It has been quite some time since anybody has come to find me in this forgotten place, poking around and asking for me. Perhaps that is the reason why, when the young man requested an interview, I agreed to give it. His demeanor on the phone (slightly stuttering, harmless) suggested I would be rather insensitive to refuse, and before I was conscious of it, I had offered not only my consent but also my invitation, indicating a specific time and place. There is nothing for me now but to go through with it.
This morning's breakfast was terrible--a rather runny version of eggs Benedict--but I have decided it is not an omen. Breakfast foods must be discounted when it comes to the business of augury, else no one would ever look into the future and see anything good or even remotely promising. On all other accounts I feel it will be a pleasant day; I must remark that the weather this morning is unusually spectacular, and as they wheel me out into the blaring sunshine of the interior courtyard, I can already tell it will be an early spring, tight little stubborn buds knitted about the greenery everywhere I look.
It is not easy, this business of growing old, and I must admit I have not gone about it with any of the grace that other writers are famous for having at their disposal. But perhaps I lack the magnitude of fame that those other writers also have in their possession. Quite often the security of irrefutable fame can provide the comfy cushion necessary to produce the masterful illusion of grace. But all this digression about aging gracefully tires me. I haven't any delusions about that anymore. I smooth my palms over the tops of my knees and study the green rivulets of veins sprawling and bulging their ways across the backs of my hands. No, I haven't any delusions about any of that anymore, but even so, I wish I wouldn't have to meet the young man coming to interview me this way--in my wheelchair, a plaid blanket tucked carefully around the inanimate flesh that is my lap. But I haven't a choice about the chair. The medication they've put me on lately makes the chair altogether more than necessary. They tell me it is for my arthritis. I don't see the good use of lubricating my joints if it renders the limbs themselves utterly useless. But then, I have never portended myself a doctor, and perhaps total estrangement from one's body is the most prudent route to take during one's final years.
When the young man arrives he comes in a nervous flurry, obviously a man accustomed to being late and making apologies for it, though when I turn my wrist to glance at my watch I note that he is precisely on time. I look him over, tallying the details that might divulge the secret of his sum substance. He is the sort of man I once saw myself as being--robust, eager, moderately handsome, and haphazardly intelligent, as if he'd woken up one morning and only accidentally stumbled upon the prowess of his own brain and consequently learned to guard it as one might any other unexpected gift. Instead of one of those offensive, rectangular, hand-held tape recorders they all shove in your face these days, he takes out a small pad of notepaper and extracts a pencil from his breast pocket. There is a small gesture--a quick lick of his tongue to the pencil lead, and he is ready to begin. So much like myself, I hear myself murmur in a low tone. He pretends not to notice my ill-monitored omission and politely clears his throat. I decide I like this man, and select the version of my story I will tell for the day. It has been so long since I have last told it; I am losing track of all the different ways and manners in which it has come out.
"Where shall we begin?" he asks, a delighted gleam in his eye. The endearing stammer he had on the telephone is all gone now, replaced by a much more carnivorous brand of charisma.
"It is your interview, sir," I remind him.
"Alright," he pauses a moment, running his eyes politely over me. I can see him seeking out the best seam at which to pull. "Is it true you were once a close confidant of C. C. Rider?"
I have been too quick to like this man; it is a shame he has chosen the same route they all take. I sigh.
"C. C. Rider was a member of the Writers' Commune during the same years I myself was a member. We were all confidants for each other. That was the very idea of the place."
"Then what of your remarks as recorded by John Blythe in his biography of the life and works of C.C. Rider?"
"John Blythe was never a member of the Commune. Whatever hare-brained publisher decided to commission his production of Ms. Rider's biography is plainly an ignorant dolt. I have no further opinions on the matter."
At this the young man hesitates. I can feel a shift in his energy. Whatever in his person that was moments ago bursting with vitality and confidence has now been stumped by the conundrum that is the bitterness of my old age. I relent a little and decide to push forward of my own accord. It is only fair.
"I never knew a person named C. C. Rider," I begin, and in instant reaction the boy becomes even more crestfallen, "but I did know a person named Celeste." He brightens. "Celeste," I continue, "like the heavenly skies, or whatever else caught her hippie's fancy, as I am sure the name was a rechristening of her own doing."
The young lad straightens up now. He thinks he has got a hold of something now, something more tangible. A steady but timid tug at the line. He proceeds, but is cautious not to reel in too quickly.
"Tell me about Celeste then, if you will . . ."
Tell him about Celeste. He will not like it if I do. They've all got her chiseled into the stone tablets exactly the way she had wanted it done--as a god, as a cosmic energy. Something beyond reproach--like the very sky itself. He does not know--but then, neither does anybody else, so how can he be faulted? Celeste. The word whispers through the mouth in exactly the same manner the women herself did. A thoughtless thing. A thoughtless bimbo, or so I thought at our first encounter. I remember that day in the Commune--she moved her things into the office on the third floor, and as I watched her long blonde ponytail bounce its way up two flights of stairs I thought to myself how disgraceful it was that the complex could go so quickly to hell in a hand-basket. The Commune was a place for serious writers. She was clearly not in our league; not in the league of those who had founded the damn thing. To speak plainly--instead of an admirable colleague, I saw a firm ass bouncing up the Commune stairs, attached to a cartoonish blonde swathed in a much-too-small a tube top. As a still image or film reel it might have been almost comical, it was as if her positive and negative points were all on display for everyone to see: the firm ass being her strongest attribute, and her bad judgment in women's attire revealing the full character of her rather restricted intellect. This young man now before me will think me cruel for putting it in such an openly slanderous manner--they all do, so quick they are these days to champion her merits now that she is no longer around. In my defense, my objection to her presence was not entirely irrational, nor was it the chaffing of a jealous ego. I had my reasons. To begin, Celeste had not been formally admitted to the Commune in the traditional fashion--that is, painstakingly selected from afar and later and voted in by all members of our society. Her arrival was a shock to me, and I will admit it was my assumption that she had likely slept her way into our group--an assumption that took no great toll upon the imagination to conjure up, as Celeste was better known at the time for her romance novels, of which it is best to say were quite graphic and illustrative in their details and leave matters at that.
"To understand any of this," I warn the young man, "you must first understand the Commune." He nods. I take this as a promising sign and continue. "It was the Sixties, you see, and the Commune was created by those of us who had mutually agreed that we would both embrace and choose to be unafraid of all those ideas that were--how shall we say?--intellectually dangerous. In those days, even the word itself, `commune,' had the thrill of danger to it, and we knew we were trafficking in controversy when we erected the painted wooden sign out front of the building and found our façade pummeled with broken bottles and rotten eggs later that very same night. In the first years it truly stood as the symbol of all that was quintessentially revolutionary, and it was no surprise to spot our pictures in the paper. They had it all wrong of course--calling us Reds and so forth because of the name, but in a way we enjoyed that just as well as we enjoyed what we really were."
"What you really were?" the young man asks, his pupils dilating as he glances up against the brightening sunshine of early afternoon. He regards me in such an earnest manner as I have not seen in a long time.
"Well, certainly not the radical supporters of the Soviet Union and Red China that everyone supposed we were. In fact, I hate to say it, but politics had very little to do with the Commune. It was something larger than merely that."
"Meaning?" His head jerks up from the notepad. I listen as the compunction dies from the question and his voice trails off.
"Meaning the Commune was about writers writing, and just that. An idea that was infinitely large, and yet entirely simple in its design."
I sigh impatiently and roll up the sleeves of my cable-knit sweater. Why have the nurses dressed me in such a heavy knit for the day? Surely they must want me to broil alive out here in the courtyard. It makes me think of the way they roast pigs in Hawaii for the tourists--wrapping them in foil, carrying them outdoors, and then burying them in a pit under several layers of sand and hot coals.
"Please, tell me more about the Commune," the young man entreaties me gently. "And Celeste," he quickly and quietly adds, a slight, almost imperceptible note of desperation creeping into his voice, "I want to know more about Celeste."
The Commune. He wants to know more about the Commune. What can one say? It became exactly what we intended it to be--one day the school books will set it down in writing. The fabled mansion in San Francisco, packed to the hilt with writers. They might even take photographs. The tiny octagonal-shaped rooms, the peeling floorboards, the old gaslight chandeliers hanging like forgotten earrings from the ceiling. The coffee ring stains, the yard sale furniture, the books stacked heap upon heap. And, of course--never to be forgotten: the writers that called it home. The Commune was a space we'd designed for writers to live and work amongst writers, to encourage one another, to include one another, to share and always conquer our individual blockages, to share and never conquer our collective fame. It was a lovely utopian dream in every way, and in the beginning it worked quite well.
Catastrophic disasters always arrive abruptly and without the slightest inkling of forewarning; it is only fitting that this was precisely the manner in which Celeste arrived that first morning. A knock upon my door signaled the beginning of the end. Before I uttered a word of acknowledgement or invitation, Celeste had entered my cramped little office, skirted her way around my desk and was settling herself on the dilapidated chaise lounge I had wedged into a corner of the room, just below the picture window. At her feet she rested a giant straw bag, embellished with colored yarn in the shapes of butterflies and flowers. I must have given her a stare not unlike a goldfish sprung from its own bowl, gills straining to make sense of the very air all around it. But no matter what look I aimed at her, Celeste was obviously impervious to it. Instead she assumed a slumped posture on the chaise and fixed an intent gaze on the frayed state of her chewed fingernails.
"I've read you," she stated matter-of-factly. I watched as she shifted her legs, crossing and re-crossing them with the distracted impatience of a little girl. "I liked your stuff," she continued. "Well some of it, anyway. I can't say I liked Elysian Fields very much, but it had its shining moments."
I must have winced visibly at the mention of my most recent book. What was supposed to be the jewel of my career had lately become the critics' favorite target for gratuitous derision.
"Well," I said, trying to sound as if I were welcoming her remarks as compliments, "We do our best to please."
Celeste nodded enthusiastically at this, then furrowed her brow as if considering the matter. To my horror, she was not yet finished in her ill-mannered ramblings.
"I mean, who cares what a bunch of phony old critics say? It won't matter much in a hundred years, and besides, I suppose you'll always be better known for Hedgehog Down."
Ah, Hedgehog Down. How many years had passed since I'd penned that first novel? I still remember every word of it--and I ought to; I'd written them all out longhand several times over before even daring to glance at a typewriter. Suddenly I noticed from the corner of my eye Celeste was shifting again upon the chaise. I found myself irritably ripped away from my happy remembrance.
"Would you like to see what I'm working on?"
"No," I replied in a flat tone, hoping to clip her back a to formal distance early on so as not to have to mess about with feigning a friendship later down the road. "I'm quite busy lately, as a matter of fact. But thank you for thinking of me."
Undaunted, she leaned over to reach into her straw bag, whereupon I began to better appreciate the merits of the tube top she'd selected that day. I watched as she extracted several typed sheets, crisp and new despite their mode of transport in the straw handbag.
"You don't have to read it right now," she stated in a plain voice, and got up from the chaise in a flounce. "You can read it whenever you like," she added in a generous tone, and flipped the pages of typeface onto my desk. With the pages came the scent of her in its gust: the sickly baby-powder-smell of her perfume mingled with a whiff of cherry-flavored Chapstick.
"It may take me some time to get around to it," I continued, desperate to be rid of what was sure to be her most ill-written words, "Really, I'm quite swamped. You'd better not leave them with me for fear you never see them again." I pleaded, eyeing the venomous pages were they lay upon my desk and not daring to move an inch toward them.
"Oh, I'm not worried," she replied breezily. "I always make plenty of copies of everything I write."
How could I argue in any sort of genteel mode with this woman? What on earth did she think she might be writing that I could possibly harbor a secret desire to read? I realized I had been forcibly made the owner of some ninny's malformed brainchild--how embarrassing if someone were to spy the pages in my office and think them mine! At that juncture, I found myself utterly repulsed by everything about this woman and was relieved to see by her body language that her next intention was to leave the confines of my office. But, just then, she did an odd thing. On her way out the door, she feigned as if she'd dropped her purse. This sent her into an intentional and rather choreographed sprawl down to the floor just next to my feet, and as she rose back up, she used my knee as a brace by which she might better hoist herself up. The touch of her hand was quick--it ran from the top of my knee and up my inner thigh in the matter of a few seconds, but it was enough to elicit a reaction from the region just below my belt. As she walked out, I found myself staring blankly after her and was quite unable to write a single word for some time after that. The next few weeks continued in much the same manner.
"Every day," I now explain to the eager young man sitting across from me, "Celeste would come into my office, every day she would offer up her day's worth of pages for my perusal, and every day she would, by some device or rouse, find a new way to excite me. Until, of course, things reached their final conclusion."
"Which was?" he prompts me, his eyes two innocent saucers.
"I fucked her," I say, relishing the sound of it. The young man furrows his brow, looking to me in bewilderment. Surely, I think, he has heard this part of the story before. I know I've told this part before--that first time telling it to Mr. Blythe was so deliciously delightful. Surely this young man has done enough research to have heard this little morsel of tasty gossip before.
He straightens up, and I can see now that he has heard it before. Perhaps his shock had more to do with my use of profanity. Other writers are always unnerved by a writer's heedless use of the word fuck. It's as if they all wish they'd thought of breaking the rules first, just to be the first between the two of you to make a point of it.
"For a time," I continue, "I found the arrangement between Celeste and myself quite splendid. Reliable and comfortable, even." I wait a few seconds for my words to sink in, to make their mark. "She never lingered in my office very long--always arriving and departing in a rather spontaneous, abbreviated fashion, you see--and afterward I found that the sexual tension it exercised from my body freed me up to attack my writing in a much more prolific manner such as I'd never before experienced."
I notice that the young man has all but abandoned his little lined tablet of paper, frozen and gawking in my direction. Is it incredulity? Which part does he doubt? The idea of a woman like Celeste making love to a man such as myself? Or the part when I'd said it'd been a wondrously productive time in my life's career? I'd hate him for thinking the first notion; I'd despise him for considering the second. I can't remember what eventually prompted me to look at those wretched pages of hers, but I do know it must have occurred as a result of the hours I was keeping by then at the Commune.
"After Elysian Fields," I explain carefully to the young man, "money was a little slower in the coming. I had to tighten down a bit, and since I was spending so much time in my office at the Commune, I didn't see the benefit any longer of keeping my apartment in the city. I let the lease on the latter go, and moved all that I had into my office in the Commune, sleeping on the roll-away I put in there for the odd occasion that I'd find myself working all night. It was not an unsuitable lifestyle--I found myself able and eager to write more and more each night. That is, until I finally lifted Celeste's pathetic pile of pages from their resting position upon my desk."
I glance nervously at the young man's face. This part of the telling never fails to make me uneasy; I haven't quite got the knack of telling it down properly. So far, he looks convinced. I can see the muscles of his face, tensed and receptive for whatever will come next.
"It was only then that I discovered what Celeste had been giving me during all those little interludes. As I held the pages in my hands and rifled through them, I felt every last ribbon of breath escape from my chest. Excuse me--" I say, and cough a little for authenticity. "Quite often the memory of it can still exert a small degree of effect upon me."
The young man springs from his seat. Likely he is seeking the nurses. Not the sort of man who finds himself daily faced with the withering symptoms of old age, I think to myself. I wave a hand to soothe his lack of confidence.
"No, no," I say in a feeble voice, "I am quite fine, I assure you."
The young man settles back into his chair. I can tell he urgently wishes me to continue in the story, but fears voicing his request aloud. He is trying to be considerate of my health, I know. I wait a good many seconds before clearing my throat to continue.
"That was the day," I say, with conviction. "That was the day I discovered the bitch had been stealing my writing all along!"
The young man's eyebrows shoot up in an involuntary reaction. Obviously he means to challenge to my veracity, I think.
"I don't know how she did it," I continue, impatient to wade through the landslide of questions he will undoubtedly pour upon me. "But somehow, by some method, she had been systematically copying my pages, word for word . . . I found the entire first half of my next novel that night, all neatly typed and stamped with Celeste's ridiculous fancy of a name at the bottom."
"What . . .what did you do?" the young man stammers. I almost smile but carefully control the muscles and frown instead.
"Well I certainly couldn't continue on with that piece any longer. I scrapped it. When she arrived at my office the next day, sans knock, per her usual behavior, I confronted her."
"And the righteous act of indignity she performed was very convincing. Perhaps the strength of her performance in such matters is what finally led her to the success of her life. I am convinced it is surely what allowed her to publish my writing as her own. The very thought of it was so absurd when I found out--she, the hack romance novelist, producing a masterful work of literary fiction. It's outrageous. I'm only sorry more people could not see the obvious flaw of such a logic."
Good God. The sun is really beating down on us now. Talking to this reporter, confessing the more troublesome details of my career, I feel as if I have been placed under an interrogation lamp. I take out a handkerchief from my trouser pocket and mop the beads of perspiration on my forehead.
"And after this..." the young man searches for the best word, "this ... confrontation, that was the last you saw of C. C. Rider?--I mean, that was the last you saw of Celeste?"
"Well, shortly after that, of course, the manipulative little Lolita went and got herself famous. It was all dignified book-signings and black turtlenecks after that," I grunt, not bothering to hide a single note of bitterness. The young man seems almost satisfied with this. He begins to flip through his notebook, reviewing the notes he has made. Somewhere a nightingale sings in a warbled voice. The courtyard is near to exploding with the scent of spring.
"Of course," I begin, a little distrustful of my own voice by now, "there was one more encounter I might mention."
"Yes. An encounter during which Ms. Rider came back to the Commune to see me."
"And? Please, if you don't mind . . ."
The poor lad is hooked. I want so badly to unburden it all into the open receptacle of his sincere expression. I cannot help myself now.
"I will speak plainly then," I say. "After Celeste moved from the Commune, I won't pretend I hadn't imagined how the meeting might happen in several ways--scenarios in which we'd meet by odd coincidence and somehow she'd be forced to admit the blatant theft of my work, or perhaps another in which she'd come to me in tears, unable to begin a second novel without me. But none of these scenarios actually occurred. The day it happened, Celeste let herself into the room as usual. It was almost as if she sought to reenact the former ritual of our relationship. Silently she crossed the room, and, standing before the chaise lounge she'd favored upon her very first visit to my office, she slowly and methodically pulled her clothes from off her body."
"Do you mean to say that the two of you...?" the young man's voice trails off, unable to complete the sentence.
"Good heavens, no! I would not have touched Celeste that day for a king's ransom. But I believe she already knew that upon entering the room. This was a rather unique situation, you see; she was not undressing for sex, she was undressing for revenge."
Suddenly the reporter is aiming a piercing look in my direction, one I have not seen in his arsenal yet in the course of our day together. Perhaps I have misjudged him. Perhaps he will not react in the sensitive and sympathetic manner I now expect. I find myself racing to explain.
"You must understand, in all my dealings with Celeste, I had never seen her body entirely nude. Our trysts were somewhat rough, hurried affairs, and I rarely took the time to undo more buttons and clasps than were absolutely necessary. That day, the day she came back to the Commune, was the first time I saw her complete inventory of anatomy ... it was the first day I saw who she really was."
The young man's eyes have that squinty, narrowed look about them that predatory cats have when they are sighting prey from a far distance away.
"Then you admit, you knew Celeste was a man," he says in a calculated voice, somewhere between inquiry and statement.
"I'm sorry," I start into a coughing fit again. "I think I may have conclude our interview earlier that I anticipated."
He is not dissuaded from his line of questioning and continues.
"If you knew C.C. Rider was a man, then doesn't it stand to reason that you might have suspected as much all along?"
"Young man, don't be ridiculous," I say as I wave my hand as a signal to the nurses. Damn them. Leave it to them to ignore me at a moment such as this.
"Doesn't it stand to reason that you may have known more about C. C. Rider's identity all along, and that you have suppressed the acknowledgement of it until now?"
"That's enough," I say, now genuinely gasping for air. The nurses have spotted me, waving my arms like a lunatic to get their attention. They come to rescue me, to wheel me away from this intruder and into the safe and dark confines of the brick walls.
"My apologies," I call to the young man over my shoulder as I am being wheeled away. "I hope you will not feel this has been a waste of your time."
"On the contrary," he says and rises from his chair to trail my rolling wheelchair to the hospital door. He rushes ahead of our path and politely draws the door open, holding it wide for the big rubber wheels of my chair to pass through.
"In that case I will gladly look for the forthcoming article," I say with as much finality as I can muster, "Now you must excuse me."
BAY AREA WRITER NATHAN HATHAWAY TELLS
THE STORY OF LIFE AS A SCHIZOPHRENIC AUTHOR
It seems only appropriate that I met Nathan Hathaway on a cold morning in late autumn, a crisp day with the scent of bitter change in the air. The character of that morning to me seemed only to intensely reflect the sort of fractured genius I was scheduled to encounter.
Despite the chill of the morning, Mr. Hathaway insisted we meet outdoors in the courtyard of his most recent home, the Latterly House for Greater Psychological Care, a rather large and stately assistance facility located just outside of Sunnyvale, California. Contrary to any preconceived expectations I may have had based on rumors, Hathaway appeared alert and ready for our interview, though rather impervious to the frigid temperature of the day and the darkly fattened rain-clouds hovering just over our heads.
Mr. Hathaway gave every sign of being at ease as we began with what the doctors had warned me might be a volatile topic--the existence of C. C. Rider. Hathaway admitted the existence of C. C. Rider in a startlingly straightforward manner and furthermore appeared to be willing to discuss the life and writings of C. C. Rider, though he did not express a willingness to own up to the nom de plume on his own behalf. According to Mr. Hathaway, C. C. Rider, or "Celeste," as Hathaway preferred to refer to her, was merely a thief who had maliciously stolen his best work from the late sixties.
Though the story of C. C. Rider hardly requires introduction for your average lit major in college, the rest of us might do well to know that Hathaway funded his early career by writing romance novels under the name Celeste Rider. Later in his life, his work took a profoundly literary turn, and he penned the works for which he is most famous while working in (and later taking up full residence in) the San Francisco Writers' Commune on Stanyon Street. Upon achieving fame, he dropped the name Celeste and substituted the initials C. C. (though by reputation he refuses to disclose the significance of the second C), thereby becoming C. C. Rider--the author we have all come to know as a sturdy fixture in the modern cannon of English language literature. The tragedy of Hathaway's life occurred when Hathaway no longer was able to consciously acknowledge C. C. Rider as his own nom de plume, and turned his back on all further and forthcoming works. This is most definitely the state in which I found Mr. Hathaway to be when I paid him a visit last week.
Upon further research, the conclusion is quickly drawn that it is highly likely that the schism of Mr. Hathaway's life occurred when he was allowed to move into a second room in the giant Victorian house that was the San Francisco Writers' Commune. While Hathaway's fellow writers and close friends at the Commune (including Beach, Goulet, and Kelfer, to name but a few) felt at the time this was a reasonable request, given the growing magnitude of his work, they were later to admit this logistical transaction may have been the turning point that marked Hathaway's final and permanent descent into the darker depths of his psychosis. During our visit together, Hathaway spoke of this acquisition of a second room in the commune in the third person--describing the arrival of "Celeste" as if she were, in fact, a living, breathing woman, separate and independent of his own person. He tells the tale of her arrival as if Celeste were an uninvited invader, describing her entry into the Commune as a "bimbo entering the company of distinguished gentlemen," and calling her work "hack romance" and "the disfigured progeny of an absolute ninny." Though he claims Rider's best work was really written by his own hand, he disavows all ownership of his earlier romance novels--the novels which originally earned Hathaway his proverbial keep, and perhaps afforded him the leisure to pursue his larger literary novels.
The details of Mr. Hathaway's psychosis have only recently begun to be better explored in an academic light. Never before has a living, canonized author demonstrated the kind of psychological disruption concerning his nom de plume as has Nathan Hathaway. To detach oneself so completely from the hand that penned one's own novels is no doubt a topic that will continue to fascinate both popular readers and literary theorists alike. John Blythe's biography, published last year, is one such example of a deeper exploration into this territory--a territory that marks the dark boundaries between a writer's living identity and a writer's literary identity.
My last comments to Mr. Hathaway regarding the existence of C. C. Rider seemed to suggest that there might be hope for reunification between his multiple personalities--that there may someday be reconciliation in store for C. C. Rider and Nathan Hathaway. As we exchanged our parting remarks and I watched his caretakers wheel him gently away, I could not help but yearn for such a happy reunion to find its own potent place in literary history.
At this point, the article concludes in an abrupt fashion, I note. The young man obviously has a few more miles to go in his quest to write at the fully realized level of a seasoned writer. But altogether it is not a poorly written article.
I fold the newspaper article at its roughly scissored edges. The nurses have cut it out hastily for me. Likely they think I do not have the capacity to appreciate the smaller corners of consideration. Or perhaps if they allow me any credit at all they think I will not keep this article, for lack of dignity in its content. But they are wrong. I fold the article up carefully and tuck it into the cigar-box under my nightstand, along with all the others. Then I hesitate. With my aged paw of a hand, I slide the cigar box to one side and retrieve the book resting just beneath, debating whether or not to give Mr. Blythe's wretched prose yet another go-round. It would be my forty-second time through; I've counted each one like an obedient dieter rationing his intake of chocolate.
It is not easy, this business of growing old. Even more difficult still, is the business of cultivating one's own insanity. I've worked so hard and so long, it would be a shame to have it all undone now. This one was damned clever, I must admit. Perhaps I should do better to refuse the invitation next time a fresh young reporter decides to come round. But then, what would be the pleasure in that?
© 2005 by S. E. Rindell. All rights reserved.