Charlene moved a quarter turn away, deflecting C.J.’s verbal barrage, but was unable to ignore the pity in the eyes of the witnesses in the room.  When he drank, C.J. became a bully and a boor and, in those moments, sympathies always turned to Charlene who absorbed the barbs aimed most times and without cause at her.  He often wondered aloud to Charlene why people continued to invite him anywhere.  Host Brian Keen took C.J. by the arm and led him to the door.  “Come on, laureate, it’s time to get some air.” 
        C.J. went without a fight, but with a drunken sneer raised his whisky tumbler toward the rest of the party.  “Nobody edits me, goddamn it.”
    
Because Charles Jackson Emery had two best-selling novels to his name and collections of poems and short stories, villagers referred to him as “Laureate,” and when he wasn’t writing he often spent wasted hours at the village pub drinking alone, while bartender Barney Emmons took the brunt of Emery’s surliness and endured his outlandish stories of a past littered with the damaged lives of two ex-wives and five children who no longer acknowledged him.
        Keen led Emery onto an open porch that was glowing orange in a sunset slowly dying behind a stand of large oak trees.  He deposited C.J. on a lounge chair and left him to sleep it off.  Later, like all the other times when Charlene drove them home, C.J. drunkenly apologized, and like all the other times, she forgave him. She understood it was a temporary reprieve and that his regret would last only until the next gathering of friends and hangers-on.
    
He and Charlene lived in a small cottage clinging to a bluff that overlooked a rocky inlet on the coast of Maine.  The village claimed some sort of historic link to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a statue of the poet stood watch over the village square.  Emery wrote in his office most early mornings when the sun first sent spears of light through large French doors that opened out onto a small balcony overlooking a shaded patio.  The air was always thick with the scent of brine and each day before he started work, he opened the doors to let the smell of the ocean fill the space.
       
Charlene met C.J. at a writers’ conference on Cape Cod; he was leading a workshop on the art of fiction and Charlene was a student of literature at Boston College, working on her graduate thesis on the plays of Eugene O’Neill.  Emery offered to help her organize her paper, and they spent afternoons discussing O’Neill and the tragedy of his life, and how O’Neill’s creative output was kept alive with the help of his last wife, Carlotta Monterey.
        It was Carlotta who guided O’Neill’s weakening hands in the last months of his life. When O’Neill penned “Long Days Journey into Night,” his hands were so unsteady and painful that he wrote in a fashion barely decipherable.  He put down, in his illegible scrawl, page after excruciating page and turned his writing over to Carlotta, who would begin the equally excruciating task of transcribing his miniscule script by scouring the manuscript with a magnifying glass.  Together they finished what many considered O’Neill’s greatest achievement.
    
Charlene often wondered what it must have been like to share in the triumph of one of the world’s great playwrights.  She was never allowed to read Emery’s stories and he never shared his work with her or asked for her opinion.  However, he did send drafts of his pieces to a former mistress for critiquing.  Charlene watched from a distance as the creativity flowed.
        Emery’s latest effort would not match O’Neill’s, but the scope of his new novel was stretching him to the limits of his creativity.  It was a huge undertaking; a historical novel requiring more research than anything he had attempted before, and the rigors of it were taking a toll.  He was having trouble concentrating on the actual writing of it, was drinking more and had developed tremors.  He cursed his inability to write faster because his brain was outpacing his capacity to put it down, and he complained bitterly to Charlene, as if she might be the cause, but as usual, she just happened to be nearby.
    
One morning, Charlene found C.J. sitting on the stairway to his office, still in his pajamas.  He looked as though he had been up all night, and stared through Charlene without emotion, wringing his hands as if to wipe them clean.  “They don’t work anymore, Char.”
        “What don’t work?”
        Emery held up his hands.
        “Your hands don’t work?”
        Emery nodded.
        “Have you been working all night?”
        C.J. didn’t answer and continued to wring his hands.
        Charlene decided to go into Emery’s office, something she never did. The workspace was in shambles.  Papers and books were strewn about the room and half empty vodka bottles and coffee cups were overturned in the midst of the mess.  His computer keyboard was upside down on the floor and the computer was on.
        She picked up the keyboard and put it on his desk and sat in his chair.  On the computer screen was a page from the novel.  There were lines of text interrupted by gibberish, extraneous characters and typographical errors.  Competed pages that had been printed out were laying on the desk and they all contained babble.  Some lines had nothing but the letter, “Z.”  Others began with lucid sentences, but had deteriorated into nonsense.  It was evident that there was more to Emery’s problem than just tremors.
    
Charlene went back to C.J. and led him to their bedroom. She called the doctor.  After looking Emery over, the only answer the doctor could give was the one Charlene already understood: C.J. was an alcoholic and his drinking was short-circuiting his motor skills, so much so that he couldn’t scribble with a pencil or type.  His inability to write was “driving him to mental instability,” the doctor put it. Charlene understood it to mean that C.J. was going mad.
        “He wants to see you,” said the doctor.  “But I’ve given him something so he may not be that lucid.”
        Charlene returned to the bedroom and opened the door a crack to look in on C.J.
        “I need your help, Char.”
        The words hit Charlene like a load of bricks.  He had never asked for anything before, and certainly not for her help.
        “With your help, I can finish the book. I’m too close to quit now, but I can’t do it myself.”
 
     
    
(top)

        The great C.J. Emery was broken and needed Charlene to fix him. She was tempted to say no.
        “What do you need me to do?”
        “I’ll dictate, you type.”
        She didn’t like the sound of it. The arrangement had the resonance of servitude.  In order for Charlene to become his Carlotta, civility would have to be involved in the collaboration. What O’Neill and Carlotta shared did not exist in this house—too much hostility lived here.     
    
Charlene thought for a moment then paused at the door.  “That’s fine, but there will be rules.” 
        As Charlene left, C.J. called after her, “Rules?”
    
Over dinner that evening they laid down the guidelines for the working relationship. There weren’t many, mainly that the collaboration be civil, and that C.J. would curb his drinking.  He balked at that part, claiming that if he didn’t drink he could do the work himself.  He apparently failed to see the irony in that, but agreed.
    
The plan worked fairly well for the first couple of months.  Emery recorded his manuscript and Charlene, working in the evenings in a small alcove off the kitchen, wearing earphones, transcribed everything Emery sent. She would leave the completed pages outside his office and Emery would give her new pages and revisions at the end of his working day, which normally ended at one in the afternoon.  Over strong objections from Charlene and Emery’s promise that beer would be the only drink allowed, he would leave the house to visit the pub.
    
Being Emery’s Carlotta proved tenuous when politeness started to unravel and Emery began leaving scathing passages deriding Charlene’s transcriptions, accusing her of doctoring his writing.  Long tirades on the recordings began to preface all of his work, accusing her of doctoring his copy, changing the thrust of his intentions.  “God damn it, Charlene,” he would say.  “How many times do I have to say it: nobody edits me.”
        Then he would go into a long litany on his past achievements as though she had never heard them before.  It mattered little to C.J. that Charlene denied doctoring anything. She confessed only to cleaning up the numerous grammatical errors that dotted his manuscript, but hid from C.J. the fact that much of what he was recording made no sense.  In truth, she had been cleaning up broad stretches of his prose, arranging and rearranging wide swaths of copy.  Historical facts were corrected, slanders were erased, and rambling tirades were polished and masked.  In his deteriorating condition, it was evident that C.J. couldn’t tell the difference and was slipping slowly into insanity.
    
On Christmas Eve, light flurries of snow pelted the windows and C.J. had not returned from the village.  Charlene began transcribing and was greeted with the usual screed about tampering with Emery’s writing, but she was now numb to his tirades and her thoughts turned to Carlotta. What joy she must have felt sharing in the inspiration that came through the minute scribbling of the great O’Neill.  What must it have been like anticipating what the next page would hold?  As Charlene watched the snowfall, she recalled a passage in one of O’Neill’s plays that read, “There’s a lot to be said for autumn. That’s got beauty, too. And winter…if you’re together.”  Yes, thought Charlene, if you’re together.
    
Charlene was shocked out of her reverie when she realized that C.J. was dictating in rhyme and unstructured prose.  Inserted into a narrative on the growth of the industrial age was, “Time was when the chime of bluebells tolled their silent peals and mythic kings sealed their sacred deals.”  In another section, paraphrasing a speech by President Eisenhower was a children’s riddle that ended with, “Lah lee lo tee dum, lah lee lo tee dum.”  Charlene became mesmerized by the gibberish coming through the headphones and continued to type the nonsense.  Halfway through the recording, C.J. began to buzz like a bee and whistle. Then the recording became muted and the mutterings sounded as if he were away from the microphone and pacing his office.
        Charlene stopped transcribing and went upstairs to Emery’s office. The French doors were wide open and the flurries had blown snow and papers throughout the room.  On the desktop there was a sheaf of hand-scribbled hieroglyphics, and she sat at the desk and made a futile attempt at decoding the garbage.  Could it be a suicide note?  Apparently, C.J. had climbed over the balcony in an attempt to escape the agony of his dilemma.
    
C.J. had stayed away before, but Charlene was concerned because it was Christmas Eve.  She stayed up late, sifting through the insane prattle and waiting for Emery’s return. She read over her notes on his final recording and scoured the cryptic symbols again, searching for any clues that would give a hint of where he might have gone, physically and mentally.  She finally went to bed at 2:00 a.m.
    
Early on Christmas morning, the bartender at “The Tankard” called Charlene and asked her to come to the village and retrieve C.J.  When she arrived at the square, a crowd was forming at the based of Longfellow’s statue. She assumed it was a holiday gathering of some sort; but no.  At nine in the morning on Christmas Day, Charlene and fifty villagers watched as C.J. Emery, poet, published novelist and tortured soul completed his descent into private anguish.  C.J.’s madness crested in a naked display at the foot of Longfellow’s statue, where he sat nude with his legs crossed Indian-style, disconsolate and weeping, while the village park brass ensemble played “Silent Night.” 
    
    
                    About the Author
     
        J. D. Blair, writing from the San Francisco Bay area, developed a career in journalism, and television production as a writer/producer that spanned thirty years.  Since 2000, J.D.’s focus has been writing one-act plays, short fiction, essays and poetry.  Blair has been successful in placing the stories and poetry in various literary magazines, including Pearl, Writers Journal, Fog City Review and Carve, among others. 
        In May 2009, J.D.’s one-act play, “Vincent” was produced by the Ross Valley Players of Marin County, California.  A poem, “One More Day,” has been accepted for publication in California Quarterly.