Dead Men Don't Blog: A John Ray Mystery - Chapter 4

I lit two cigarettes and gave her one. She uncoiled herself from me and laid back, her hair splayed luxuriously against the pillow, the thin sheet clinging to that body of hers like Graham Greene clinging to a hash pipe. After smoking for a while, she said,

"What happened, Jack?"

"Nothing happened," I said. "It's just been a while. I was overly excited."

"No, I mean with your writing. Your fiction writing. What happened?"

I didn't like this line of questioning. But when you've got a dame like that lying next to you stark naked, and having just given you her best Edna St. Vincent Millay on silicone and steroids imitation, you make exceptions.

"Lost focus, lost faith," I said. "Decided it wasn't my game."

"I've read your books," she said. "Seems to me like it was very much your game."

"You read 'em?" I said. "Well, that brings the total to 19. Call the Swedish Academy."

"I mean… you know. The scandal."

Was it a scandal? No, it was more like an embarrassment. You have to be bigger, more successful, better known, all those things, for such a situation to rank as a bona fide scandal. I was just road kill.

"Look, Sugar, it's just the way things go. Yeah, I could blame my publicist, or my editor, or my publisher, or my ex-wife who said she read the whole thing but didn't, or any number of people along the way. But it was my name on the novel, and that's that."

"How did it happen?" she said.

I puffed a couple smoke rings and thought about that. Thought about it like I'd thought about it every night for the past ten years…

I could have told her that something like that happens pretty easily in this racket, and explaining it is not so hard, either. Finding someone to believe you, though, is a whole other ball of wax. I could have told her that it happens because saps like me, when we're young, get ideas. Big ideas. We read a book, and it's a good book, and suddenly all we can think about is doing something like that ourselves. Learning how to make that magic on the page. Learning how to put together sentences that'll swarm through some reader's head the same way what you've just read has swarmed through yours, and made you feel different somehow. You read lots of books, sure, until one day reading becomes like breathing. And the special ones, you read again, and again, because they're pure oxygen. And because they're the only way you can learn to do it yourself. The rhythm, the pacing, the structure, the silences. You learn by imitating your touchstones, until your own voice starts to struggle up through all this apprentice work. Is it so hard to believe that some rhythms, some phrases, even some passages, get lodged in that spongy, besotted, eager brain of yours? Lodged in your subconscious mind, that nuclear reactor churning away on just this side of no-control?

Well, that's what happened to me. And what I thought were original ideas and sentences turned out to be someone else's. And no one in my personal entourage—usually ready with plenty of half-baked advice—picked up on it. But the reviewers did—those no-talent mugs on the margins, always itching to administer a come-uppance. And the next thing you know, you're in the hall of shame: Joe Biden, David Leavitt, Doris Kearns-Goodwin… and John Ray.

I could have told her all those things, but I didn't. She probably wouldn't have believed me anyway, and even if she did, what did it matter now?

"It happened because I was trying to be someone I ain't," was all I said, but it was too late. I'd spent so much time thinking about it, she'd already finished her cigarette, gotten dressed, and left.