Of course there never was. There was never a note from
Playboy
inside the envelope. Big Daddy Hugh had never taken the time to tell her he was dying to see something else she'd written.
“Open it slow,” she'd say. “Look in.”
I'd open it slow. I'd look in.
“Do you see anything?” she'd say.
I always said the same thing: “Yeah, I see something.”
“What?”
“I don't know.”
“Is it a note?”
“I don't know.”
Then there'd be this small period of silence. She'd lean forward and turn down the volume on the TV She'd look over at me like we were about to be gassed and only had a few remaining moments between us.
“Look,” she'd say.
I'd reach in and pull it out. “The material enclosed has been given careful consideration and is not suitable for use in our publication at this time. Due to the volume of submissions received, we regret that we cannot offer individual criticisms. All submissions should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope if their return is desired.
Your interest in blah blah blah is most warmly appreciated. The editors.”
And then she'd go off on a crying jag. She'd just get up and rush off into the bedroom and throw herself on the bed. So I didn't want another one of those scenes coming up that Saturday morning. She didn't have anything out right then; she'd sent some stuff off to
Redbook,
but they'd rejected all of it. I think she'd already gotten about fourteen rejection slips when she wrote “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.” I was sitting there eating my breakfast when she came in. I had the story beside my plate. I'd been reading it over again, but it didn't look any better than it had the night before. As far as I could tell, the kid was a nerd, and his mother was a turd, and the only thing the dog did, even on the last page, was lie around and whine and thump “its tail weekly against the hard unforgiving gray cobblestone pavement littered with cruel gray pigeon droppings.”
“Well,” she said. She was grinning again. “You've slept on it.”
Yes I had.
“I didn't know you knew so much about literature,” she said.
“Ah, I'm a closet fan of Flaubert's.”
“Who's he?”
“Gustave. I like Melville, too. You ever read
Moby Dick?”
“No, but I saw it on the late movie. Gregory Peck and all them. Did that come from a book?”
“Yes, it did, dear. A very great book.”
“Well, I didn't know it was a book. What'd you think about my story?”
I knew that if I said I liked it, she'd ball my brains out. She'd shut down the typewriter, lock all the doors and pull the curtains closed, strip naked down in the floor and tell me to climb on.
“It was something else,” I said. “Indescribable.”
She started stripping out of her clothes.
“Unbelievable.”
She stepped out of her panties.
“I can't believe you wrote it.”
She got back on the pillows of the couch and put one foot on the coffee table and said, “Come and get it, big boy.”
“You're better than Jackie Collins,” I said, and went to her.
Okay, so it was a lousy thing to do. But it made her happy, for a while at least. Naturally she typed up a clean copy of “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati,” didn't change a word, and sent it off. I think it set some kind of record for coming back. I came home from the reactor one evening and she was drunk in the living room. She had a bottle of vodka, a pint, and she was halfway through it. She had it mixed up in some grape Kool-Aid, and she was soused. Supper wasn't fixed, and she started getting sick, and I wound up holding her head over the commode for her while she threw up.
All this happened before things got bad.
I really got into that first novel she wrote. It was about this grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park that had lost its fear of humans and was running around eating everybody. The story line was pretty good, even if her dialogue did suck, and
she somehow knew how to make all these narrative hooks. For instance, getting one of the characters into a tight squeeze, then cutting to another chapter so that you'd rush along to see what was going to happen. And she invented all these people. That was what amazed me. She just made up all these people out of her mind. I mean people that were nothing like us. It was all about these park rangers who were trying to kill this bear. Most of them had bad marriages, but one of them, this young guy named John, was a newlywed. He was a real upright guy, loved his wife and all that, was dedicated to the Park Service. But his buddy, Jesse, had this wife who looked like Ann-Margret and was always coming on to him. Okay. Then, there was this other ranger named Walker, who'd already been dipping his wick into Jesse's wife, Glenda, and this Walker dude was sort of nuts. But he kept it carefully hidden. He was a big muscled-up mean motherfucker with a temper like a short fuse. John had this other friend, Ben, who knew what was going on between Walker and Glenda, but he didn't say anything. (You know how that shit goes if one of your friends' wives has ever been messing around on him and you didn't want to tell him. I mean, you're sort of caught in the middle. You can tell your friend, and risk him knocking the shit out of you and calling you a liar, or keep your mouth shut and feel like a bastard for not telling him.) So that's what old Ben was going through. He had a wife, too, but she was almost nonexistent in Judy's novel. All these park rangers were running around trying to kill this man-eating bear, and the bear was killing their dogs and eating campers. They had a bunch of close encounters with the bear, missed
some shots and things, and then close to the end of it, old Jesse went one-on-one with this bad Ursus Horribilus, missed his shot, and got killed. Very painfully. That was a heart-breaker. I liked old Jesse. And right after that, old Ben amost went crazy because he hadn't told Jesse that Glenda was messing around on him with Walker. And then he really went crazy. He beat the shit out of this
other
dude named Tommy, who'd been messing around with Glenda a few years before, and they kicked him off the Park Service. And see, that left John and this maniac Walker to kill the bear. I didn't know what was going to happen. I imagined all sorts of bad things happening. What I figured was going to happen was that Walker was going to rape John's wife, and John would come in and catch them in bed at the same time he found the bear going through the garbage in his back yard, and there'd be this big incredible scene of bloodshed and retribution right at the end. But the ending was so disappointing that I don't even want to talk about it.
She built me up for a big letdown. It pissed me off. But I didn't know what to say to her. I mean she came so damn
close
on her first try, and then screwed it up at the end. The ending just left me hanging. But naturally she flew into a big flurry of typing and typed it all up, didn't change a word, and sent it off to Random House. Excellent choice. One of the biggest publishing houses in the world. And guess what? It came back with a
note.
Somebody had scribbled in at the bottom of the rejection slip,
suggest you send this to a paperback house.
She freaked out. She ran around
showing
that damn note to people and calling everybody. And then she
sent it off to seven other places and they all rejected it. I think it cost us about forty-seven dollars in stamps. And then she gave up on it.
“Give up on it?” I said. “What the hell for? After you spent all that time on it?”
“It's not any good,” she said.
“Well, it's not the worst thing I've ever read. I think you just need to fix up the ending a little, maybe cut it some, work on the dialogue.”
She just sat there with her arms crossed and her legs crossed and looked at me. I could tell what she was thinking. There I was, the non-writer, trying to tell the writer how to write.
“I used to think it was good. Now I don't.”
“
Why?
”
“It's hard to explain,” she said. “The more I write, and the more I read, the more I see how bad I am.”
“Well hell. What's the use of keeping on, then?”
“Because. The more I write, the better I'll get.”
“When?”
“In a few years.”
“Years? How many years?” I wasn't sure how much more radiation my system could stand.
“I don't know. Nobody does. But I'll know it when I get there. Now run along, hon. I'm working on a new story.”
“What?” I said, and I couldn't help it. “âCinderella and the Four Flashers'?”
I didn't look at her face before I slammed the door.
I didn't mean to be mean to her, hell. But my sex life was practically nil. Oh, sometimes we'd have a quickie, just before she went to sleep, but most of the time she was just too tired. She worked like a dog, and I started working more overtime just so I wouldn't have to sit around the house by myself. When I got home I'd smoke a joint and watch TV I'd watch Buck Rogers, anything. I couldn't play the stereo because she said it bothered her.
Sometimes she wouldn't even eat. She'd get up in the morning and have a piece of cheese toast or something, and she'd go until supper without anything else. She started losing weight, and I bitched at her about that. That made her mad, and she'd retreat into her work. One thing caused another, and sometimes the only time we spoke to each other was during arguments.
But she was getting better. There was no denying it. Sometimes in the morning when I was getting ready for work and she was sleeping, I'd read part of what she had written the night before. You could just see the things the characters were doing, and why they did them. But she got to where she didn't like for me to read her stuff, said it wasn't good enough yet, and she'd hide it.
It wasn't just the sex. I mean, I loved going to bed with her, but more than that, I loved
her.
I wanted to
hold
her. Just kiss her. I wanted to spend time with her and talk to her, and I wanted us to be just like other married people we knew. But we weren't like them. We stayed in separate rooms and only slept together. Half the time I'd have to go to bed before her, because I had to get up. She didn't have to get up. All
she had to do was write and sleep. And I guess I began to get a little bitter.
I started going out at night. She didn't seem to care. She'd be sitting at her typewriter when I left, and most of the time she'd still be sitting there when I came back in. Or if she wasn't, she'd be in the bed asleep. I was hardly ever seeing her. I never saw anybody so obsessed. Her appearance went to shit, and she'd dress in the first thing that came to hand. Sometimes she wouldn't even get dressed, just sit there and work in her nightgown.
And then she started getting published. One story here, another one there. The first acceptance was a great event, and we were happy for a few weeks, and she wanted to throw a big party and invite all our friends. But some of them didn't show up, I guess because so many of them felt that they had been left by the wayside. I understood it. I told Judy that you couldn't keep friends like a can of worms and just open the can whenever you needed them. I said that to her after everybody had left, while we were standing in the kitchen after cleaning up the mess. She smiled a strange little smile, and went behind the closed door, and her clattering machine.
Nowadays I don't expect too much. She doesn't ask me to read her stuff any more. I get up and go to work, have a few beers with the boys afterwards. I come in and go in there and peck her on the cheek, then find my supper in the microwave and punch the button to start it. I might have a beer or two after supper, or read a little.
I love her is the thing. I've tried to stop loving her, I've even tried seeing other women, but it never did feel right, so I quit it.
Sometimes she'll surprise me. She'll have a big candlelit dinner fixed, or step into the shower with me when I'm least expecting it. I don't know where this writing thing came from or what caused it, but it's a part of her now, like her arms or her face. Success for her isn't a matter of if any more. It's just a matter of when.
Once in a while, just for fun, I pull out “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati” and read it. It's got to be the worse damn thing I've ever read. But I'm sort of beginning to like the dog.
She came into a bar I was in one night and she took a stool. I noticed the tight jeans, the long brown hair, the pretty red blouse. A woman like her, you have to notice. That's what you're sitting in there for.
I noticed that she looked around to see who was in the bar. There weren't many people in there. It was early yet. So I began to wonder about her. A good-looking woman, alone in the early evening in a sort of redneck bar. I guess she felt me watching her. She turned to look at me, and she smiled for several seconds, and then she leaned over and spoke to the bartender, who soon brought her a beer.
I'd been out of things for a while. I was having trouble with my wife. One of the things that was wrong was that I was spending too many nights away from home, and it was causing
fights that were hard for me to win. Its hard to win when you don't have right on your side. It's hard to win when you know that your own fucking up is causing the problem.
Boys from work, some friends I was supposed to meet, they hadn't shown up. I had a table to myself because it was more comfortable than a stool. A basketball game was on, with the sound off, lots of guys jumping around, other people like me watching it. I looked at the bar and tried to see the woman's face in the mirror behind the bottles. She didn't look old. Sometimes at first glance the bodies look young, but the faces, on closer examination, are not. This one didn't look old.
I sat there without watching what was going on on the television screen. I didn't know why I didn't just get up and go home. I could see them all in the living room, sitting in front of the television without me. My wife would be in the bed asleep when I went in, probably, if she wasn't sitting up waiting on me. There were times when I couldn't stand to stay there. Leaving the house like I did made it hard on everybody. I knew the kids asked her where I went and why I went. I didn't know what she told them. I didn't want to think about what she told them. I knew if I kept it up they would stop asking after a while. I knew that would be as bad as anything.