Work Text:
After the reading there was a question and answer session in the back of the bookshop. Inevitably someone would ask where he got his ideas, what inspired him, did he have a muse.
"My wife," he said, "is retired now, but for most of her life she was a dance instructor. Prior to that she was a duck."
Laughter from the audience. They always mistook him for a comedian when he told this story.
"When I first started writing 'seriously' I wrote a lot of epic sagas about ducks turning into princesses, or prima ballerinas, and when those didn't work out I tried writing about ducks turning into ordinary women. None of those were any good. It's easier to write what you want to be true rather than what is true, I think.
"One night I had a breakthrough. I scribbled off this monstrosity about a boy who loved a duck. It went on about how clumsy he was, how useless and frustrated, and how patient the duck was, putting up with a writer--writers are the most insufferable people to live with. We were living together at the time, unmarried. Of course all the young people do it now, but in that day and age we only got away with it because she was a duck. In any case. I wrote this thing, which had no happy ending, I think it ended with ellipses, which your grammar teacher will tell you not to do, and then I got piss-drunk on cheap porter--the cheapest, since we had no money, we were living on breadcrumbs, literally--and I passed out. When I woke up the next day it was almost noon, and there was this," he paused, caught in admiration of the memory, "this incredible naked girl sitting next to me, and white feathers all over the bed." His audience laughed again. Their faces wavered at him like lamps against the backdrop of slipshod bookcases.
"As you can imagine I fell directly off the bed and hit my head on the bedside table. She had to put on old clothes of mine and drag me to the hospital. On the way there I kept thinking over and over, I should've had a dress for her--why didn't I have a dress ready for her to put on? But I would've guessed the size wrong. Anyway the concussion turned out to be mild." He reached for the glass of water on the tabletop, where the anniversary edition of his first novel lay shut. He took a drink, frowning as he swallowed. "I'm sorry, what was the question?"
He stayed another half hour, signing books and talking, before he put on his hat and coat and took up his black umbrella. It had rained in the early evening but the sky had settled since. Between the cobblestones outside the bookshop little threads of silver water unspooled to run down the length of the street. For a moment he stood on the curb, studying their tracery. Instead of hailing a cab he set off at a walk to follow them, unhurried, while his umbrella swung from his hand very like a cane, nothing like a sword.