Free About the Author by John Colapinto Page A

genesis.
    Then something happened that allowed me to put off the job no longer. At the very beginning of September, Blackie called to say that
Esquire
was interested in running a short story of mine in its Christmas issue. “Have you got something I can toss to the editors?” Blackie asked.
    I flashed on Stewart’s plump file folders.
    “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think I can dig something up. Call you back.”
    I hung up, then passed through the living room and into the office, a high-ceilinged chamber with a large leaded-glass window overlooking a garden court. Shielded from the street noise, it was a quiet sanctuary, ideal for writing (if ever I should feel so inclined). Beside the desk, which stood in front of the window, I had installed the one piece of furniture that had survived my Washington Heights days: Stewart’s gunmetal-gray filing cabinet.
    I rolled the desk chair over to the cabinet, plucked the key from its hiding place in a crack along the baseboard, and unlocked the bottom drawer. I pulled it open. At random, I lifted out the file labeled “Odds and Ends” and opened it on my knees. On top were some notebook pages torn from a pocket-sized spiral pad and scribbled with words that I immediately recognized as the names of bodegas, hair salons, liquor stores, and bars lining upper Broadway in Washington Heights. Stewart must have jotted these down while on the M5 bus, judging from his shaky handwriting. Notes on local color that he had used in the novel. I separated these off to be destroyed.
    I leafed through the notebook. On a page with the scribbled date and place “19 Mar. Chicago,” Stewart had written:
     
First loosening of winter. Gray mist. Melting. The sidewalks mirrors of white light. A tang of woodsmoke and a humid smell of earth breathing from thawing lawns. Even the sounds of traffic are idealized in this atmosphere: the car tires make a luscious sticky noise on the wet streets, like an endless Band-aid pulled off itchy skin. Can I express the richness of life I feel on such a day? How can I ever communicate the emotion of walking these streets in a March thaw? I must not let it go.
     
    I looked up and thought about this.
Had
he “let it go”? He was dead, yet here before me was the evidence of the world’s impact on his senses, resurrected in me as I read. In college I had endured endless lectures about the power of literature to transcend mortality, but I don’t think I had ever understood as I understood that morning just how potent a force against loss, time, and death writing could be. Mere black marks on a page, which arouse in you a flow of memories, sensations, thoughts. It was as if Stewart, conjured by these scribbles, had become a living presence in the room.
    I turned the page and was confronted by a piece of paper that did not look like the rest of the handwritten sheets. It was a carbon copy of a typewritten letter. I noticed, with a pang of deep unease, the date, in the upper right-hand corner: July 1 of that very year. The
day
Stewart had died. The rest I transcribe from memory. It is a faithful rendering, believe me; every word, every punctuation mark, of that letter is etched on my memory forever.
     
    Dear Janet (it mysteriously began),
    As you can see, I’ve typed this. Forgive the formality. But I’m not sure how things stand between us. Or rather, I’m not sure how things stand with you . I know how I feel, how I will always feel.
    This is harder to write than I thought it would be. So I’ll get straight to the point.
    I hope you will read the enclosed manuscript, Almost Like Suicide . It’s a novel. I told you it could be done (despite law school, New York, etc.). I hope this doesn’t sound too much like an I-told-you-so.
    You are the first person I am showing it to. Yours is the only opinion (outside my own) that matters to me. But you know that.
    I don’t trust myself to say more. At least for now.
    Love,
    Stewart
     
    PS: I probably don’t need to tell