”
“Well,” she said, smiling and taking one of the flutes as I bent down to her with the tray, “then that’s all right, isn’t it?”
I realize now that the essence of the ritual—the part that was alive and powerful, like the one true magic word in a mouthful of gibberish—was that phrase. We almost always had champagne, and she almost always came into the office with me afterward for the other thing, but not always. Once, five years or so before she died, she was in Ireland, vacationing with a girlfriend, when I finished a book. I drank the champagne by myself that time, and entered the last line by myself as well (by then I was using a Macintosh which did a billion different things and which I used for only one) and never lost a minute’s sleep over it. But I called her at the inn where she and her friend Bryn were staying; I told her I had finished, and listened as she said the words I’d called to hear—words that slipped into an Irish telephone line, travelled to a microwave transmitter, rose like a prayer to some satellite, and then came back down to my ear: “Well, then that’s all right, isn’t it?” This custom began, as I say, after the second book. When we’d each had a glass of champagne and a refill, I took her into the office, where a single sheet of paper still stuck out of my forest-green Selectric. On the lake, one last loon cried down dark, that call that always sounds to me like something rusty turning slowly in the wind. “I thought you said you were done,” she said. “Everything but the last line,” I said. “The book, such as it is, is dedicated to you, and I want you to put down the last bit.” She didn’t laugh or protest or get gushy, just looked at me to see if I really meant it. I nodded that I did, and she sat in my chair. She had been swimming earlier, and her hair was pulled back and threaded through a white elastic thing. It was wet, and two shades darker red than usual. I touched it. It was like touching damp silk. “Paragraph indent?” she asked, as seriously as a girl from the steno pool about to take dictation from the big boss.
“No,” I said, “this continues.” And then I spoke the line I’d been holding in my head ever since I got up to pour the champagne.”
“He slipped the chain over her head, and then the two of them walked down the steps to where the car was parked.’” She typed it, then looked around and up at me expectantly. “That’s it,” I said. “You can write The End, I guess.”
Jo hit the Tt3m-4 button twice, centered the carriage, and typed The End under the last line of prose, the IBM’s Courier type ball (my favorite) spinning out the letters in their obedient dance. “What’s the chain he slips over her head?” she asked me. “You’ll have to read the book to find out.” With her sitting in my desk chair and me standing beside her, she was in perfect position to put her face where she did.
When she spoke, her lips moved against the most sensitive part of me.
There were a pair of cotton shorts between us and that was all. “Ve haffvays off making you talk,” she said. “I’ll just bet you do,” I said.
I at least made a stab at the ritual on the day I finished All the Pay from the bp. It felt hollow, form from which the magical substance had departed, but I’d expected that. I didn’t do it out of superstition but out of respect and love. A kind of memorial, if you will. Or, if you will, Johanna’s real funeral service, finally taking place a month after she was in the ground. It was the last third of September, and still hot—the hottest late summer I can remember. All during that final sad push on the book, I kept thinking how much I missed her. . but that never slowed me down. And here’s something else: hot as it was in Derry, so hot I usually worked in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, I never once thought of going to our place at the lake. It was as if my memory of Sara Laughs had been entirely wiped from my mind. Perhaps that was because by the time I finished 3p, that truth was finally sinking in.
She wasn’t just in Ireland this time. My office at the lake is tiny, but has a view. The office in Derry is long, book-lined, and windowless. On this particular evening, the overhead fans—there are three of them—were on and paddling at the soupy air. I came in dressed in shorts, a tee-shirt, and rubber thong sandals, carrying a tin Coke tray with the bottle of champagne and the two chilled glasses on it. At the far end of that railroad-car room, under an eave so.steep I’d had to almost crouch so as not to bang my head when I got up (over the years I’d also had to withstand Jo’s protests that I’d picked the absolute worst place in the room for a workstation), the screen of my Macintosh glowed with words.
I thought I was probably inviting another storm of grief—maybe the worst storm—but I went ahead anyway… and our emotions always surprise us, don’t they? There was no weeping and wailing that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of loss—the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.
I poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up.
“I’m done, Jo,” I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. “So that’s all right, isn’t it?”
There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that’s worth repeating—there was no response. I didn’t sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.
I drank the champagne, put the glass back on the Coke tray, then filled the other one. I took it over to the Mac and sat down where Johanna would have been sitting, if not for everyone’s favorite loving God. No weeping and wailing, but my eyes prickled with tears. The words on the screen were these: today wasn’t so bad, she supposed. She crossed the grass to her car, and laughed when she saw the white square of paper under the windshield. Cam Delancey, who refused to be discouraged, or to take no for an answer, had invited her to another of his Thursday-night wine-tasting parties.
She took the paper, started to tear it up, then changed her mind and stuck it in the hip pocket of her jeans, instead.
“No paragraph indent,” I said, “this continues.” Then I keyboarded the line I’d been holding in my head ever since I got up to get the champagne. There was a whole world out there; Cam Delancey’s wine-tasting was as good a place to start as any.
I stopped, looking at the little flashing cursor.