Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,63
on her sculpture.
She paused before the almost finished marble, hammer and chisel at ready, her mind utterly devoid of inspiration. She was working on a bust of a young woman—the proverbial artist’s self-portrait. Martine squared her shoulders and set chisel to the base of the marble throat.
As the hammer struck, the marble cracked through to the base.
Afterword
Not much need be said, actually. Every writer—every creative person—lives in dread of those nagging and inane interruptions that break the creative flow. A sentence perfectly crystallized, shattered by a stupid phone call, never regained. A morning filled with inspiration and energy, clogged by an uninvited guest, the day lost. The imaginative is the choice prey of the banal, and uncounted works of excellence have died stillborn thanks to junk phone calls and visits from bored associates.
After all, a writer doesn’t have a real job. Feel free to crash in at anytime. Probably wants some company.
Nothing in this story is in any way a reflection upon this one writer’s various friends, nor does it in any way resemble any given actual person or composite of any persons known to the author. It is entirely a fictitious work and purely the product of the author’s imagination.
It has taken me five days to scribble out this afterword.
There’s the door...
Did They Get You to Trade?
Ryan Chase was walking along Southampton Row at lunchtime, fancying a pint of bitter. Fortunately there was no dearth of pubs here, and he turned into Cosmo Place, a narrow passage behind the Bloomsbury Park Hotel and the Church of St George the Martyr, leading into Queen Square. The September day was unseasonably sunny, so he passed by Peter’s Bar, downstairs at the corner—looking for an outdoor table at The Swan or The Queen’s Larder. The Swan was filling up, so he walked a few doors farther to The Queen’s Larder, at the corner of Queen Square. There he found his pint of bitter, and he moved back outside to take a seat at one of the wooden tables on the pavement.
Ryan Chase was American by birth, citizen of the world by choice. More to the point, he spent probably half of each year knocking about the more or less civilized parts of the globe—he liked hotels and saw no romance in roughing it—and a month or two of this time he spent in London, where he had various friends and the use of a studio. The remainder of his year was devoted to long hours of work in his Connecticut studio, where he painted strange and compelling portraits, often derived from his travels and created from memory. These fetched rather large and compelling prices from fashionable galleries—enough to support his travels and eccentricities, even without the trust allowance from a father who had wanted him to go into corporate law.
Chase was pleased with most of his work, although in all of it he saw a flawed compromise between the best he could create at the time and the final realization of his vision, which he hoped someday to achieve. He saw himself as a true decadent, trapped in the fin de siècle of a century far drearier than the last. But then, to be decadent is to be romantic.
Chase also had a pragmatic streak. Today a pint of bitter in Bloomsbury would have to make do for a glass of absinthe in Paris of La Belle Epoch. The bitter was very good, the day was excellent, and Chase dug out a few postcards from his jacket pocket. By the end of his second pint, he had scribbled notes and addresses on them all and was thinking about a third pint and perhaps a ploughman’s lunch.
He smelled the sweet stench of methylated spirit as it approached him, and then the sour smell of unwashed poverty. Already Chase was reaching for a coin.
“Please, guv. I don’t wish to interrupt you in your writing, but please could you see your way toward sparing a few coins for a poor man who needs a meal?”
Ryan Chase didn’t look like a tourist, but neither did he look British. He was forty-something, some where around six feet, saddened that he was starting to spread at the middle, and proud that there was no grey in his short black beard and no thinning in his pulled-back hair and short ponytail. His black leather jacket with countless studs and zips was from Kensington Market, his baggy slacks from Bloomingdale’s, his T-shirt from Rodeo Drive, and his tennis shoes from a