I stood to walk to him. “Even if that were true, which I doubt it is, your body of work is so profound already.”
“That isn’t the point and you know it. If I have nothing left, what is there of me for God to work through? There must always be more until there isn’t.”
“Let’s brainstorm. Let’s throw out the ideas you love the most. I know you’re not dry.” I settled back into my own chair. “Is there anything you’ve started and put away?”
“Of course there is, but I put it away because it didn’t work.”
“Sometimes things need time to grow in the soil of the imagination, to percolate in the unconscious, to unfold without our dirty hands all over them.”
He smiled at me. “Yes.” Then he walked to the side table where he kept the liquor on the bottom shelf. He chose a decanter of whiskey and poured two glasses and motioned for me to sit opposite him at the game table.
Did he notice my new haircut or new pearl earrings or the way I did my very best to make him see me as a woman? No. Instead he stared at me with an intensity that told me he wanted only to solve his dry spell, and I was the possible source of water.
I sat across from him. “Is there anything you’ve abandoned that you might want to pick up again?”
“One of my very first short stories rests unfinished. ‘Light,’ I had called it.”
“Well then, what of that?”
“I don’t believe I have the heart for it as of yet.”
“Then let’s go here—what fascinated you the most as a child?” I asked, already knowing the answer and wanting to guide him to deep water.
March winds howled outside. A storm was on its way, but neither of us mentioned it.
“Myth,” he answered. “I could write another allegory like Screwtape or Pilgrim. Or another children’s book, but those seem to have run their course.”
“And what myth do you think of the most when you think of myth at all?” I asked.
“Cupid and Psyche,” he said without hesitation.
“Well then . . .”
“I’ve already tried that.” He sat in a posture of defeat, lit a cigarette as if the conversation were over.
“You give up that easily, my lad?”
He didn’t laugh, but a smile eased slowly from the corner of his lips. “I wrote a play about this myth, also tried prose, a ballade, couplets. I’ve approached it from every angle, but still I think of it often.” He poured another whiskey in his glass, sipped it. “I’ve even dreamt of the sisters.”
Cupid and Psyche: it was a myth about the most beautiful of three sisters, Psyche, who was sacrificed to the gods, her older sisters complicit, only to be rescued by the winds and then discovered by Cupid—a love story at its finest. But when Psyche disobeyed Cupid and looked directly at him in the night, she was cast out to the forest, and then sent by Venus to fulfill impossible tasks. When Psyche finished the tasks with the help of the river god and magic ants, she was reunited with her true love. I knew the myth well—it was one of my childhood favorites, complicated and chock-full of envious gods, jealousy, true love, and mystical rivers.
“I first read of the sisters in Metamorphoses,” I said. “I was as jealous of the beautiful Psyche as if I were the older sister in the story. I felt as if I’d sent Psyche into the woods to be sacrificed. But I couldn’t have; I never would have stolen her happiness on purpose as her sisters did.”
“Not even to save her?” he asked. “Maybe her sisters took away her happiness because they believed they were saving her.”
“There, Jack. You’ve got it.” I popped my hand onto the tabletop. “Write about that.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled a long plume of smoke. “The sisters weren’t taking away her happiness but trying to confirm reality.”
“Yes, saving her, not destroying her. That’s it. Your story is hidden in there.”
“In this version . . .” He stared past me to whatever Muse spoke to him. “In my version, Psyche is motherless, so her older sister is raising her.”
“The beautiful older sister who isn’t quite as beautiful but—”
“No,” he bellowed in a friendly way and stood with his whiskey to look down to me. “This time she’s ugly. She’s the opposite of Psyche. And she loves Psyche with such obsession that—” He slammed his hand on the table with glee. “Yes.”
“More . . .”