He lived in the attic of a four-story Victorian house built after the big quake. Once a queen now more Cinderella, it tilted downward at a slight angle on a despairing street suffused with potholes in a largely forgotten section of the city where the reduction in police was most evident. Its yesteryear bright yellow facade, blemished with years of neglect, was now a sallow shade. Its bay windows were specked with city soot; its dentil blocks under the cornice were in need of fill. The roof was impossible to see unless one was up the hill a bit, and then there was nothing of interest except maybe absence of a chimney suggested it was built during a time of economic stress like in the early 30’s.
He was a writer.
His room was virtually square, about thirty by thirty. One wall supported the headboard of his bed, a side table with a reading lamp and a mini-fridge. Against another wall rested his desk, a swivel chair, and his computer. Above on two shelves were thirty or so books each replete with scribbled notes, observations and truths that he would have thought of if their author had not beaten him to it. There was a closet, the size of a gym locker, where he kept maybe a half dozen shirts and worn trousers, a drawer of underwear and socks that he washed twice a month in the quarter-fed machine in the basement, one hundred and eleven steps down and the same up.
The third wall was now an arch, an opening to the bathroom, a late-century addition funded by a previous owner craving rental revenue, with sink, medicine cabinet and shower-less bathtub. The fourth wall could hardly be categorized as a wall either with its two windows, near floor to ceiling, about five feet in height each shielded by two curtains that opened and closed horizontally with hand held polymer draw rods. His one addition to the room were the window treatments, midnight blue with intermittent representations of the sun and moon each about the size of a golf ball.
The writer had lived there for three years, producing a novel and a novella in that time. His agent who shopped them to all the usual publishing suspects, said no soap. Told him he had to write for an audience, not for himself. He needed to focus on plot. “Readers are demanding plot, not your allusive, elliptical style and your meticulous characterizations. Your work may appeal to intellectuals but there are not that many of them about and competition for their time is fierce.”
It was a way of saying his writing was not commercial. Give the masses what they want. Give them pablum, give them TV reruns. Give them dirty laundry. The writer thought Joyce’s agent probably told him that too. He pouted on that for a while, said to himself, “Fuck you, Saul. I’ll do it my way, self-publish. Recognition and the audience will come.” He didn’t believe it though, and so he didn’t try. A billion books for sale on Amazon.
He was working on a new novel, closing in on its finish. He felt he had found himself, his voice in step with audience interests. Saul sounded supportive, said the plot had real potential but it still drifted a bit. Agent jargon, drifted a bit. He wondered what language, what words the agent used when attempting to sell his product to publishers. Absorbing, scintillating, peerless. Whatever.
The story involved a precocious sixteen year-old Boston girl, admitted to MIT, the subject of a fierce custody battle between two dysfunctional parents. The judge decided she had the maturity and wisdom to choose which parent to live with. It’s a free will story: showing human beings making choices and dealing with the consequences. Free will, Ayn Rand lectured, was the key requisite for characters in great fiction.
Slowly, steadily though, he was losing faith in the story’s coherence. Could he persuade the audience that a judge would decide this? Was there a Massachusetts law requiring a child be of a certain age? In what ways exactly would her life change, if neither parent behaved as she and he testified to the judge? What will be the denouement?
His answers to these questions kept changing, wafting from inside his world, the home in his head, to the imaginary other world beyond the curtains. And he kept altering the facts related to the parents and the girl. But he couldn’t convince himself which parent should be awarded custody of the child, and that was a problem. If he was ambiguous so his readers would be Saul said showing little enthusiasm for the book.
He was a writer and this was his chosen venue, a life room isolated from other people where he could blot out the vagaries of daily existence, where he could savor the slow-motion moments, unaccompanied by the quotidian necessities that enslaved others, the perfect habitat for the creation of fiction, the many stories to be fused in his mind, a citadel of creation and content that never quite materialized.
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