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Blackmailers Don't Pick Fruit

Ed glanced at the time, saw with alarm that it was almost six, and dove for his seat in front of the typewriter.  Leona would be home any minute, and Ed always made it a point to be working on his “novel” when she arrived.  Leona was, after all, supporting him, and she expected him to be working diligently on his book.  Ed would have loved nothing better than to be working diligently on a book, but in order to work on a book first you needed an idea for a book. Weeks had gone by since he’d moved in with Leona, and he had utterly failed to come up with one that excited him.  In fact, he hadn’t even come up with one that failed to excite him.  He hadn’t come up with one, period.  Not one, stinking, lousy idea.  
    So when the key turned in the latch at a couple of minutes past six Ed’s fingers were flying over the keyboard.  He called a greeting to Leona but went on typing, hoping to give the impression that he was embroiled in a passage too fiery and dramatically compelling to interrupt simply because his woman had returned from her day of toil.  Leona walked over and kissed the back of his neck.  Ed, from long experience, knew just how to contort his body so that it blocked the sheet of paper in the typewriter upon which the phrase, “All work and no play,” was repeated ad infinitum.  
    “Hello, my writer man,” she breathed.
    Enough was enough.  Ed swiveled his chair around and took her into his arms.  His hands began to roam over her body.
    “Are you sure we should be doing this?” Leona said.  “You seemed so absorbed when I came in.”
    “I can pick up my train of thought no problem,” Ed said, nuzzling her throat.
    “But shouldn’t you forge ahead just a little more, cheri?  If the floodgates have just opened…”
    “To hell with the floodgates,” Ed said.
    But Leona had now extricated herself from his arms.  “Now, now, mon auteur.  I’m just going to have to tear myself away.  Your work must come over my needs, you know.  I’ll manage to contain myself until you’ve finished just a few more pages.  In fact, I think I’ll take a cold shower.”
    “Oh, for Pete’s sake!”
    “And we’ll talk about the progress you’ve made just as soon as I’ve cooled off.”
    And she was gone before Ed could object.

*     *     *

    The next morning Ed was again sitting at the typewriter, typing away while Leona got ready for work.  Today he was filling sheets of paper with the phrase, “makes Ed a dull boy.”  He’d hoped all last evening and ever since he’d awoken that morning that the effects of her cold shower had worn off, but apparently they hadn’t.  Suddenly she came hurrying out of the bedroom, snatched up an apple, and said, “Tonight I finally get a peek at the book, okay?”
A sinking feeling settled in the pit of Ed’s stomach.  Before he could respond she blew him a kiss and ran out the door
Ed’s hand jerked away from the typewriter as if the keys had caught fire.  He got up and paced.  Surely he’d get over this infernal block and dream up a good idea today!  It was true, of course, that Johnny had selfishly monopolized the idea-hatching department, but it wasn’t as if Ed had never thought up one of his own.  He couldn’t recall any off-hand, but he was positive that a few, at least, must have originated from his brain.  So why had it become so difficult to dream up an idea since he’d agreed with Leona that his best chance of succeeding lay in going it alone?  He had to prove to himself that he’d made the right decision, and nothing lay between him and that goal except his utter inability to think of anything to write.  He’d tried everything, and still nothing would come.  Just in the last week, in fact, he’d swallowed his pride and bought a pamphlet from a street vendor on Hollywood Boulevard that guaranteed it would help the would-be writer hatch bona-fide story ideas.  But the peddler had turned out to be a dirty chiseler, because the pamphlet hadn’t helped him do anything but waste another hour and spend another afternoon in self-loathing.
    At ten o’clock he went downstairs to get his mail and discovered that Lester Dent had finally written back.  Dent was an old writer buddy of his and Johnny’s from the pulp-magazine days, and Ed had written him for advice.  (He hadn’t dared approach anybody in Hollywood with his problem for fear word would get out that he was blocked.)  He eagerly tore open and letter and read it in the elevator.  Dent had come through!  “Write what you know,” his letter advised.  Of course!  Why hadn’t Ed thought of that himself?
    But no sooner had he returned to has apartment than his excitement drained from him.  What the hell did he know, anyway?  How could he possibly milk any ideas from having grown up in a Chicago tenement, or knocked around the country hustling for work, or written for Stars and Stripes during the war, or scrambled to hit it big in Hollywood?  How the hell were you supposed to turn meager material like that into good fiction?  He’d spent too many years writing about ghost hunters, and convicts forming their own football teams, and all-Negro civil-war regiments to suddenly go prosaic!  He tore up the letter and threw it in the wastebasket.
    For a while he pondered Saroyan’s advice, but that didn’t get him anywhere.  What else where you supposed to write about than man, anyway?  Voles?  He hadn’t forgotten Leona’s parting threat, and he knew he’d have to start writing about something before she returned home that evening.  But what?  Dear Lord, what?  And suddenly a glimmer of hope appeared.
When Leona had gone through their trunk last month, helping them select the ideas they were to present to Maxwell Anderson, she had fortuitously overlooked one of their screenplays, the one about the Canadian nurse tending the mysterious, burned-up pilot during the war.  Now it occurred to Ed that he could novelize it from memory.  He could never hope to sell the damn thing, as Johnny would have to be credited as co-writer, and Leona would sooner he co-write a novel with Tojo.  But at least he’d have something for her to take a “peek” at.  The trick was to make sure she didn’t like it too much.  Just enough to satisfy her that he was indeed at work on a novel, but not so much that she’d be tempted to submit it anywhere.
With a sigh of relief, he sat down in front of the typewriter, shut his eyes in concentration for a moment, then started to write.  “Imagine, if you will,” he typed, “that we are fading in from blackness to the view of an exterior.  A lonely Italian villa, day.”  He paused to glance over the opening sentences, and decided they were just right.  Leona, he was sure, would not be tempted to show this to anybody.
He was on page thirty-four when the door opened that evening and Leona came sauntering in.  Ed noted the flush of excitement on her face, and thought for a moment that she’d espied the stack of manuscript pages next to the typewriter.  But when she opened her mouth he realized his book was the last thing on her mind.  “Oh, Ed!” she cried.  “You’ll never imagine who I’ve arranged for you to meet this time!”
Ed groaned inwardly.  Leona was forever setting up meetings that would lift Ed into “higher cultural circles.”  Whenever she heard of some arrogant young playwright or baffled European litterateur coming to town, she got to work through her network of studio contacts to persuade them that they simply must meet Ed for lunch or drinks.  The worst had been the Englishmen, four of them descending upon him in four successive days like sailors passing along the address of a new sing-song girl, and impossible to keep straight.  They all wore the same narrow-shouldered black jackets, they all crossed their knees and sucked feverishly on the same little brown cigarettes, and they all made the same incomprehensible jokes about American beer and Hollywood stupidity in the same lisping monotone before suddenly leaning toward him and announcing how Swami Mumbojumbo had opened their eyes to the secrets of the universe.  And they all ended up asking him to run errands for them because they were terrified to drive in Los Angeles.  How delivering a jar of pomade to Aldous Isherwood or taking W. Huxerset Waugham’s shirtfront out to be starched was supposed to uplift him, Ed didn’t know.  But Leona kept making appointments.
Ed forced a smile to his lips and said, “Who now, my love?”
“This is my greatest coup!” she gasped.  “Tomorrow you’ll be having lunch at Salka Viertel’s beach house—with a guest list comprising Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schoenberg, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Fritz Lang!  A veritable roll-call of the German intelligentsia!”
Fritz Lang he knew about, of course, and he was pretty sure Brecht was one of Lang’s screenwriters. Thomas Mann he’d at least heard of.  But the others?  For all he knew, they might have tried to kill him during the war.
“Well, aren’t you excited?”
“Of course,” he boomed, coming out of his reverie.  “I was just trying to absorb such colossal news, is all!”
    Leona had clearly absorbed it.  She was so excited that she babbled about it all night, apparently forgetting all about Ed’s magnum opus.

*     *     *

As the next day was one of Johnny’s with the Nash, Ed had to ride the Santa Monica Red Car all the way to the end of the line and then hoof it from there.  He made sure to leave with plenty of time, which meant he got there an hour and a half early.  He perched his ivory trousers on a sand dune and reviewed everything Leona had told him over breakfast about the men he was to hobnob with today.  He was determined that nothing would go wrong with this meeting, and that from an afternoon of dazzling repartee with these brilliant Teutons would emerge the inspiration for his novel.
The first shock, when it finally came time to knock on the door of the beach house, was that this Salka Viertel was a woman.  Fortunately, he caught on quickly after some brief confusion when he asked for “Mr. Viertel,” and he allowed his middle-aged and vaguely mannish hostess to lead him to a solarium where the other guests were already seated at a circular table.  
No group of faces could have been less reassuring to Ed even had every one belonged to a rent collector or sheriff’s deputy. The only one he knew was Lang, and he, with his glittering monocle, madly arching eyebrows, and perpetual smirk, was scarcely what any man wanted to see before he’d had a chance to imbibe a few snootfuls.  The other five were a collage of hatchet noses, piercing eyes, furry brows, and trim mustaches.  All wore dull gray suits, except for Brecht who, for reasons Ed didn’t even want to guess at, sported a cap and a wool coat that made him look like a Bohunk on a loading dock.  And all were superimposed, as if in a rear-projection shot, against the azure stillness of the Pacific Ocean.  The whole scene reminded Ed of the nightmare he’d had when he’d fallen asleep during that weird old German movie some dame had dragged him to so he could appreciate its daring camera angles.
But Ed would not be thrown.  He weighed into the crowd with all the continental charm he’d been rehearsing in his head the whole morning.  He lifted Salka’s hand to his lips, clicked his heels, and said, “Bei mir bist du schoen.”  He bowed before Thomas Mann and said, “I want you to know how much I admire The Magic Flute.”  He commiserated with Feuchtwanger on having his books burned by the Nazis and wished him luck on replacing his library.  He gave Brecht a collegial smack on the shoulder and said, “Congrats on that screen credit for Hangmen Also Die, Bert!  I’m sure you’ll be doing even bigger things one of these days!”  He couldn’t bring himself to get too close to Lang and his monocle, but he did toss him a jolly, “Someday we’ll have to swap war stories about making robot movies, Fritz!” To Schoenberg he said, “They tell me you’re in the music biz, Arnie.  You know, there are big opportunities for song-pluggers in this town!  Look at Buddy DeSylva and Artie Freed!”  Adorno gave him pause, for as many times as Leona had explained what he did and what his new book was going to be about, Ed had been unable to figure it out.  “Hiya, Ted!” he said at last.  
Rather than responding, Adorno turned sharply to Schoenberg and asked, “Ist das ein Witz?” On the rude side, Ed thought, but then everything Uncle Sam had been teaching him about the Krauts since basic training had told him to expect plenty worse.
“It’s mighty white of you folks to see me,” Ed said, feeling like quite the diplomat as he sat down before the boiled cabbage and cold sausage on the plate in front of him. “I know our two countries haven’t exactly the best of buddies these past few years.”
“I fear there has been a misapprehension,” Salka Viertel said. “These gentlemen came here during the war precisely because they were enemies of the Nazi government.  In fact, Herr Feuchtwanger escaped from a German prison camp at great risk.”
“Say, I’ll bet there’s a great story in there,” Ed said.  “In fact, I once…”  Then he realized that he was about to start pitching one of his and Johnny’s old ideas, the one about New York City being turned into a giant prison and the president having to escape from it, and he felt such a pang that he couldn’t go on.
Feuchtwanger rescued him with a kindly smile and said, “I have in fact written it in a memoir.”
“Write what you know!” Ed said.  “That’s what I always say.”
“So, my friend Ed,” Lang began, “my lovely friend Miss Leona at Warners tells me that you have become recently a novelist.”
“With pride!” Ed boomed.  Then, looking eagerly from Mann to Feuchtwanger, he added, “Of course, I still have a lot to learn about the trade from you veterans!”
Feuchtwanger kept up his kindly smile.  Mann looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“And if I may ask, what is your novel about, Ed?” Lang continued with his usual smirk.
“Oh, this and that,” Ed said.  “Love and life, eternal verities, you know how it goes.  But say, I get tired of talking about my own ideas.  I’d like to hear what irons you boys have in the fire.  What’s cooking with you, Tom?”
 “I am writing a novel I call Doctor Faustus,” Mann intoned.  “It is a modern telling of the legend, with a musical theme.”
“Say, there’s a winner!” Ed crowed.  “A musical novel!  Why, it’ll be a snap to sell that one to MGM!”
Lang and Brecht watched Ed with the amused expectancy of men waiting for the punchline to a long joke.  Adorno continued whispering to Schoenberg.  Feuchtwanger kept his kindly smile frozen to his face.  Mann looked embarrassed.
“Not so precisely a musical, as you mean it,” he explained with great care.  “It is only that my Faust figure is a composer.  Professor Adorno here has been kind enough to assist me with the musicological content.”
“Oh, a research man, eh?” Ed grinned, pleased to understand what it was Adorno did at last.  “You’ll have to meet my ladyfriend, Ted.  She’s in research too.  But Tom, what was that you said about a legend?”
“Surely, man,” Adorno blurted, “you must know the story of Faustus, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power?”
“Oh, Dr. Faustus!” Ed chuckled, and squiggled his finger in his ear as if his hearing were troubling him.  “So this novel of yours, Tom, it’s sort of a remake?”
Mann looked down at the table.  He seemed incapable of continuing.
Brecht laughed.  “That’s just right, Ed!  That’s what our friend Mann here does!  One remake after another!”
“And you, Brecht!” Schoenberg grinned.  “What is your Threepenny Opera but a remake of…”
Ed suddenly shot from his seat. “Remakes!” he exploded. “Why, that’s brilliant!  I only wish I’d thought of it myself!  There’ve got to be a million novels out there with great stories but full of dated slang and styles.  Heck, how many times has Hollywood remade Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?  Why wouldn’t the publishers pay through the nose for a streamlined, post-War version of the novel appealing to today’s sophisticated reader?”
The Germans gaped at him. Brecht swept his cap off his head as if he found himself in the presence of royalty.
Then, slowly, Thomas Mann stood up.  “I am sorry,” he said.  “But I cannot continue this.” He dipped his head in Ed’s direction. “Forgive us, sir.  I am embarrassed for us all.”
He turned and left the room.  Salka Viertel trotted after him with a frown of concern.  The exodus continued as Adorno flung his napkin violently on the table and followed, and then Feuchtwanger shook Ed’s hand with a nervous smile and hurried after.  Only three Germans and Ed remained.
“What was that all about?” Ed asked.  “Why would Tom be embarrassed?”
“Why?” Brecht said.  “Because until you spoke he did not see how the ‘classic’ novels upon which his glory is erected have become so outdated.”
“The great remaker,” Lang said, shaking his head sadly, “in need of remakes himself.”
“Well, hell,” Ed said.  “I could take care of that!”
A look passed from Brecht to Lang to Schoenberg.
“Ed,” Schoenberg said, “would you do that for Tom?”
“Why, it’s the least I could do!” Ed crowed.  And the three Germans moved their chairs closer to him.

*     *     *

    Ed was in a fine mood when he answered the phone that afternoon.  He knew it would be Leona, too eager to hear how his lunch had gone to wait until she got home, and he was right.
“It went splendidly, mein liebchen,” he said, tipping a mug of pilsner to his lips.  “I’ve found the novel I was meant to write.”
“Really?” she breathed.  “Can you tell me anything about it?”
“It’s a philosophical novel,” Ed drawled, “set among the patients at a sanitarium in Switzerland.”
For a while he heard only her breathing.  Then, “Thomas Mann already wrote that novel.”
“Why, sure he did—twenty years ago!  But in my remake their philosophical conversations can be all about the issues of today.  Religious intolerance…the housing shortage…”
“Did you say remake?”
“That’s what your Eddy-bear said, all right!  After all, who needs new ideas for novels when there are so many great old ideas just waiting to be brought up to date?”
    He heard a click, and then silence.

*     *     *

The next day found Ed back in Stanley Rose’s bookshop.  Leona had given him a number of very pointed, heartfelt reasons why writing remakes of great novels was not a good idea, and when she’d finished giving them to him she gave them to him again.  In the morning he’d received a third helping of those reasons, and as soon as Leona was out of the house he knew he was going to have to find an idea for a novel in a hurry. He spent hours browsing through the novels on the shelves, and his spirits alternately soared and plummeted.  They soared every time he came upon a book with a great idea, and plummeted every time he reminded himself the idea was already taken.  
He rose highest and fell furthest on novels that had anything to do with Switzerland, or mountains, or tuberculosis, for he had come to look back on the few hours when he had been certain that his calling was to remake Mann’s Magic Flute as a sort of Golden Age.  He’d even conceived a scene—an entire scene—in which his Army-vet protagonist and the beautiful, run-away Russian Commissar he loves gaze out at the Matterhorn and discuss the implications of the new medium of television.  Ed thought he would do just about anything to come up with a novel that would enable him to use that scene.  He remembered Mann’s own novel in progress (and with a flush of resentment he asked why an old Kraut should be allowed to write remakes while an enterprising young American, one of the boys who’d won the war, had to make up something new), and thought that if the devil himself had risen up through Stanley Rose’s floor in that moment and offered him an original idea for a sanitarium novel in exchange for his soul, Ed would have been looking for a pen to sign on the dotted line.  But then, he doubted that his soul would have any more market value than one of those text stories he and Johnny used to write as filler for the backs of comic books.  Finally he plunked down a dime for the new Planet Stories and headed for the door.  Then he heard the two words he’d come to dread more than any others.
“Hi, Ed!”
He turned to find a short, dark-haired guy with a big nose striding toward him.  “Hiya, Buzz,” Ed said in a small voice.  He remembered how he’d boasted to Leona that he was going to show that “third-rater” A. I. Bezzerides “a thing or two about what real writing means.” Was that only a few weeks ago?  It felt long enough ago for great rivers to have dried up, mountains ranges to have crumbled, and suns to have gone nova.   
“Funny, somebody was just telling me something about you,” Bezzerides said.   “It was Faulkner, that’s who.  He had a funny story…”
“You know that Bill, always making things up,” Ed said hurriedly.  “So what are you up to, Buzz?  Any great ideas?  I’ll bet a guy like you generates more ideas than he could ever hope to develop, eh?”
“Well, I got a programmer coming out from Paramount this summer.  Oh, and Fox is sniffing around this new novel I’m cooking up.”
“A new novel, eh?” Ed said, more loudly than he’d intended.  “What’s that about, Buzz?”
“Fresno, produce racket, truckers.”  Bezzerides gave a confident laugh.  “What the hell else do I write about?”
“Fresno, eh?” Ed said.  “That’s a good location, is it?”
“Nobody uses it but me and Saroyan.  You can’t call it overused!”
“Sure,” Ed said.  Bezzerides kept talking, but Ed was no longer listening.  Into his head had blazed an understanding: if the sanitarium were set in Fresno, surely no one could accuse him of just remaking Thomas Mann.  He could turn the Russian beauty and the comical Italian professor into the kinds of people you find in the California produce business.  Braceros and Okies and…Armenians, maybe.  He could worm the facts out of Leona.  And they could philosophize about such great issues of today as labor disputes and food prices and…lots of things.  Suddenly he had to get out there.  He had to get to work!
“Well, Buzz, it’s been great talking to you, but…”  To his dismay, he realized that Bezzerides was waving someone over to join their conversation, a fussy-looking mug with a pipe in his teeth.  Ed was already opening his mouth to give the mug his regrets when he heard Buzz saying:
“Ed, do you know Ray Chandler?”
Ed froze.  Chandler was another veteran of the pulps, just like Ed himself.  Sure, there were quibblers who would say that Black Mask, where Ray had sold his goods, was a notch above Saucy Movie Tales and Ed’s other regular markets.  And sure, Chandler got published under his own name rather than the house-owned pseudonyms that Ed and his former partner had been required to use.  But still, he was a brother veteran of those yellow, ragged-edged  pages, and now Hollywood was going crazy for him, not only adapting all his books to the screen but throwing screenplays at him right and left.
“We’ve never met,” Chandler said, “but of course I’ve heard of Ed.”
Ed made a note Chandler’s phony English accent—that must be how he convinced producers he was high-toned!—and vowed he’d get to work cultivating his own before his next pitch meeting.
“Say, Ray,” Ed said, so filled with renewed confidence that he began rocking on the balls of his feet.  “I don’t know if word’s gotten around, but I’ve gotten into the novel racket lately.”
“Do tell,” Chandler said around the butt of his pipe.
“I’ve got a hot one rolling off the platen right now,” Ed said.  “It’s about patients at a sanitarium, set in…”  Seeing Bezzerides listening intently, Ed chose to skip over the detail of the locale.  “Set in these furious times we call today.  A philosophical novel.  Lots of talk, you know the game.  Now, what do you do when you really need to sell an idea?  I mean, take a profound literary invention and really make it socko, one that’s going to have the book critics and Hollywood eating out of your hand?  Of course, I have my own notions, but I’m curious to hear what you do, one novelist to another.”
“Well,” Chandler said slowly.  “When in doubt, I always have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”
Ed’s rocking began to make the floor creak.  A huge smile spread across his face.  “That’s the ticket,” he roared.  “Action!  Who says a philosophical novel has to be all talk?  Picture Madame Bovary throwing herself in front of that train!  Ray, you’re okay in my book!”
“So pleased,” Chandler said, still not withdrawing his pipe from between his teeth.
“You too, Buzz!” Ed hollered as he made for the door.  “Don’t let anyone ever call you a third-rater!”
“Now there,” Chandler said, looking after him, “goes a man with creative fire.”
Bezzerides nodded.  “Va-va-voom,” he said.
The ideas were flooding into Ed’s head as he rode the streetcar.  How had he not seen it before?  Of course, the sanitarium patients, having realized that they were powerless against the inherent injustices of the produce business and the failing of their own tubercular lungs, would become cynical and turn to crime.  They’d start by blackmailing each other, but then their schemes would lead to murder, and our young veteran-turned-trucker protagonist would come to realize that the beautiful Armenian raisin heiress he loved was in fact a black widow!  It was lucky that Chandler had happened by so he could jog the thoughts loose, Ed thought, although he had no doubt that he’d have arrived at them soon enough.  For these were ideas forged in the very smithy of his soul!
So distracted was Ed by the activities in his soul’s smithy that he failed to realize he’d climbed on the streetcar going the wrong direction, back toward the Edna, until he’d already jumped off at his old accustomed stop.  He hiked a few blocks back down the road so that no one from the Edna would see him as he waited for the eastbound train that would carry him home to the Coral Gables.  By the time he got back to Leona’s apartment, he’d begun to feel an odd coldness in the middle of his gut, but he ignored it and reminded himself that the next few hours would be the most creatively satisfying of his life.  He hollered a bold greeting to the mustachioed punk at the front desk, stomped up the stairs, threw the door open, and plopped himself in front of the typewriter to let the ideas flow free at last through his fingertips.
He sat there a while waiting for his fingers to move.  He thought they might move more easily if he could just shatter the whiteness of the paper, just get the first word down.  “The,” he typed.  He waited.  Then he typed, “sanitarium.”  And waited some more.  Somehow the ideas that had seemed so bountiful and compelling as he rattled westward in the Red Car were eluding him now.  Guided by years of experience at the writing trade, he picked through the possibilities in his mind to discover the problem.  Had he not developed his theme clearly enough?  Did his protagonist not have a convincing enough motivation?  Was there some dissonance between the characters and the milieu?
Then, in a flash, he realized that the problem was much simpler than that.  Elementary, in fact.  His new idea was a huge, steaming pile of shit.

*     *     *

That night, Leona insisted upon seeing his novel.   She wasn’t angry about it, nor was she eager.  “Matter of fact” is the phrase Ed chose to describe her tone to himself, although “cold” or “fatalistic” might have been more accurate.  He found it impossible to sit still, or even stand still, as she began to read it.
“You understand, this is only the first foray,” he said as he paced around, picking up wine glasses and ashtrays and setting them down again.  “An ice-breaker, as it were.  You know, St. Bernard Shaw purposely wrote ten plays and threw them away so he could learn the craft of playwriting before he grew attached to anything that wasn’t ready yet.”
Leona turned over the first page.  She flicked the ashes off her cigarette.
“I’m saving my great concepts for the next book,” Ed continued, suddenly discovering a loose thread on the curtains that needed to be picked away.  “When I have the mastery to implement my most powerful ideas.”
Leona opened her mouth as if to say something.  Then she snapped it shut again and turned over the second page.
“I dare say, love,” Ed said, “I’m rather surprised that you haven’t done any writing yourself.  That is, you know so veddy much about it.  And you have such veddy strong convictions.”
Leona looked up him through narrowed eyes.  “Why in God’s name are you speaking with a British accent?”
Ed blinked, suddenly feeling like an ass.  “I think maybe I’m catching a cold.  But about your writing…”
“I’ll confess that I did once dream of being a writer,” she answered absently, returning to page three.
“Really!” Ed said eagerly.  “What were some of your ideas?”
She waved him off.  “They were sophomoric.”
“Oh, I can’t believe that, Snookums!  Come on, tell your Eddy-Weddy a few of your ideas!”
“They were juvenile drivel.  Much like your chosen endearments.  Let them rest in peace.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself!  Just tell me one or two.  You know, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if some of them echoed my own ideas.  We have so much in common, after all!”
She sat up and looked straight at him.  “Why do you want to know so much about my ideas?”
“I just thought we might be able to work together, that’s all.  There are a lot of successful writing teams who are also…well…romantic teams.  Dorothy Parker and…what’s his name…”  Ed didn’t like that example and hurried on to, “Albert Hackett and Frances Goodyear.  For instance.”
Leona surprised him by smiling. “What a sweet idea!” she crooned.  “I am flattered that you’d want to write with me, and I must admit that I have a facility for scintillating verbiage when I put my mind to it.  But I have to confess the real reason I gave up on being a writer.  I just couldn’t come up with any ideas at all!”
Ed sat down.  Very hard, on the couch beside her.  Suddenly he realized it didn’t matter what she thought of the pages she was reading.  She could hate it, and then he’d be off that meat hook and dropping straight into the licking flames below.  Or she could love it, and then he could turn all the powers of his apparently pea-sized imagination toward sabotaging her efforts to make anything of it, lest Johnny’s coauthorship be revealed.  Like the inmate of a sanitarium in Fresno, he could see only hell within and hell without.
She turned over the fourth page and stopped.  She looked very thoughtful as she set down the rest of the stack of pages and knocked loose another tower of ashes.
“Your style,” she said.
“Yes?” he said.
“It’s very…cinematic.”
“You don’t say.”
“It’s very unusual, for example, for a novelist to make such frequent use of the term ‘close-up.’”
“So what do you want me to do?” Ed sighed.  “Throw it in the trash?”
“No, no,” Leona said, squinting at the pages.  “I feel as though there’s something here.  It just needs the right medium.  I’ll tell you what.”  She scooped up the manuscript and shoved it back at him with a smile. “Try writing it up as a screenplay and see what you’ve got.”
She whirled away to make dinner, leaving Ed staring at the pile of paper in his lap.