Broken Vessels Read online

  So I almost did. I bought a later issue and tried to read it but mostly had to deal with an erection, and I decided the magazine wasn’t dumb so much as useless. My story was to appear in August and I didn’t get galleys and I began to worry. I was accustomed to small quarterlies that could not afford galleys; their occasional misprints were forgivable. But this was different: among the crotches and the shallowness of the magazine, I wanted badly to preserve the part of myself I had spent on those sentences. For me, there are usually only three pure pleasures that come from writing: finishing a final draft, mailing it, and seeing it in print. And especially with Penthouse, I needed to preserve all three. My advance copy arrived; I thumbed past the pictures and found what used to be a story of mine. I went to my desk, laid out the manuscript, and spent a long outraged afternoon reading lines alternately from Penthouse and from the typed page. In a sixteen-page manuscript, someone had made eighty-five changes.

  The man at the New Yorker loves commas more than Henry James did, but he never inserted one without asking my permission. The deleting of “diaphragm,” “brownnose,” and “horny” was done with gentle courtesy; perhaps I could have won that one, if I had had the sense to fight. But the Penthouse editing, or rewriting, was an intolerable violation, and I wrote a letter to their fiction editor. The letter said a lot of things, and one of them was goodbye to another $900, for he had accepted another story from my agent, though he hadn’t paid us yet. When he read the letter he returned the story to my agent, said this is a mass publication, and we don’t need writers like that guy. So I don’t have to worry about Penthouse anymore.

  Last winter Sewanee Review published a story I had worked on for seventeen months: seven drafts, totaling four hundred pages. The final draft was sixty pages long, and I got $500 for it, and I got that third, necessary, and lovely pleasure: the story, no matter what its worth, has been given a dignity I can see. On those pages it lives alone, untouched by paper genitals, diamonds, and gold.

  1977

  MARKETING

  I LOVE SHORT stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice. We can sit all night with our friend while he talks about the end of his marriage, and what we finally get is a collection of stories about passion, tenderness, misunderstanding, sorrow, money; those hours and days and moments when he was absolutely married, whether he and his wife were screaming at each other, or sulking about the house, or making love. While his marriage was dying, he was also working, spending evenings with friends, rearing children; but those are other stories. Which is why, days after hearing a painful story by a friend, we see him and say: How are you? We know that by now he may have another story to tell, or he may be in the middle of one, and we hope it is joyful.

  This is how we talk to each other, but for some reason people do not buy collections of short stories. I do, and I take them home and read the first line of each story; then I read them in the order the writer wanted me to. Some books of stories can be read in two or three sittings, like a novel. Others want to be read more slowly, one or two stories an evening, so their effects won’t be blurred. Since I was eighteen years old, I wanted a book of my own stories on my shelf. I got it when I was thirty-nine, but before that there were some low-key adventures and comedies.

  Some editors wrote that my collection was weak. Those letters were more embarrassing than painful. You can’t be hurt because someone doesn’t like your work; there will always be someone who doesn’t, and very often with good reasons. The rejections which hurt deeply, for they drove me closer to admitting my hope was futile, were the ones that said: If you are writing a novel, or if you have one, or will have one, we will consider publishing these stories, or we will publish these stories. After we have published the novel.

  A woman at a publishing house in Boston was one of the kindest and most encouraging editors during that time. For six weeks one summer she held my stories, and I felt they were in caring hands. We wrote letters which became as long and passionate as love letters: about Chekhov and writing and the short story as a form which publishers had to neglect, which she would probably have to neglect too, for she worked at a house that had to make money. No one can blame a publisher for that. So that woman and I had none of the solace that comes when you can rage at someone, can blame them. Like doomed adulterous lovers, we could only share our passion and futility and the wish that our lives had not come to this impasse. And we shared our hope. All this time she was showing the stories to people she worked with, and every Friday afternoon I called her, because the phone was there and the clock was moving toward five and I had to hope that in their last hour of work for the week the publishers had decided to say yes. Then one morning I got her final letter, or the final letter of our summer affair. The people she worked with liked the stories too, but the man at the top said: We can publish them, but what will he do for us?

  I sent the stories to a house in New York, and got a letter from its king. He was keeping the stories; but I could not understand, from his letter, whether he meant to publish them. He mentioned a novel, but did not require one. Or did he? Finally I phoned a friend who publishes with that house and has spent much time with its king and I read him the letter.

  “Go out and have a drink,” he said. “He’s publishing your stories.”

  “What about this novel he mentions? Is he holding the stories in case I have a novel, or is he publishing the stories anyway and he hopes I have a novel, or what?”

  “Do you have anything that looks like part of a novel?”

  “I have a thirty-five page story.”

  “Send it to him, and tell him it’s the first section of a novel.”

  “It’s a story.”

  “Look, our business is to get into print, not to worry about being ethical with these mercenary bastards. Send it to him.”

  So I did, and waited a long time, and finally I called him. He was at lunch, but the woman I spoke to said he had dictated a letter to me that morning.

  “What’s it say?”

  “I don’t know. It’s still in the machine.”

  “The machine?”

  “You can call about five and I’ll read it to you.”

  I taught my classes that afternoon, or at least went to them, for while I stood in the classroom I saw myself squatting inside a machine in an office in New York. When I called at five, the king came to the phone.

  “That piece you sent me looks like a story.”

  “I guess that’s what it is.”

  “I can’t publish your stories.” His voice was so wistful that, again, there was no one to blame, no one to scream at. “I mean, I could; but it wouldn’t help either of us.”

  “Why wouldn’t it help me?”

  “You wouldn’t make any money.”

  “I don’t want any money. I just want the stories bound on my shelf so they can finally rest and I won’t have to worry about them anymore and they won’t have to worry about themselves or about me either: you can have the stories. I’ll give them to you. I just want —”

  “No. No, it wouldn’t do you any good. If you ever write a novel —”

  I spent many evenings during this period lying on my bed and drinking gin and listening to records. When I lost a woman, I played Dylan’s songs about losing women. I have found that, in matters like this, the best course is an irrational one: build up some rage, whether it’s real or not; think of every flaw she has, multiply it by twenty-three, and, with the help of the juniper berry, convince yourself she is a harridan whose true nature you are only seeing now. On evenings after my book was rejected, I listened to Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil.” Rage had no purpose on those evenings, nor did irrationality. Publishing is a business and you can’t dislike a man because he knows his business. So, on my back in body and spirit, I sipped and listened to Kristofferson sing about being in Nashville with songs that no one
would hear. When I got out of bed the next morning, my spirit usually got up with me. Good morning, spirit, my old friend; let’s keep moving.

  In the same circle. In the winter of 1973 I got on that circle for the last time with yet another woman in yet another Boston house. After she read my stories, she invited me to lunch. My oldest daughter has said, about my dining hedonism, that I remember everything that’s ever gone into my mouth. But I don’t know what I ate that afternoon, or even where. Because I believed that the act of eating lunch with her was a prelude to change. At lunch she talked about the stories, and I think she spoke well of them, but I can’t say that with any more certainty than I can recall the restaurant or what I ate. The place was crowded, the woman had a soft voice, and I could not hear what she said. I tried to read her lips. I did not ask her to repeat herself, for I was afraid she would think I wanted a litany of praise. All I could do was nod once in a while. When lunch was over I walked her back to her building, and as we parted, I said: “Which ones don’t you like?”

  “Oh, I like them all.”

  She seemed puzzled. Did she think I couldn’t handle two Bloody Marys?

  “When will I hear from you?” I said.

  “Probably next week.”

  I thanked her and drove home to friends who asked if she had taken the book.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She has a soft voice.”

  She had a soft voice in the letter she wrote a week later. It was the same letter I had gotten for years, but there was that voice telling me: This is the way things are, and there is nothing any of us can do about it. She gave me the names of two agents, and said I should not have to keep going through this with publisher after publisher, I should have an agent to receive these letters.

  I did not agree. I believed I should perform surgery, sever that book hope once and for all, and learn to live without it. I put the stories in a drawer, told myself they were published in quarterlies anyway, and it was time to be satisfied with that; told myself there was nothing cowardly about leaving this game I could never win; I was lucky to have a life as a teacher and a writer whose stories appeared in quarterlies; it was a life with dignity and I was foolish to need a book on my shelf as testament to it; and many writers would trade circumstances with me in a moment. I still believe all of that, but it was a belief I could not live with, for my dream was stronger than my conviction, my hope stronger than my belief, and eight months later I took the stories out of the drawer. I found the woman’s letter and chose the name of one of the agents, only because I liked its sound better, and sent him the stories. He liked them and said he would find a publisher, and I tried not to hope but did anyway, and in spring of the following year he found David Godine of Boston. A year later Godine published the book, and last fall he published another one. Nobody made much money, but the books are on my shelf, and I have a publisher who doesn’t talk about novels. And if he never publishes my stories again, it’ll be because he doesn’t like them, and finally I’ll have someone to blame: myself.

  Last year a man from New York whispered in my ear; an honest man, a warm and intelligent man, but he whispered about money. His house could do more for me, he said. I told him I wasn’t interested. He didn’t buy that, so finally he bought a dinner. It was at Ferdinand’s in Cambridge, and I had duck and Pouilly-Fuissé.

  “What can you do?” I said.

  “Give you more money and sell more books.”

  “Then what? Another book of stories?”

  “You’d have to sign a contract promising a novel.”

  “I write stories.”

  “So if your next book were a collection of stories, you could use it to break our contract.”

  “Then what?”

  “Go back to Godine.”

  “I’ll stay there. I’ve been waiting for him since I was eighteen.”

  1978

  Part Four

  TWO GHOSTS

  I AWOKE ON Sunday morning in the house in Provincetown and remembered a woman saying at the party the night before: Of course the house is haunted. She was talking about the house we were to live in for two weeks: my wife, our baby daughter, and one of my grown sons. I believe in ghosts, because I spent some time with one in 1961, so I asked people about this one. Sounds, they said; sounds in the night. I knew what they meant: those sounds which are not as specifically preternatural as the clanking of chains, moans from the walls, or screams in the chimney. But the sounds an old house may or may not make at night, depending on the house, depending on how you are when you listen to them. One man told us of a couple bringing a small girl to the house. They had told her nothing about a ghost. Yet she walked around the room — he didn’t say which room, but I imagine her in the living room — and said: Ghost; ghost hiding here; ghost. … People told us it was a benevolent ghost, and I was prepared to believe this too. So that I was not afraid of any mischief from the ghost; I was only, I think, afraid of what I would feel when I first saw it, or did not see it but knew it was there.

  It rained or was grey for most of those two weeks, and often there were strong winds. The house is on Commercial Street, faces south, and is across the street from the bay. Our three upstairs bedrooms were at the front of the house, so from their windows we could look between the houses across the street at the water. Our bedrooms were adjacent: the baby, oblivious to ghosts, sea, and the weather on one end, my wife and I on the other, and my grown son in the middle room where the desk was at the window, so my wife wrote there in the mornings, and I worked at it in the afternoons. A hall separated the rooms from two bathrooms, the staircase, and another bedroom. We — I — kept the hall light on so we — I — would not, waking in a strange place with a full bladder, go over the railing and down the stairs. Downstairs is a large living room which should have been comforting but somehow was not: a couch and several good chairs and lamps, my cassette player on the mantelpiece, and a large window facing what would have been the bay but was the house across the street. Still, it was a good place to read.

  At night my son, Jeb, was with his new love, my baby daughter slept, and my wife went to bed at a reasonable time, between eleven and twelve, a gift she has. Or so it seems to me, because I cannot do it, and, since quitting sleeping pills in the summer of 1979, I have been able most nights to get to sleep around two. So I spend about three hours a night awake and alone, and that is when, at Provincetown, I heard the sounds.

  You’ve heard them too: the creaking of wood, a sudden noise like a footfall, and you shiver for an instant, remember it’s only wood, and go back to your book. I heard those as I read downstairs, and was frightened, and slowly recovered. But after a few nights I was frightened without noises, and did not recover, and began to read in the wide and very comfortable bed while my wife slept. But sometimes I would go downstairs to smoke. I did not like going downstairs, and this had nothing to do with the sounds, but with the reason for my fleeing upstairs to read: I had begun to sense the ghost’s presence. I knew that I sensed it, as I had paid attention to the sounds, because I was thinking about it. I am impressed, often amused, and generally glad that knowing why we feel something so often fails to dispel the feeling. I smoked with fear, and no courage, and was up the stairs again, to the bed, the lamp, and above all, my wife.

  One night I woke to the sounds of footsteps on the ceiling above my head; or on the attic floor. I lay there listening, and very soon my wife woke and went to the bathroom. When she came back and got in bed, I said: “Did you hear the ghost walking?”

  “That was Jeb going to the bathroom.”

  “In the attic?” I said, and she went to sleep.

  Then one night, still in our first week there, a wind blew hard from the west, from the mainland and across the water, blew against the side of the house opposite our bedrooms. It was a wind that shook trees, and stirred whitecaps out on the bay and, coming through the partly opened bathroom window, pushed open our bedroom door. So when we went to bed, we latched the door: a hook and
eye latch on its inside. My wife read for a while, then slept, and I read for two more hours. I was reading Nicolas Freeling then. After a while, the wind died and I was reading paragraphs whose sentences began to merge with lines I had heard spoken during the day, and lines I had thought or was thinking, and images and words that were the beginning of a dream, and I knew that I was nearly asleep, that I actually would sleep, and I turned out the light and did.

  There was a bedside clock, an electric one that sat on the window sill at my side of the bed. At three o’clock I suddenly woke. But that is not true: on those nights when I suddenly wake, alert as with adrenaline, it is due to insomnia: whatever that is, wherever in my flesh it exists, it wakes me and either I am poised with energy as though my muscles want nothing less than a session with barbells and dumbbells and a long fast walk, or my body tautens and shifts and turns with the energy of nerves stimulated by too many cups of coffee. That night I was wakened, my body still in the ordinary settled state of one asleep, and only my heart quickening with fear as I turned from my side to my back, pressed my hands against the mattress, and looked across my wife at the sound, the movement, that had wakened me. It was the latch, the hook in the eye. The door did not shut tightly against the doorjamb, so a vertical line of light from the hall was visible between them. In this light I could clearly see the hook moving back and forth with the rapidity of the sound, the metallic click click click, that had startled me from sleep.

  My wife is far more sensitive to noise than I am, and needs silence, or what we can have of it, both to go to sleep and stay asleep; while, usually, noise neither keeps me awake nor bothers me when I do sleep. But, as the hook clicked fast against the outer rim of the eye, as though pushed and pulled back and forth, she slept. In that thin line of light, I watched the hook, breathed deeply, pressed legs as well as my hands into the mattress, and said, in my mind: All right. Come on in. Let’s see what you look like. I do not know how long I waited. More than a few seconds; probably no more than two minutes. Then the hook sprang up from the eye, and fell free. The door slowly swung open, admitting more light from the hall; after an opening of six or eight inches, it stopped. Nothing entered. Nor did any wind. The door simply stood ajar, and the house was silent, as were the trees outside the window. After a while my heart calmed, and I slept.