“It’s shrimp,” he said. “You no doubt couldn’t tell because the shells have been removed. I was also fooled the first time. I’ll order something else for you.”
“Really, I’m not hungry.”
“I insist. You’re young; you have to eat.” He ordered something else. But he spoke so rapidly to the waiter that I again didn’t make out what it was. “No meat in it of any kind,” he said to me, “so you’re safe. Now, let’s talk about your work while we have one more drink. Or I’ll have; you two can stay here for as long as you want and drink on me. The waiter will put it on my tab.”
He went on and on about my work. What he liked, what he didn’t think particularly worked but could easily be repaired, because it was too good to toss out; what he thought was original. He’d obviously read both my books, or a lot of each of them.
“May I now say what I think about your fiction?” I said. “Especially, the short prose. What I have to say is all good, believe me. And I’m not saying that because of the kind things you said about my stuff.”
“Stuff. Oh, I love that. No, my friend, I have to go, and please don’t save it for another time. I mean, we might meet again—I’ve enjoyed our brief conversation—but I get extremely uncomfortable when someone even alludes to my work in front of me, no matter how high the praise. No, I correct myself. Higher the praise, worse I feel. So.” He drank up, shook our hands, patted my shoulder and left through the street door.
“He lives upstairs, as you know,” my friend said, “and could have got to his building’s lobby through that door there. But he likes leaving the bar and entering his building from the street, don’t ask me why.”
“Maybe he went for a walk or had an errand to do.”
“That could be true too, though I know he wasn’t planning to. He told me on the phone that after he leaves us he was going to take a half-hour nap, which he does daily at precisely this time.”
We didn’t take Cochran up on his offer for us to run up his tab. We drained our glasses, left, and I went back to my hotel and immediately sat at my tiny work table and started to write about my meeting with him. But the account was so much about me—what the great writer thought of the much younger writer’s work and how it made the younger writer feel—giddy; ecstatic—that it seemed so silly and self-aggrandizing a piece that I tore it up. Maybe one day I’ll write about it, I thought, although so many other writers, young and old, have written about their first and usually only meeting with him, that I doubt I could have anything new to say. Anyway, I met him. I liked him. He was the way I felt a very successful serious writer should be. Warm, personable, courteous, modest, affable, and it was generous of him to want to talk only about my work. It didn’t take me long to realize he did that so he wouldn’t have to talk about his own work. I don’t like talking about mine either, or haven’t since that meeting.
Cochran checked himself into a small simple nursing home in the city a year later. He told friends that after sixty years of writing without let-up he was finished with it for good. He refused to see any visitors at this home but his niece, lawyer and long-time publisher, and the word was that he didn’t think he’d ever leave there or else didn’t think he’d want to.
A few months after that I got a letter from his lawyer saying that Cochran had given me his one-room writing studio in a building a short walk from his apartment. He owned the studio outright, as he did his apartment, and the maintenance fees for it were paid up for the next five years. The only things I’d have to take care of were gas and electricity. “All Mr. Cochran asks of you,” the letter said, “is that you not try to thank him by letter or telephone or visiting the nursing home.”
I called my friend, who already knew about my getting the studio, and said “Why would he give me it? You know better than anyone that I had no connection to him but a half-hour’s talk.”
“Beats me,” he said. “I saw him a couple of times since that day and he never mentioned you once, not even ‘How’s your friend?’ I don’t know if you know—it’s in the recent J.T. Christophe bio of him—but it was the only place he wrote in other than his cottage in the country, and that he gave to the village it was in to be used as a public library, along with enough money to convert it. As for the studio, no one, for more than forty years, has been in there except Cochran, the housekeeper who came every other week to tidy it up, and the occasional plumber and electrician if something went awry. Not even his wife was allowed in it. Maybe he liked your work even more than he said that day and thought giving you the studio he’ll never use again and with everything paid up, will be an incentive for you to continue to write. And his wife died a couple of years ago, as you probably know—not by her own hand, as your wife did, and nowhere near as young as yours, though just as ill—so maybe there’s something in that too.”
“I’d rather not talk about that,” I said. “By the way, you ever write about him? I never saw anything and you never spoke about it.”
“No, never, and not just because he wouldn’t have wanted me to. He scorned writers who wrote memoirs, especially those who included him in theirs or published their personal encounters with him. He never read these accounts and cut off anyone who wrote about him. You?”
“For that one meeting? Nah. I kept it all in my head. Let me just ask you, though. What did you talk about with him those last times?”
“A variety of things. Sports, visual art, modern Italian poetry. Homer, Rabelais, Heine, Musil. The street he lives on. What he saw from his windows. The pigeons he fed on his window sill. Good scotch. How in his next life he was going to become a serious bird watcher and maybe even a park ranger or fire tower warden. A dog he had as a boy. And when he was in his cups, a lot about his sister, who also died young and whom it was obvious he adored. Did the lawyer say how you can get into the studio?”
“The concierge of the building it’s in.”
I got the keys from the concierge. It was an ordinary looking walk-up. The studio was on the third floor and I unlocked the door. It was a small room, about twelve by fourteen feet, with an alcove a little more than half that, which had a toilet but no door to it. The only furniture was a school desk that was just to the left of the only window, a wall lamp facing the desk, a kitchen chair and a bookcase put together out of bricks and three wood boards, with about fifteen books in it. One was by my friend, his first, probably inscribed. Another was a Spanish translation of one of Cochran’s. Rabelais’s two big books in one volume in French and a few other books in French by writers I never heard of except for Gide. I looked to see if it was inscribed, for it’d be worth a lot of money, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t anything on the walls but that one lamp. A typewriter was on the desk with no cover on it. I turned on the wall lamp and sat at the desk. The chair was uncomfortable. I’d have to get a cushion for it, I thought. The lamp didn’t provide much light. I’d need a higher-wattage bulb for it and maybe even a new floor lamp. The typewriter was an old portable, the same Italian-made model my mother gave me when I graduated college and which I wrote on for five years till it seemed my fingers got too fat for the keys and I bought the Swiss-made standard model I still use today.
There was about half a ream of paper on the shelf under the top of the desk, the place a schoolboy would put his books and loose-leaf binder. I took some paper out, put it on the desk, which now left little room there for anything else, put two sheets into the typewriter and typed “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid or something.” The typewriter didn’t have good keyboard action. It needed a cleaning, maybe a complete overhaul. The print was English. Anyway, I didn’t feel like typing now.
I
