Two Georges & Sylvia Plath

George had wallpapered the area by his desk with rejection notes. He had read somewhere that Sylvia Plath had done the same, and she seemed as good a role model as any.

He reveled in the idea that even if he never “made it” as a writer, even if no one ever “got” the Plath reference when they walked inside his dark studio on 125th and Lenox and commented on his morbid obsession with loss — he got it, he understood.

George nursed that belief held by many writers just starting out that to be misunderstood was the first step toward “breaking out” — of what he’d never truly considered. For this vague reason, after graduating from a well-respected university near Boston (George had long-distanced himself from the family Ivy League) and spending one unmentionable summer sunbathing in the Hamptons, George drove to his grandfather’s estate in Sag Harbor and told the ruddy-faced gentleman under the bowler hat that under no uncertain terms he wanted to be cut out of the family’s inheritance. George never returned to the estate, but the butler told him to leave the Mercedes in the driveway, so on the hot walk back to the beach, he convinced himself that the butler had surely passed along his message.

At one time George had been close to his grandfather. George Sr., had even raised his namesake for a time at the estate, back when his mother was too preoccupied with the bottle, his father (George Jr.) too preoccupied with work and neither too interested in the son they’d had back when they were in love and those other things hadn’t seemed so important.

His had been a childhood of boarding school and horseback riding — a lonely existence, to be sure, but met with unsympathetic eye-rolls whenever it was talked of.

He shook his head at the predictability of his parents’ problems. Too much work and too much vodka. No one ever “made it” by surviving so little. Perhaps in another age these would have been meritable marks against his family, but now, he reflected with latent discontent, they were too worked over, the stuff of cliché.

There had also been those occasional late night yelling matches when he heard his mother choking in a room below, liquor bottles flying, the purpling fingerprints of his father still tight around her neck in the morning. But some stories are too painful to tell.

George was mulling over what he considered the perfect childhood for a writer — one sitting decidedly between his own cushy memory-majority and those he tried never to think about, when the phone rang.

Or, rather, the landline rang. He’d once spent several frustrating hours trying to disconnect it when he first moved in — the attempts leaving him screaming into the humming of elevator music. Like most things he attempted without immediate success, he soon gave up.

“Hulo,” he said, and then, when no one answered. “Hellooo?”

The ehhh-hmm of a clearing throat and then: “Yes, am I speaking with George Three?”

George cringed at the familiar name. “Mmmm,” he said undecidedly.

“Good morning sir, I’m calling on behalf of your grandfather-- .”

“I don’t have anything to say to him.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said the man George guessed was the butler. “Your grandfather is dead. I’m calling on behalf of his estate.”

Of all the emotions coursing through George in those first moments after hearing of his grandfather’s death, none could be greater than regret — regret that he’d left his fate to a butler who--

“I did not, you see, repeat those choice words to your grandfather all those summers ago,” the butler said with, could it be called pride? “You are now the sole inheritor of his estate.”

First, George cursed himself for worrying over the writerly imperfections of his childhood when his adulthood was now fated to be so much worse by comparison. Then, he cursed himself for thinking how nice it would be to move into a larger apartment, one so new it wouldn’t have a landline.

“Fuck,” George said — this third curse directed to his grandfather’s butler. (For all George’s aversions to wealth and status, he still had never bothered to learn the man’s name.)

“Not quite the thanks I expected,” the butler said. “But if wealth is what you’re worried about, I can assure you there is very little.”

George Sr. had been in the cigarette business, and it seemed, what he had not lost to lawsuits he had lost at the poker table trying to win it back.

“How much does it come to?” George asked, finally.

“When all his debts and damages are paid and the estate sold off, I’d guess some $20,000.”

Finally, something was going right in George’s life — $20,000 was something for sure, but it wasn’t life-changing. No one could blame him for an inheritance of such insignificant worth.

“Good, good,” George said, his mind carrying the one for those little luxuries he’d coveted over his last nine years of chosen poverty.

He agreed to go to Sag Harbor the following Saturday to review the accounts.

“And sir, your convertible is still in the garage.”

George was, begrudgingly, glad to hear it: parking in New York would chew up whatever remained of the $20,000, and he’d soon be back to square one remaking himself. “How did he die anyway?”

“Stuck his head in the oven,” replied the butler. “He said you’d understand.”

Books were the one subject on which the Georges always seemed to agree. The younger had spent much of his youth holed up in his grandfather’s library, which smelled sweetly of aging leather books and the Marlboros his grandfather smoked every day for some 70 years at least.

Each summer, when his grandson returned from boarding school, George Sr. would rearrange the library with little George’s favorite books on the lower shelves, and when he was still small enough to fit, George Three would pile the books into a fort around the bottom shelf, climbing inside with an old favorite and a flashlight.

Sometimes, after a good day on the stock market, his grandfather would push past the array of books toward his desk and pour himself a whisky, no ice. “How ‘bout a few pages, Three?” he’d ask, calling his grandson by his numeral. (“Three is fine,” he was fond of saying. “But nothing to Número Uno,” and he’d jab thumb to chest.)

George Sr. always read aloud from his own favorite Hemingway. And in this way George learned of the particular allures of women and bullfighting and being a man.

Perhaps in another life, his grandfather waxed one day, he would have been a great writer himself — the greatness was, of course, given. For men like George, Sr., greatness is expected, and in turn, endowed. He had never done anything (that he spoke of) badly.

But, of course, he could not be a writer. “I’ve been too busy living,” he’d say. Even Hemingway, a man who wrote so much of living, must have stopped a while to write it all down, his grandfather mused. “And just look at his later works: The Old Man and the Sea, huh! A book about an old man who, what, goes fishing?” No, he continued, he wouldn’t slow down — ever. “I’ll stop when I’m dead.”

Unlike most men with great libraries, George, Sr. had read every book he owned — many twice, and he never stopped expanding (even when his luck ran out at Poker), buying up little-known authors, many translated from parts of the world to which his oxygen tank no longer allowed him to travel.

For George, Sr. life had not concluded as he’d hoped. He had seen from great heights and now his body was failing him, and so were his investments. If he had been a more introspective man, he might have considered where he’d erred and tried to right a few wrongs before the very end. But that was not the way of George, Sr., and if anything could be said of him it was that he held constant — at least by his own calculations.

In the days leading to his return, the younger George would piece together the facts of his grandfather’s suicide. It seemed that after many years of shaking his head at “the whole cancer thing,” George, Sr. had himself been diagnosed with lung cancer.

“I’ve been telling you to cut down, sir,” the butler had said at the time.

George Sr. just offered him a cigarette.

“This isn’t how I go, Syd,” he said. “That’s not what I want people reading in my obit: ‘Cigarette Tycoon Dies of Lung Cancer.’” (And in this way, through his grandfather’s recounted dialogue, George finally learned the butler’s name.)

With little life left, George Sr. had finally taken up a pen and tried a few lines — concerning himself. They were, of course, great. Like most who have lived fully, he found on reflection he possessed quite a few stories he’d never had time to share and wondered with the lightest twinge of regret why he had not started writing sooner. He titled the resulting work: “For The Times, Upon My Death” and left it on his desk, amongst some other papers to be sorted at that given date.

And there George found the ramblings, which while certainly not very great, had that touch to them, he thought with the writer’s critical eye, that could have very nearly been something.

“There is another matter, sir,” Syd said from the door, holding a cardboard box.

Seated at his grandfather’s desk, George stared emptily into the bookcase of his youth. How many hours he had spent there!

Syd could have sworn he caught the young man in a smile — but it disappeared as he turned to the butler. “Yes, what?”

“You’ll need to sell off most of the books to settle the debts,” the butler said. “Your grandfather planned for this, of course, but he still wanted you to have a few favorites.”

George crossed the room and took the box from Syd. He picked through his grandfather’s Hemingways: The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon, A Farewell to Arms, Green Hills of Africa — and, George paused at this one, The Old Man and the Sea.

Of course he would have gifted him his favorites, George thought, and, again, Syd noted a possible smile.

“As I understand it, he has a few keepsakes that belonged to the author as well,” Syd noted. “Toward the bottom.”

George dug further.

“Some old manuscripts he bought at an auction a few years back,” Syd continued. “And an empty notebook Hemingway never used.”

George pulled out the small black notebook and flipped it open. “There’s writing inside.”

“Yes, well, I didn’t say your grandfather didn’t use it,” Syd said. “He told me he’d left you a message, before, you know-- ”

“Before he stuck his head in the oven.”

“Right,” Syd said. “So I’ll just leave you to it, then,” and he turned to go.

George sat at his grandfather’s desk: a message from beyond the embers. His grandfather, not much practiced in the art form he had spent a lifetime foregoing, had written only a few short lines, dated from his death.

Three,

Since you’ll be reading this after I’m gone, the words “I was wrong” will have none of the usual sting of embarrassment that usually accompanies them. I won’t apologize — it’s too late for you to forgive me anyhow — but perhaps you’ll do the whole charade a little better than me. In the end, perhaps I should have spent more time fishing.

—Número Uno

George turned from the desk and looked out the window toward the beach — blue water under blue sky.

“Syd!” George called.

“Yes, sir?”

“Get the fishing rods!”

And this time, Syd was certain, George was smiling.