Free All Is Vanity by Christina Schwarz Page B

generous margins, this lucubration on a man self-conscious to what seemed likely to be the point of insanity filled a little over half a page. It was something, at least. I could go on to describe the kitchen—the precisely folded hand towel with its border of pineapples, the hiss and spit of the percolator, the sectioning of the grapefruit with a Swiss Army knife heel carried over in ’Nam. I set my pen down. I needed a bathroom break.
    There is such a thing as effortless concentration, when one is thinking so deeply and so fast that shouts of “fire” would only further color the dream. In that state, the ideas run from the brain more quickly than the hands can catch them and make them concrete. I’d experienced this often enough before to know that the condition in which I’d written about Robert Martin was nothing like it. This was a forced concentration, a grit-your-teeth-and-press-your-fist-to-your-forehead-in-imitation-of-The-Thinker concentration, a concentration in which one quarter of the brain dragged the rest screeching with the hand brake pulled up hard. It resulted in halting words, painfully squeezed forth one by one, as in the proverbial blood from a turnip. It also caused a tense, headachy trance, which made me move stiffly and sluggishly toward the ladies’ room and then take my time in that sanctuary. I washed my hands twice, once on the way in because I didn’t really have to go and couldn’t think what else to do, and then again on the way out, after I’d determined that I might as well see if I didn’t really have to go. As I wiped up the water I’d dripped on the counter to sanitize it for the next person, I made a mental note to have Robert Martin mop up the sink in a public restroom.
    I wound another brown paper towel out of the dispenser to geta clear sense of the texture. Was “brown” really the best way to describe the color? I could more easily picture Robert in a service station washroom on the way to Filmore, trying to dry his hands on the semi-clean edge of an overused roller towel. It would make him feel used and dirty. No! It would symbolize the impossibility of keeping one’s hands clean in this world—thus providing a neat segue into a flashback to Vietnam.
    I hurried back to my table, pregnant with this idea. Vietnam was admittedly a bit beyond my experience, but I could reread Tim O’Brien’s books and take notes for atmosphere. Maybe Ted and I would rent
The Deer Hunter
tonight. Few women had written fiction about the Vietnam War—I would get points for my daring originality. I could already hear the choppers chopping—no, slicing—no, whipping up the humidity. “He remembered it as if he were still slogging through the water-heavy air,” I wrote. Or I would have written had my pen been on the table where I’d left it.
    I looked under my notebook, then picked it up by the wire binding and shook it. Nothing fell out. My breathing quickened. My armpits prickled. Ted’s pen. The pen Ted gave me. The pen that made me a writer. I pushed my chair back and crawled under the table, scanning the floor in all directions. How could I have left it? This was New York, for God’s sake! True, it was the cleaner, safer New York, as compared with the last few decades, but this applied only if you were a person, better yet a man, on certain subway routes and downtown streets, not if you were a gold-nibbed Mont Blanc on a public library table.
    “Looking for this?”
    The ostentatious scribbler was bending over so that his balding head was even with his knees. He waggled the pen in one inksmudged hand. I grabbed it and shot out from under the table, nicking my head on the edge on my way up.
    “Careful there.”
    “You took my pen!” As the words left my mouth, I realized I should have been more circumspect. I’d broken the first rule of the woman on the street, or, as it were, in the library: never engage. Although, had I not noticed his furious writing earlier, I’d have