Several hours later, Jamie
opened the door to Adam's new apartment and called, "Adamsky!" But when the echo
of his voice died, all there was by way of a response was a slapping sound. A
tiny slapping sound; rhythmic. The sound haunted him with a sick, sweet old stab
in the ribs, but he couldn't remember why. He walked into the apartment, around
the foyer wall, into the main room. Blinded by the light, but bedazzled more by
the vision of Adam pouring writing into his computer, Jamie hosannahed over the
writerly image and remembered where he had heard a sound like the keyboard
tappings all in one intaking and outletting of breath. Adam's fingers on the
keys sounded like rain on a tiled roof.
1944. Italy. Jamie had gone to
sleep in the attic of a grand house in the midst of a rigid vigil of terror as
shells rocked the village where his battalion was billeted. When Jamie awoke, he
was relaxed and the only sound was rain tapping the tile roof. Just as the
bombast was temporarily over with, the war for Jamie was permanently over with
that morning. He had wakened too relaxed. He had cracked up in his sleep.
Now as Jamie admired Adam
concerted with the computer, he breathed deeply as if to survive on the
inspiration. But suddenly he thought he smelled the Italian rain. His panic
lasted a moment until he realized that he smelled the actual rain that he wore
on his trenchcoat, and not world war rain.
He marveled a few more minutes at
the enlightened concentration, and then left the apartment on tiptoes, wondering
about many things, but mostly wondering why an angel at a word processor wasn't
a more weird image.
In another
hour Jamie looked in at Adam again, went away and came back after an interval
with a tray of coffee and food.
"Honduras," Adam said, as Jamie came to the desk with the tray.
"What?" Jamie almost shouted in
his fright as he almost tipped the tray over. He hadn't realized that Adam might
speak--or could!
"Where's
Honduras? What's north and what's south of it?"
"Wait," said Jamie, holding up an
index finger, and then he went to his apartment. He returned dragging his globe
on its oak stand. Adam, who had rested his hands in his lap and had waited as
Jamie ordered him to, picked up his coffee, got up stiffly and went to the
globe. Jamie went back to his apartment, and when he returned with an atlas,
Adam was sitting on the floor sipping coffee and staring at Central America.
Jamie laid the enormous book on the floor near Adam and backed away a few steps
as if he were proffering the gift of a box of jewels to a potentate. After a bit
Adam put down his cup, sat up on his heels and started looking into the atlas.
Jamie silently took the cup back to his kitchen and prepared more sweet, milky
coffee for Adam. "Oh this is good!" Jamie said, as though he might be crazy for
the cup of common substances.
"Eat, too," he told Adam when he brought him the cup. Adam, who was now sitting
at the desk reading dialogue on the screen, put the cup down, put his fingers on
the sandwich. But after a moment's dawdling there, the fingers gave the napkin
that lay on the tray a stroke and leapt to the keyboard. "What a ham!" Jamie
thought. "He plays the part to the hilt." But he back out of the apartment like
a Chinese houseboy, gobbling up the vision of Adam writing.
Frequently, Jamie awoke in that
night, thinking he had heard or would soon hear Adam come into the apartment.
Jamie wondered why Adam didn't come and sleep on his couch bed out in the
livingroom.
But Adam labored,
played through the night, deep in the first scenes while at the same time
divining a foundation and conjuring a superstructure. Adam would be at one
moment imprisoned by a knot of themes; at the next moment he relaxed and played
with the tangle; and then when the threads of ideas relaxed, he knitted them
ruthlessly into a sensibly handsome grid. He was driven and seduced by words. He
smacked sentences around like tennis balls. Or he laid fragile truths in cotton
batting beds like baby sparrows. Some thoughts need nursing along. All night
long, in the crime of sleepless dreaming that writing is, Adam was abetted by
his characters. They were his collaborators. When dawn had long been humming
greyly at his windows, Adam paused. He had written two scenes of serious
nonsense which fairly well reflected that of life.
He set the printer in motion to
leach the scenes from disk to paper, and he took the stale sandwich with him as
he went and gazed out a window onto a drizzly morning. Though he wolfed down the
sandwich, he shouldn't have been able to as raw as his throat was, except that
he was ravenous. He heated coffee in his kitchen and drank a few cups while he
read the scenes and his notes. After writing several more pages of notes, he
went after scene three.
At nine
Jamie appeared with a breakfast tray. He insisted Adam stop to eat. Adam ate. As
he ate, he watched Jamie and the day elevator operator carry the hide-a-bed
couch into his apartment. When the helper left, and Jamie was making the bed
afresh, Adam realized that he had merely watched as the two older men had
struggled with the especially heavy couch. He had viewed the business as if it
had been some vestigial scene happening dimly in his playwright's eye. As if to
compensate, as if to plug into reality, he said to Jamie, "Aren't you going to
work today?"
"It's Saturday, you
know," Jamie replied, struggling with a pillow case.
"Oh. No. I didn't know," said
Adam. Adam seldom knew what day it was except by the TV Guide and Jamie's
week-a-day comings and goings.
"Really, you ought to get some sleep. You'd work better." And then Jamie bit his
lip, regretting the direct reference to Adam writing, not wanting to upset what
had to be in tender balance. And to Adam, each sound from their mouths sounded
gigantic and ridiculous and he was afraid the talking out loud would overwhelm
and blot out the words and rhythms and mood for his play. But the talking was
swallowed bones and all by the rude beast of creative reality. It was okay to go
through the noises of living in the world, Adam thought. "Really. Get some
sleep, Adam," Jamie was saying again.
Adam ogled the bed, but in
deference to its launderedness, he lumbered to the bathroom where he started a
bath in the huge Victorian tub that reminded him of the one from his childhood
home. Having gone to Jamie's apartment for a change of clothes and toiletries,
he spilled about five times too much soap powder into the bathtub in
preoccupation over a passage in the scene he had been working on. He ran back to
the word processor, startling Jamie who was cleaning up in the kitchen. Adam
changed a word in the play, then a whole line, went back to the original, then
changed the word again. But he thought better of the change and went back to the
starting place again. He was too tired, he realized, and he left it and turned
off the machine. He returned to the bathroom, took of his shoes and socks and
started to shave. He didn't notice that the bath was still running because the
level of the water was above the faucets now.
Half shaved, Adam sat on the
closed toilet seat screwing and unscrewing the handle of his razor, opening and
closing the blade compartment as he considered a new block of dialogue for scene
three. At last a sheet of bath water fell onto Adam's feet. When Adam yelled in
surprise, Jamie came running into the bathroom, slipped on the spilled water,
fell and slid until his feet were wedged under the claw foot tub. "Oh my god! My
ass!" the older man groaned. His tailbone had given an audible crack as it broke
when he landed on the tile.
The
water continued sloshing over the edge of the tub, bearing with it a glacier of
soap suds in slower rhythms of sliding than the water had. Adam skated to
Jamie's head, stooped over, reached under Jamie's shoulders and pulled the
whimpering man up. But when he got him to a sitting position and could reach all
the way around his chest to pull him out from under the tub, Adam slashed his
wrist. He had been so concerned that Jamie might drown in splashing water that
he had forgotten he had his razor in his hand. The loosened razor made a deep
gash in Adam's left wrist when he crossed his arms over Jamie's chest.
The razor skittered across the
watery floor, the water fell in waves out of the tub, and the two men watched
the blood break over Adam's hand and polka dot and stripe Jamie's wet white
shirt. Jamie yelled at Adam to turn the water off. Adam reached beneath the
water to the faucet, displacing a cascade with his right arm, while his left arm
splattered blood over Jamie's white wool trousers. Sitting on one buttock to
relieve the pain, Jamie ordered Adam to step across him and sit down on the
toilet. "Carefully!" But when Adam stepped on the razor with a bare foot, it
seemed for a moment that he would fall onto Jamie until he grabbed the towel
rack and steadied himself.
Jamie
recoiled when it seemed Adam would fall and this sent a spasm of pain through
his posterior and back and legs. The spasm made his body jerk and this made him
slip and slide a few centimeters, which made for more spasms when he tried to
hold still. Etc. Finally, he got his body under control and he saw that Adam's
wrist had ripped worse from having grabbed the towel rack. Jamie thought, "Oh
god, don't let it keep him from typing!" Out loud he said, "Take the towel and
wrap it tightly around your wrist." Adam did this without mishap while Jamie
pulled himself up by a surprisingly dry, fortunately rough grip-hold on the
under lip of the bathtub rim. He had an untimely memory of having done this
exercise for fun as a small boy. He suppressed a laugh.
He leaned over and pulled the
plug out of the tub drain. He stood panting from the exertion, trying to keep
respiration shallow because deep breaths were a pain in the ass, and because
deep breaths might cause his feet to slip in the suds. "Sit there and hold that
towel fairly tight until I come back," he told Adam. His intention was to get
his first aid kit from his apartment, and a load of towels to throw on the
water. He moved by inches to the door. It was Adam in the end who started the
giggling process. But Jamie was right with him giggle for giggle before Adam's
first syllable of laughter had elapsed.
Still four feet distant from the
door in the enormous Victorian bathroom, the older man stood helpless with
laughter on a crazy field of blood, water and bubbles. Hugging his wound and its
huge bandage to his chest, Adam rose, held the wall with his right hand as he
advanced, and he inched his way to Jamie. He arrived at his friend after five
two-man sets of laughter that stopped all progress until hysteria was
controlled. He took Jamie under the arm and they baby-stepped their way to the
door, Adam leaving one bloody print dissipating in the water every time four
feet moved.
They stopped for a
few minutes to laugh unconstrainedly outside of the reach of the water that had
spread into the hallway. Then they laughed all the way to Jamie's kitchen where
they were abruptly silent upon unwrapping Adam's wound. "Jesus, Adam. We ought
to have this thing stitched."
"No!" Adam bellowed. "No goddamned doctors." Then he added more softly, "I've
seen worse than this. It's nothing. Just bandage it, will ya?"
Of course Adam had seen worse,
thought Jamie. That girl he had lived with, Kookie--no--Kiki was her name--Kiki
had slashed her wrists. And Adam's uncle, the one Adam had written Roses and
Horses about, had slashed his wrists. Jamie shivered with horror as he stood
at his linen closet door, too blind with these thoughts for a moment to remember
why he was there. Then he got the first aid kit off the top shelf.
After Jamie meticulously
butterflied Adam's wrist and bandaged the superficial cut on his foot, they
argued over who would clean up Adam's bathroom. Tailbone or wrist? Then they
worked at it together. Then Adam finishing shaving, noticing when he got to his
neck that his glands were swollen. Jamie ran Adam a new bath the while, staring
at it as if less than constant vigilance would cause a duplication of the
disaster just past. Adam wanted to laugh at Jamie's hydro intensity but the
earlier hysteria had wrecked his throat. He asked Jamie to leave. Jamie went to
his own place, washed and dressed as fast as his ass would move. He wanted to
get back and read the play while Adam was indisposed in his bath.