm. “—and I read this with great pleasure. My prediction is that your career as a reporter for the Devry News is never going to survive its rookie stage.
I think I’m going to be a novelist’s wife.”
Her words thrilled me—actually brought goosebumps out on my arms. No, she didn’t know anything about the glamorous world of publishing, but if she believed, I believed… and belief turned out to be the right course. I got an agent through my old creative-writing teacher (who read my novel and damned it with faint praise, seeing its commercial qualities as a kind of heresy, I think), and the agent sold Being Two to Random House, the first publisher to see it.
Jo was right about my career as a reporter, as well. I spent four months covering flower shows, drag races, and bean suppers at about a hundred a week before my first check from Random House came in—$27,000, after the agent’s commission had been deducted. I wasn’t in the newsroom long enough to get even that first minor bump in salary, but they had a going-away party for me just the same. At Jack’s Pub, this was, now that I think of it. There was a banner hung over the tables in the back room which said GOOD LUCK MIKE—WRITE ON! Later, when we got home, Johanna said that if envy was acid, there would have been nothing left of me but my belt-buckle and three teeth.
Later, in bed with the lights out—the last orange eaten and the last cigarette shared—I said, “No one’s ever going to confuse it with Look Homeward, Angel, are they?” My book, I meant. She knew it, just as she knew I had been fairly depressed by my old creative-writing teacher’s response to Two.
“You aren’t going to pull a lot of frustrated-artist crap on me, are you?” she asked, getting up on one elbow. “If you are, I wish you’d tell me now, so I can pick up one of those do-it-yourself divorce kits first thing in the morning.”
I was amused, but also a little hurt. “Did you see that first press release from Random House?” I knew she had. “They’re just about calling me V. C. Andrews with a prick, for God’s sake.”
“Well,” she said, lightly grabbing the object in question, “you do have a prick. As far as what they’re calling you… Mike, when I was in third grade, Patty Banning used to call me a booger-hooker. But I wasn’t.”
“Perception is everything.”
“Bullshit.” She was still holding my dick and now gave it a formidable squeeze that hurt a little and felt absolutely wonderful at the same time. That crazy old trouser mouse never really cared what it got in those days, as long as there was a lot of it. “Happiness is everything.
Are you happy when you write, Mike?”
“Sure.” It was what she knew, anyway.
“Sknd does your conscience bother you when you write?”
“When I write, there’s nothing I’d rather do except this,” I said, and rolled on top of her.
“Oh dear,” she said in that prissy little voice that always cracked me up. “There’s a penis between us.”
And as we made love, I realized a wonderful thing or two: that she had meant it when she said she really liked my book (hell, I’d known she liked it just from the way she sat in the wing chair reading it, with a lock of hair falling over her brow and her bare legs tucked beneath her), and that I didn’t need to be ashamed of what I had written… not in her eyes, at least. And one other wonderful thing: her perception, joined with my own to make the true binocular vision nothing but marriage allows, was the only perception that mattered.
Thank God she was a Maugham fan.
I was V. C. Andrews with a prick for ten years… fourteen, if you add in the post-Johanna years. The first five were with Random; then my agent got a huge offer from Putnam and I jumped.