new novel: excerpts

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

Writing a novel is. . . .different.

For me, it's an organic, layering process. It starts out simple enough, but as more chapters are grafted on, they necessitate going back and modifying what's been done before, so in the end when it's all over it may look quite a bit different from how it did to begin with.

Anyway, here are some excerpts from the new novel I'm working on. Draft 1, so very, very early and very, very raw. . . .Also, i'm writing it all as text files, so there's no formatting, or even spell-checking as I'm going along. Trying to keep it moving simple and uncluttered. . . .

Chapter 1 (Excerpts).

Isabel Blake felt the big bed under her long body, soft and white like an enormous angel food birthday cake. She was not fully awake. Her mind drifted. She could feel every rustling fold of the satin sheets like smooth ripples spreading as she moved her feet, and the warm blankets pressing down from on top. Her eyes were closed still, but she could sense the wide open dimensions of coldness in the big bedroom. Consciousness awaited out there for her somewhere, coming toward her with steady intent, a slow and steady beat, like muted rowboat oars on some great, slow, luxurious river, carrying her floating gently along. But darkness remained a soft, firm weight on her unopened eyes.

The radio had been on for more than a minute, she knew with a vague, fuzzy awareness, some low-key jazz piano piece. A little pretty, a little choppy thing. A little complex. Now her dreams fell tumbling away one by one, unheeded, forgettable. Disregarded. She felt the clean sheets on her moving feet, at once both cool and warm against her skin. She loved the sensation. And the quiet of the house. The whole house was quiet. She felt it all around her, oddly reminding her of the strange and perfect quiet of her grandparents' house when she was a child. Comfort. Languid. Sumptuous. She could lie here forever in this safe place. Peaceful.

She remembered: Bill's here.

A low beat of irritation pulsed through her, a vibration rising up all the way from her curled toes, spreading through her entire body. A trilling of tension.

Bill.

The first jarring moment faded away.

She began thinking of the world waiting outside the walls of her home. It would be full of slowly dawning light and color and motion out there. All those neat and tidy little houses on neat and tidy block after block.

So much sacrifice. So much lost.

I could have been. . . .more than this. Should have been.

Was.

She stifled a sigh.

Percy had already left for work. He left very early. She barely heard him when he was moving about so early in the morning. Mousing about the house, careful to avoid any creaking board underfoot or thumping footfall. He had his work to do. He didn't want to disturb her sleep.

I have work to do, too. He doesn't think about that. He thinks this house runs itself. And so he leaves me here with Bill, and he goes off to his important work at his important university. When he could have had anything. We could have had. Here in this miserable town. End of the road. Nowhere, USA.

Bill has friends coming today, she suddenly recalled. From Florida. It irritated her. Turning their home into a. . . .what? A hangout for college boys? Undergrads, anyway. Little baby boys. Well. . . .some of them, anyway. Some of them, some undergrads. . . .But not like Bill. Definitely not. And if his friends were like him, and of course they would be. . . .Half a smile flashed over her mouth for a fleeting instant. Anyway, she wouldn't be here. She'd skip that scene.

Her fleeting humor quickly gave way to a pang of anger. She was too old to be playing babysitter. God, Bill was too old to need a babysitter. Why couldn't Percy see that? And if Bill did need a babysitter, what was the matter with his own mother? Didn't either of them think of that?

She didn't move. She stopped moving her feet. She tried to lie perfectly still, straining to hear any faintest sound of anyone moving about downstairs, trying to listen through the radio music. But there was no sound.

She sighed again.

She was lying on her side with her legs pulled up and her arms wrapped around a pillow. She extended her legs. Colder sheets down there. Stretching her legs made them feel better. They had become tense.

She could smell the coffee. At least Percy always set the timer on the coffeemaker for her.

The sheets felt fine and her legs began to feel disentangled. They could breathe. The coffee smelled rich and dark. It beckoned to her, drawing her higher up in her mind. The day wasn't getting any younger. She opened her eyes to peek over the edge of the blankets at the clock. Six fifty-seven in gentle green glowing digits in the darkness of the room.

Six fifty-seven, and here I lie.

She rolled over onto her other side. Even in the darkness she could make out Mr. Chips coiled up tightly on the other pillow, front feet neatly tucked in, quietly gazing at her from his deep emerald eyes sunk in long white wooly fur, just as she found him every morning after Percy left. She smiled and reached over and stroked the side of his face with her thumb. Soft. He lolled his head in her hand, turning so that his ear folded under against her fingers. She felt a purr begin. Morning ritual. He leaned into the palm of her hand and, putting his forelegs out before him, raised up his hips, stretching, a tremor passing through his vibrating body, his poor, clawless toes padding the pillow uselessly.

No more procrastination.

She pushed back the blankets and sat up, pivoted to the side of the bed, her bare feet dangling some inches above the colorful Indian rug on the black walnut flooring. She reached for the lamp on Percy's end table. Golden-yellow light streamed into the room. She sat up straighter on the edge of the bed, reaching up with one hand to push the dark curls out of her eyes. She put her arms straight up above her head and stretched. Okay. Time to go.

Sliding her feet into her fuzzy slippers, she rose and crossed to her dressing table where she'd draped her nightgown over the back of the heavy gold-painted chair the night before. She pulled it across her shoulders and felt some of the room's chill retreat. She flicked down the twin switches on the electric oil heater. It would take a while for the heater to warm up. After switching on the dressing table lights she crossed to the bedroom door and turned on the room lights. Everything brightened even more. She liked having all the lights on. Percy never liked that but she did. Anyway, Percy wasn't home and she wouldn't have to pretend not to see his disapproving eyes.

Always lecturing. Poor little Percy. Always just a little discontented, even when he's not saying a word. So sad around the eyes. But far be it for him to ever say an unfavorable word. Perfect gentleman. Ah, subtle and tricky type. Doesn't even know it about himself. He thinks if he doesn't say it out loud, he hasn't meant it. But he means it, even if he doesn't admit it to himself. That's why Amelia. That bitch. She could never understand a man like Percy. So simple a man, really. All men are simple, but many are devious and disloyal, and he's neither. That's why he's simple. Ruin a man like that with her insanity. She's much simpler than he is. Stupider. Took me five years to get him back up to something like normal. All that work, and only this to show for it. . . .Well, to hell with that, and to hell with her. She's crazy, and she knows nothing about men. Or women, for that matter.

She opened the bedroom door and went out into the hall. She padded quickly through the darkened family room to the kitchen. She was not eager to encounter Bill just yet. Bill was nowhere in sight. Mr. Chips tagged along expectantly at her heels. Mr. Chips wasn't thinking about Bill, she felt certain. She turned on the kitchen lights and poured a small dish of dry food for the cat and a cup of coffee for herself before hurrying back to the bedroom, making sure to lock the door behind her. Safe again.

She sat down at her table and sipped the coffee. Aromatic steam around her nose. It was very good. Her mind was still a little foggy from sleep. She needed these few minutes every morning to complete the waking process. But she only sat for a very few minutes, cautiously sipping the hot coffee and making sure she didn't accidentally look in the mirror, before putting the cup down and rising to make the bed.

Five minutes of news headlines were on the radio now at the top of the hour. Five minutes was about as much as she could bear. She tried to not hear it, but little pieces always got through. Little dissociated pieces. It was all so terrible. She could scarcely stand to have the TV on anymore. Percy watched it when he got home at night. She always found another room to escape to. He never tried to talk about any of it with her anymore. She was grateful for that. How anyone could stand hearing about it or watching it on TV was a complete mystery to her. Bewildering. The way they'd kept showing the video of the attacks, over and over, over and over during that first horrible week. Appalling. People needed to get over it. Why couldn't they understand that? People needed to forget, not remember. But how could you forget when the news only grew worse with every passing week? You could not forget. No one could escape it. Not even children. Poor children. What kind of adults might they grow up into? Even if you tried not to hear, like she did, you were bombarded with it. It was relentless. It was everywhere. TVs on everywhere you went. Radios. Even when you left your house you could not escape it. Everyone watching the news, listening to the news, reading the newspaper, holding it up in your face and in front of your eyes and pouring it like a flooded river into your ears. Flags flying everywhere you looked. A psychedelic deluge of red, white and blue. Psychedelic. Yes. It was surreal.

What had happened to the world? It felt as though she were living in a low-budget, made-for-TV movie, like she'd awakened one day to discover that everything around her was just slightly different from how she'd always known it to be, only she couldn't quite identify exactly what had changed. In fact, it looked to Isabel Blake as if precisely nothing at all had changed. But those around her seemed to notice a change she could not see. They could see it out of the corners of their eyes, maybe. A dissociative psychological earthquake was spreading through the land. United We Stand. What was that supposed to mean, exactly? Everyone seemed to know except for her. Is was nothing more than a hollow slogan, a new instant fad. It was a disease that was turning everyone into pod people. People she had known forever were turning into strangers. They were paranoid. A creeping paranoia was upon the land. That's how she felt. It was all because people wouldn't leave the news alone.

That was why she kept the clock radio tuned to the jazz station now. She much preferred classical to jazz, but she couldn't stand waking up to hours of the news filling the morning anymore. The jazz station broke for headlines at the top of the hour, so she had to hear about US Marines on the ground near Kandahar, and the first report of an American fatality in Afghanistan. This was followed by a statement from a Senator that an anthrax letter mailed to his office could have killed 100,000 people.

Charming.

Eighteen people had contracted anthrax so far, they said. Five had died. Drone drone drone.

Rounding out the news was a headline about Iraq's attempt to acquire the Ames strain of anthrax as early as 1988.

Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden. Mullah Omar. Anthrax. WMD. Operation Infinite Justice. . . .

Every day a horrible new concept rudely thrust into your life. Rise and shine and take your punishment. It was the daily bludgeoning. She was infinitely grateful when she finished tucking in the last pillow and the jazz resumed. Safe for another hour, anyway.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Isabel entered the bathroom, locked the door, and turned on all the lights. Gleaming golden fixtures. Spotless glass. Mirrors. She turned on the water in the tub, very hot, just the way she liked it. She undraped the nightgown, hung it on the hook on the back of the door above Percy's housecoat. She wrinkled her nose, smelling him on his housecoat, and made a mental note to wash it. Men. She sat down on the toilet and watched the mirrors fogging around her, noticing approvingly how everything was so clean in the bathroom. Everything was safe. She was not thinking about the news, but for some reason she suddenly remembered Doreen's voice on the phone that terrible morning.

The phone was ringing. It wouldn't stop. Percy had already left the house, of course. Afterwards, when she was standing dumfounded in front of the TV, she thought to call him. He was watching it too, with Walter. Walter had found a TV somewhere. Resourceful Walter. Like everyone else in the country, Percy and she ended up watching it together from their separate locations, linked by cell phones ("My God. My God."): she in the family room, the professors, she imagined, standing around somewhere in Walter's dingy lab (she'd been there once, years ago), shaking their heads gloomily, no doubt, blackly. And knowingly. Oh yes. They would never be surprised, would they? Ivory tower prima donnas. . . .

They couldn't help it, though. They were children pretending to be men. What more could be expected from them? Nothing.

At least Percy isn't cruel, she thought. And he's not too stingy. It could be worse. It could be much worse. Imagine being married to Walter, for example: that pretentious, arrogant windbag. Mrs. Walter Kern. Imagine that. How can Claudia stand it? But then, think of what Percy had to deal with too, with Amelia. I'm lucky, and Percy is lucky, too. Oh, yes. In so many ways he's lucky. He's just too simple to understand how lucky he is.

Only the aftermath of all the drama was left by the time Doreen called to wake her up. It was already over. The two towers were gone, like blown out candles. The Pentagon was burning, and the other plane was a crater in a Pennsylvania field.

When she was finished, she stepped cautiously into the tub. Oh so very hot. Perfect. Slowly, gingerly, she slid down, watched the smooth water gliding leisurely up over her calves and up her long thighs. She leaned back and closed her eyes and sighed. Luxuriated. Ahh. Wanton indulgence. That's what she wanted. That's all she required from this life. She pulled her knees up and slipped farther down, and her long hair became a forest of seaweed adrift around her head. Eyes closed in hot water, with the water over her ears so that she could see nothing and hear nothing. She was cut off from all the universe. Isolated.

But the hot water would not remain hot forever. After a while she sat up and shaved her legs. She was very careful with her shaving and very precise: perfectly straight lines were absolutely as necessary as the total depilation where no hair must be allowed to remain. In the era of the Brazilian cut a certain controlled thickness could be a real inciter of arousal, but only under precisely controlled conditions. She finished that chore and washed her body and her hair, rinsing it under a renewed flow of hot water from the shower massager. Then she climbed out of the tub and dried herself, wrapping her sopping hair in a second towel. She reached back into the tub to let the water out.

Still wrapped in her plush towels, she turned to the sink and brushed her teeth. Now, for the first time, she dared look in the mirror. Her eyes were clear, she noted with approval. She put the toothbrush away and rinsed, and then she loosened the towel that was wrapped around her body and let it fall to the floor. She stood regarding her body in the mirror with a critical eye. What she saw was good, though. She knew it was good. It was a thirty-year-old's body, and she was in her late forties. Maybe not a thirty-year-old's body, but a thirty-five-year-old's body, she thought: long, slender, softly brown limbs, with a good butt and breasts still remarkably round. Lucky. She still caught men's eyes. And boys, she thought. smiling slightly. Yes. She turned so she could see her back better in the mirror. In a way her back, she thought, was her best feature. Still so very soft and olive-bronze, like a perfectly turned cello, with long rings of hair tumbling down the curve of her spine. She liked wearing dresses with open backs at every opportunity. She always could feel the men from across the room looking at her when they thought their wives weren't watching, secretly or not so secretly desiring to explore that soft, inviting expanse of female skin. She kept her body lotion and powder in the bathroom. She sat down on the lid of the toilet and powdered herself and put on her deodorant. She could still smell a trace of the floral soap she used. It was a faint aroma, but it was there. Men liked to know you were clean, and she liked the smell, too. When she was done she put her nightgown back on and put everything away and put out fresh towels. She wiped out the tub with her big body towel and cleaned the sink and various faucets and taps. Then she collected up her night clothes and the towels Percy had left and returned to the bedroom.

She dumped the dry things into the laundry basket in the closet and spread out the wet towels to dry, making sure she closed the closet door on her way back to her table.

While she was drying her hair, and then brushing out its long, dark rings and putting on her makeup and perfume, and enjoying the warmth of the heater on her shins, she considered the events of the day before her. She thought of the trips to be made today, and this reminded her about how much she hated living in this town, and how little there was for a girl like her to do here. Percy seemed to love Springfield. If Percy loved anything. Sometimes it was hard to know. Percy loved his son. She could see that. Sometimes when Percy looked at Bill she was sure she could see a spark of affection that she had seen in his eyes many years ago when he'd looked at her. But it no longer bothered her to not see that anymore. Percy and she were at another place in the arc of their lives together, that was all. She didn't really need romantic love from him, like a puppy had for a boy, or like cheap, stupid heroines always found in trashy romance novels. That was for before marriage, or for a short, sweet interval after marriage. Then you inevitably started noticing the flaws. All the flaws. It had happened with Donald, and then it had happened with Percy. You didn't think it would happen, but then it did.

She didn't mind it at all with Percy. He had a good job, even if he really ought to have a better job, and he wasn't mean to her. He just wasn't very good at paying attention to her, but that was just a flaw. It wasn't personal. So they had this separation between them that was just the kind of no-man's-land that was necessary for any marriage that lasted. She didn't intrude on his side of the neutral zone, and he didn't intrude on hers, and their partnership endured. Whatever science he did that she'd never understand because it bored her to death, he could have all of that and she'd not begrudge him it. And she'd have her friends and acquaintances who, while nothing like her friends and adventures in Savannah, or even in Atlanta (Percy you damned fool, why'd you have to throw your career away and move us out West?), were her own means of not going completely insane in this backwards, uncivil country. Percy neither wanted nor needed to know about it, not about any of it, and that was the best for all of them.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

She turned off the bathroom lights. Morning light was now glowing visibly through the white liner of the drapes, but she didn't look outside. She turned off the space heater and retrieved her feather duster where she kept it on her table and dusted lightly about the room, turning off lights as she came to them. Finally she picked up her empty coffee cup and her black shoes in her other hand, unlocked the door, and went out.

Mr. Chips was waiting there, just as always, to rub against her legs. He followed her to the family room. She put the duster down in its place on the edge of the fireplace mantle.

The cat followed her on into the kitchen. She put her coffee cup down on the counter and her shoes down on the floor near the bar. She toasted a bagel and poured orange juice and took her vitamins. She sat on one of the barstools listening closely for a moment, but she still did not hear Bill stirring. He'd been at the house almost a week now, and often he didn't come upstairs before ten o'clock. She glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and saw it was only now eight o'clock.

Percy had left the News-Leader on the dining table. She glanced through it, avoiding the first few sections. Not much to see. When her meal was done she threw the paper away and cleaned the front of the refrigerator, where she'd noticed Bill's smudged fingerprints.

I'm not meeting Rose until eleven, she thought. What am I going to do until then? Just roam the mall, I suppose. Another dreary thought.

She went to the family room. The moody, dark shutters were closed over the wide, east-facing window so that tight, narrow beams of yellow-white light squeezing in around their edges turned them into an enormous silhouetted array of dark columns and rows. She crossed to the window and lifted up the tilt-bar, allowing the trickle of light to flood in from outside. Momentarily her eyes adjusted, and she peered across the yard at the empty street. They lived in a young neighborhood in Nixa: a feeble suburb for a sapless town. They were almost exactly thirteen miles and a direct shot from the university. Their house was on one of the big, flat lots with consummate green grass lawns (no glistening frost today, she noted). Perfect corner lamp posts rising straight up against perfectly blue skies intermittently populated by herds of perfect white cumulus clouds. Razor-precise lot alignments with red-brown brick piles centered on exquisitely manicured lawns, each with its own perfect back patio and perfect fireplace and perfect basement, with perfect little basement windows gazing up half expectantly, half timorously, from down low. Add on white picket fences, and they would have been dream homes for 1950s suburban housewives. And in fact plenty of smiling, happy housewives did live in these houses, for she'd see them every day during the warmer months out in their pretty yards, putting in flowers, collecting the mail, awaiting the afternoon returns of their perfect husbands from their trying jobs in town. Perfect silver-gray SUVs in every perfect carport. Perfectly spaced young trees anchored against the perfectly tedious elements. Power lines ran up and down along the perfect curve of Nicholas Road. That was the road Percy drove every morning: straight up Nicholas to Mount Vernon to Massey Boulevard, which became Campbell, along the shoddy country roads and past the dirty local hardware stores and trashy fast food eateries, across the river and up the hill and under the freeway into town, up along the cemetery (gateway to Percy's employer: fitting, that) to Grand (damned if she could imagine what could possibly have ever been deemed grand about it), rounding the cemetery corner and going on several blocks to the John Q Hammons freaking Parkway. A perfectly uncomplicated and unvarying drive to the university for a perfectly uncomplicated and unvarying man who had walked away from so much promise so long ago. She hated all of it.

She moved back from the window and sat down on one of the large divans. She looked down at her stockinged feet. She'd put her shoes on when she was ready to leave the house.

Why not now? The longer she stayed home, the more likely Bill would get up. She would much prefer to avoid having to see him this morning. She still hadn't heard him moving about downstairs, though.

He must still be asleep, Isabel thought. Thank the Lord for small favors.