Stephen Dixon - Friends - More Will and Magna Stories

Suddenly an idea comes to me. The streetlight’s bad where I sit and the weather’s gotten windy and cold, so I find a quiet-enough bench at the bus terminal and begin a new novel that has no relationship to the last four. I write all night and the following day, nibbling on my sandwich sparingly to keep away debilitating hunger for as long as I can, and think this novel might end up being the best one I’ve written so far.

They’re sitting at a bar. Floyd says “I have to tell you something, now that you brought up Gabe — something you might not want to hear.” “What, that he doesn’t like it that I didn’t like his novel?”

“He told me about it. It hurts him very much. Not that you didn’t like it but that you dropped him cold right after it was published, without even writing him about the book when he sent you a copy.”

“He stole parts of it from one of my novels. I once — do you know the story?”

“He never mentioned anything about it. He just feels you couldn’t face it or something that he got a book out before you, and because you still haven’t published one, it’s still bothering you.”

“Listen. He was once over my place for dinner with his girlfriend Pearl.”

“Pearl. Boy, that name brings back memories. Floods. But what happened?”

“He lived downtown then — well, still does, but at that time a block away from White Nights Press. So I asked if he’d drop my manuscript off — my novel Flowers , which was new then but I’ve since trunked.”

“That’s right. She got married, to a doctor, has a kid, Gabe said.”

“Did she? Pearl? Anyway, I didn’t want to send the novel fourth class — it could take two weeks in this city — and first class would cost a few bucks.”

“So he took it to them for you.”

“Eventually. But that night, around two a.m., I couldn’t believe it, phone rings—”

“Gabe calling saying how much he likes your novel.”

“He told you?”

“No, that’s just the way he is and always has been. Gets a manuscript, starts reading — can’t keep his hands off it, really — and if it’s good, and I’m assuming yours was, and he’s too tired to finish it but wants more time to — a few hours after he wakes up the next day when he’s supposed to be bringing it to the publisher, let’s say. That what happened?”

“Truth is, he didn’t even have to call me about it. He could’ve brought it to them the day after the next — what would be the difference? It’d still be getting to White Nights earlier than it would if I sent it by mail.”

“But he was trying to give you confidence. Trying to say — saying it for all I know — and you must have been flattered and felt good and so on he called, even if he woke you up — that he likes it, he, another writer, and so much so that he’s asking for more time so he can finish it — time when he would normally be writing himself.”

“Sure he liked it and needed more time. Liked it enough to steal from it and needed more time to photocopy or type parts of it. Not whole paragraphs and sentences. But two or three characters and several ideas and scenes, all changed a little, and a lot of dialogue changed even less — but distinctive dialogue, not hello and goodbye dialogue; but idiosyncratic dialogue.”

“That he never said. None of it.”

“Of course not. Why would he?”

“Still, why didn’t you at least say thanks for the complimentary copy of his book? ‘Congratulations’—after all, it was his first published book — and that you were reading it. Then, maybe some day later after you had really done some comparison research on the two novels, taken him up on the parts you thought he swiped.”

“You still don’t see why I dropped him cold?”

“I see, I see, from your perspective, but you don’t know what you did to him. And the guy’s in such awful physical state that I also don’t want to see him emotionally hurt. I in fact want to see him emotionally built up. But maybe, to be fair to both of you, the important thing to ask you now is how much time elapsed between his taking your manuscript to White Nights — I assume they weren’t that interested in it if it was never published.”

“I said so, they rejected it, not even a peep. Just ‘Thanks very much’—not even saying they’ll be glad to look at my next novel if there’s one, which editors usually say. Now I don’t care — then I did. I don’t even know if I like it anymore, and I’ve stolen parts of it, consciously or unconsciously, out of it myself.”

“Any of the parts that you say ended up in Gabe’s book?”

“Some, and also the idea that he took from my novel. Put it into another novel. But there I said sentence for sentence what Abe, a character who’s very much like Gabe, took from the narrator’s manuscript, which the narrator then had to trunk. That novel was sent all around too.”

“White Nights see it?”

“Sure. Also the same editor Gabe had at his publisher, but if he recognized anything, he never said it. But what do you think I should do with Gabe now? After four years of not talking to him since he sent me his book, I should write him about it, give him a call, apologize?”

“It’d be nice. And without saying you thought he stole from your novel. Anyway, by this time you should just forget that.”

“No, I couldn’t write or call him about that book. It still sticks in my throat.”

“Want another drink?”

“I think I’ve had it.”

“Dave,” Floyd says to the bartender, “another for me, a fresh soda in back; I think he’s finished. — So, do me a favor and yourself one too. He’s more than just sick. He’s deteriorated pitifully in the last two years. By the way he looks and what someone said the doctors say about him, he isn’t going to last another year. He’s too weak most days to leave his apartment and some days to leave his bed. He’s living off Welfare and Medicare and what money the writing organizations give him from their emergency funds. But still trickling out his fiction — not getting any of it published — and some articles for the Voice.”

“I’ve seen them. Throwbacks to the Fifties and Sixties.”

“He’s only writing them for money and to keep his name in print, so he’d mostly agree with you. But call him, don’t write. Say you just read his book a second time and realize what a shit you’ve been about it all these years. You don’t have to explain. Just talk about how good’s his book. He’s been carrying this sore for a long time and it’ll make him happy. And you know, outside of what you say he did to you, I’ve never heard anything but the best things about what he’s done for others.”

“I don’t have a copy. I gave mine away after I read it.”

“So what? All I want you to do is praise. Call him now, in fact. From the phone over there. While I drink, you call. He loves your work, you know.”

“Does he? What’s he looking for, another of my unpublished manuscripts?”

“Don’t be mean. He likes your work a lot and feels lousy you still haven’t a book out. And he’s done what he could for you — without telling you and despite your silence; even wrote several book editors in your behalf, he said. That was nice of him. Most writers don’t go out of their way for other writers like that — you’ve said so yourself.”

“He sort of owes it to me, no? Because I’d say fifty pages of that six-hundred-page book of his had some of my stuff in it — that’s why I stopped sending my novel around. I thought anyone who had read his book—”

“Not many did, so little chance of that.”

“But if someone had, he’d have said he’d read something like this before — parts of it — and word might have got around that I plagiarized Gabe’s book and then no publisher would have looked at my work again.”