A writer's mystery (the conclusion)
Jan. 28th, 2005 11:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vaneramosContinued from last night. For ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
danthered.
~~~~~~~~~~
"Good morning, Allison," Jack said, folding the morning paper. He must have been looking for leads. And I don't mean clues. He was neatly dressed this morning. Jack only looked that way when he had been sitting at his desk too much. When he was busy, he looked shabby.
"What do you want?" he asked.
I just raised an eyebrow at him.
"Don't give me that look. I know you want something because you're wearing that dress."
The red one he always liked because of the way it showed my figure. Jack was the kind of man who liked a trophy on his arm. Too bad he preferred them without brains. Or perhaps just as well, because we were never happy together unless we were quarrelling. When I walked in he didn't even stand up or offer me a chair, so I found a space on the corner of his desk. I watched him struggle between irritation and curiosity.
"No swift riposte? Something must be wrong."
How clever of him. He sounded too eager to see me discomfited. I was already beginning to wonder whether I had done the right thing, coming here. When I didn't respond the way he expected, the balance tipped toward irritation.
"Alright, Allison, my time is valuable. If you're doing to barge in like this, you better explain what's on your mind, and quickly."
His vague threats never fazed me. I sighed resignedly, as I might with an impatient child. That was one of the things we never could agree on: children. I didn't want them.
My eyes scoured his office and settled on a notebook in easy reach of his left hand. I stretched toward it, beckoning him to give it. Instead he chose the opportunity to demonstrate his stubbornness, placing his hands behind his head and lounging back in the chair. He knew it was a gesture I despised, probably calculated to elicit an emotional outburst. But I wasn't about to make a fool of myself that way, at least not today. He thought I was toying with him. I gestured insistently, but to no avail.
Getting up I walked around his desk, half expecting him to snatch the notebook childishly away, but he let it lie. He had a pen in one of his hands, but wasn't about to offer it. I scrounged through the clutter on his desk for another and, finding one, applied it to the pad.
"I can't talk," I wrote simply and lifted the book so he could see it clearly.
"Huh? Must be a pretty nasty cold? Nothing ever silenced you before.."
He was still enjoying this too much, but he didn't get it. So I wrote, "NO," and underlined it several times. This didn't seem to suffice, so I added, "Something is wrong with my tongue."
So Jack started to giggle.
"You're admitting this now? The one who never had a good word to say about anything? And you're coming to me of all people as if I might know what to do about it. Honey, if I had the answer to that problem, our lives would have been a lot different."
Fine. I didn't go there to be lectured and humiliated. By the time he got that far, I was out in the hall.
"Wait!"
I wasn't in the mood for a one-sided fencing match. Let's see how many times we can lacerate Allison's ego while her hands are tied and she can't strike back. No, I'd find someone more helpful or else resort to plan B: the gardening hermit.
But Jack wasn't going to let the opportunity escape from him so easily. By the time I reached the car he had come running out behind me, pulling on his jacket. As I buckled up and started the engine, he pounded on my window. I was ready to pull out, back up over his foot if I had too. Then I noticed he was waving the notebook and pen at me with his free hand. Alright, I rolled down the window and took it from him.
"I'm sorry, I know this must be hard for you."
He was still having too much fun with the words, but at least he was trying to say the right thing. I brandished the pen and stabbed his notebook.
"And another thing," I wrote. "Jazz is missing."
I knew that would settle him down. As much as cat failed to understand that cat, he loved it to death. The news sobered him instantly.
It was true. While dressing to go out, I had tried all Jazz's favourite nesting spots, rattled dry food in his bowl, opened a can as noisily as I could, even got out his special kittie treats and crinkled the wrapper, but none of the usual strategies brought him running. I was becoming more distraught about that than my voice, particularly after his strange behaviour the previous evening.
After that, it didn't take any more persuading. Jack got in his car and followed me over my to place. He followed me inside. Then I expected him to start turning the place upside down, but instead he sat down in the living room and asked me to tell him what happened. Maybe he would go about this like a detective after all, instead of a panic-stricken parent. He wanted the whole story, so I wrote it out from the beginning: the way Jazz disappeared last night, about my strange awakening this morning, trying to call Jazz and discovering I couldn't talk. He asked whether I had eaten or drunk anything unusual the night before.
"Take home chicken from the supermarket," I scrawled. "Four glasses of Merlot."
The corner of his mouth curled up at the corner.
"You must have been having a hard time writing," he said, but there was no derision in it. He knew me pretty well. But the wine was not unprecedented, and it didn't explain what had happened to my voice.
"You should see a doctor right away," he said.
But it was half-hearted advice. He knows how stubborn I am about looking after myself. I'll ask for help when I get desperate enough. Truthfully there's no one I trust near as much as Jack, despite the way we hate each other.
"You've checked all Jazz's favourite hiding places. I suggest we give the house a thorough going-over. Check all the places we wouldn't expect to find him."
It was one thing we could do. Nodding agreement, I gestured around me, meaning I would start on the main floor of the bungalow. Something we both knew: Jazz and I both hate basements. That cat likes warm, enclosed places, not dark, damp ones. But under the circumstances, we needed to look everywhere. Jack headed for the basement stairs.
I began rummaging around the living room, then moved into the hall, opening the closets and pulling out boxes. Next came the bedroom. I had already looked under the bed this morning, but was giving it another try when I heard my ex-husband coming back upstairs.
"I found how he might have gotten out," he said, standing in the bedroom doorway. "There's a window open just enough for him to slip out. Do you always leave it like that?"
No, I don't. It seemed implausible. Jazz had started his life as an alleycat, but from the day he came home he had made himself comfortable, spending all of his days on the back of the chair where I sat writing. He had never shown much inclination to go outside except sometimes during the day with one of us in the yard. At night the house was his wilderness. He had never tried to escape before. And yet what other explanation could there be? Jack and I spent another half hour. Our frustrating increasing, we became more brutal, tearing the contents out of closets and throwing them on the floor. But what had happened seemed more and more apparent. The window hadn't come open on its own. We knew Jazz's magical ability to get in and out of closet. He must have managed to tease the window open somehow.
The question why kept hanging in the air between us. It was the most obvious line of inquiry for a detective, but perhaps the most obvious question for an ex-husband to leave unasked. I had shown him considerable trust in letting him tear through my things like this. After getting off to such a bad start this morning, I could see Jack being much more careful, and I appreciated it. As the afternoon went on and we got more frustrated, it seemed strange that we weren't at one another's throats the way we always had been.
Suddenly the reason for our truce became terribly obvious to me. It wasn't because of Jazz. No, a shared concern was not enough to stop me and Jack from tearing each other apart. The truth was sadder than that. I stopped searching the living room and dropped onto the couch in despair. He happened to be nearby and stopped to gauge my mood.
"Well it seems obvious what happened," he said. "I'll call the Humane Society if you like. Maybe he'll turn up somewhere."
I nodded gratefully. I was on the verge of tears and didn't want to show it, but didn't need to show it for him to know it. He also knew without asking that it was time for him to go. Not that I resented his company at that point, just that I needed to be alone. I stood up and walked to the door with him.
"Maybe a good night's rest will help," he said. "If you want, I'll drop by tomorrow morning on the way to work to see if there's any improvement."
I nodded and took his notepad from him one last time.
"Coffee?" I wrote.
He smiled and nodded, then went out.
I returned to the living room and collapsed. The day had started in a panic over my voice, but had turned to deeper anguish over the loss of my cat. It was incomprehensible and out of character. Jazz had only been with us for five years and I hadn't begun to prepare myself for his departure. The idea of going into retirement so completely bereft of companionship was unthinkable. I reached carelessly for the notebook I had discarded on top of the newspaper last night. Returning to my writing was the only thing that could console me now, taking comfort in its creative rhythm. A little light dinner, I told myself, and then a half hour at the desk. That's all it would take to make sure I didn't let a day pass without keeping the creative energy flowing. I didn't have the heart to continue that mystery novel, but perhaps a new idea would suggest itself once I put my pen to paper. I flipped to the last written page to contemplate it.
I was surprised to something added after the end of the previous chapter. I must have written it in the night. The additional paragraph was recorded in a strange scrawl I sometimes use when aroused from a dream, still half asleep. I have recorded dreams all my life, and occasionally find entries like this that I don't remember making. It makes the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. Weirder still, I could half remember the dream, but not the ending, nor waking and recording it.
"I dreamt that a white rabbit chased me through dark streets and underground corridors. He was missing one paw, and I thought it was the paw Jack found in the murderer's glove box. I believed he was trying to get it back from me, so I kept running.
"At last I was out of breath and turned to confront him, prepared to tell him I didn't have it. But instead he handed me a pocket watch. I asked him what it was and he told me, ‘It's your life -- your words running out.'
"I wanted to ask what he meant, but when I glanced up from the face he was gone. I was still standing somewhere underground but there was a window nearby and I was startled to see Jazz silhouetted in the moonlight. I recognized his green eyes, glowing like emeralds. He was poised to slip through the window. I moved to stop him, but he was too quick.
"‘I'm taking a hostage,' he hissed. ‘I'll come back when you finish the novel. As long as you write, I'll read from the back of your chair.'
"And then he disappeared."
So here I sit with my pen and notebook and another glass of Merlot. To write two more chapters is a small price to bring home Jazz.
danthered.~~~~~~~~~~
"Good morning, Allison," Jack said, folding the morning paper. He must have been looking for leads. And I don't mean clues. He was neatly dressed this morning. Jack only looked that way when he had been sitting at his desk too much. When he was busy, he looked shabby.
"What do you want?" he asked.
I just raised an eyebrow at him.
"Don't give me that look. I know you want something because you're wearing that dress."
The red one he always liked because of the way it showed my figure. Jack was the kind of man who liked a trophy on his arm. Too bad he preferred them without brains. Or perhaps just as well, because we were never happy together unless we were quarrelling. When I walked in he didn't even stand up or offer me a chair, so I found a space on the corner of his desk. I watched him struggle between irritation and curiosity.
"No swift riposte? Something must be wrong."
How clever of him. He sounded too eager to see me discomfited. I was already beginning to wonder whether I had done the right thing, coming here. When I didn't respond the way he expected, the balance tipped toward irritation.
"Alright, Allison, my time is valuable. If you're doing to barge in like this, you better explain what's on your mind, and quickly."
His vague threats never fazed me. I sighed resignedly, as I might with an impatient child. That was one of the things we never could agree on: children. I didn't want them.
My eyes scoured his office and settled on a notebook in easy reach of his left hand. I stretched toward it, beckoning him to give it. Instead he chose the opportunity to demonstrate his stubbornness, placing his hands behind his head and lounging back in the chair. He knew it was a gesture I despised, probably calculated to elicit an emotional outburst. But I wasn't about to make a fool of myself that way, at least not today. He thought I was toying with him. I gestured insistently, but to no avail.
Getting up I walked around his desk, half expecting him to snatch the notebook childishly away, but he let it lie. He had a pen in one of his hands, but wasn't about to offer it. I scrounged through the clutter on his desk for another and, finding one, applied it to the pad.
"I can't talk," I wrote simply and lifted the book so he could see it clearly.
"Huh? Must be a pretty nasty cold? Nothing ever silenced you before.."
He was still enjoying this too much, but he didn't get it. So I wrote, "NO," and underlined it several times. This didn't seem to suffice, so I added, "Something is wrong with my tongue."
So Jack started to giggle.
"You're admitting this now? The one who never had a good word to say about anything? And you're coming to me of all people as if I might know what to do about it. Honey, if I had the answer to that problem, our lives would have been a lot different."
Fine. I didn't go there to be lectured and humiliated. By the time he got that far, I was out in the hall.
"Wait!"
I wasn't in the mood for a one-sided fencing match. Let's see how many times we can lacerate Allison's ego while her hands are tied and she can't strike back. No, I'd find someone more helpful or else resort to plan B: the gardening hermit.
But Jack wasn't going to let the opportunity escape from him so easily. By the time I reached the car he had come running out behind me, pulling on his jacket. As I buckled up and started the engine, he pounded on my window. I was ready to pull out, back up over his foot if I had too. Then I noticed he was waving the notebook and pen at me with his free hand. Alright, I rolled down the window and took it from him.
"I'm sorry, I know this must be hard for you."
He was still having too much fun with the words, but at least he was trying to say the right thing. I brandished the pen and stabbed his notebook.
"And another thing," I wrote. "Jazz is missing."
I knew that would settle him down. As much as cat failed to understand that cat, he loved it to death. The news sobered him instantly.
It was true. While dressing to go out, I had tried all Jazz's favourite nesting spots, rattled dry food in his bowl, opened a can as noisily as I could, even got out his special kittie treats and crinkled the wrapper, but none of the usual strategies brought him running. I was becoming more distraught about that than my voice, particularly after his strange behaviour the previous evening.
After that, it didn't take any more persuading. Jack got in his car and followed me over my to place. He followed me inside. Then I expected him to start turning the place upside down, but instead he sat down in the living room and asked me to tell him what happened. Maybe he would go about this like a detective after all, instead of a panic-stricken parent. He wanted the whole story, so I wrote it out from the beginning: the way Jazz disappeared last night, about my strange awakening this morning, trying to call Jazz and discovering I couldn't talk. He asked whether I had eaten or drunk anything unusual the night before.
"Take home chicken from the supermarket," I scrawled. "Four glasses of Merlot."
The corner of his mouth curled up at the corner.
"You must have been having a hard time writing," he said, but there was no derision in it. He knew me pretty well. But the wine was not unprecedented, and it didn't explain what had happened to my voice.
"You should see a doctor right away," he said.
But it was half-hearted advice. He knows how stubborn I am about looking after myself. I'll ask for help when I get desperate enough. Truthfully there's no one I trust near as much as Jack, despite the way we hate each other.
"You've checked all Jazz's favourite hiding places. I suggest we give the house a thorough going-over. Check all the places we wouldn't expect to find him."
It was one thing we could do. Nodding agreement, I gestured around me, meaning I would start on the main floor of the bungalow. Something we both knew: Jazz and I both hate basements. That cat likes warm, enclosed places, not dark, damp ones. But under the circumstances, we needed to look everywhere. Jack headed for the basement stairs.
I began rummaging around the living room, then moved into the hall, opening the closets and pulling out boxes. Next came the bedroom. I had already looked under the bed this morning, but was giving it another try when I heard my ex-husband coming back upstairs.
"I found how he might have gotten out," he said, standing in the bedroom doorway. "There's a window open just enough for him to slip out. Do you always leave it like that?"
No, I don't. It seemed implausible. Jazz had started his life as an alleycat, but from the day he came home he had made himself comfortable, spending all of his days on the back of the chair where I sat writing. He had never shown much inclination to go outside except sometimes during the day with one of us in the yard. At night the house was his wilderness. He had never tried to escape before. And yet what other explanation could there be? Jack and I spent another half hour. Our frustrating increasing, we became more brutal, tearing the contents out of closets and throwing them on the floor. But what had happened seemed more and more apparent. The window hadn't come open on its own. We knew Jazz's magical ability to get in and out of closet. He must have managed to tease the window open somehow.
The question why kept hanging in the air between us. It was the most obvious line of inquiry for a detective, but perhaps the most obvious question for an ex-husband to leave unasked. I had shown him considerable trust in letting him tear through my things like this. After getting off to such a bad start this morning, I could see Jack being much more careful, and I appreciated it. As the afternoon went on and we got more frustrated, it seemed strange that we weren't at one another's throats the way we always had been.
Suddenly the reason for our truce became terribly obvious to me. It wasn't because of Jazz. No, a shared concern was not enough to stop me and Jack from tearing each other apart. The truth was sadder than that. I stopped searching the living room and dropped onto the couch in despair. He happened to be nearby and stopped to gauge my mood.
"Well it seems obvious what happened," he said. "I'll call the Humane Society if you like. Maybe he'll turn up somewhere."
I nodded gratefully. I was on the verge of tears and didn't want to show it, but didn't need to show it for him to know it. He also knew without asking that it was time for him to go. Not that I resented his company at that point, just that I needed to be alone. I stood up and walked to the door with him.
"Maybe a good night's rest will help," he said. "If you want, I'll drop by tomorrow morning on the way to work to see if there's any improvement."
I nodded and took his notepad from him one last time.
"Coffee?" I wrote.
He smiled and nodded, then went out.
I returned to the living room and collapsed. The day had started in a panic over my voice, but had turned to deeper anguish over the loss of my cat. It was incomprehensible and out of character. Jazz had only been with us for five years and I hadn't begun to prepare myself for his departure. The idea of going into retirement so completely bereft of companionship was unthinkable. I reached carelessly for the notebook I had discarded on top of the newspaper last night. Returning to my writing was the only thing that could console me now, taking comfort in its creative rhythm. A little light dinner, I told myself, and then a half hour at the desk. That's all it would take to make sure I didn't let a day pass without keeping the creative energy flowing. I didn't have the heart to continue that mystery novel, but perhaps a new idea would suggest itself once I put my pen to paper. I flipped to the last written page to contemplate it.
I was surprised to something added after the end of the previous chapter. I must have written it in the night. The additional paragraph was recorded in a strange scrawl I sometimes use when aroused from a dream, still half asleep. I have recorded dreams all my life, and occasionally find entries like this that I don't remember making. It makes the hair stand up on the nape of my neck. Weirder still, I could half remember the dream, but not the ending, nor waking and recording it.
"I dreamt that a white rabbit chased me through dark streets and underground corridors. He was missing one paw, and I thought it was the paw Jack found in the murderer's glove box. I believed he was trying to get it back from me, so I kept running.
"At last I was out of breath and turned to confront him, prepared to tell him I didn't have it. But instead he handed me a pocket watch. I asked him what it was and he told me, ‘It's your life -- your words running out.'
"I wanted to ask what he meant, but when I glanced up from the face he was gone. I was still standing somewhere underground but there was a window nearby and I was startled to see Jazz silhouetted in the moonlight. I recognized his green eyes, glowing like emeralds. He was poised to slip through the window. I moved to stop him, but he was too quick.
"‘I'm taking a hostage,' he hissed. ‘I'll come back when you finish the novel. As long as you write, I'll read from the back of your chair.'
"And then he disappeared."
So here I sit with my pen and notebook and another glass of Merlot. To write two more chapters is a small price to bring home Jazz.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:03 am (UTC)I loved how it flowed and the dialogue, the whole thing.
I love it when I can picture in my mind's eye what the story is saying etc, the locals, the cat etc.
I've always been visually oriented along with aurially and hands on to learn - in other words, multi sensory in nature.
Thanks for sharing (even if for
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:41 am (UTC)More comments when I am more coherent and less exhausted...
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 06:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 05:15 pm (UTC)Of course, I like the idea about it being about a writer, too. It got me thinking about my dissertation, designing an argumentative outline for part of it.
Now I'll probably be tricked into working on it on a Saturday again.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-29 07:06 pm (UTC)Thanks for your comments.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-02 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-02 05:48 pm (UTC)I'm always curious with someone who is removed by more than one degree of separation (although I've seen your name before), how you found this post.