by Ira Wood
Before I began the press I imagined publishers who wore wide wale corduroys and French blue shirts with flamboyant bow ties, who worked late into the night blue-penciling manuscripts, then went for martinis with starry-eyed young women editors to whom they were legends. I didn’t own a blue pencil, but I did wear corduroys, and a sweater and a muffler, and I did work late into the night reading manuscripts next to the space heater in my office, willing them to captivate me with the same plaintive longing with which I stared into the refrigerator at lunch time, as if simply looking long and hard enough would give rise to something I could actually eat, or in this case, sell.
Why, I wondered, had I ever wanted to sell books instead of write them? It wasn’t that people didn’t love books and want to read them, they just didn’t see why they should buy them retail. And why would they when new books were free in libraries and used ones selling for pennies online? Sometimes, as the wind shook the old wooden building and the clock ticked to daybreak, as the reality of money and sales or, to be honest, the lack of both, kept me up at night, my catastrophic mind set loose, I imagined thousands of unsold books returning to our warehouse from bookstores all over America—on pallets, in boxes, on trucks, in trains, mounting in piles like the columns of debt in my monthly statements. In an effort to soothe myself to sleep I made lists, conjuring all the things that were easier to sell than books—pizza, tattoos, t-shirts. One night I imagined standing on a street corner hawking underpants, a ridiculous comparison but one that in my increasingly battered frame of mind deserved scrutiny. People needed underpants. Most people did not feel they needed a book. Nor were critics likely to write a sarcastic review of a pair of underpants. And who would ever pass a pair of old underpants to a friend—“Have you worn this? I think you’ll enjoy it.”—or sell it to a used underwear dealer? But most shameful was the way I began to feel about books, once a treasured source of knowledge and delight, now a symbol of failure and pain.
One day, however, I received a telephone call from a starry-eyed young woman editor to whom I was apparently a legend. Her voice was hesitant. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you but I . . . me and my backers, that is . . . are starting a small press.” Recalling my own timid questions at BEA and the publishers who took the time to answer them I invited her to my office.
“We l-o-v-e your press,” she said upon driving two hours to get here and shyly admitted she was copying our website design, our mission statement, the “look” of our books. “You’re so cool,” she said, “so cutting edge.”
She picked my brain for details I had forgotten years ago and I had to admit to an unexpected frisson, the attentions of a cute young woman who saw in me everything I had wanted to become. But surrounded by stacks of titles we had published, giant blow-ups of book covers, boxes of promotional rubber toys, a six-foot-long calendar board that projected the deadline of every task for the next twelve months, she found herself in paradise while I was in a prison of my own making. At one time in my life a situation such as this, a bright and energetic young woman who was asking for my guidance might have led me to fantasize one scenario while I was already beginning to conjure another. After several more meetings I was ready to make my move.
I proposed a small café this time, unhurried and intimate, and found a table where we would not be overheard. When she entered, late and sweetly frazzled as always, she didn’t see me at first but glowed as soon as we locked eyes. When she sat down I admitted I’d been thinking a lot about her. She blushed. “But,” I edged closer and said in a hesitant whisper, “there’s something we need to talk about.”
She looked wary.
“Promise me you’ll think it over, that you won’t just say no.”
Now I was beginning to freak her out but before she could answer, I came out with it: “I think you should buy the company.”
“What?”
“You promised me you’d think about it.”
“I did not.”
“That you wouldn’t just say no.”
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You have backers.”
“But we can’t afford to buy a publishing company.”
“How do you know? Do you have any idea how much you’ll need to start one? How many years it takes to develop a brand? How many books you’ll have to publish before you attract a distributor? Wouldn’t your backers rather take over a ten-year-old company with a great national reputation than start from scratch?”
“But the financing.”
“Leave the financing to me. I’ll come up with something you can manage.”
“I doubt that.”
“Trust me. I can.”
There were lawyers involved, money to raise, a contract with endless terms. We went back and forth for almost a year. Some days it seemed a deal was likely to happen; others it appeared impossible. But we persevered, pestering people for advice, looking for likely models, studying endless options—much as I had done years before—she for the dream of owning a publishing company and me to get out from under one.
When the deal was actually done I was in uncertain territory. I no longer quite knew how to define or what to do with myself. Having made lists of all the projects I couldn’t wait to begin I was positively featherbrained and unable to focus for months. A famous episode from the Oprah show kept running through my mind, the one in which she dragged a red wagon full of suet on stage to symbolize the weight she’d lost. For the first time in ten years I felt free, free of debt and deadlines and the slush pile; free to read once again for pleasure. The book business and all the expectations I carried around had been my red wagon full of fat. I didn’t know if I wanted to write again and if I did I would never quite look at editors the same way. For having spent a decade acquiring, editing, designing, and selling books, I attained a certain insight into the secret desires of those who publish them. Far from wanting to replace their writers with new young talent, many publishers have a more personal agenda, a longing few writers imagine: If I didn’t have all this contractual, marketing, and publicity crap to take care of, Hell, I could write a book and do it better than my authors.
THE SECOND MARSHMALLOW: AN EPILOGUE
My father once stared at me for a few long moments before expressing something that he seemed to have just figured out. “You know, you can talk to anyone in the world for half an hour.”
It might have been when I was visiting the family in Lynchburg, Virginia, or Savannah, Georgia, or Miami Beach, any one of the cities to which they moved and kept moving as the clothing trade moved south. There was always a pool at the apartment complexes where they lived and around the pool, strangers; all their old friends and relatives left behind. Since on these visits I usually passed a lot of time talking with whoever was around, this is where I remember the conversation happening. When I understood that he had actually taken notice of this practice of mine, I would engage absolutely anyone in his presence: neighbors, deliverymen, his colleagues from work. It didn’t matter. It was something that my dad admired.
As difficult as a facility for wanton conversation must have seemed to a shy man like my father, it was surprisingly easy, in fact a necessity, for those of us for whom silence in the presence of strangers feels impossibly awkward. Although peppering people with questions, telling jokes, making small talk about children or gardens or sports was a habit that served me well on dates and at parties and the like, it drove my wife crazy when I first met her and she did her best to help me curb the impulse. I can still feel it coming on. I can feel myself beginning to entertain people waiting in line at movie theaters. I have to stop myself from jabbering with cab drivers, UPS guys, the plumber at 90 dollars an hour. The willpower to remain silent while staring at the ceiling with my mouth open wide and not to engage the woman who cleans my teeth is almost impossible to muster.
Although a quick glance at any early photograph of myself is all the evidence I need to confirm I am no longer the person in these stories, the impulses of t
he past, even the distant past, remain. Sometimes I think of them as a phantom limb. Decades removed, they still tingle and twitch.
I’ve come to think that it’s the ability to deny these impulses that sets our early selves apart from the people we’ve grown to become. A psychologist named Walter Mischel once offered a large plate of marshmallows to a group of preschool kids at Stanford University. He told them they could eat one marshmallow immediately, but they could eat two if they waited for him to return from doing an errand. After fourteen years of following data on their lives he discovered that the kids who were able to deny the impulse to eat the marshmallow had better SAT scores, were happier, and were better adjusted.
All but one of the stories in this collection re-play the memories of a man who lived them decades ago. I don’t remember the last time I was even in the same room with a gram of cocaine and have certainly never done a line of it since. But I still sometimes long for the obliteration of the inner censor and the sublime illusion that whatever I’ve written is a triumph of the imagination. I was re-elected to office three times since my first disastrous term as a Selectman. I had to train myself not to personalize issues. I had to learn not to befriend town employees however many times the impulse to do so returned. Nor do I get jealous of the success of others. I might experience a stab of envy when a friend receives a great review, but I’ve learned to put it in context. Given the disappearance of so many independent newspapers today, that great review is likely one of very few he’s received. Most miraculously, after thirty-six years, I am still very happily married to her. However many years it has taken, I have learned to wait for the second marshmallow.
Still, the strongest of the impulses somehow win out. Like my mania for talking. I still do it, in a studio, on public radio, every week. Call me.
THE AUTHOR
Ira Wood is the author of three novels, The Kitchen Man, Going Public, and Storm Tide, co-authored by Marge Piercy, with whom he has also written So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and Memoir. They make their home on four acres of land in a small fishing village on Cape Cod. His talk show, The Lowdown, addresses politics, books, and national trends. It airs on WOMR-FM Provincetown, a Pacifica network affiliate, and streams worldwide on WOMR. ORG. His website is irawood.com.
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You’re Married to Her? © 2012 by Ira Wood
All rights reserved.
These are tales inspired by memory. Dates and places have been altered, events and characters freely compressed, exaggerated, and combined. In addition, characters have fictitious names and identifying characteristics. Since this is the way my mind and my memory work, to claim adherence to some absolute truth, however subjective that might be, would be impossible, and much less fun. As to the veracity of the pronoun “I,” that is shamefacedly “me” throughout the manuscript and my wife, Marge Piercy, that’s “her.”
Portions of this book in various forms have appeared in Ploughshares , The St. Petersburg Review, The Cream City Review, The Rowe Center Post, and Fifth Wednesday Journal.
Published in 2012 in the United States by
Leapfrog Press LLC
PO Box 505
Fredonia, NY 14063
www.leapfrogpress.com
Distributed in the United States by
Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
www.cbsd.com
eISBN : 978-1-935-24827-9