Read Scissors for Free Online Page A

spreads her legs
.
    Sometimes Raymond’s as modest as a silly young girl.
MARIANNE AND RAYMOND
    “Is that what you meant to say, Raymond? You meant to say ‘spreads’?”
    “I don’t know what I meant to say.”
    “Then how can he? How can Douglas know that for you?”
    “Maybe I thought ‘spreads’ and then wrote ‘moves.’ It’s true that I have a tendency not to say things.”
    “That’s a virtue, right? Chekhov, Salinger—you always say their force comes from not saying things.”
    “In
their
work. In their work, it’s a force.”
    “And in yours?”
    “It might be a weakness.”
DOUGLAS
    Raymond has a strange way of ending his stories. It’s like when another driver stalls out in front of you at a green light. You don’t wait for him to restart his engine. You steer around him and pass him by. That was my first reaction to Raymond’s work.
    The second, no, the third time I read through it, I understood.I no longer saw any clumsiness in the way he stalled. I perceived that the fulfillment of his short stories was in that very stalling.
    Yes, Raymond’s art lies in stalling in front of your eyes when you least expect it.
    I get out of my car and walk over to his old jalopy. I open the passenger door and get in. Raymond’s eyes are blurry with alcohol. I grab the steering wheel with my left hand and say, “Onward.”
    Have confidence, Raymond. Onward.
    We’re going to travel down a stretch of road together.
    And we’ll both stall when we feel like it.
    I look in the rearview mirror and see my car with nobody at the wheel. I have no regrets. The gas tank was practically empty.
MARIANNE
    Go. He’s paying for your ticket, you may as well go. But don’t drink in front of him, okay? And tell him you want to keep “Excuse Me” as the title for your story. If that’s what you want. I don’t even know anymore.
    Of course I’m happy, of course I’m excited.
    But don’t discuss our debts, all right? Be sure you don’t say a word about our money problems.
DOUGLAS
    Lately I’ve had my doubts. First of all, there’s Lorraine, talking to me about divorce. I take her at her word and call up the best lawyer in town. I didn’t expect to find she’d hired him two days previously.
    And then there’s Nicole, that whore. I discover the best female short-story writer of her generation, and what does she do? She signs an exclusive contract with the outfit across the street to publish her novels. I say to her, “Nicole, your name is Ingratitude.” She replies, “No, it’s Nicole.” Novelists are too prosaic.
    I wished her good luck, but because of her departure, I hit an air pocket. My scissors were snipping at the void. Then Raymond came. With his fondness for whiskey. In his case, alcohol and writing make a compatible couple. Until alcohol prevails. Then he loses all restraint. He says too much when he ought to say less. He sounds like someone who wants to be forgiven. But nobody forgives too many words.
    When I’m editing Raymond, a strange phenomenon occurs: I see Douglas through him.
All his secrets are mine
. When I edit Raymond, I have no more doubt.
    He was supposed to have arrived in town by now. He was supposed to be in this office.
    Hello, Sibyll? Why isn’t he here yet?
MARIANNE
    My head’s spinning. The colors in the bar I work in clash so hard it hurts. Every day I go from the school where I’m a student teacher to the bar where I’m a waitress. This morning I handed out plastic letters to the kids. Then I waited patiently until they managed to spell “CONSEQUENCE.” While waiting, I considered the best way of illustrating that word. “As a
consequence
of my marriage to an alcoholic writer, I have two totally unrelated jobs and a feeling of vertigo when I go from one to the other.” I didn’t tell them that—I would have been fired on the spot—but the sentence has stuck in my head and leads to other sentences. “For the moment, everything that Raymond writes remains of