Heavy Water: And Other Stories Read Free Page A

this aside with a groan, snatched up a clean sheet of paper, and wrote:
Dear Mr. Sixsmith,
It is now well over a year since I sent you Offensive from Quasar 13 . Not content with that dereliction, you have allowed five months to pass without responding to three more recent submissions. A prompt reply I would have deemed common decency, you being a fellow screenplay writer, though I must say I have never cared for your work, finding it, at once, both florid and superficial. (I read Matthew Sura’s piece last month and I thought he got you bang to rights.) Please return the more recent screenplays, namely Decimator, Medusa Takes Manhattan and Valley of the Stratocasters , immediately.
    He signed it and sealed it. He stalked out and posted it. On his return he haughtily threw off his drenched clothes. The single bed felt enormous, like an orgiast’s fourposter. He curled up tight and slept better than he had done all year.
    So it was a quietly defiant Alistair who the next morning came plodding down the stairs and glanced at the splayed mail on the shelf as he headed for the door. He recognized the envelope as a lover would. He bent low as he opened it.
Do please forgive this very tardy reply. Profound apologies. But allow me to move straight on to a verdict on your work. I won’t bore you with all my personal and professional distractions.
    Bore me? thought Alistair, as his hand sought his heart.
I think I can at once give the assurance that your screenplays are unusually promising. No: that promise has already been honored. They have both feeling and burnish.
I will content myself, for now, by taking Offensive from Quasar 13 . (Allow me to muse a little longer on Decimator.) I have one or two very minor emendations to suggest. Why not telephone me here to arrange a chat?
Thank you for your generous remarks about my own work. Increasingly I find that this kind of exchange—this candor, this reciprocity—is one of the things that keep me trundling along. Your words helped sustain my defenses in the aftermath of Matthew Sura’s vicious and slovenly attack, from which, I fear, I am still rather reeling. Take excellent care.
    “Go with the lyric,” said Jim.
    “Or how about a ballad?” said Jeff.
    Jack was swayable. “Ballads are big,” he allowed.
    It seemed to Luke, toward the end of the second day, that he was winning the sonnet battle. The clue lay in the flavor of Joe’s taciturnity: torpid but unmorose.
    “Let’s face it,” said Jeff. “Sonnets are essentially hieratic. They’re strictly period. They answer to a formalized consciousness. Today, we’re talking consciousnesses that are in search of form.”
    “Plus,” said Jack, “the lyric has always been the natural medium for the untrammeled expression of feeling.”
    “Yeah,” said Jeff. “With the sonnet you’re stuck in this thesis-antithesis-synthesis routine.”
    Joan said, “I mean what are we doing here? Reflecting the world or illuminating it?”
    It was time for Joe to speak. “Please,” he said. “Are we forgetting that ‘ ’Tis’ was a sonnet, before the rewrites? Were we on coke when we said, in the summer, that we were going to go for the sonnet?”
    The answer to Joe’s last question, incidentally, was yes; but Luke looked carefully round the room. The Chinese lunch they’d had the secretary phone out for lay on the coffee table like a child’s experiments with putty and paint and designer ooze. It was four o’clock and Luke wanted to get away soon. To swim and lie in the sun. To make himself especially lean and bronzed for his meeting with the young actress Henna Mickiewicz. He faked a yawn.
    “Luke’s lagged,” said Joe. “Tomorrow we’ll talk some more, but I’m pretty sure I’m recommitted to the sonnet.”
    “Sorry,” said Alistair. “Me yet again. Sorry.”
    “Oh yes,” said the woman’s voice. “He was here a minute ago.… No, he’s there. He’s there. Just a second.”
    Alistair jerked the receiver