Hot Night in the City Read online

  As he spoke, her eyes slowly widened, her spine straightened, and she seemed to grow taller in her chair. "Are you letting me go, Mr Griswald?"

  "I wouldn't put it that way."

  "How would you put it, sir?"

  "Well, it's not as though... You know, funnily enough, just the other day I was talking to someone from Piper and Hathaway, and he said they were dying to have you back," he lied with his usual glibness. "In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they gave you a—"

  "I am not interested in returning to copyediting, sir," she said firmly.

  "Oh? Well, that's your business, of course. I just thought you might—"

  "Excuse me for interrupting, but would you mind terribly if we didn't discuss this further just now? I have a lot of work to get out this morning. And I confess that I find this subject rather... unsettling."

  He shrugged. "Whatever you say. But it's something we have to face sooner or later."

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before returning to the task of responding to a devoted fan from Seattle who suggested, not at all obliquely, that if the Great Man ever found himself in the Pacific Northwest, she would be delighted to be of service.

  An hour passed in taut silence broken only by the staccato click of Plimsoll's typewriter in counterpoint to the loose clatter of his old portable, which he loathed because it was forever breaking down, but it had become so much a part of the Griswald mystique that every visitor wanted to have a look at it. Another sacrifice he made to his image. He kept his head down, pretending to be absorbed in work. He couldn't understand why she was reacting in this childish way. This unexpressed resentment! This accusing efficiency! This hysterical silence!

  "I need a drink," he grumbled, as he rose to get himself a glass of burgundy. He didn't really feel the need for a drink, but he wanted to let her know that this wasn't easy for him, either. "Look at this place! I don't know why that goddamned Mrs What's-her-name can't manage to get here and clean up. God knows I pay her enough!"

  Plimsoll did not respond. She rolled the last of the morning's letters from her typewriter and added it to the stack for his signature. Then she turned her chair towards Matthew's desk and folded her hands in her lap. "There are one or two things I should like to say to you, sir."

  Here it comes, he said to himself. "All right, let's have it." He was glad she wasn't going to accept being fired without complaint, because exposing himself to her angry vitriol would diminish any sense of guilt he might feel over this business. He carried his glass to the desk and sat down heavily. "Fire away, Plimsoll," he said with a martyred sigh.

  "Before I 'fire away', sir, I should like to remind you again that Mr Gold will be calling from New York in..." She tipped up her pendant watch, "...in approximately two hours."

  "Forewarned is forearmed... the frigging bloodsucker."

  "Your unjust evaluation of Mr Gold provides us with a useful starting point for what I have to say."

  "Just so the starting point isn't too far from the finish line."

  "I'll do my best to be succinct, sir." She composed herself for what he feared would be a lengthy tirade. "I should begin by telling you that I have always considered you to be one of the most gifted writers of our age."

  "I have seldom heard a set-up line more pregnant with its 'however'."

  She smiled. "However... I also find you to be the most self-centered and ungrateful man I have ever met. Mrs O'Neil serves as a case in point. She has cleaned up after your silly, profligate parties for six years and you've never even bothered to learn her name. Mr Gold carried you through your most difficult period, and yet you constantly refer to him as a parasite. And I, who have worked with you and supported you for these many years... Tell me, Mr Griswald, do you even know my first name?"

  "Your first name?"

  "My first name."

  "Well, it's... All right, so I don't recall it at this moment! But I'm sure you have one. Coming, as you do, from generations of C of E freeloaders, I have no doubt that your bishop father lavished every inexpensive luxury on you, including a first name. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if, in an orgy of nomenclatural prodigality, he didn't bestow a middle name on you as well! He might even have— What are you smiling at?!"

  "Nothing important, sir. I've always been amused by your habit of retreating behind barriers of 'sesquipedalian obfuscation' when you're stung with a sense that you're in the wrong. It's a charming tic, really. Particularly in a man noted for the leanness of his style. Don't you agree?"

  "No, I do not!" He bit off each word.

  "Pity. One of your saving graces has always been your sense of humor. Without that, you would often have been... well, frankly insufferable."

  He stared at her. "You're certainly making it easier for me to give you the sack without remorse. What did you mean when you said that Gold carried me through the Great Drought?... If anything."

  "Mr Gold would never tell you himself, but I think you should know. Do you recall how you managed to survive the lean years when you were unable to produce material you considered—and quite rightly—worthy of your name?"

  "Of course I do. I lived on a trickle of residuals, foreign rights, reprints—that sort of thing. A trickle from which Gold wrung his percentage, you can be sure. So what?"

  "There were no residuals."

  "What? What the hell are you talking about?"

  "No residuals, no foreign rights, no reprints. You were, not to put too fine a point on it, a drug on the market."

  Matthew was silent for a long minute. "Are you trying to tell me Gold sent that money out of the goodness of his heart?"

  "He sent it because he had faith in your talent. And because he was sorry for you."

  "Sorry for me?" He stood up, and thick hangover blood thudded painfully behind his eyes. "That presumptuous son of a bitch was sorry for me? Well, I'll give him something to be sorry about. When he calls this afternoon, I'll fire his ass!"

  Miss Plimsoll tilted her head to the side. "No... I don't... think so."

  Matthew's face stretched with mock wonder. "I beg your pardon?"

  "I don't think you're going to give Mr Gold the sack, sir." A ghost of a smile creased the corners of her eyes. "Any more than you are going to give it to me." She rose and opened her oversized attaché case. As she drew out a large stack of manuscript, some rumpled and old, she said, "Perhaps you have wondered why I began carrying about so cumbersome a case a couple of months ago."

  "Frankly, I hadn't spent much time worrying about it."

  "No, I suppose not. To do so would imply an interest in others."

  "If you're accusing me of not staying awake nights, pondering the hidden implications of the weight and size of your attaché case, then I plead guilty. And I assure you that— O-oh! Wait a minute! I get it. You've written a novel! And you want me to help you get it published, as conscience money for giving you the sack. Don't believe that crap about everybody having a novel somewhere inside them, Plimsoll. There are two kinds of people in the world: the storytellers and the audience members. And you, Plimsoll? You're an audience member. You are, in fact, the prototypic audience member. No, I don't want to read your manuscript. I'm not interested in the refined wordsmithery of someone who, has never lived, never sinned, never loved!"

  "Oh, I have loved, sir," she said, as she carefully evened the pages of the manuscript by tapping them on her desk.

  "No! Don't tell me! Plimsoll in love? It's an image as arousing as a hip bath in ice water. And what poor bastard was the recipient of this uniquely modest gift?"

  "You, sir."

  "Me?"

  She drew a shallow breath. "But that's neither here nor there. What I want you to do now is to read at random from this material. I think you'll find it very—"

  "Me? You've been in love with...?" His eye fell on the top sheet of the manuscript. "Wait a minute! What's going on here? This is my work!" It was indeed two drafts of his latest novel: his own, full of X-ings-out and penciled
marginalia, and Plimsoll's neatly typed copy. She had evidently disobeyed his instructions to burn his originals after copying them, to protect his reputation as a natural stylist whose first draft was practically galley perfect—a facet of the Griswald myth that he had not originated, but one he perpetuated.

  "Now, Matthew, why don't you sit down and read through some of this manuscript while I make us—"

  "Matthew?"

  "—while I make us a nice pot of tea."

  "I don't drink tea!"

  "Well, I'll make some for myself, then. No, on second thought I'll have a glass of your excellent burgundy."

  "My burgundy?"

  "Just read the manuscript, Matthew. Whatever limitations you may have as a man of compassion, I have complete faith in you as a critic."

  While Plimsoll sat at her desk, sipping the wine, her long legs crossed at the ankle, Matthew read, scanning at first with impatient irritation; but his frown deepened as he read with growing—and chilling—fascination. She had made many small deletions and adjustments, an adjective pruned here, a more precise verb substituted there, no one change significant in isolation, but in the mass they made a lean paragraph out of one that had been merely thin, or converted a redundancy into evocative foreshadowing, or transformed the obscure into the ambiguous. He could not quite put his finger on the overall change brought about by her culling and honing, but it had to do with increased celerity. If a minute spent reading his original draft were taken as a norm, compared, for instance, to a heavy, eighty-second minute spent wading through Faulkner's glutinous word-bogs, or stumbling through Henry James's involute parentheticals, then Plimsoll's revision could be said to have swift, light, forty-second minutes. In sum, what the world recognized as the Griswald style existed in Plimsoll's copy and was absent from his original.

  He set the manuscript down and stared out the window, his eyes defocused, his stomach cold. For years he had half-known, if never really faced, the fact that he lacked most of the qualities he admired in his characters. He had never really been devoted to the political causes he so pugnaciously espoused, he was too wrapped up in self to care about the anonymous Wad; even his love-making was based more on tactic than emotion; and as for his much-vaunted physical courage? He had climbed those mountains with the aid of guides; he had shot those lions with a backup man covering him with a Holland and Holland; he had made sure he was often photographed, rough and unshaven, with guerrilla fighters, but he had written his famous war coverage at secondhand, closer to hotel comforts than to battlefield dangers. For years he had admitted to himself that if he were not a good writer, he was nothing at all. And now...

  "I think I know what you're feeling, Matthew," Miss Plimsoll said softly.

  "Do you? Do you really? What a consolation it is to realize that Plimsoll knows how I feel."

  "This is something you must understand. I could not have written those novels and stories alone. It's you who have the creative imagination, the experience, the sense of pain and laughter, the pantheon of unique and fascinating characters."

  "I'm delighted to have contributed a little something."

  "Yours is the voice. I am merely the interpreter. What you lost during the Great Drought was merely... style. And that's the only thing I have provided: just style. Please don't feel miserable, Matthew. We have been a team for some years now, a belle équipe, but it's always been you who possessed the inspiration and the dynamic energy, and I've admired those things in you... loved them, actually."

  "I don't want to hear about it," he said wretchedly.

  "I know this is unpleasant for you. You've never been exactly avid to face the truth about yourself. So it's inevitable that this truth comes with pain... as it comes to the heroes of our novels."

  He reached forward and rubbed his palms along the sides of his battered old typewriter in a kind of tactile farewell.

  "I was content with my invisible role," she continued. "I even cherished helping you the more for the knowledge that you were unaware of it, and happy to be so. And I had every intention of going on like that forever. But I have seen something growing in your attitude towards me for the past month or so." She smiled thinly. "You're nothing if not transparent, Matthew."

  "Please don't call me by my first name."

  "But I've always called you Matthew... to myself. I've known for some time that you were steeling yourself to be rid of me. At first I was sorely stung by the unfairness of it. But then I realized that you were as helpless in this as you are in other things. You've been a slave to your image for years now, and getting rid of me would have been yet another service demanded by that image. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, for your good as well as mine."

  "I don't want to hear about any of this. Nothing matters anymore. It's all over. I suppose you intend to do an exposé? 'Matthew Griswald's Secret Collaborator'? You'll make a bundle with it. It's the kind of scandal the journalists salivate over."

  "Nothing could be further from my mind, Matthew."

  "What is on your mind, then?"

  "I propose that we continue our association."

  He looked at her out of the corners of his eyes, with chary mistrust. "You're saying that you're willing to go on just like before?"

  "Well... not just like before."

  "Ah! I knew it. What is it you want?"

  "I have reached an age when one must consider one's future."

  "So it's money."

  "Security rather than money. Our mutual security. Which I believe would best be assured if we were to marry."

  His eyes widened. "Marry? You and me?"

  "Your shock is not terribly chivalrous, Matthew. It's a solution I've considered in moments of reverie for many years."

  An almost unthinkable possibility grew in Matthew's mind. "You are speaking of a marriage of convenience, aren't you? A marriage that ensures your financial future and gives you the social advantages, the parties, the media events, and all?"

  "Actually, I don't foresee all that many parties. They're not good for your health, to say nothing of your work habits. And I must tell you that I have no intention of entering into un mariage blanc, a sham union confected for purely financial reasons."

  "Whoa. Let me get this straight. Are you saying that we—that you and I would...?"

  "I foresee us working together, tackling problems, and reaping successes together. We shall cherish one another, and we shall... satisfy one another."

  "...Satisfy. And I suppose this relationship is to be monogamous?"

  "Oh yes, indeed, Matthew. Most strictly monogamous. You will never know how I have been hurt by the mindless women I've found here in the mornings, all rumpled and smelling of sleep."

  He nodded slowly, still dazed. "So... if I want your help, I have to buy the whole package. Brains, crotch, and all. That's the deal, is it?"

  "That is the deal."

  He turned again to the stack of manuscript on his desk. He reread two pages of his first-draft work, then the same passage in her revision. Then he tossed the papers aside and looked again at Miss Plimsoll in frank appraisal. Well, she has a nice complexion. And her hands aren't all that bad...

  "It's true, isn't it, what you said about the characters and the situations being mine and mine only. All you do is tighten and polish a little. What you might call 'stylistic packaging'."

  She smiled faintly. "That's all I do, Matthew. Just packaging."

  He puffed out a long sigh and shook his head as though to clear it. "Tell me, Plimsoll. Are you... well, are you any good in the sack?"

  Miss Plimsoll glanced down and smiled into her eyelashes. "I take it you use the word 'sack' in a sense different from the sack you were intending to give me?"

  "Ghm-m!" he growled. "Well, are you? Good in the sack?"

  A slight flush blossomed on her throat. She tipped up her pendant watch and glanced at it. "We have an hour and twenty minutes before Mr Gold calls. That gives us sufficient time to investigate the matter, I should ima
gine."

  HOW THE ANIMALS GOT THEIR VOICES

  AN ONONDAGAN PRIMAL TALE

  Europeans moving westward across America collided with Iroquois pressing eastward to maintain contact with the Algonquin tribes that they followed as a shepherd follows his flocks, for raiding was an important part of their economy. The Europeans found the Five Nations to be the most advanced tribes in North America, both culturally and politically. They also found them to be fierce and ruthless fighters of a caliber they would not meet again until, a hundred years and half a continent later, they encountered the Sioux and the Apache.

  Occupying the center of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Onondagas were neither so warlike as the Senecas nor such crafty traders as the Mohawks, but their role was essential to the union, for they were the conveners of inter-tribal meetings, and they acted as moderators in disputes, as befitted the tribe of Hiawatha who, with Dekana-widah, had molded the warring tribes into a peaceful league centuries earlier.

  In addition, the Onondagas were custodians of tribal memory, guardians of tradition, and tellers of the ancient tales until, most of their warriors fallen in battle against land-hungry Europeans, the women, children, and old men were driven north to the haven of New France, where they settled on poor, stony farms. Lacking young men, they interbred with the French who had left their women behind in their pursuit of riches. My grandfather was a child of Onondaga/French parents.

  In the early years of this century, the Onondaga gift for story-weaving was still alive here and there in pockets of their diaspora. It was from her formidable aunts that my mother learned tales of the sort ethnologists call primal myths. All the stories began by describing the creation of the world by Crayfish, Buzzard, and Wind working to the plan of She-Who-Creates-by-Speaking-Its-Name: always the same words spoken in the same rhythm... those repetitions that children find so enchanting and reassuring. After being attached to the origin of things, each tale would go its own way, each carrying a moral message meant to elevate and to guide.