Free Foul Matter by Martha Grimes Page A

small step to writing, I guess. My past seems to be a series of flickering images, like an old silent movie.” Saul laughed. “I’ve never done one damn thing, except in my head. How would they like that?” He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down on the moss-brown sofa.
    Ned sat down then in the leather wing chair he always favored, positioned to take in most of the objects in the room. He could not imagine the things here as fleeting. In firelight and lamplight they looked crusted over, sealed against the looting of time.
    “You know more about the past than I do. You’ve cracked its code. I don’t even recognize these people sometimes.” Saul prodded the air with his cigar.
    “ ‘Cracked its code’? Don’t I wish. Yesterday I couldn’t write at all. Literally, I didn’t set down a word for three hours. The story’s set in Paris, yet I keep thinking of Pittsburgh.”
    “Pittsburgh, I’ve always thought it a mysterious sort of city.”
    Ned laughed. “That’s the last thing I’d think. Why?”
    “Oh, it’s reinventing itself. Becoming beautiful after having been so ugly. At least, that’s what I’ve read.”
    “Maybe so. Anyway, it stalled my writing well enough. What do you do when you can’t write? I sharpen pencils into spears. They’re lethal by the time I get through with them.”
    “According to Jamie, we can always write. How the hell she does it, all of those books, all of those different genres, I don’t know. I wander around and pick up things—silver bowls, pieces of porcelain—and look on the bottom to see whether the stamp’s there and looks authentic.” Saul blew a smoke ring and pierced it with his finger.
    Ned got up to look at the pictures again, the two small ones of Saul’s grandmother. Saul, like his grandmother, was a softer rendering of the sharp-eyed, imperious male ancestors. She had been alive through his childhood. Saul felt himself lucky; he was fifteen before she died, and even then she was young, only in her late fifties. She had been quite young when Saul’s mother had been born—the unobtrusive mother. Her death (Saul had said) had leveled the house and everyone in it.
    It had not occurred to Ned before that “everyone” was not really Saul’s grandfather (he of the mutton whiskers) or Saul’s father (of the chilly, painted smile), but Saul himself. It rattled Ned to think this; it shook him, only because he’d pictured Saul as another, altogether different sort of adolescent—distinct and distant, a writer even then who didn’t trust anyone or anything not of his mind’s own making. Because his mother and father had pretty much cast him adrift, Ned had assumed everyone else had, too. Or at least that Saul felt they had. But this was not so.
    He turned from the two oval pictures and asked, “Do you think about her much, your grandmother?”
    Saul took the cigar from his mouth and studied the coal end in the way of those strange lunar moths that beat their wings slowly before fire in an unquenchable need of light. “All the time,” he said.
    Ned looked at him, surprised again; he would not have thought Saul to be stuck in the past. Then he wondered why, why had he not thought this? The End of It dealt precisely with an overwhelming loss suffered by the austere and exacting narrator. Indeed, how could anyone have written this book other than a person who had never recovered from the loss of someone—or something, even—and never would. The End of It. Ned foundered here, wondering if there was some clue in this that would explain why Saul couldn’t finish the novel he’d been working on.
    “They called her Ossie; her name was Oceana. She was the dose of good humor that the others had to take daily. Though you could see,” Saul said, “it lay on their tongues like lead.” Saul looked at him. “What are you thinking?”
    Ned just shrugged; he did not want to say what he had been thinking because he hadn’t thought it over enough. Neither