Read Online Novelties & Souvenirs by John Crowley - Free Book Online

still that he had ever talked with her, much less what imaginary novel he had claimed to be writing.
    “It’s like coming into a cave here,” she said, raising her glass, empty now except for the rounded remains of ice. “You can’t see anything for a while. Because of the sun in your eyes. I didn’t recognize you at first.” The ice she wanted couldn’t escape from the bottom of the glass till she shook the glass briskly to free it; she slida piece into her mouth then and crunched it heedlessly (a long time since he’d been able to do that) and drew her skirt away from the stool beside her, which he had come to occupy.
    “Will you have another?”
    “No, nope.” They smiled at each other, each ready to go on with this if the other could think of something to go on with.
    “So,” he said.
    “Taking a break?” she said. “Do you write every day?”
    “Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don’t work very hard, really. Really I’m on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too. It comes to the same thing.” He’d said all this before, to others; he wondered if he’d said it to her. “It’s like weekend homework. Remember? There wasn’t ever a time you absolutely had to do it—there was always Saturday, then Sunday—but then there wasn’t ever a time when it wasn’t there to do, too.”
    “How awful.”
    Sunday dinner’s rich odor declining into stale leftoverhood: was it that incense that made Sunday Sunday, or what? For there was no part of Sunday that was not Sunday; even if, rebelling, you changed from Sunday suit to Saturday jeans when dinner was over, they felt not like a second skin, like a bold animal’s useful hide, as they had the day before, but strange, all right but wrong to flesh chafed by wool, the flannel shirt too smooth, too indulgent after the starched white. And upstairs—though you kept as far from them as possible, that is, facedown and full-length on the parlor carpet, head inches from the funnies—the books and blue-lined paper waited.
    “It must take a lot of self-discipline,” she said.
    “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much.” He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that “Dumas, I think itwas Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter—if you write one page a day, you’ll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.”
    “I don’t know,” she said, laughing. “I can’t even bring myself to write a letter.”
    “Oh, now that’s hard.” Easiest to leave it all just as it had been, and only inveigle into it a small sect of his own making…easiest of all just to leave it. It was draining from him, like the suits of the bathing beauties pictured on trick tumblers, to opposite effect. Self-indulgence only, nostalgia, pain of loss for what had not ever been worth saving: the self-indulgence of a man come to that time when the poignance of memory is his sharpest sensation, grown sharp as the others have grown blunt. The journey now quite obviously more than half over, it had begun to lose interest; only the road already traveled still seemed full of promise. Promise! Odd word. But there it was. He blinked, and having fallen rudely silent, said. “Well, well, well.”
    “Well,” she said. She had begun to gather up the small habitation she had made before her on the bar, purse and open wallet, folded newspaper, a single unblown rose he hadn’t noticed her bring in. “I’d like to read your book sometime.”
    “Sure,” he said. “It’s not very good. I mean, it has some nice things in it, it’s a good little story. But it’s nothing really.”
    “I’m sure it’s terrific.” She spun the rose beneath her nose and alighted from her stool.
    “I happen to have a lot of copies. I’ll give you