"Hey, slave driver, break time," Jennifer called into Jake's apartment.
"Yo!" he replied from his work room. "Give me five minutes. I'm on a hot roll of the dice. There's milk in the frig. Put some on the stove to heat."
"Okay," she agreed.
The delay gave her a chance to examine Jake's apartment. One wall of the kitchen was covered with what appeared to be wooden packing crates. These were of various sizes and were stacked to form a wall of shelves. Most of these shelves contained books, magazines, stacks of paper, and file folders. One crate contained a variety of hand tools--hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, and such. Several contained Jake's photographic equipment--lenses, filters, camera attachments, and a number of items that Jennifer couldn't identify. The opposite wall was taken up with the usual appliances and cabinets, all of which were of an old fashioned design. The doors to Jake's bedroom, workroom, and bathroom comprised the third wall. The outside door was in the corner of the appliance wall. The last wall had the door through which Jennifer entered. That wall was covered with very ugly wallpaper, most of which Jake had mercifully covered with photographic prints, paintings, and several of Marla's silkscreens.
Jennifer tested the milk with her pinkie, but it was only lukewarm. Continuing her explorations, she peeked into Jake's bedroom; the door was open. The room was almost stark. It contained a bed (made), an oak bureau, a single ladder-backed chair, and a small scatter rug which was actually a sheepskin. The unadorned walls were freshly painted beige-tinted white. Jennifer stood in the doorway to Jake's workroom and watched him as he pounded away at his typewriter. He was totally absorbed in his work. The walls of this room were entirely covered with the same stacked-crate bookshelves that were in the kitchen. These, however, were entirely filled with books. The center of the room, before the windows, was dominated by what appeared to be an enormous desk. It was actually several tables butted together, but this wasn't readily discernible because they were all covered with papers, news clippings, books, file folders, pencils, pens, and such things. Only the space immediately adjacent to Jake's typewriter was cleared.
Next, Jennifer examined the book collection. It was almost all fiction. A set of Balzac's novels caught her eye because they filled three crates. She pulled out a volume. SPLENDEURS ET MISERES DES COURTISANES, No. 406 of a limited edition of 1250 copies. She slipped the book back into its place. Further down the wall, she pulled out another red-covered book, Willa Cather's THE TROLL GARDEN. She passed a set of Dickens in new green bindings, made a mental note that Jake had copies of Millay's and Parker's volumes of poetry, and started to read Joaquin Miller's recollections of his dinner with Dante Gabriel Rosetti when she realized that the sound of the typewriter had stopped.
Jake was sitting with one elbow resting on the desk and his chin resting in his hand, looking at her. "Hi, bookworm," he said.
She slipped the book back into the crate. "I didn't realize that you had such an extensive library."
"My cat likes to read," Jake said, scratching the cat behind the ears. Blake had been sitting on the edge of Jake's desk, watching Jennifer with a suspicious eye.
"Your cat ... OH! The milk!" She fled the room. "It's okay," she reported from the kitchen.
"You're almost as absent-minded as I am," Jake said as he entered the kitchen.
"It's just that ... I'm not usually forgetful."
"The way to a woman's heart is through the library," he commented.
She laughed. "In that case, it might be true. Where did you get all those books?:
"Oh, I've been prowling through used book stores and flea markets for years. They just keep accumulating."
"You're going to run out of shelves."
"I already have. Several times. That's why they're expanding to the kitchen. It's sort of like one of those 1950's horror movies--THE BLOB THAT ATE THE BOOKSTORE."
"Speaking of eating ..."
"Ah, the child wants her cookies and hot chocolate ..."
"I'm no child," she said fiercely.
"No, I don't suppose that you are," Jake said with a smile.
"Since we're going to be living under the same roof, perhaps I should warn you that I frequently speak in the ironic mode. You have to take what I say with several grains of salt, sometimes with a whole shaper."
"Oh."
"Don't take what I say seriously, and we'll get along fine," he warned. "If I call you a child--cookies and hot chocolate are children's food--it doesn't mean that I think of you as a child. It's just that our snack is a child's snack. Remember, I'm eating them too."
He could see that this idiosyncrasy of his was slightly confusing to her. It had gotten him into trouble on several occasions in the past. It was just that his sense of the absurd and the ironic was highly developed, and it occasionally cheeped into his ordinary speech.
"I'll try and watch my tongue," he offered.
"Yes, watch your tongue," she said.
He wasn't sure if she wasn't being ironic herself, but he let the remark pass. "Let me tempt your tongue with some oatmeal cookies."
In a few minutes he had a platter of oatmeal cookies and two mugs of hot chocolate set on the kitchen table.
"I thought that you weren't going to do any writing today," she said.
"I wasn't planning to, but when it comes, you've just got to set it down, otherwise the train of thought would be lost."
"You've got your opening?"
"Perhaps. Let me read it to you." Jake went into the workroom, then returned with a piece of computer print-out paper.
"Can I ask you a silly question?" she asked as she settled back into her chair. "Why are you using that paper?"
"This?" He held out the paper so that it unfolded itself into a long strip. "It's the biggest sheet that will fit into my wide-carriage typewriter. I get the maximum amount of words with the minimum amount of time spent feeding sheets of paper into the machine. I can get a thousand words per page if I single space and use slash marks to indicate mew paragraphs. It's just a rough draft for my own use."
"Just curious, that's all." Jennifer, of course, typed everything she did in near final draft quality with her IBM memory typewriter. In a few years inexpensive word processors would give everyone that ability, but in 1982 typewriters still were the primary tool of wordsmiths.
"Do you want to hear my opening?" Jake asked.
"Yes, please."
Jake took a sip of hot chocolate and began to read.
"I swear, city council meetings should be reported on the comic page."
"Your newspaper doesn't have a comic page."
"Yeah, I know. That's the only reason why you guys make the news."
"Oh? I'm to be tarred with the same brush as the rest?"
"A man is known by the company he keeps."
"And what about you, ace reporter for a one- horse newspaper?"
"Yeah, me too. Let's get a beer."
Jeff Steelburg and Ben Hartley walked from City Hall to the pub across the street in silence. They seated themselves in a back, corner booth, and a waitress came and set a pair of mugs of draft beer on the table--their usual procedure for a Tuesday evening. The waitress let her hand rest on Steelburg's shoulder for a second, then was gone.
"I don't see what a high class broad like Maureen sees in a stumble-bum reporter like you," Hartley commented.
Steelburg shrugged his shoulders with a smile and took a sip of his beer.
"Any more word on the woman in the photograph?" Hartley asked.
"No. Marcoutt thinks that it might be a joke, but I'm `not so sure."
"Maybe the Chief's right. He's been a cop for a lot of years. Nothing like that's happened around here. It's always been a pretty quiet berg."
"I hope you're right." The morning's events flashed through Steelberg's mind. It was a few minutes past seven in the morning when his phone rang, and he was in the middle of making his morning's first cup of coffee.
"Steelburg here," he said to the phone.
"Go to the corner of Main and School streets. In the phone booth, taped under the shelf, is an envelope," a gruff voice said.
"Hugh?"
"Corner of Main and School. In the phone booth. You'll find it." Then the phone went dead.
A prank, Steelberg thought. Even so, he drove two miles out of his way. It was a residential section of town. The phone booth was beside a "Mom and Pop" store. And there was an envelope. It had "Stealberg" written across it with a ball point pen. He slit it open with his pocket knife and found a single, black and white, Polaroid photograph of a woman sitting with her back to a tree. Across the bottom of the print was scrawled: "By Wednesday noon she'll be dead."
Steelberg examined the photograph closely. He held it be the corners and stared at it in the full sunlight outside the booth. It appeared that the woman had her hands tied behind the tree, but he couldn't be sure. The print was slightly out of focus. He couldn't make out her face; shoulder length dark hair partly obscured her features. She wore a plaid blouse and dungarees. The tree was a white birch. There wasn't really a lot of information in the photograph.
Steelberg went into the store to inquire if anyone had been seen using the phone both, but the elderly man behind the counter hadn't noticed anything out of the ordinary. Steelberg then drove directly to the police station and explained everything to a skeptical Chief Marcoutt.
"Some college boy home for a summer of pranks," Marcoutt commented. However, he agreed that it was possible that it wasn't a hoax and finally decided to go with that assumption until events proved otherwise. A short time later, when they checked the envelope and photograph for fingerprints, except for Steelberg's, there weren't any.
"What do you think?" Jake asked when he finished reading. "Your honest, hard-boiled, purple-passion-writing, professional opinion."
Jennifer munched on a cookie, then replied, "For a best seller, it's good. You get your main characters on board right at the start, you've indicated what the plot is going to be about, and you've given the reader the incentive to continue reading because she'll want to find out about the woman in the photograph. You've got the suspense started on the first page. That's all good. The only thing you don't have is the setting. Where is this taking place? Chicago? Rural Connecticut? A small city in California? And you don't say when it takes place. It might be 1948, or it might be yesterday."
"All good points," he conceded, "but I have to have something for page two."
"Okay, but get all the background stuff in quickly so that you can get on with telling the story."
Jake laughed.
"What's so funny?" she demanded.
"You're so serious, so dead earnest."
"But you asked my opinion."
"Yes, and it's a very sound opinion, except that I knew all that when you were reading THE BOOBSY TWINS."
"It's the Bobbsey Twins, and I never read them." She didn't try to conceal the hurt in her voice.
Jake leaned over and gently kissed her on the cheek. "I know the title. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to step on your toes. You just have to learn to lighten up a bit. Writing isn't all serious business and following the rules. You're doing the same thing, aren't you, parodying the pulp romances. Writing is work, but it's also fun. Aren't you enjoying your little game with the bra busters?"
Jennifer laughed. "The term is 'bodice buster,' and yes, I'm having fun with my writing."
"Good. Now let me see your stuff."
"Well ..." she hesitated. "Promise you won't laugh." Jennifer went upstairs to get her work and returned a few minutes later.
"Remember now, like yours, this is a first draft," she warned. "I haven't advanced far enough into the Sampson and Delilah story to show it to you, so I brought something else."
"Oh, what have you got?" "It's the first section of LOVE RETOLD. Now remember, you promised not to laugh."
Jake just divided the remainder of the hot chocolate between their cups and settled back in his chair.
Jennifer smiled, then began to read.
"It is nearly evening, and the long, purple shadows of the many-storied buildings are rapidly lengthening along the narrow, dirty, rat-scurried streets of Venice. candles are being set in the fly-stained windows of the not very reputable 'Ye Golden Codde Inne.' Two men are standing in the shadows of the doorway.
'Gergory, on my word we'll not carry coals,' the thinner of the two says, punctuating his sentence with a loud burp, then an odoriferous fart.
'No,' the other agrees with a foul, toothless grin, 'for then we should be colliers.' The first man frowns at Gregory's attempt at wit. 'I mean, an we be in choler we'll draw,' he says, jabbing the fat man's rotund belly with a long, thin, dirty finger.
'Ah,' Gregory says with exaggerated slowness, 'while you live draw your neck out of collar.'
'I strike quickly, being moved.' The thin man brandishes his heavy, rust encrusted sword and stumbles forward, falling face first into the muddy street.
Gregory, helping his companion rise, says: 'but thou art not quickly moved to strike,' then hitches up his pantaloons, which, because of his girth, are reluctant to stay in place.
'A dog of the house of Montague moves me,' Sampson says with beer and garlicky breath directed at Gregory's red, bulbous nose.
Gregory turns his face away and fans the air in front of him with his hand. Sneering at his companion, he says: 'to move is to stir and to be valiant is to stand; therefore if thou art moved thou runnest away.'
'A dog of that house shall move me to stand,' he shouts, brandishing his sword above his head and stumbling backwards, crashing into the dark, solid oak door of the inn. Sliding down the ancient, splintery door, he mumbles: 'I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montangue's.'
The upper half of the door flies open and a harried-looking, buxom girl looks out, staring first at Gregory, then at his companion slumped against the door sill. Gregory throws up his hands in disgust and resignation. The wench, with a look of consummate disgust of her own, slams shut the upper door.
Again Gregory sets his drunken companion on his feet. 'That shows thee a weak slave, for the weakness goes to the wall.'
''Tis true,' Sampson agrees, leaning heavily against Gregory's shoulder for support and speaking confidentially to his ear, 'and therefore women, being the weaker vessel, are ever thrust to the wall.' He releases Gregory's shoulder and grabs the thin trunk of an unlit lamppost. Clutching the wooden pillar with one hand and raising a mud- splattered finger of the other hand, he concludes; 'therefore I will push Montangue's men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall.'
Gregory stands with his hands on his prodigiously padded hips, his puffy, ruddy upper arms held almost horizontal, and admonishes: 'the quarrel is between our masters,' and in a thoughtful, quieter, resigned afterthought, he adds: 'and us their men.'
''Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant,' Sampson shouts to th black, unimpressed lamppost.
'When I have fought with the men I will be civil to the maids; I will cut off their heads.'
'The heads of the maids?' Gregory asks incredulously.
'Ay, the heads of the maids,' he pokes the uncomprehending lamppost in its diminutive belly, 'or their maidenheads. Take it in what sense thou wilt.'
Gregory shakes his head in disgust, his jellied jowls quivering with each oscillation.
'They must take it in sense that feel it." The thin man lurches to the wall and, with fumbling fingers, unbuttons the codpiece of his pantaloons, one button flying loose to be forever lost in the slimy mud. He stands, splattering his water on wall, path, shoes, and socks. Over his shoulder he speaks to the waifish lamppost: 'Me they shall feel while I am able to stand, and 'tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.'
Gregory, standing well back from the spray, says: ''Tis well thou are not fish; if thou hadst been poor-John ...' Gregory stops speaking and pears into the gathering gloom at two forms that are coming down the soggy path, daintily sidestepping the mosquito-breeding pools of water.
'Draw thy tool!' he hisses at his still dribbling companion. 'Here comes of the house of Montangue.'
Sampson picks up his rusty sword from the ground, and, holding a dirty, ill-used tool in each hand, says: 'my naked weapon is out. Quarrel, I will back thee.'"
"Stop! Stop! Enough!" Jake protested as he burst into laughter.
When he controlled his mirth a minute later, Jennifer said,
"I'm sorry you found it so ridiculous."
"You've done this to the whole play?"
She nodded her head up and down.
"Ridiculous? Are you kidding? I love it. It's great, but I think that I'll only be able to take it in small doses."
"Oh," she said in her small voice.
"The love scenes too?"
"Yes. This is all pretty mild compared to the purpleness of the love scenes. The Juliet at the balcony scene just gushes with descriptive adjectives," Jennifer admitted.
Jake laughed again. "And you have a contract to do this?"
"This? I have a letter from my publisher that says that they'll give my next book first priority in examining it."
"But they don't know that you're redoing ROMEO AND JULIET?"
"No."
"But this romance publisher hasn't given yo an advance, you haven't signed anything, have you?"
"No, but I'm sure that they'll publish LOVE RETOLD."
"But you're not obligated to them in any legal way."
"I suppose not ..."
"Then throw their letter in the fire."
"Jake!"
"Throw it away. Put it in the fire," Jake insisted.
"You'll make more with the hardcover edition than all of their paperback ones, and then you'll have the paperback sales besides."
"But, Jake, romances aren't printed in hardcover editions."
"Romances! Romances! To the devil with them all. Do you know what you've done? Romance? Baah!"
"All I did was fill in between the dialogue," she said.
"You really don't know what you've done, do you?"
She stared at him in confused silence.
"Okay, give me the manuscript." He took it out of her hands. "Come on, we're going in the study."
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to build us a cheery, little fire, mix us a drink, and then I'm going to read this thing to you."
"But I already know it all," she protested.
"Yes, you wrote it, and you know what it says, but you haven't heard it. If the rest is as good as this feather duster scene, then you're in for a big surprise ... and I think that I'll lose my bet, lunch and dinner both."
She didn't object to being led down the hall, set down in the easy chair beside the fireplace, and having a glass thrust into her hand. Jake gave her three fingers of Canadian Club and a few ice cubes.
"I want you th get a little bit of a buzz on, then listen to the words and paint the scene in your head as if it were someone else's words you're hearing," Jake instructed.
She sat in silence as Jake built the fire. Then he sat down on the floor beside her, found the place where she stopped reading, and began.
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. Feb. 2000; Oct. 2001