Draftings

The paper begged him to write.  The Mont Blanc pen screamed to be used.  The nameplate silently willed him to bind poetry worthy of that name to the page, but his focus was trying to move the elephant off his desk, the one sitting on the paper.  Every morning he retreated to his third floor office: mahogany desk, leather bound chair, two windows offering a gentle cross breeze, and blank walls.   Any reporter who would consider themselves blessed enough to interview this man in this office would be surprised by its Spartan appearance, the absence of books, the absence of his book. Unfinished hardwood floors and bare stairs announced someone crossing the threshold into his space.

            Every morning the worn third stair whimpered, telegraphing her impending arrival.   Without looking back he could see her every move, one hand working up the banister, and his mouth could already taste what the other carried in the cup.  The paper screamed but the only words his mind had to put down were “You are washed up.”  The pen remained by the paper’s side, a stoic companion. 

            The desk, free of clutter, the symptom of an active and bountiful mind, only held one other thing: the award.  She placed the cup down next to it and wrapped her arms arm his neck, her breasts pressed against the back of his neck.  This is the best part of my morning, he thought.  And it will be, too.

            “How’s it going, honey?”

            “Mining for ideas,” he muttered.  They were the words he would use in his instructional writing books if he were to debase himself by writing one.

            “And?”  she asked.

            He sighed while staring at the sheet.  “This vein’s dry today.”

            In an interview on Book TV, Richard Martin had commented on the trite overuse of metaphors in the modern novel and now, a lifetime later, his own words haunted the hallways of his mind, even past the locked door where the ideas once lived.

            She squeezed her chest against his neck one last time, then kissed his cheek.  “I’ll be down stairs.  You pick up the pen.”  He knew she couldn’t see the elephant.  Her footsteps faded as the third step chirped again.

            Had he any reserves left in his heart or soul he would have thought more about the living version of himself, the one he buried to survive.  The one who wrote with words that inspired, sold books and won the award was also the man who fell into the abyss – coke addiction, effortless womanizing after book signings, writing under a chemical cocktail the body is not meant to tolerate.  The award snickered at him all the time, but he figured it was only the acid flashbacks.  The truth was, had he been daring enough to write it on the page, that the man who wrote those words could only remember blurs.  His ex-wife, who lived extravagantly off a healthy divorce check, only took the form of a screaming head, justified but angry, all other memories faded.  The “other woman” was a composite of all of them -a single writhing body that moaned above him in a hazy pleasure, her hairstyle and figure constantly changing.  Memory offered no faces, and less names.

              The worst memory, of course, was the open season of images and words which he plucked from the air like a child hunting fireflies.  That was then, before the divorce, before the intervention, before the rehab all of which he boiled down into a time simply known as before.  Then, finding the track again, he lost the words.  No fireflies by the track.  The award giggled again; the pen beckoned.

            His nirvana occurred during his twelve step journey. As an ex-husband, he felt regret, remorse and finally after a trying session of threatening therapy, he felt the stirring of life again.  Coming out of his counselor’s office, love struck Richard a second time in a wounded heart as, stumbling hard, he fell into Rebecca Frouth, a personal trainer, life coach and spiritual healer.  His recovery had been filled with clichés, his famous interview’s worst enemy, all which now revolved around his every decision.  Nothing more clichéd had ever vandalized his mind more than when he wrote the sizable alimony check every month while reciting “Fool me once…”

            And so second time around, theirs was a passionate love eventually neutered by the signing of forms and a tax code-like book of financial proceedings to guide the couple should they decide to part ways or should love, as it is sometimes wont to do, ever burn out.

            He sipped from the cup, a brownish concoction spilled from the eternal juicer font in the kitchen.  Tomatoes and carrots.  If he could feel enough he would say he hated it.  He could already predict how his lunch would be presented: a freakishly large garnish taken off the plate of a better meal or something stolen from a flower show, a tangle of leafy angles and sharp green edges. And so it was as if a healthy glacier flattened his world carving a path of health over a solid jungle of vice that once consumed him.

            He looked at the page and sighed.

            Prenuptials are not romantic and Richard, a retired craftsman of the human heart on the page, gave resignation to all other licenses in this new marriage save the financial.  He followed Rebecca willingly into her health schemes by abandoning alcohol, free radicals, high fructose corn syrup and, sadly but without true reluctance, red meat.  His dreams were of fatted cattle on the range and juicy steaks smoldering on the grill.

            But the reserves for such active contemplation on past lives were not there, because the Pulitzer, his child sprung from a head fueled by indiscretion and chemical muses, hung around his neck like a rock, a train car full of victims or a heavy rotting albatross.  His only dream that ever outweighed attaining that prize was the desire to shake off the miasma that accompanies such accolades.  His former joy -the ink drying on page, the words gaining speed and grace, shape and substance- had somehow transformed into an old maid in waiting.

            Richard Martin stared at the page.

            No new sentence would ever be enough.