Scissors Read online

  Raymond, will you please stop typing for five minutes? Click clack click clack! I’m going nuts from so much clicking and clacking.

  Open it, my hands are wet.

  Well?

  You’re about to burn yourself with your cigarette.

  RAYMOND AND MARIANNE

  Marianne and I are in the kitchen. She’s holding my stories in her hand. My stories, revised and corrected by Douglas.

  “So what do you think?” I ask her.

  “He did more than just cut. I read the first two and skimmed the others.”

  “Well, you know them.”

  “As if I’d written them. Do they all do this?”

  “Who?”

  “Magazine types. Book editors don’t take so many liberties, do they?”

  “A magazine has more constraints.”

  “What constraints?”

  “Advertising. They need space for the ads.”

  “You mean to say this guy cuts down your stories to make room for ads?”

  “He didn’t cut all of them. Look at ‘Why Are You Crying?’ It’s intact.”

  “Except that now it’s called ‘Biscuits.’ ”

  “He loves one-word titles.”

  “And ‘Excuse Me’ has become ‘Collision.’ ”

  “One or the other, he said. I can keep it ‘Excuse Me’ if I want.”

  “Are you going to keep it?”

  “Marianne, he knows his job.”

  “You told me they call him ‘Scissors.’ ”

  “It’s a compliment. It means he has a good eye.”

  “Do you think he does?”

  “Nothing’s definite. He’s proposing some cuts. I can do what I want about them.”

  “That’s my question. What are you going to do about these proposed cuts?”

  “Marianne, I don’t believe you realize what’s going on. Getting published in that magazine—I know some people who would crawl on the earth for that.”

  “But not you. Right?”

  “He knows his job.”

  “ ‘Biscuits’ … ‘Collision’ … ‘Scissors.’ ”

  She kept on muttering. I got up and opened the fridge. I took a beer, the only one left.

  Her voice suddenly got louder: “Did he really say you have too much heart?”

  DOUGLAS

  The throes of departure. I’m accustomed to them. All writers know the feeling. At the moment when they’re about to jump on board, they imagine the worst. As if I was going to shipwreck their stories.

  Raymond got worried. The cuts frightened him. He thinks his short stories are going to turn into … very thinly sliced Raymond.

  That’s not what my scissors do. The writers I bring on board know it. They know it, and they thank me.

  Take Raymond, since we’re talking about him. Take his story about a woman who feels repulsion for her husband. She’s lying down in her bedroom. When her husband climbs into bed and scoots close to put his arms around her, Raymond writes that she “moves” her legs. Too predictable, much too timorous. I strike “moves” and put “spreads.” She spreads her legs.

  Sometimes Raymond’s as modest as a silly young girl.

  MARIANNE AND RAYMOND

  “Is that what you meant to say, Raymond? You meant to say ‘spreads’?”

  “I don’t know what I meant to say.”

  “Then how can he? How can Douglas know that for you?”

  “Maybe I thought ‘spreads’ and then wrote ‘moves.’ It’s true that I have a tendency not to say things.”

  “That’s a virtue, right? Chekhov, Salinger—you always say their force comes from not saying things.”

  “In their work. In their work, it’s a force.”

  “And in yours?”

  “It might be a weakness.”

  DOUGLAS

  Raymond has a strange way of ending his stories. It’s like when another driver stalls out in front of you at a green light. You don’t wait for him to restart his engine. You steer around him and pass him by. That was my first reaction to Raymond’s work.

  The second, no, the third time I read through it, I understood. I no longer saw any clumsiness in the way he stalled. I perceived that the fulfillment of his short stories was in that very stalling.

  Yes, Raymond’s art lies in stalling in front of your eyes when you least expect it.

  I get out of my car and walk over to his old jalopy. I open the passenger door and get in. Raymond’s eyes are blurry with alcohol. I grab the steering wheel with my left hand and say, “Onward.”

  Have confidence, Raymond. Onward.

  We’re going to travel down a stretch of road together.

  And we’ll both stall when we feel like it.

  I look in the rearview mirror and see my car with nobody at the wheel. I have no regrets. The gas tank was practically empty.

  MARIANNE

  Go. He’s paying for your ticket, you may as well go. But don’t drink in front of him, okay? And tell him you want to keep “Excuse Me” as the title for your story. If that’s what you want. I don’t even know anymore.

  Of course I’m happy, of course I’m excited.

  But don’t discuss our debts, all right? Be sure you don’t say a word about our money problems.

  DOUGLAS

  Lately I’ve had my doubts. First of all, there’s Lorraine, talking to me about divorce. I take her at her word and call up the best lawyer in town. I didn’t expect to find she’d hired him two days previously.

  And then there’s Nicole, that whore. I discover the best female short-story writer of her generation, and what does she do? She signs an exclusive contract with the outfit across the street to publish her novels. I say to her, “Nicole, your name is Ingratitude.” She replies, “No, it’s Nicole.” Novelists are too prosaic.

  I wished her good luck, but because of her departure, I hit an air pocket. My scissors were snipping at the void. Then Raymond came. With his fondness for whiskey. In his case, alcohol and writing make a compatible couple. Until alcohol prevails. Then he loses all restraint. He says too much when he ought to say less. He sounds like someone who wants to be forgiven. But nobody forgives too many words.

  When I’m editing Raymond, a strange phenomenon occurs: I see Douglas through him. All his secrets are mine. When I edit Raymond, I have no more doubt.

  He was supposed to have arrived in town by now. He was supposed to be in this office.

  Hello, Sibyll? Why isn’t he here yet?

  MARIANNE

  My head’s spinning. The colors in the bar I work in clash so hard it hurts. Every day I go from the school where I’m a student teacher to the bar where I’m a waitress. This morning I handed out plastic letters to the kids. Then I waited patiently until they managed to spell “CONSEQUENCE.” While waiting, I considered the best way of illustrating that word. “As a consequence of my marriage to an alcoholic writer, I have two totally unrelated jobs and a feeling of vertigo when I go from one to the other.” I didn’t tell them that—I would have been fired on the spot—but the sentence has stuck in my head and leads to other sentences. “For the moment, everything that Raymond writes remains of no consequence; he might as well copy out a mail order catalogue. But maybe his meeting with this editor, this high mucky-muck, will have some consequences, who knows?” I’m still not finished with that word when I find myself pouring hot coffee and trying hard not to splash the red, yellow, and fuchsia leatherette wall seats. “As a consequence of his misdeeds, the interior decorator should be hanged.” A greasy smell permeates the fibers of my apron, the straps of my top, the locks of my hair. I feel like slapping that customer down there with his elbows on the bar—I can’t stand the way he lets his coffee get cold and looks as though his house has just been seized—but I’ve got to watch the little old freezer repairman, whose eyes aren’t anywhere near focused. Look at him, a miracle, he manages to hold on to the stool. I don’t want to have to lift him out of the beer puddles on the floor again today. I replace
the coffeepot and switch on the percolator. Nobody complains about the noise—everybody’s as numb as I am. Only three hours to go.

  I notice a couple I didn’t see come in. Two young people sitting in a booth and facing each other. They look as though they just had a fight. They’re like Ray and me right before we got married, when I was several weeks pregnant. The girl’s a bit plump, the way I was at sixteen. She’s sitting back with her arms folded. Looking at her, you’d say she feels she’s being accused.

  I see their lips moving, and I have the impression I’m listening to us.

  “You want them both. Why compare them, why put them in competition with each other?”

  “Marianne—”

  “You can want to write and you can want our baby.”

  “But I couldn’t choose. I’d be forced to—”

  “Not forced, no. You wouldn’t have to force yourself.”

  “If I was obliged to choose between my family and my writing, I believe I’d choose—”

  “You can have both.”

  “I’d choose writing.”

  I look at the girl. Her face is set. She’s very close to standing up, walking through the bar, and going out. Why shouldn’t she have a choice? Why not her too? Holding back tears, she looks over at the door.

  Then she turns to the boy. “I can make it work. You’ll see. Everything will go so well you won’t have to choose.”

  She falls silent. She’s just sealed her fate. Let no one say this fate was reserved for her at her birth, that it’s the consequence of her sex and her upbringing. Let no one say that. It’s the consequence of nothing but her love.

  In that case, why do the blinds on the front window make her think of prison bars?

  The boy leans over and kisses her.

  “I love you so much, Marianne. You’ll never know how much I love you.”

  I choose that moment to approach their booth, coffeepot in hand.

  “All right, you two, what’s your pleasure?”

  RAYMOND AND DOUGLAS

  “You visit them?”

  “Of course.”

  “But not when they’re so far away? Not as far as where I live?”

  “Sometimes even farther.”

  “Really?”

  “If it’s necessary. Only if it’s necessary.”

  “When is it necessary?”

  “When I want to prevent them from going over to the competition. How do you think a person becomes one of the three editors that count in this town?”

  “I had no idea.”

  “You’re not going to eat your sushi?”

  “I don’t know if sushi’s my thing.”

  “I’ll eat it for you. Have you brought the manuscript?”

  “The one you mailed me?”

  “We’re going to keep it the way it is now, all right?”

  “Well … I mean … I discussed it with Marianne.”

  “Marianne?”

  “She’s my wife.”

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “I married Marianne when she was sixteen.”

  “I got married three times in sixteen years. You don’t want your beer?”

  “You can have it.”

  “My divorce comes through next week.”

  “Marianne finds the cuts—”

  “Lorraine thinks I spend too much time at my office.”

  “She finds the cuts, the cuts in my short stories—”

  “Raymond. Let me stop you right away. Writers’ wives are their worst enemy.”

  “They are?”

  “Especially when they’re dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they get it into their heads that they must protect their husband’s work.”

  “And they do it wrong?”

  “It’s a profession. Just like widowhood’s a profession. But it’s not the same profession.”

  “Being a widow’s a profession?”

  “Being a writer’s widow is. A writer’s widow is a full-time manager of her late husband’s posterity. It turns into an obsession. Such women lose all judgment and make some … disastrous decisions. What does Marianne know about editing short stories?”

  “Oh, uh, she’s a schoolteacher.”

  “…”

  “And also a waitress, to pay the rent. Supplemental income.”

  “What does she know about editing?”

  “We’ve talked about my stories together.”

  “They’re extraordinary, those stories of yours!”

  “Thanks.”

  “The only one I left out is ‘Why Are You Crying?’ I didn’t have time to look at it closely.”

  “But you changed the title.”

  “I have to read it again.”

  “I hope you like it.”

  “Not to worry, not to worry. Let’s go back to—”

  “Your cuts.”

  “We don’t know each other very well. Our paths crossed a long time ago, and we’ve just gotten back into contact.”

  “Lucky for me.”

  “And we haven’t done anything yet, the two of us. We haven’t yet accomplished anything.”

  “Still, you’re one of the three editors—”

  “Every time I publish a story, I put my reputation on the line.”

  “Really?”

  “If only writers … if they would only see things my way, there wouldn’t be all this waste.”

  “Waste?”

  “These obese books, this useless fat. You know what they call me? ‘The Captain of—’ ”

  “ ‘Scissors,’ they call you. Is that a compliment?”

  “No. It’s resentment. It’s misplaced pride.”

  “Ah.”

  “The author’s worst enemy.”

  “Along with his widow.”

  “Along with his wife, Raymond. His wife who interferes in the editing process. What do you think of these stories?”

  “Which ones?”

  “These here.”

  “The short version.”

  “Don’t say ‘version.’ Don’t say ‘short.’ Take them as they are.”

  “They’re not how they were. They’re—”

  “Another beer, Miss Lovely!”

  “I was going to say ‘drained of sap.’ ”

  “You were going to say it. You said it.”

  “Marianne thinks so too.”

  “I’d like to know her. I’d like to meet her. You all could come to dinner with Lorraine and … no, wait, I’m getting divorced next week.”

  “Marianne thinks about it the way I do. She’d tell you the same thing.”

  “I have a different idea of sap, Raymond. Different from yours and Marianne’s.”

  “We could make a compromise.”

  “Of course, because I’m very fond of these stories.”

  “We could come to an understanding about the cuts.”

  “After all, you want to be published … no need to say anything, of course you do. Who doesn’t dream of being published? Who? Tell me who.”

  “Nobody I know.”

  “And when you’re not writing and not drinking, you go trout fishing, you said? The countryside, what a blessing.”

  MARIANNE

  I should have kept my mouth shut. Now he feels trapped. I used to think … I thought he wanted my opinion. He always asks me for it. I’ve often thought that if he ever reached anything like the beginning of a success, I’d be there to encourage him. Just as I was there to support him when nothing was working. So what do I tell him when I see those cuts? I say, “You’re going to stand up for yourself, aren’t you? You’re not going to give in?” As if he was getting ready to betray me. I wanted to defend his writing. I’ve been defending his writing for ten years, for ten years I’ve been supporting him … There were so many words crossed out. Not just words, not just sentences, but whole pages. As if Raymond’s short stories were made up of a few words and many long silences. But his stories, they’re him. They’re
him spilling out. Who does this Douglas think he is? He says—he dared to say, “You have too much heart, Raymond.” As if he was going to have to relieve him of some of it.

  Nobody wants his stories, so he feels trapped. If he refuses to accept the cuts, he loses a chance of being published. And we lose the money. But if he gives in, he’s going to feel like a coward.

  In the past, there was Raymond, me, and between us, Raymond’s writing. Now there’s someone else. Douglas and his magazine. Is there any room left for me?

  Is that what I’ve become, one person too many?

  RAYMOND

  Suppose he’s right? Suppose he sees something I can’t see? Because there’s too much of me in there, too much of my life in every one of my stories. Douglas sees a writer in me. He doesn’t talk to me like he’s talking to a drunk. But in Marianne’s eyes, there’s nothing I can do, I see myself as a drunkard, I see myself as a nasty guy. A bastard whose stories make him better.

  Another Scotch, please!

  Being far from Marianne doesn’t agree with me. This town doesn’t agree with me, either. Everybody here looks as though they’re right.

  As soon as someone starts talking around here, I get the impression it’s to lay the blame on me.

  THE UNKNOWN WOMAN AND RAYMOND

  “Why come into a bar if you want to be alone?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve been watching you for the past few minutes. You talked to yourself the whole time. What’s your name?”

  “Raymond.”

  “What do you do for a living? You sell cars?”

  “More like spare parts.”

  “You see? I’ve got a sixth sense. I knew you were going to sell me something.”

  “I didn’t say I had anything to—”

  “My car broke down outside. You could start it.”

  “…”