Leon Uris - A God In Ruins

She wrote her Venice pages and read and corrected them, lured by the soft-scented fire. Thoughts which had been so clear in her mind had terrible trouble finding their way onto paper.

It was perfect here, she knew. Peace and isolation had been achieved. She had a wonderful, understanding husband. God, she thought, does God want writers to go to hell to write?

For all the ethereal wonderment, Rita began to feel she was in a trap, a cage. Why did the story stop suddenly?

Quinn was due home from San Francisco late. She admonished herself for not going into Denver to meet him and stay over at their condo. She didn’t like him flying into Troublesome at night.

She closed her eyes and thought of him, and the stirring between her legs went on automatic. She’d while away the hours thinking of Venice, and then his Jeep would vroom into the driveway. Hearing his voice was like eating chocolate. Rita purred and stretched and ran her hands over herself.

Her tummy felt squiggly. She made a pitcher of margueritas, which she never did when drinking alone. As she licked the salt around the top of the glass, her forehead broke into tiny droplets of perspiration. Now came unfettered fright.

The level in the marguerita pitcher lowered.

Quinn knew something was awry when he arrived a few hours later. Rita’ was slightly listing, and their kiss was punctuated with salt.

“I’m a couple of drinks up on you,” she said. “How did the meetings go?” He related the business of the trip. Dinner was sitting on the floor before the fireplace at the coffee table and afterwards, a sink into soft pillows with softer sax over the hi-fi.

Rita appeared misty-eyed, hardly taking her eyes off him. Quinn loved what he saw. It seemed that they were unable to pass each other without some kind of touch. Painted-on leather pants, bare midriff, an open blouse knotted under her breasts, glowing lipstick. He watched her clear the table .. .

“Quinn,” she said, meandering to her desk. “I’d like you to read my

pages. I realize some of them look like they were writ *

ten between the sheets. Look, I think I might need some help.”

Quinn was about to go into his standard evasion, but on this night the air had something different drifting on it.

“I’d be scared to death,” he said.

“Scared of hurting me? Scared of rejecting me, telling me I stink? Mal has played that game with me for years.”

“Rita, it isn’t as though Mal was telling you that you made the bacon too crisp, try to get it right the next time. Writing has been at the center of all your longings most of your life. I don’t have the proper credentials. I don’t want to screw around in a place I have no right to be.”

“I’ve heard all that before,” she said with a tart edge rising in her voice.

“Don’t be pissed at Mal for wanting to protect you from his ignorance. He was smart not to make that kind of mistake. Damned if I want to sit in judgment of you.”

“You’re both convincing. Frankly, I think you’re copping out. Between you and Mal, you’ve read every piece of literature written since the Middle Ages.”

“That doesn’t make me an expert.”

“Who is an expert? Christopher Christopher? I’ve reached that stage where anyone with a license to steal is a self-promoting prick in business to keep the wannabes coming back for one more writers’ conference. Quinn, do you know what it’s like making a submission for publication? You’re dead, rejected before you put it in the mail. “Your story is well-written but doesn’t fit our needs,” signed “The Editors,” who will remain nameless.”

“Rita, nobody forced you into writing.”

“Thanks, I really appreciate that. I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve been doing this since I was nine. I need a break. Mal takes my work to the literature professors on campus. “Shows a lot of promise, but needs work.””

“Haven’t you just answered your own question? What professors at the

University of Colorado, or all the universities in Colorado, have published anything of major note in the past fifty years?” Quinn argued.

“I want a straight answer. I want to hear cold-turkey truth from one person of literary integrity. Just one person. If I can’t get that from my husband, who can I get it from?”

Rita would not be deterred. She had drawn the line, and Quinn had to cross it.

“Are these the pages?” he asked. “All right, but I wish to hell I knew better about what I am doing.”

He knew enough.

Some of her earlier poetry had danced and leapt and was filled with cunning and grace and metaphors. Down through the years, as each new piece of non-poetry grew longer, it strayed. She was unable to organize the work, keep it under the central command of the writer. The dialogue came from pickled talking heads, not people of wit and observation.

There was a list of commonplace pitfalls, no sense of when a sentence could be expanded into a paragraph or a chapter shrunk to a few paragraphs. Her first chapter was front-loaded with information, a fear that novice writers have about leaving anything out of the manuscript.

What about the prerequisites? Writing required both enormous motivation and enormous drive. Rita had only enormous desire.

The baffling part of it was that lesser writers had succeeded. Rita could glow in spots. Some writers were ready to cut off their arms and legs for the title of writer. Was it possible she could rally her gifts, enhance them, and then make the commitment to enslave herself at the typewriter?

Perhaps Rita’s life and Troublesome Mesa and her beauty and her father had all been too perfect to arouse a bit of rage. Rita had been too protected, and her craving for expression could only carry her through a half dozen verses of a psalm.

Quinn set down the Venice pages deep in the night. He was dog tired, too tired to be intelligent about it now.

Rita had fallen asleep atop the bed, adrift in self-deprecation. She was curled up tightly, her perfect hair askew and an odor of tequila lingering. Rita couldn’t drink worth a damn. She had tipsied out.

Jesus, Quinn wondered, what was she making him do?

Rita’s eyes opened slowly, and the first thing Quinn saw was her fear.

“Hi,” he said, patting her hair.

“I’ll take a shower,” she said.

“It’s almost five o’clock,” Quinn answered. “I flew in late, remember?

I’m dead tired. Push over, let me on the bed.”

Quinn pressed his backside into her tummy and she wrapped her arm over him in a favorite sleeping pose, but she could sense his eyes were open and Quinn always knew when she was staring at him from behind.

“I need to hear it, Quinn,” she pressed.

“I loved you this morning more than I loved you yesterday, and I love you now more than I loved you earlier tonight. Isn’t that what really matters?”

“And with three you get egg roll!” Quinn felt the violent jerk of the comforter being flung off as she ripped it away from him. Quinn rose on an elbow as the end table lamp blared on. Rita stood over the bed, disheveled and rocking back and forth. Obviously, she had been awake and seething to a boil.

“It’s actually very good,” he said. “I don’t want to go into it point by point until I have a few hours’ sleep and can get my thoughts together.”

“I I”

Liar!

“There’s some fine writing there,” he said. He closed his eyes. “But most of it stinks!”