18
ALMOST FOUR YEARS LATER, Albertine and I were sitting in Dudley Beaker’s living room one evening. We had come for dinner, and we had been having a wonderful time. The conversation had been lively, and Eliza had, I think, genuinely enjoyed our youthful volubility. Albertine and I were so full of ourselves and of each other just then that in conversation we never really confronted a subject directly: we could only talk about its relationship to, meaning for, effect on, or even irrelevance to, ourselves.
It was late now, and the four of us had moved from the dining room to the living room, where we sat sipping cognac, which I was trying very hard to learn how to sip, and talking, talking, talking. Mr. Beaker had been, throughout the evening, urging me to take a position that had opened at the Babbington Clam Council, a position as an assistant copy writer. I had restrained myself, throughout the evening, from telling him that a position as an assistant copy writer at the Babbington Clam Council seemed ridiculous to me. Talk had turned to Burton Calder, whose new novel, Burning Wind, had everyone talking, including me. Finally, because the hour was so late and the meal had been so good and I had known Mr. Beaker and Eliza for so long and I had had too much to drink, I confessed.
“You know,” I said, and I paused to gather all their attention, “that’s what I’d really like. I’d like a Burning Wind. I’d like to write a big, fat book, bigger than Burning Wind.” (Just as an aside here let me ask what it is about being young that makes us want to do things that are difficult beyond anything we know, beyond the level of difficulty that we have even learned how to imagine, and in some cases, of which mine is one, makes us so burn to do them that we never let go of the desire to do them until at last we have done them or have failed in the attempt? Albertine’s answer, when I posed this question to her, was, “We were all asses in the past,” but she was busy at the time, going over the accounts, and she may not have given it much thought.)
Mr. Beaker, perhaps because he had endured with equanimity and restraint an evening of youthful ambition and egotism that must finally have had an effect like that of eating too many jelly doughnuts, and because he had endured my coolness toward the work at which he had labored for so long, work that he had hated when he had done it but had come, in the fullness of time, to regard as his apprenticeship, work that had been necessary and valuable, rose, stretched, yawned, looked down at me, and said, deliberately, “Ahhhh, but Peter Leroy will never do that.”
He gave me a twisted smile, drank the last of his cognac, and got our coats while my heart sank and snow fell on my future. We said our goodnights, and we all kept our smiles on, but after that night I never spoke frankly to Mr. Beaker again.
In Topical Guide 204, Mark Dorset considers Reality: Real and Fictional from this episode.
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🎧 204: Almost four years later, ...