Community of Women

5

Linc Barclay awoke around ten in the morning. He came down to breakfast, buried his face in the Times, drank two cups of coffee in stony silence. Then he folded the paper carefully and placed it on the floor beside him. He shook a cigarette loose from a crumpled pack and lighted it, blowing out a thick cloud of smoke.

Roz looked at him across the breakfast table. She saw his high forehead, his deep eyes, his hawklike nose, his well-trimmed, square-cut black beard. A handsome man. A man she loved.

“Morning,” he said.

“Good morning?”

He shrugged. “Not especially.”

“Hung over?”

He thought that over. “A little bit hung,” he admitted. “Nothing drastic, no bombs going off in my skull. Just a quiet to-hell-with-it hangover. It won’t kill me.”

He had come home for dinner last night, money in his pocket, a bottle of J.W. Dant bourbon on the seat of the car beside him. His agent had come through, after prolonged argument, with five hundred dollars, half of the thousand he had asked for. The banks were closed by the time he got the check, but he had been able to cash it at a check-cashing office on 42nd Street at Sixth Avenue. They’d eaten dinner, and then Linc had gone to work on the bourbon. Roz drank with him.

“Well,” she said now. “Sure you feel okay?”

“Positive.”

“What’s on today?”

He looked away. “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I should get to work.”

“Not if you don’t feel—”

“Oh, hell,” he said. “Not if I don’t feel like writing? I haven’t felt like writing for months. I can’t sit around waiting until I feel like it. I’ve got a goddamned book to finish and I have to finish it. We’re broke, babe.”

“I know.”

“And it’s such a rotten book.” He stubbed out his cigarette, poured a fresh cup of coffee from the silex. “It’s a terrible book. Thirty thousand words done so far and all of them ill-chosen. A stupid plot and a cast of cardboard characters.”

“Don’t you want to finish it?”

This was familiar ground. They’d had the same conversation for roughly three months now.

“No,” he was saying now. “No, I don’t want to finish it. But, by Christ, I want it to be finished. I want the damn thing out of the way once and for all, and the only way to accomplish that happy end is to grind out another thirty thousand words of drivel to match the thirty thousand words I’ve got done so far. Jesus, I wish this book were out of the way!”

The book was a mystery, tentatively going under the title of Murder By Moonlight. The title would probably be changed, if only because it had a too-familiar ring to it and Linc was certain it had been used before at least once. Now, however, the title was the least of anybody’s worries.

“Why don’t you try something else?” Roz suggested. “A new book, one you can enjoy working on. Something to break the slump.”

“It won’t work.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I tried. Oh, last week — I didn’t bother to tell you about it. I put fresh paper in the typewriter and went to work on a straight novel, just swinging along off the top of my head. I did ten pages.”

“Why, that’s wonderful!”

“The hell it is. I ripped it up, Roz. It was lousy. Wooden prose, stiff dialogue, the works. Genuinely bad. All I managed to do was waste ten sheets of paper. That’s all.”

She looked at him, then looked away. “This is a bad one,” she said.

“The worst yet.”

“It’ll straighten itself out, Linc. It—”

“It has to, but God knows how or when. Roz, maybe I should take a job. It wouldn’t have to be permanent, just a stop-gap measure until things start to click again. Editorial work, something along those lines. There’s no sense starving.”

“Is that what you want?”

His hand went to his beard, stroking it thoughtfully. “Sure,” he said, forcing a weak grin. “Hell, I can hit one of the cheap houses for a job. I can pick up something that’ll mean steady money, a check every week that we can count on. And I’d go on trying to write in the evenings until we worked our way out of this jam, and then—”

“No!”

He looked at her.

“Damn it,” she said, “you’re a writer, Linc. You’re not an editor and you’re not a hired hand. You’re a writer.”

“Some writer.”

“Yes, some writer. A damned good writer, Linc. And you don’t have to scoot into New York on the damned 8:30 with the rest of the galley slaves. You can stay right here and you can lick this slump. We’ll manage.”

He reached across the table, rumpling her dark brown hair. “Wise guy,” he said. “Tough old broad.”

“I mean it, Linc.”

“I know you do.”

He stood up, stuffing the pack of cigarettes into his shirt pocket, picking up a pack of matches. “What the hell,” he said. “I’m going to sit in front of the machine for awhile. The blessed typewriter. Maybe something’ll happen. I’ve been on page 98 of good old Murder By Moonlight for one hell of a long time. Maybe I can make it to page 99.”

She stayed in her seat and watched him go. She thought how much she loved him, during the good times and the bad times as well. Now he was going to torture himself, was going to tear his hair out trying to make words come, trying to draw water from a dry well. But he had to do this, had to continue going to the typewriter every day and sitting there as long as he could. Eventually something would happen. Eventually the words would come again, the well would yield water, the words would push out at breakneck pace. Then he’d be in his study for hours on end, punching typewriter keys like a madman, going without food and sleep, living on coffee and cigarettes until the book was done and another book was started. When Linc worked, he was a dynamo. Now, in a slump, the current was off and he could do nothing about it.

The slump would end. All slumps ended.

Soon, she wished. God, make it be soon!