The Ice-Cream Headache: And Other Stories by Jones James

Author:Jones, James [Jones, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781453215661
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

VII

There was a red-headed widow from Mount Carmel, Illinois, staying at Lake Lawler, leasing one of the bungalows—as distinguished from cabins—around on the other side of the lake, who was interested in artists and writers and did not like the Middle West either. She was afraid of a new husband taking her for what the first one had left her. She felt she had earned it and she meant to enjoy it. But she did not let this hurt her appreciation of art. She had chanced to read two of Sylvanus Merrick’s stories, and when she found out he was him, in the flesh, she was anxious to see what his novel was like. So he started in to read the whole thing to her. She bought wonderful scotch, and he thought perhaps he might get new ideas by watching her reactions. But when he read what he wrote to the widow she giggled at all the wrong places, the same places Norma Fry had always used to look shocked at. He even found after a while that he would take to defending the Middle West against her attacks.

It was as if in moving from Fandalack to Lake Lawler Sylvanus had moved from one end of a teetertotter to the other, a teetertotter whose bar and fulcrum was the great Middle West heritage and culture he had almost been ready to believe he had escaped. But he was willing to overlook this because he felt the widow would be a good antidote. Sylvanus had discovered he needed an antidote.

The cabin he had got at Lake Lawler was only one room and there were no trees around it. It was very hot, now that the rainy spell had finally broken, and at night the jukebox music from the pavilion pervaded the cabin and helped the heat keep Sylvanus awake. The sound of the cars that kept driving down toward the swimmers’ outhouses to park at the foot of the hill where his cabin was did not help either. A lot of giggling and laughter came from the cars. The people in the cars sounded very happy, they did not seem to mind losing sleep. Sylvanus Merrick, on the other hand, felt he needed a lot of sleep very badly. This was because the heat and the music and the cars kept him awake. And because he was determined to work.

Then, quite suddenly, the novel began to come again. Out of a clear sky. For no apparent reason. Coming all at once, the way the last dozen pieces of a jigsaw suddenly fall into place. He could even see the end of it. That was the fine thing about writing. Sylvanus even quit worrying about the Book-of-the-Month Club. Maybe that was what helped him to sleep. But then writing was the only religious ritual Sylvanus Merrick had ever found that did not require a third party and he worked at it very seriously in the same way a good Catholic has to go to Mass every morning, so that by evening he was always very tired now.

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