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He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.
“Do you think you’ll ever make money writing?” “If I get good enough.”
“How did you come to it straight through the woods with no trail and no blazes?”
They stopped at the smoking room bar and Nick bought a bottle of red wine. Leon stood at the bar, tall in his French uniform, inside the smoking room two big poker games were going on. Nick would have liked to play but not on the last night. Everybody was playing. It was smoky and hot with all the portholes closed and shuttered. Nick looked at Leon. “Want to play?” “No. Let’s drink the wine and talk.” “Let’s get two bottles then.”
I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back.
“It’s a hell of a nuisance once they’ve had you certified as nutty,’ Nick said. “No one ever has any confidence in you again.”
His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him. From
Nick climbed out onto the meadow and stood, water running down his trousers and out of his shoes, his shoes squelchy. He went over and sat on the logs. He did not want to rush his sensations any.
“He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards,” Bill explained.
“That’s right,” said Nick. He was impressed. He had never thought of that before. He had always thought it was solitary drinking that made drunkards.
He did not want Kate with Odgar around. He could see the car on the road beside the warehouse. Odgar and Kate were down there. Odgar with that fried-fish look in his eye everytime he looked at Kate. Didn’t Odgar know anything? Kate wouldn’t ever marry him. She wouldn’t ever marry anybody that didn’t make her. And if they tried to make her she would curl up inside of herself and be hard and slip away. He could make her do it all right, instead of curling up hard and slipping away she would open out smoothly, relaxing, untightening, easy to hold.
Bill Bird’s dentist in Paris said, in fly fishing you pit your intelligence against that of the fish.
It was hard to be a great writer if you loved the world and living in it and special people. It was hard when you loved so many places. Then you were healthy and felt good and were having a good time and what the hell.
He always worked best when Helen was unwell. Just that much discontent and friction. Then there were times when you had to write. Not conscience. Just peristaltic action. Then you felt sometimes like you could never write but after a while you knew sooner or later you would write another good story.
It was simply that it was the greatest pleasure. It had more bite to it than anything else. It was so damn hard to write well, too.
Ahead of him he saw a rabbit, flat out on the trail. He stopped, grudging. The rabbit was barely breathing. There were two ticks on the rabbit’s head, one behind each ear. They were gray, tight with blood, as big as grapes. Nick pulled them off, their heads tiny and hard, with moving feet. He stepped on them on the trail. Nick picked up the rabbit, limp, with dull button eyes, and put it under a sweet fern bush beside the trail. He felt its heart beating as he laid it down. The rabbit lay quiet under the bush. It might come to, Nick thought.
“Too damn long,” John said. “It’s no good doing a thing too long.”
Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous. Then, too, he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused.
It was a good story but there were still too many people alive for him to write it.
