She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
I SAT AT MY COMPUTER, staring at the screen and writing nothing. I spent an hour that way, and then I turned the thing off and went to the kitchen for some coffee. The other early risers were in the lounge, but I avoided them. I took my coat from the closet under the stairs and let myself out the front door quietly. I walked to the dock with my mug of coffee, sat myself down, and tried to get started on a good stretch of uninterrupted brooding, but the coffee was delicious that morning — Miranda’s work, I think — and the rising sun was gilding the windows of Babbington across the bay, so for a while I had some difficulty working myself into a blue mood, but by castigating myself for being a person so shallow that he could be cheered by good coffee and the morning sun I had just begun to make some headway toward self-loathing when Albertine plunked herself down beside me.
“Feeling suicidal?” she asked.
“Not yet, but I’ m working on it.”
“The coffee’s good.”
“You’re right. It is. Between that and the golden light of the dawn, it’s hard to work up a good funk — but — ”
She had brought her hand up to her face. She seemed to be on the point of tears.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She shook her head and waved me off for a moment, then blinked hard and said, “A news story Lou read to us on the porch — a twelve-year-old girl who killed herself — shot herself in the head — and her body was found by her little boyfriend — and I — ” She looked away. “ — I don’t understand it. There is a cult of misery that — goes far beyond the blues — somehow kids fall prey to it — and I just don’t understand it.” She sighed, but what came from her wasn’t simply a sigh. There was a catch at the end of it that would have been a sob if she hadn’t kept a grip on herself. I put my arm around her. “It’s a nasty world out there,” I said.
“Yeah,” she sighed, and then she asked, “What’s your problem?”
“Compared to that? Nothing.”
“Come on.”
“Nothing, really.”
“Out with the bad air,” she said, in the singsong of a lifesaving instructor teaching an outmoded method of artificial respiration.
“Well, aside from the fact that I now feel tremendously guilty for feeling that I have any problems at all, my problem is that I seem to have lost the story of my life.”
“You mean like losing the thread?”
“No, I mean like losing a contest. When I began writing it, I thought it was a success story. Well, maybe success isn’t quite the right word, since it suggests striving and struggling, succeeding against the odds, and I thought of my personal history as a story of good fortune — or dumb luck. When you and I moved here and I started writing, it was a time when I felt very lucky, singularly fortunate. I had you. I had my little kingdom. I had money coming in from my Larry Peters stories. I had my own story to tell. I lacked for nothing.”
I stopped, and I sat there, staring.
“And now?” she asked after a while.
“Now, I look across the bay at Babbington, at my past, and all my feelings about it have changed. It’s not an escape for me anymore. Now it’s the place where things began to go wrong, somehow, in some way that I haven’t figured out. It’s where I began to become the man I am, a dreamer, an escapist, and a loser, and my younger self — well, I’ve spent a lot of time with him, back there, while he has his little adventures, and I used to like him — I wished sometimes that I could make contact with him — but my attitude toward him has changed, and now I blame him for becoming me, the man who bought this fool’s paradise, and — ”
Suddenly I was exhausted. I just stopped talking.
“And?” she said.
“And I feel that it’s all my fault, and that it has always been my fault, the fault of every one of me, every age and stage of me down the years, adding mistakes on mistakes — and now I’ve gotten us into the mess we’re in and I can’t find a way to fix it. I try. I have tried, and I do try. I try to think of ways to bring some money in. Every idea starts out full of promise, but then the more I think about it the less promising it becomes, and in a few minutes all its promise is gone, and in a minute more it has become another failure. I’ve even tried to — well, never mind.”
“What?”
“Oh, I tried writing — ” I shook my head and expelled a bitter laugh. “ — the confessions of a hit man. The memoirs of a professional killer.”
She leaned against me and kissed me, and then she said, “A world in which little girls shoot themselves does not need the memoirs of a professional killer.”
“It could make some money,” I said. “Maybe. But probably not, because I have a hard time keeping myself from undercutting the story and the character. I try to be evil but the irony keeps creeping in. The story’s becoming a bloody farce, and the character is a despicable clown. I can’t stand him. I — ”
“Get rid of him,” she said. “I don’t want to meet him.”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s kind of funny. His name is — ”
She stuck her fingers in her ears and said, “I don’t want to know his name, and I don’t want to hear anything more about him.”
“Okay,” I said. We sat in silence for a while, and then I asked, “Got any other ideas?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “The truth is I followed you down here to make a suggestion.”
“Yeah?”
“I think that if you tried you could sell the hotel — ”
“Me? So far the realtors haven’t even been able to coax people who seem to me to be certifiably insane to make an offer on the place. How can I — ”
“ — to Lou.”
“To Lou?”
“To Lou.”
“Of course. Lou will buy the hotel. All will be well. It’s such an obvious solution — why didn’t we think of it before?”
“Because ‘panic can keep a person from seeing things that are as plain as the nose on his face,’” she said.
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