Hot Night in the City Read online

  Little by little, a new style began to coalesce. Occasionally a page would not be dropped into the waste-paper basket. His characters were still men of flesh and appetite rather than spirit and mind, more moody than deep, more hesitant than reflective, but they became a little older, a little kinder, and hitherto unknown elements began to play a part in their actions: compassion and regret, for instance... even remorse. A short story was offered and published; then another. He won a minor award for a piece about the Paris of his youth, the self-lacerating jealousies and self-inflicted anguishes of his 'lost generation' of self-imposed exiles. He started a novel. And when he went dry, the encouragement he received from his agent, together with gloomy financial prognostications from Plimsoll, made him keep working, flogging out the words, despite his grumpy complaints that nothing flowed naturally and easily, as it had done in the old days. As he licked the drafts into shape, his critical sense told him the writing was not bad, and was getting better.

  The book gave the critics a chance to fill their columns with comparisons between his earlier style and this new one, and The Graying of Matthew Griswald became a fashionable topic at literary cocktail parties. The book never breached the top half of the best-seller charts, the first of his novels not to do so; but the fact was, the heroic era of American letters was passing, soon to be replaced by moist, adjective-strewn, soap-opera novels written about and by ambitious women seeking fulfillment and self-discovery through commercial success and musical beds.

  An honest and therefore only moderately successful film was made from his novel; then another novel followed; and soon his stories were in demand everywhere, despite the collapse of the short fiction market in America, where the reading classes were more interested in articles on self-assertiveness, advancing one's career, getting in touch with one's inner self, and skillful money management. The Great Drought was broken, and his life routine slowly returned to its old rhythms. His flat became a meeting place for the literary luminaries of London: young talents on their way up, writers scratching to maintain their place in the public eye although they produced little beyond reviews of other people's work, society drones who viewed idleness as a sign of breeding, media creatures who, lacking any talent other than their ability to thrust themselves forward aggressively, became talk show hosts and television panelists—in fact, all the social perennials: the climbers, the succulents, the epiphytes and parasites, the delicate blossoms that flourish best in reflected light. Parties sprang up of their own volition, always at his expense, and more often than not he ended up drunk in bed with one of the literary ladies or one of the cute young things who gravitate to such gatherings. He found that he could reduce his work rate to only three or four hours a day, easily half of which was dictating answers to letters and requests into his tape recorder, while Plimsoll cleaned up the latest pages of whatever tale he was working on.

  Over the next four years of relative success, his waist and eyebrows thickened, his hair thinned, his beard whitened. But Plimsoll never altered in energy, attitude, or appearance. Always crisp, always exact, always pushing him to deadlines and duties; she was a dour presence in tweed skirt and white, high-necked blouse, sensible shoes, and long, meatless legs. Her expression seemed to blend strained patience with mute rebuke, particularly when she arrived, as she would this morning, to find the flat strewn with the litter of a party. And her attitude towards the women who sometimes lingered into the morning was a politely arctic version of the reaction one might have at finding something alive in the bottom of one's soup bowl.

  Naturally Matthew resented this, just as he resented Plimsoll's busy, productive proximity as a silent recrimination to his laziness. But above all he resented her being so remorselessly, so unrepentantly plain! He sometimes felt she did it on purpose.

  Just last night during the party he had been stung by the persistent ribbing of one of those people who feel they must pay their way by being unceasingly clever. He had contended that all writers sleep with their secretaries (or, if not exactly 'sleep with', at least use them occasionally to relax from work tensions). Many of his guests had met the cool and proper Miss Plimsoll in passing, and they found hilarious the image of Matthew Griswald, Iron Man of Letters, reduced in his waning years to grinding away on the razor-sharp pelvis of Miss Plimsoll.

  That was the last straw. It was time to be rid of Plimsoll. He could easily manage his own revisions and corrections... or whatever the hell it was Plimsoll did. All he really needed was someone to juggle his calendar and respond to earnest letters from readers, using the standard forms he had worked up to save time and thought. Any good typist could do that, even a cute young thing with no more brains than a racehorse. Yes, his mind was made up. This morning he would find an opportunity, and the courage, to interrupt their iron-clad routine and inform her that her services would no longer be required. That was it. Settled.

  ...Or maybe it would be better to write her a letter. Just to keep the whole thing from becoming tacky and... well, personal. No fair-minded person could call that cowardice. No, it was simply handling a nasty chore in the most dignified way.... For everyone concerned.

  Yes, but what reason would the letter cite for sacking her? The problem, Plimsoll, is that you have a sharp pelvis? Sorry, kid, but the roundness of your glasses and your lack of chin are beginning to affect your typing speed?

  No, the letter idea was stupid! After all, he'd have to dictate it to her, and that would lose him the advantage of emotional distance. The best way to play this would be to find fault with everything she did for a couple of weeks so she wouldn't be surprised when he finally said that all this arguing and bickering was making it impossible for him to work! Hey, maybe if he found fault persistently enough, she'd quit of her own volition. He'd be surprised and hurt by her decision to leave him, but he'd try to understand her feelings, and he would be—

  He heard her key in the door, which then closed with a precise click. She had an irritating way of pressing a door closed behind her, rather than just shutting the goddamned thing. Like any normal person would! Christ, she even closed doors tidily!

  "Mr Griswald?" she said, as she entered, crossed to the little table that served as her desk, and dropped off the letters she had collected at his door. She greeted him exactly that way every morning, the slight interrogative lift at the end of his name serving in place of 'good morning'. She glanced at the debris of the party with infuriating expressionlessness.

  "Damn it, Plimsoll..." he began. But although his irritation was genuine enough, he couldn't think of anything specific to complain about.

  "Sir?" she asked, as she opened the oversized new attaché case she had begun to affect lately, drew out the retyped pages of yesterday's output, and tapped them on his desk to make the edges perfectly smooth before setting them on his desk for his pencil corrections... if any. "Sir?" she asked again. "Is something wrong?"

  "Damn it, Plimsoll! I was thinking my way through a problem and almost had the solution, when you came bursting in and drove it out of my mind!"

  She measured him with her frank, intelligent eyes. Then she smiled faintly and began collecting the messy pages he had ground out yesterday between her departure and the arrival of his unexpected guests. "I'm sure it will come back to you, sir," she said over her shoulder as she brought the work to her own table.

  " '...sure it will come back to you, sir,' " he iterated in a singsong chant that he instantly regretted as infantile. "It frigging well won't come back! It's lost now!"

  From her straight-backed chair she looked at him, her eyes slightly narrowed, as though she were hefting his mood. "Are you feeling ill, Mr Griswald?"

  'Feeling ill' was her euphemism for hungover, and Matthew answered that he was not 'feeling ill'!

  Her smile thinned. "Perhaps not, sir. But you are a little tetchy this morning." She dropped the junk mail into her wastepaper basket and began opening the other letters, reading them with her rapid, vertical scan and setting them on her desk in
order of urgency. "Oh, here's a letter from Mr Gold. Details of the MCA option with which you should familiarize yourself. He'll be telephoning from New York at..." she tipped up the pendant watch that was her chest's only ornament "...at one o'clock our time."

  "Yes, yes, I remember," he growled. "The bloodsucking bastard."

  "That's hardly fair, sir. Mr Gold stuck by us through our difficult times."

  "There's no such thing as an honest agent. Certain people have a warp in their DNA spirals that cripples their consciences and lets them become drug dealers or child rapists or tobacco company executives or literary agents. And what's all this about our difficult times?"

  "Just a manner of speaking, sir. Shall we go over your calendar?"

  "No," he growled. "Where in hell is Mrs What's-her-name? This place looks like a pigsty!"

  "Yes, it does, rather," Miss Plimsoll said, in a tone so expressionless that Matthew could take it for arch. "But I'm afraid Mrs O'Neil won't be in. She telephoned me this morning to say she was feeling a little off."

  "Off what?"

  "Off color, presumably. And off the wagon as well, I suspect."

  "You disapprove of drinking, don't you, Plimsoll."

  "I disapprove of anything that prevents a person from doing his work, sir."

  "But particularly the vices, eh?" He was becoming frustrated with Plimsoll's disinclination to rise to his ill-humor and his taunts.

  She looked at him from behind her steel-rimmed glasses and smiled with a hint of weariness. "To which vices are you referring, sir?"

  "Just the usual lot. The Big Seven. Sloth, Greed, Envy, and the rest of the gang. And their insidious cousins, the Seven Deadly Virtues: Moderation, Probity, Sincerity, Thrift, Chastity, and the rest of them. How do you stand on the deadly virtue of Chastity, Plimsoll?"

  Her lips compressed slightly as she returned to making notes in the margins of the letters she would answer on his behalf. "If chastity is indeed a vice, sir, one can take comfort in the knowledge that it's the one vice modern society is struggling to stamp out, and quite successful—Ah!" She held up an envelope. "We have an invitation from Somerville, my college at Oxford. You are invited to deliver a lecture next term."

  "On what?" He sat at his desk with a heavy grunt.

  "Let me see... There is to be a colloquy on 'the Antihero in Literature and Society'."

  "The antihero exists only in literature. The same person in society is either ridiculed or crucified. ...Or both. And anyway, academics don't know the difference between an antihero, an unlikely hero, and an attractive villain. What are they offering?"

  "It appears that they offer expenses and a banquet in your honour."

  "A banquet in my honor, eh? Well, screw 'em, the tight-fisted bastards."

  "May I paraphrase that in my reply?"

  Was she was trying to be amusing, or was she was being snide? "I never got a college degree. In fact, I was kicked out of two colleges."

  "Wisconsin and Northwestern."

  "Right! And I never majored in literature!"

  "I am aware of that, sir." She smiled. "I recall a letter to an American academic in which you expressed your view that studying literature is, for a real writer, what analysing horse droppings would be to a stallion."

  "I never said droppings! No, I never studied literature, but you did."

  "Yes, sir. In fact, I published a stylistic analysis of your early work which, if I say so myself, was widely praised as a—"

  "But for all your literary study and insight, you ended up a typist. There you are, Plimsoll. Some people lay the eggs; others just nibble at the omelets."

  She lowered her eyes. "Well... I'll confess to nibbling my share of omelets, sir, if you'll confess to laying your share of eggs."

  With a grunt and a frown he buried himself in Plimsoll's neatly typed transcript of yesterday's output, while she dashed off answers to the morning mail. She was able to type replies in so close an imitation of his style that he could get away with just signing or, in rare instances, adding a P.S. in his own scrawl.

  "Well, what about you, Plimsoll?" he asked out of a long silence.

  "Sir?" Her tone was distant, her attention on the letter she was typing.

  "We were talking about the deadly virtue of chastity."

  She was used to the non sequitur vectors his thoughts often took when he was working. "Are you asking what I think of chastity, sir?"

  "I'm asking if you're guilty of it."

  She was silent for a moment before pointedly changing the subject. "Have you decided what you're going to say to Mr Gold when he calls?"

  "Bloodsucking ten percenter!"

  "Mr Gold has proved himself a devoted friend."

  "Devoted to profit. Let's get back to your chastity. What shape is it in, Plimsoll? Unassailed? Assailed but well-defended? Assailed but not within the last decade?"

  "I see no reason to discuss my chastity, sir." There was an edge to her voice.

  Ah! A chink in her frosty armor. At last.

  "Don't think I'm asking on behalf of my own inquisitive libido. I'm working up a character not unlike you, and I was wondering how she would respond to a sexual advance."

  She turned from her work and looked directly at him. "Why on earth would you want to introduce a character like me, Mr Griswald? You usually populate your novels with women of a more obvious and functional sort."

  "Contrast, Plimsoll. I want to establish a character alongside whom the ordinary woman would seem to be a passionate houri."

  "...I see."

  "Well?"

  She drew a sigh and folded her long, thin hands over her lap. "Very well. To begin with, I believe that chastity—which in my view flows from a sense of self-worth—is a most desirable quality in any person. It has been my observation that the promiscuous are either seeking to deny an unstated accusation of sexual inadequacy or attempting to find companionship at its most biological and least compassionate level. One might say that for them coitus is a prelude to handholding; fornication, an avenue to conversation. But I do not equate chastity with sexual abstinence. I see nothing unchaste in making love when one loves... even when that love is only an ephemeral flood of feeling, and neither the product nor the precursor of an enduring relationship. Have I responded adequately to your question, sir?"

  "My frigging cup runneth over!" He returned to scanning yesterday's work. But after a minute he lifted his head. "How old are you, Plimsoll?"

  She emitted a slight sigh that seemed to ask if she were ever to be allowed to get on with her work. "I am forty-six years old, sir."

  "Forty-six. Fifteen years younger than I am. And already you're standing aside from life. You've become an observer rather than a competitor."

  "I have never wanted to be a competitor, sir. Which is not to say that I don't want to be a participant."

  "You can't participate unless you're willing to compete. Life is a contact sport." He liked that, so he scribbled it into in the little notebook he kept for collecting orts of colorful or apt phrasing. When he looked up, he found Plimsoll watching him.

  "May I ask what is wrong, Mr Griswald?"

  "Wrong? In what way wrong?"

  For a moment her gaze remained on him, unblinking. Then she lowered her eyes. "You seem to be bristling with antagonism this morning, sir. And I find it difficult to ignore the feeling that you're intent upon embarrassing me... even hurting me."

  "Nonsense! That's one of your problems, Plimsoll. You're hypersensitive." He sensed this was the moment to list her other flaws and faults, and to tell her he had decided to give her the sack. But he recoiled from the unpleasant task.

  "Is it really nonsense, sir?" She lifted her eyes and measured him for a moment, then, with a slight lift of her shoulders, she returned to annotating the day's mail.

  Shit, he thought. His chance to get this business over with was slipping away. "Ah... actually, Plimsoll, there is something on my mind."

  "Really?" Her eyes remained on her work,
but not her attention.

  "Yes, I... well, to tell the truth, I've decided to..." He knew he was going to lie, as he usually did in awkward social circumstances. More for the sake of the other person's feelings than for his own comfort, of course.

  She left her finger on the paper to mark her place and looked up at him, her eyebrows raised. "You've decided what, sir?"

  He cleared his throat. "Look here, Plimsoll. This routine of work, work, work is beginning to burn me out. I'm sick of cranking out a couple of thousand words every day, every day, every day. I need a break. And I've been thinking about the south of France."

  "What a splendid idea, sir! And perhaps you're right. A change of scene might do you a world of good. But, of course, you mustn't stop writing altogether. We both know the danger in that. The juices stop flowing and your style becomes heavy, and—"

  "Never mind my goddamned juices!"

  "The season's already begun, so I'll have to get cracking to find us someplace pleasant but not overrun with tourists." She smiled self-deprecatingly. "I'm afraid I have only schoolgirl French: accurate enough in grammar, frightful in accent. But still—"

  "Hold it! I didn't say we were taking a vacation. I said I was."

  "Oh," she said, with a soft catch. "Oh, I see." A slight flush reddened her long throat. "I didn't mean to... But I naturally assumed that..." She smiled bravely, but Matthew could have sworn her eyes were damp. Then she took a quick nasal breath and continued in a businesslike tone. "And what do you have in mind for me to do while you're en vacance, sir?" The bit of French just slipped out. "I assume I shall act as a letter drop, unless you want to deal personally with all the trivia of—"

  "Listen, Plimsoll, the fact is... Well, I'm not absolutely sure I will be coming back to Britain. This damned weather and... everything. And even if I do return to London, it won't be the same as before. I plan to reduce my work rate permanently. I can afford a little more leisure. I mean... well, goddamnit, I've earned it. In any case I won't be needing a... well, it would be a waste of talent to use a person like you just to answer a few letters and... that sort of thing."