Seazed by Hindoos
DEAR HENRY, Let me tell you after the fashion of Our Savior a story about a man, a woman and some money. There was once a Samaritan (Claude La Badarian) who came across a woman in straitened circumstances. The womans husband (like Claude La Badarian a "young" novelist, meaning he was under the age at which people commonly expire of maturity in what Literatures Dr. Larch calls "other parts of the world"), was on one of those "literary retreats" which so frequently signify dull and wordless divorce after return from New Hampshire, where one invariably ends up involved with a mixed media expert with a navel ring and a slightly chipped front tooth–which is what happened in this case, too, but as this material is being worked into a screenplay (please make sure youre not "sharing" this Henry: the law protects only expression of ideas, not ideas themselves: fucking thieves paradise when you think about it), I will discontinue this part of my Paper and continue with the Claude-centric story, which is more interesting, anyway.
Anyway, at the time Claude La Badarian met this giant-assed literary grass-widow at the Artists and Writers Softball Game (Claude, gut hanging over a pair of borrowed shorts, was playing "shortstop" as if it were the character of Hamlet), he was significantly in funds and therefore in the grip of a massive alcoholic breakdown of the sort which happens two weeks after any true genius receives any major check. In Claudes delirium tremens (this was the only time in his life, since every Sunday brunch in college, anyway, when he found that he could not pick up a coffee cup without using two hands), there was no bat coming out of a hole in the wall and biting him, but obviously some quiet time was in order, and as it happens the absent novelists wife had a large house in Amagansett which had on the grounds a cottage with a cold-water sink and a single gas ring. Claude likes that sort of primitivity (which reminds him of his first "apartment" in an arked seine loft in an art colony), and he took the cottage to "decompress"–self-restricted to Jane Austen, a typewriter and white wines.
Ironically, considering the circumstances, it was in this cottage that Claude, while paying $700 a week for a hovel, composed much of a novel which made money, while the master of the house, a better-connected writer on charity exhibition in New Hampshire, was meanwhile somberly creating at other peoples expense a novel which sold 237 copies domestically and 3 copies in Canada. No fucking idea of making an entertainment, Henry: never occurred to him. AND it wasnt literary. I have no idea how you manage that, but most of your "young novelists" do that these days.
One night there was a feminine sound of weeping from the main house, and La Badarian investigated, knightly (as opposed to nightly, though the latter has been alleged), moving bathrobed (and, despite the above paragraph, intoxicated) through mazy French gardens previously, casually and falsely suggested to be ancestral. The minor novelists wife presented drunk as a boiled goat, and precariously bathrobed among the equally precarious hanging copper pots in the "country" kitchen. She revealed to Claude that her finances were temporarily in desperate state owing to the malfeasance of her familys lawyers, and that despite his $700 a week (which she was spending on Vicodin sold by the local tennis pro),