by Inez Baranay
Ada found the name in the phone book. She chose the closest agent with a big print and slogan phone-book entry. ‘Sophie Stein. Stranger Stuff.’ Instead of dialling Ada unfolded her map for the address. She walked, she rang the doorbell, she knocked, she opened the door, she entered, arriving at the outer room, with the large desk in the centre of the room empty but for a phone, the filing cabinets to one side, the opposite wall all bookshelves crammed with volumes, books piled atop the vertical rows. ‘Come in, in here,’ called Sophie from her inner room. In subsequent years visitors would be confronted with an intercom at the street door. Even back then you were meant to have an appointment, and Sophie was expecting someone and was saying, ‘In here, you’re late, that is not a good beginning.’
Ada said, ‘I need an agent.’
Sophie looked her up and down from behind her desk, adjusting to the alteration of the situation.
Whoever had applied for the assistant job never did show up.
Sophie found someone after a while.
Sophie sat in an office lined with more bookshelves stuffed with books, books two deep and in piles on the upright books, books on the couch, a large ginger cat still and watchful atop some books on a low table.
Dark-haired, black-eyed Sophie wore clothes in a mix of patterns in colours of minerals and semi-precious jewels. She favoured clothes with much texture: layered knits each differently colourful, differently patterned, a long felt jacket appliquéd with felt flowers. She wore ornate silver rings in her ears and loaded her fingers with big irregular stones. She was heavily built as if she needed a large body to contain her formidable energy and certainty. Although not very much older than Ada, Sophie seemed to carry, or embody, decades of hard-won knowledge of the world. Sophie seemed to have things figured out, and she was possessed of another quality as well: she was ready to figure out new situations that didn’t resemble any from the past.
Ada will always think of Sophie sitting in her offices crammed with books, posters, manuscripts. Sophie’s dark eyes were always ringed with kohl. Sometimes she wore a turban low on her forehead, her frizzy dark hair peeking out at the sides. She looked as if she might set up a stool on a street corner near here and read your Tarot cards or see what her crystal ball showed. One day Ada will buy Sophie a crystal ball.
Ada explained herself as best she could, holding out her copy of Turn Left At Venus with its lurid misleading cover art.
‘Dagon,’ said Sophie, ‘of course you never heard any more from them, they’ve gone, Dagon, swallowed up. One mystical beast swallowed another. You can get your rights back for a start.’
Already Ada had learned something: she had rights. A writer had rights.
‘Dagon,’ said Sophie, ‘picked up some interesting things for a while, but once Jimbo was gone there wasn’t anyone to save it.’
Ada learned that the actual human persons who worked at a publishing house mattered.
Later Ada learned that she could have no better agent than Sophie, but she already felt she was where she should be. At the time this seemed simply matter-of-fact. It was a time when everything worked out.
‘Go back outside,’ said Sophie, ‘turn left, left at the corner, go to Penelope’s. Sit down, have yourself a coffee. When you finish, tell them you’re picking up my coffee, so it’s hot when you get back.’
When Ada returned with the steaming paper cup Sophie had read her book, or enough of it.
And Sophie knew someone who could go for this. Sophie doesn’t say maybe or hopefully. Or say it in any kind of fakeyexcited way.
Sophie knew a commissioning editor who wanted to publish as many women as she could. This editor would say that soon enough everyone will be wanting to do this, make a feature of publishing women. Sophie thought that was possible but not a sure thing. Anyway for now the editor worked for a house that published a science-fiction imprint.
‘Some people will say this is not Science Fiction,’ said Sophie; ‘we only hope they make a noise.’
‘But,’ said Sophie, ‘before we go ahead. What else have you got? What have you been doing since this?’
Ada had written some small part of her way into a novel about a woman who simultaneously lives on different planets or at different times in history or in history that had turned out differently. She didn’t know what to call it, or the kind of book it would be if she ever managed to really actually write it, to really know just how to write it. It would be quite a few years until she did.
So she hadn’t been looking for a publisher for that.
Nor for other things she had written since Turn Left At Venus was first published. Short stories: a spacewoman’s adventures in outer space.
Yes, Ada had kept on writing. Sometimes life stopped her for a while, but life always made her go back to it, vowing never to be away again for so long.
‘A short-story collection,’ said Sophie, ‘comes later. And you’re not ready to write that other one.’
A wave of dismal apprehension swept through Ada making space for a new possibility.
‘What do you want?’ Sophie asked.
Ada thought she’d told her. ‘I need an agent.’
‘For this?’
‘For everything.’ Meaning all the books she will write.
‘So what you want,’ said Sophie, ‘is to make a living writing your type of stories.’
So she did. ‘Yes.’
‘How fast can you write?’
‘As fast as I let myself.’
‘I want you to do a sequel. You write a sequel to this, to Turn Left At Venus. Good title. The sequel is your next book.
Don’t say anything yet – you have to think about why this is such a great idea.’
Not at once but Ada admitted she had an idea for a sequel.
‘I know,’ said Sophie, who spoke in a kind of loud growl, incapable of sounding anything but assured, definite, knowledgeable, ‘it’s when more people from Earth, whatcha call it, come to this planet, they want what’s there for themselves. You’ve set it up. Write it fast.’
Suddenly Ada’s whole being felt light and assured, and she realised she was smiling.
‘We can do better than Dagon,’ said Sophie, ‘they never really knew what they were doing … I’m surprised they published your book but some things are meant to be, it brought you here.’
‘Then,’ said Sophie, ‘we talk about marketing. Have you ever been interviewed?’
Now here it is, the test; Ada testing Sophie, Sophie testing Ada.
And Ada had had all this time and she was very sure about this.
Sophie was not going to agree at once. ‘That’s what you think you want now.’
Ada said, ‘I’m not going to change my mind.’
‘People change their minds all the time.’
‘Not really.’
‘About what they want.’
‘I will always want this. I promise.’
‘Readers want to know about the author. Don’t you want to know about authors you like?’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Ada.
‘I need to be very sure that you are very sure,’ Sophie told Ada, making her respond to her thought experiments: ways in which revealing her identity or letting it be found out would sooner or later appeal to her, maybe sooner than she could imagine. Or, even a long time from now. So, please. Ada had to imagine all possible temptations and changes of circumstance. There’ll be temptations, there’ll be changes of circumstance.
Ada calmly insisted that she won’t change her mind.
‘No agent would agree to this,’ proposed Sophie.
Ada only looked at her with calm trustfulness.
Sophie gave a deep sigh. Then a look of amusement. ‘Let’s try it then.’
Ada understood that Sophie found her amusing, interesting, that Ada was a kind of project for Sophie, that although Sophie was not nearly old enough to be her mother Sophie had a kind of maternal or aunt-like – tantacious, materteral – interest in Ada.
Ada thought there was a chance that Leyla was still at the same address in Los Angeles. She sent a postcard of the Bridge, and on the back wrote her own current address, and, ‘Came for a look, stayed to see more. I’ll be here for a while, still typing.’
‘You know,’ said Sophie, ‘writers often think they want the fame, the attention, but it disappoints them.’ Fame can ruin a writer, she told Ada.
Can there be famous books without a famous writer? We’re going to wonder this in different ways over the years.
Ada wanted her book to find all its potential readers; if that was fame it was the fame she wanted for her book. For herself, there was nothing to want. What she needed came to her.
‘There’s a film I want you to see,’ said Sophie.
It was as astonishing as anything Ada had ever seen, and nothing like anything she had seen, a stark black-and-white horror comedy filmed with grave, grotesque beauty, about the crazed men who ran the world of power and war and caused the nuclear bombs to go off and end the world just because they were too self-regarding, stupid and insane to stop it.
‘He wants to do something different next,’ Sophie told Ada, referring to the filmmaker, ‘and there’s no stopping him. He wants to do a film about Napoleon eventually. He is the young Napoleon.’ Sophie had met with SK, who was looking at some other property she managed, and Sophie told SK the story of the writer from Australia, a not-so-very-young woman who had taken herself over to San Francisco to make a new life.
Sophie gave SK the copy of Turn Left At Venus that Ada had just given her. Meanwhile, Sophie did the things she did, spoke to people, made deals. Once it got out that SK was interested there would be little trouble getting a publisher, one of the better ones doing this kind of thing.
20
YOU KNOW HOW TO WORRY
‘It’s dark, it’s disturbing,’ Ada told him.
‘You like that,’ said SK.
‘Happy endings are an insult to the intelligence.’
‘You’re one twisted sister.’
‘It’s all the more disturbing because it’s funny,’ Ada told him.
‘Funny should be disturbing.’
Ada tried to say something she had been thinking about films; she had seen a few in Sydney. And now here, also, of course.
About how images from films become our own memories, our own dreams, and we come to believe they were made by our own minds. It works differently with books, in which we create our own images to a large extent. There must be an effect of others watching with you at the cinema while with books it’s only you there.
As if he hadn’t heard all this before, but she discovered these ideas with him.
SK liked to meet in the lobby of his hotel. An area beyond the reception desk held a few chintzy couches and small tables, and they would bring him tea in a big silver pot. ‘This hotel is the only place in the whole of the United States where they know how to make a pot of tea,’ he said. SK had taken up drinking tea in England. He was going to move permanently to England soon. He and his wife loved the countryside there, so green and pleasant, and he knew they would find the perfect place to live. ‘Away from the fakery and fraudulence and bullshit of Hollywood,’ SK declared.
SK liked meeting writers and talking over ideas, a practice that seemed fine to Ada, who expected that life was now always going to be like this. Conversations in hotel lobbies with people who think and make. At this point Ada thought life’s disappointments were behind her.
‘Excuse me, aren’t you …’ The group of five people had entered the hotel, with an idea they could find him there. They knew who he was, and four of them adulated him.
SK was a little pleased and more displeased. ‘I’m in a meeting right now,’ he said, but they didn’t quite believe him, thought he might be waiting for someone.
‘You are my inspiration,’ said a long-haired young man. ‘I’ve always wanted to make a film about Napoleon.’
‘You should definitely make a satirical thriller next.’
‘If you ever want anyone to work for you, I just want to learn.’
‘You can become invisible!’ SK said to Ada when they had gone. ‘They thought I was talking to myself.’
He wanted to know everything, see everyone: inner being, outer being, halo, mask, Shadow, all of it. He wanted to know everything, he read all night, he never slept. But he did not like to be seen and would avoid meetings in public. Plus, people in the business, you don’t wanna know, you’re better off writing novels. Stay independent. So he was doing his work up here in San Francisco rather than in LA. But good to be actually invisible.
‘Can you teach me?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Ada didn’t want to even try to analyse it. She didn’t know how she did it, it was a kind of feeling-state she could summon, not a thing you could teach anyone.
‘Don’t be a schmuck. Do you know what a schmuck is? I thought you did,’ he noted, pleased, something confirmed for him.
‘I’m not being a schmuck, I just wouldn’t know how.’
He sighed, or performed a resigned sigh. ‘It’s like that with some of you. Going with the instinct and never analysing it.’
SK said, ‘Magic is older than religion. Religion is a way of explaining, or controlling, magic.’
Ada said, ‘That’s what Frazer says in The Golden Bough.’
That look he gave her, out of his black eyes. ‘How do you know?’
‘I read it.’
‘Why?’
‘To understand some things I saw.’ Ada told him a bit about her trip to Bali.
‘You didn’t go to college,’ SK confirmed. He approved. ‘We’re better off self-educated,’ he said; ‘for an artist there is no other way.’
Also he said you had to live like a monk. Ada understood what he meant; it wasn’t about religion; he meant everything had to be for the work.
Ada thought she would also live like a monk. She would live like a monk in her own way.
‘You’re someone who knows how to worry,’ he told Ada. As if this were a good thing, something necessary even if not something that was supposed to make you happy. SK did not look for things to make him happy.
Did this mean there was good without happy? Was he the only one who thought that?
In following years Ada would learn of his estate in England, a fortress where he lived and worked, with his own studio, his own editing rooms.
‘What are you going to write next?’ SK asked her.
‘The sequel to Turn Left At Venus.’
‘Turn Right At Mars? Sorry. What will you call it?’
‘I don’t know yet.’ Ada paused. ‘I might call it Disappointment.’
‘Ha. Good title. But not good enough.’
‘Doctor Jones, maybe.’
‘What else you got? You got a file of ideas, drafts? Tell you what I want, I’m looking for the right story about aliens. Not your ones, with their good tolerant lives, staying put over on their own planet. I want a story about aliens who come to Earth.’ Their motivation would be more interesting, SK thought. Restless, questing Earth people – not so interesting. Aliens, though, what do they want with us?
Ada and SK began talking about the different kinds of outer-space stories, the different kinds of aliens. How aliens might not be scary, might not be impelled to conquer. They might have other purposes, maybe benign, or at least well meaning.
‘If the aliens get in touch with us, they have superior technology. Does that make them superior in every other way?’ SK asked her.
‘If they had something to teach us, what would it be?’ Ada asked him back.
Ada said, ‘I’ve been thinking about the aliens. They are from an advanced civilisation. They come to Earth to save the Earth from humankind. They make it impossible to commit acts of violence. They impose peace.’
SK said, ‘So that humans can evolve to something higher.’
Ada said, ‘Yes, that’s why.’
‘But of course there is a resi
stance.’
‘Yes,’ said Ada. ‘And people want to go to where the aliens came from.’
‘Humans welcome the aliens if they think they’ll get something. Heard of cargo cults?’
‘The aliens want to save the planet from humans.’
SK gave it a beat. ‘You know you have a twisted mind.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What will you call it?’
Ada had an idea. ‘Second Childhood.’
SK nodded. ‘Get it to me. That sounds like something I could work with.’
They had at least two conversations in that hotel lobby lounge.
Then they went their separate ways.
Not so many years later the film of Turn Left At Venus was made, not by him. It wasn’t all that good but that didn’t matter much and it would be rediscovered every ten years or so.
Ada would write Second Childhood eventually, living in Amsterdam. Someone else adapted that one also.
SK eventually did make a film about alien life. His aliens were never seen; they were a vast superior consciousness whose visibility manifested in massive pillars of smooth black glass erected on distant planets. When you saw the film you believed there actually was superior consciousness and you were looking at a bit of it.
21
A NOTE IN THE POST
Probably it was Sophie who took her to the show.
Ada was wearing that dress. The creme silk crepe that Charles had made for her about fifteen years earlier, a skirt and jacket subtly draped like a Grecian statue, the first of those pieces of clothing that stayed with her for many years. She added a leather blazer, learning to dress the way they do here. She pinned her hair up in uneven clumps and carried a big velvet handbag she found at the flea market.
It was in some kind of warehouse, a large space with high ceilings, now all scrubbed cement floors and whitewashed walls.
Ada had never seen paintings like this. Ada said, ‘The more I look at them, the more I have to look at them, it’s as if they want you inside them.’
She didn’t know she was speaking to the artist. Later they told each other about this moment.