Scissors Read online

  Translation copyright © 2013 by John Cullen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in France as Ciseaux by Fayard, Paris, in 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Librairie Arthème Fayard.

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  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Jacket photograph © Tetra Images/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Michaka, Stéphane, author.

  [Ciseaux. English]

  Scissors : a novel / Stéphane Michaka; translated from the French by John Cullen. — First American Edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Carver, Raymond, 1938–1988—Friends and associates—Fiction. 2. Biographical fiction. I. Cullen, John, translator. II. Title.

  PQ2713.I235C5713 2013

  843’.92—dc23 2012046949

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53751-3

  v3.1

  For Lilas

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  First Page

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Scissors is a work of fiction. Although I have used some publicly known facts from Raymond Carver’s life and from his relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish, the characters in this novel are loosely based, rather than closely modeled, on real-life figures. My characters’ words, as well as the four short stories included in Scissors, are all my invention. For nonfictional surveys of Raymond Carver’s life and work, which will no doubt continue to inspire readers and writers alike, the reader is directed to the selected bibliography at the end of this volume.

  RAYMOND

  What comes over us is pretty scary. It takes hold without warning. Even when nothing’s going on, it’s there. It’s waiting. A delayed explosion, that’s it, that’s precisely what it is: a time bomb.

  The alcoholic’s internal clock is the thing we’ve all come here to get rid of.

  Paula and Cathy, the directors of this center, are unfailingly patient. They need patience with guys like us. And they have a sense of humor too—who could do without one in their line of work? Whenever somebody starts to shake, a sure sign of an imminent attack, Paula or Cathy comes over and says, “We must pull our tongue in, we mustn’t let it hang out of our mouth.” And then you find that one or the other of them, or the big fat guy when he’s on duty, has their thumbs between your teeth. Some people bite themselves bloody.

  I checked in yesterday. It’s not the first time I’ve come here, but I’d like it to be the best time. The last time.

  Two days ago, I broke a bottle on Marianne’s head.

  In the fifteen years we’ve been married, that’s never happened before. Marianne provoked me, of course. I’ll spare you the details. I love Marianne and as she often tells me, she couldn’t live without me. Maybe the bottle was on account of that.

  I’m going to give you the details after all. We had a house-warming party at our new place in town. Alcohol was flowing like a mighty river, and Marianne started flirting with one of my colleagues. A history professor, I think. “Hey,” I said to my wife. “Am I seeing right? Are you letting him check out your tits?” I should have whacked the guy, but Marianne was the one who got it. The bottle broke against her skull. She raised herself off the floor and left the house. She was found staggering down the street. The doctors told me an artery was cut and she’d lost half her blood.

  Half her blood gone and still walking: that’s Marianne.

  The most embarrassing thing is I don’t remember hitting her. Some of our friends told me about it afterward. “I don’t remember anything,” I said. “Not a thing.” They looked at me as though I’d killed someone.

  I felt so bad I packed my bag and left.

  I landed here.

  *

  I know I have to call Marianne and apologize. For that and for all the rest. But whenever I go to the telephone, there’s a long line of guys waiting to do a whole lot of apologizing to a whole lot of people. Just listening to them makes your head spin. You’d think the worst criminals on the planet had somehow wound up here. Some of them manage to pull through. They start over from scratch. After they get past withdrawal, I mean. You see, the problem’s in your body. It’s your system that’s dependent. And then one fine day it isn’t anymore, but that takes awhile.

  *

  I don’t know how long I’m going to stay here, but this will be the last time, I think. It’s a great place as long as you don’t have an urgent phone call to make. Paula and Cathy bought the land from a retired farmer. There’s a dilapidated farmhouse at the end of the road. Its doors and windows are boarded up. Right in front of it, there’s a chestnut tree that drops leaves all year round. One day it’s going to fall on the farmhouse. Farther on there’s the paved road, and about a mile and a half away there’s alcohol for sale. We’re not allowed to venture that far. I found a little stream near the fence. A thin thread of water with pebbles on either side.

  I kneel down and think about Marianne. About what I’d like to tell her. Some sad things, consoling things, and some other things, too.

  Maybe she never wants to see me again.

  *

  People are always assuring us we don’t live in a world of certainties. We’re told there’s nothing certain but love, so long as it lasts; the family, so long as it stays together; and friends, when they’re passing through. Which is the same as saying that none of all that is any surer than anything else. And so? Does that mean we have to do without certainties? Can you hold out for very long without one or two stones in your hand?

  Marianne and I live near a river. Our children are grown up now. Well, almost grown up. They don’t go down to the river with us anymore to catch trout or skip stones. I try to guard against it, but every time I throw a stone, I feel a twinge of fear. A superstition. There’s one less stone in my hand, and I’m going to have to make do. To live without the smallest certainty. In the catastrophe of complete uncertainty.

  I don’t think my stories have ever been about anything else.

  My name is Raymond. I’m a writer. That is, I hope to become one.

  DOUGLAS

  All my days are alike. That’s something I wanted. A victory, you can say.

  I look out the window. You can’t say window. It’s a glass panel, a transparent solid overlooking the city. A cleaning person washes it down with soapy water three times a week (the panel pivots around) and then goes over it with a rubber broom. I’m rarely in the room when she does that. At the time when she comes, I’m generally dictating a letter to Sibyll or downstairs having lunch somewhere near the magazine’s offices. There are so many restaurants I haven’t come close to trying them all. Here’s the advantage of working in the publishing district: The good tables are always opening and closing. Like publishers. A series of openings, failures, and reopenings. There are no disasters, just different ways of trying your luck. One of my mottoes. I have heaps of mottoes.

  When the worker assigned to window cleaning finishes on this floor, she goes on to the next. I’ve never asked her whether she moves her operation one floor up or one floor down. There are twenty floors in this building. Window cleaning on that scale requires a method. Or maybe a dozen people like her. I don’t know her name. The girl with the rubber broom. You could make a novel out of that. Sometimes I get the itch to do that sort
of thing. But I restrain myself. My imagination is concise. My work is reduction. I edit short stories, epics in miniature.

  The girl has a rubber broom, and ten pages on, all you’ll know about her life is that she goes down one floor after another, cleaning windows. Or maybe up. I like to leave things blurry.

  *

  It’s time. At a certain point in the day, depending on the weather, the light comes in from the west. It caresses the side of the building, but only from the floor below on up. It rubs its muzzle against the glass—it’s an image, don’t overuse it, I tell my students. An image is a beauty mark; when it’s close to another one, it becomes a wart. The light rounds its back against my panes and shhh—an example of onomatopoeia; two are allowed, but they must be comic in intent. You can see it at this very moment: the prism of colors. An effect that requires no fewer than sixty-six colored panes. This rose window cost me an arm and a leg. It never fails to thrill me.

  People sometimes ask me, “Suppose you get fired? If they fire you from the magazine, what will they do about your stained-glass window?”

  If they fire me, what will they do about their magazine? It’s entirely dependent on the stories I buy and publish. The voice you hear inside. Readers come to listen to that voice.

  I’m not God. Who said I thought I was God? I have enemies everywhere in the publishing business. In rival houses, at other magazines. Enemies spreading like a case of psoriasis I purposely encourage. I love the constant eruption of envy around me.

  Don’t think for a minute this stained-glass window can’t be removed. Like every one of us here below.

  What else? Nothing for the moment. For the moment, this day is like the others, and the girl with the rubber broom has already taken up too much of my attention.

  Oh, I almost forgot: My name is Douglas. People in the business call me “Scissors.”

  RAYMOND

  That was a goose, right? I thought I heard a goose.

  Geese have a way of squawking that imposes a brief period of silence. Then everything starts chirping and buzzing again, just like before.

  Those brusque interruptions remind me of the first years of my marriage. I was young, I needed air, so did Marianne, but I didn’t let her have any.

  We were kids, with two children we’d had too soon. What do you do when the road behind you closes and you can’t back up anymore? I wrote a story about that: “Who Needs Air?”

  I’d like to take it up again, revise it, improve it. This morning Paula asked me, “What do you love most in life? What is it you want to preserve at all costs?”

  I didn’t say, “My wife.” I didn’t say, “Marianne and the children.”

  I said, “My stories.”

  Good God, I said my stories.

  Who Needs Air?

  Ambulance sirens, that’s what I bring home with me from my nights on duty.

  From midnight to eight in the morning, the sirens follow one another, or sometimes blend together, on the two-lane road that circles the hospital. I can hear them from my night-watchman’s box, first far, then close, and finally not at all, when the lights are still on but the sound is off and the ambulances park in the back, unburdened of an injured person or a corpse.

  At the moment, my thoughts go no farther than that. To me, emergencies are distant sounds I hear from inside a glass cage.

  But when the night’s over and I sit down to write, the sirens return and haunt me. They get mixed up with other sirens, with specific catastrophes engraved in my memory.

  Like the time in the sawmill where my father worked, the Big Gully sawmill. I went there after school one day to learn something about the work, and I saw a man, Frank Dubont, whose arms no longer ended in hands. The foreman said Frank was drunk and had leaned over the saw so it would carry him away. But the saw had taken only his hands. I turned to my father. I figured he was going to tell me not to stay. His eyelids were red and his lips were trembling. I averted my eyes. The teeth of the saw were intact and gleaming with blood. As I was leaving on my bicycle, I passed the ambulance coming in.

  Another siren comes back to me from one Christmas when the snow never stopped coming down. The scene was our neighbors’ house. They were Carole and Ben Weber, and they’d been separated for a month. Now Ben was living in a mobile home owned by his mistress, Betty Pradinas. Carole’s best friend up until a month ago. I don’t know what Ben could have been thinking, but he showed up at the house to wish Carole a merry Christmas. Maybe she lured him with some tasty little dishes (Betty knows how to do lots of things, but cooking isn’t one of them). In any case, Ben got served. Three bullets from a .22. Who would have thought Carole Weber kept a rifle in her vegetable garden? A rifle and some Ajax for killing slugs. Ben didn’t die, he was just perforated. By love, of course, it was love that perforated him. Betty’s mobile home wasn’t seen again.

  A siren never far from my mind: the one in the ambulance taking Marion to the hospital. It’s her second pregnancy, and there are complications. I’m at her side. While I hold her hand—her fingers are too weak to squeeze mine—I start thinking, So what if …? If she lost the baby, that might not be a tragedy. A doctor’s leaning over her. With a quick look, he checks on how I’m holding up. Why on earth am I making this face? Playing the anxious guy? The truth is I’m saying to myself, It might not be a tragedy. The doctor concentrates on my wife. I keep on thinking, So what if …? I’m twenty years old. Marion’s eighteen. She got pregnant again three months after our first baby. By the time she realized what was up, it was too late.

  With the siren drilling my ears, I have the impression that Marion and I are driving right into a wall.

  My son is born the next day. Theo.

  Marion’s better. She turns her face to me, her drawn features, her pale smile. I love her so much I could go nuts from it. And I don’t hear the siren anymore.

  I should be at my typewriter, working. But as so often, I’m a truant. I don’t go home when my night duty’s over. Not right away. I take the exit ramp, park my car, and wait. While my limbs grow numb and grayish condensation fogs the windshield, I wait for the grocery store to open. So I can get, in exchange for a five-dollar bill and a grunt that means good morning, the bottle of whiskey I crave.

  The truth is I really like to drink. I like the taste of liquor. Everything would be a lot simpler if I didn’t like it so much.

  It warms me up very quickly. It’s an old acquaintance, a friend waiting patiently on the doorstep. Why leave him outside? He joins me and makes me warm. There in the car, when the bottle rolls at my feet and strikes the other bottles, I can no longer feel my legs, the cold, or remorse.

  On the way home, in the comfort zone where the sirens fade away, nothing has any consequences. It’s the hour when my actions are just a rough draft. I could delete a whole day’s worth. I forget that I’ll flop down on the sofa as soon as I get inside and fall into a sleep that will delete nothing but rather insert, insert deeper in me remorse for getting drunk.

  I forget that I want to be a writer.

  ——

  It’s a Monday in November. Monday is laundry day. I’m the one who takes care of the laundry. Dead leaves are piling up on the windowsills. The leaves block the rain gutters. I have to take care of that too.

  In the evenings, when Marion comes home, the kids are already in bed. As for whether or not they’re asleep, I don’t know. That’s another story.

  “You ought to go and check on them,” Marion says, taking out the silverware.

  “It’s ten o’clock. My shift’s over, right?”

  She flings the knives down on the kitchen table.

  “Your shift? You worked a shift? Then why isn’t the laundry done? Why has nothing been ironed?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  She moves a knife and looks daggers at me, as if I’m the one throwing the cutlery around.

  “I was at the Laundromat. I spent the whole afternoon there.”

  “Hard to tell,” Marion
says.

  “I was at the Laundromat, and something happened.”

  “Please, Robin, no stories. I’m not in the mood to—”

  “Just listen. Listen to what happened in the Laundromat.”

  She sits down, opens a beer, and pours it into a glass. I can’t get over it. I thought I drank them all. Does she have a secret compartment in the fridge?

  I suppress a trembling fit and the urge to dismantle the fridge.

  “You can tell me your story while I drink,” Marion says.

  I can see she’s dying to hear it. My wife loves listening to my stories. She likes inventing them too, but she doesn’t make it her job. Marion pays the rent and the household expenses. That’s the way the roles have been assigned. She’s challenging me to tell the story. I don’t want to disappoint her.

  “So I’m in the Laundromat. The place is packed. Mothers with children who should be in school. Why aren’t they in school? I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but not all the children in our neighborhood go to school. They’re playing hooky, I suppose. Are you listening to me?”

  “I’m listening to you, Robin.”

  “And those are the kids Sophie and Theo play hide-and-seek with.”

  “What could you possibly know about that?”

  She puts down her glass so hard it shakes the table.

  “Well, hide-and-seek or some other game.”

  “You have no proof they’re playing hooky.”

  “In any case, lots of kids. There’s a tremendous racket in the Laundromat. The machines spin and spin without stopping, or rather when one does stop, a sturdy matron doing her entire family’s winter underwear is right there to fill it up. And then she restarts the machine, the racket gets louder again, and I’m obliged to wait, to endure, trapped on a bench with three bags of dirty clothes: one Sophie’s and Theo’s, one yours, and one mine, like it’s been ever since we started separating the laundry. Incidentally, why do we separate it?”