Bag of Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

(Clancy), but by the standards of Derry, Maine, we were quite rolling in it. We made love thousands of times, saw thousands of movies, read thousands of books (Jo storing hers under her side of the bed at the end of the day, more often than not). And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.
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    More than once I wondered if breaking the ritual is what led to the writer’s block. In the daytime, I could dismiss this as supernatural twaddle but at night that was harder to do. At night your thoughts have an unpleasant way of slipping their collars and running free. And if you’ve spent most of your adult life making fictions, I’m sure those collars are even looser and the dogs less eager to wear them. Was it Shaw or Oscar Wilde who said a writer was a man who had taught his mind to misbehave?
    And is it really so far-fetched to think that breaking the ritual might have played a part in my sudden and unexpected (unexpected by me, at least) silence? When you make your daily bread in the land of make-believe, the line between what is and what seems to be is much finer. Painters sometimes refuse to paint without wearing a certain hat, and baseball players who are hitting well won’t change their socks.
    The ritual started with the second book, which was the only one I remember being nervous about—I suppose I’d absorbed a fair amount of that sophomore-jinx stuff; the idea that one hit might only be a fluke. I remember an American Lit lecturer’s oncesaying that of modern American writers, only Harper Lee had found a foolproof way of avoiding the second-book blues.
    When I reached the end of The Red-Shirt Man, I stopped just short of finishing. The Edwardian on Benton Street in Derry was still two years in the future at that point, but we had purchased Sara Laughs, the place on Dark Score (not anywhere near as furnished as it later became, and Jo’s studio not yet built, but nice), and that’s where we were.
    I pushed back from my typewriter—I was still clinging to my old IBM Selectric in those days—and went into the kitchen. It was mid-September, most of the summer people were gone, and the crying of the loons on the lake sounded inexpressibly lovely. The sun was going down, and the lake itself had become a still and heatless plate of fire. This is one of the most vivid memories I have, so clear I sometimes feel I could step right into it and live it all again. What things, if any, would I do differently? I sometimes wonder about that.
    Early that evening I had put a bottle of Taittinger and two flutes in the fridge. Now I took them out, put them on a tin tray that was usually employed to transport pitchers of iced tea or Kool-Aid from the kitchen to the deck, and carried it before me into the living room.
    Johanna was deep in her ratty old easy chair, reading a book (not Maugham that night but William Denbrough, one of her contemporary favorites). “Ooo,” she said, looking up and marking her place. “Champagne, what’s the occasion?” As if, you understand, she didn’t know.
    â€œI’m done,” I said. “ Mon livre est tout fini. ”
    â€œWell,” 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