Mentor: A Memoir

by Grimes, Tom

  That was Tuesday. On Thursday, People magazine appeared. As if I were buying pornography and didn’t want to be caught and embarrassed, I walked to an out-of-the-way 7-Eleven and opened that week ’s issue. The lead review and its large author photo: Toni. A week later, the second review and no photo: Tom. But, as a compliment, the reviewer said Season’s End read like a “baseball” novel written by Kafka. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer disagreed: it read like a “baseball” novel written by Pynchon. The Boston Globe didn’t say anything; although the Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Massachusetts did, positively. Maggie, who’d lived in Boston for years, said, “Oh, all the smart people read the Ledger.” Which was good, except the Ledger had five hundred thousand fewer readers than the Globe. A stunning review from the Flint Journal streaked across the literary firmament, and readers would have stampeded local bookstores if one thing hadn’t held them back: Flint, Michigan, had the highest unemployment rate in the country. As for the Times: silence. Frank said, “Don’t worry, it’s early. And I’ve sent off the Whiting thing.”

  I landed in Dayton several hours before my evening reading. At the hotel’s registration desk, I gave my name. The clerk checked her computer. She said, “Mr. Grimes, one night.” Then she looked at me. “I’ll just need your credit card.”

  “My publisher’s paying for the room.”

  She rechecked her monitor. “Sorry, I’m not seeing that.”

  “You mean I’m getting billed?”

  “I’m afraid you are, if you want the room.”

  I opened my wallet, removed my MasterCard, and handed it to her. She returned it with the room key, the hotel’s floor plan, and a Sights to See in Dayton brochure. “Have a good night,” she said.

  At 7:00 PM, a young man about to graduate from college picked me up and drove me to the bookstore. It was one of three owned by a small, independent chain. I’d been scheduled to read at another location, but, before I flew out of Iowa City, my PR person called to say the venue had been changed. When I asked why she said, as calmly as if she had the statistic to prove it, “More baseball fans live close to this store.” Inside, fifty folding chairs had been lined up in tight rows. Beside a podium stood a table supporting fifty copies of Season’s End. And on a table adjacent to the audience a second table was topped with a coffee urn and several platters of cookies, which would eventually be carried home by the staff because there was no audience. The young man and I waited, expecting at least one customer to take a seat, if for no other reason than to rest. Occasionally, someone would swipe a cookie, then scurry away as if I might begin reading to him. Soon the manager, a trim woman in her forties, ventured out of her office to apologize. “We usually have a good turnout,” she said.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Well, wait a while, it’s only,” she eyed her wristwatch, “ten to eight.” She told me to autograph copies of the book before I left. I promised I would.

  Bored, the kid and I chatted about his major, literature. Then he asked me if he should apply to MFA programs. I waved at the empty chairs. “My audience,” I said, “is chocolate chip cookies.” Feeling slighted, he stared at his shoes. “Look,” I said, “if you have to write, you’ll write. You don’t choose the writer’s life; the writer’s life chooses you.” He raised his head and looked at me. “Take a year off,” I said. “Stay out of school. Get a job, travel. Whatever. After that, if you still want to sit alone in a room three to five hours a day, every day, call, and I’ll answer any questions you like.” I lifted the pen from the book-signing table and jotted my number on a napkin. Then I said, “Are there readings at your other two stores tonight?” He nodded. “Who?”

  “The Galloping Gourmet and Gail Sheehy,” whose book about women’s sexuality had sold five million copies.

  I autographed every copy of my book, then said, “Take me back to the hotel.” On the way out, he grabbed a cookie.

  In Toledo, my audience of six kept saying they couldn’t hear me over the espresso machine’s hissing.

  But the Columbus store owners had designed and mounted on foam core a baseball-shaped advertisement for my reading. It weighed a few ounces, but was thirty-six inches in diameter. On it they’d printed baseball stitches, Ann Beattie’s blurb for Season’s End, and a snippet from the New York Times’ review of A Stone of the Heart. After the reading, they told me to take it with me. Thinking it was sweet of them to make the effort, I did, but as I was about to board the flight home a stewardess said, “I’m sorry, that’s too large to store in the cabin.” We decided it would be crushed in the luggage compartment, so I said, “I’ll just toss it.” She said, “Wait a second.” She disappeared, reappeared, and said, “The captain will stow it in the cockpit.” I said, “Thanks, that’s really generous.” At thirty-four thousand feet, the captain announced over the intercom that we’d reached our cruising altitude. “The weather between here and Iowa is clear,” he added. “So sit back and enjoy a smooth flight.” My face was tucked between two pages of the Times when I heard, “And we have a celebrated author with us today. His new novel is Season’s End.” I pulled the paper closer, like a turtle retracting its head into its shell. “‘Persuasively touching and comical,’ the New York Times called his first novel.” Around me, people seemed to worry about who was flying the plane. In Cedar Rapids, the stewardess handed me the huge, round poster. The captain shook my hand and said, “A pleasure.” I smiled, then marched up the ramp, mortified, and disappointingly famous to nearby passengers.

  While I was away, Little, Brown mailed Eric twenty-four review clippings: each positive, each approximately twenty-four words long, and each from a newspaper’s sports section. With a trace of exasperation and complaint in his voice Eric said, “Tom, I can’t do anything with these,” meaning, the reviews were worthless. He couldn’t use them to promote the book, particularly to foreign publishers, all of whom, despite the literary scout’s enthusiasm, ultimately declined to publish it. I don’t believe Eric intended to make me feel responsible for the length and nature of the reviews, he was too kind and supportive; nevertheless, he did.

  If I could ask him today, no doubt his recollection would differ from mine. Our conversation has been replayed, reshaped, and re-remembered so many times that the divide between memory and imagination no longer exists. I am trying to remember not only events and conversations but also emotions related to who I was, what occurred, and how I felt about what occurred a third of my lifetime ago. And as I write, I revise these sentences. I will revise them again and again, hearing them differently, satisfied with them one moment, frustrated the next, even though I’m sure they’re the best sentences I can make. But one day, I’ll reread them and want to change them again. They’ll no longer be the sentences I trusted.

  Now, I’m fifty-four, and it’s 6:28 PM. It’s summer and the sunlight is brighter than my room’s lamplight would be in autumn, when I would call the same hour “evening.” Yet despite how I feel about my memory of Eric, I still want to relive those few moments when I had to decide who would publish the book and he waited for my answer. I want to see and feel the alternate life I would have lived had I answered differently. And if I were not seated at this desk in a warm, sunlit room, if I were cold, and typing by lamplight, my memory of that conversation would not be the memory I’ve conjured up at this moment. Our voices, Eric’s and mine, are fainter now than when I began to describe them. But these words are the only accurate record of what I thought and felt in a warm, sunlit room, at this time in my life, which, at 7:06 PM, has already become my past.

  Several days later, Eric told me the Times wouldn’t review Season’s End. That evening, I found Frank, standing at the Foxhead’s crowded bar, a drink before him, a cigarette in one hand. He wore the rumpled tweed sports coat that made him look like a disheveled prep-school boy. I glanced at the blackboard near the pool table. Through the smoky haze, I saw his name. The one above his had been erased, meaning Frank would play next. As usual, the space beside him was empty. Stude
nts didn’t approach Frank, he approached them, usually to bum a cigarette. When he saw me he said, “Hey!” As always, his voice rose an octave. It was this sound of happy surprise I would miss more than anything once I left Iowa. I delivered the news bluntly. The reviewer had nothing kind to say about the novel so, as an act of kindness, the Times decided to say nothing at all. Frank didn’t react, other than to look away, without moving his head. He had distanced himself, not from me, or his estimation of the book’s quality, but from the book’s fate. To protect himself, intellectually and emotionally, he’d moved beyond anger and bewilderment. The book’s critical and commercial failure implied his failure to predict its success correctly, and being wrong puzzled him. As we stood at the bar and Frank waited for his next game of pool, he pondered the news about the Times with profound equanimity. Then he adjusted his glasses and said, “Well, maybe the New York Review of Books will get what it’s about. But who knows what those Columbia dons think?” (He was referring to Columbia University intellectuals associated with the review.) I ordered bourbon with a beer chaser, but I didn’t answer. “A dark night of the soul,” Frank said. For the first time since I’d given him the news, he looked at me. “Listen, don’t let it stop you. Write another book.” Someone called his name. He said, “I’m up.” He patted my shoulder and said, “It’ll pass.” Then he walked to the table, holding his cue.

  And I returned to the novel I had recently begun. I’d written roughly fifty pages. The first paragraph took eight hours to draft over the course of two days. The novel’s music—its rhythms, its key signatures, its varying tempos—would be determined by those words. I learned this while reading García Márquez describe, in an interview, the importance of composing One Hundred Years of Solitude’s opening paragraph. The novel’s symphonic structure needed to be established immediately, he said; otherwise, he risked becoming hopelessly lost. Also, concentrating on sentences makes time dissolve. Your mind searches for the perfect word. You locate it. You type it. You look at it. You hear it. Maybe say it aloud. Then you decide it’s the wrong word. You change it. Look at it. Hear it. Say it aloud. Decide it’s the wrong word. You try a third word, repeat the above, decide it’s also the wrong word, and restore the original. Then you count the word’s syllables. You listen to its tone. Is it sharp, flat, or out of key? By chance, you notice the clock. Sixty minutes of your life have been swallowed by eternity and you still haven’t found the right word. Famously, Flaubert declined to take a weekend excursion with friends so he could remain home and work. When they returned they said, “Did you get a lot done?” He answered, “Yes. I’ve decided to keep the semicolon.” Writing with ludicrous intensity isolated me from Season’s End’s disastrous reception. And, naturally, Frank helped. He’d hoped my success would match his success with Stop-Time. Knowing it wouldn’t happen—the book was dead; Little, Brown couldn’t even sell its paperback rights—his allegiance to the novel diminished. But he understood that part of me had died and his concern now was to make it a minor, fleeting death. “Ultimately, writing’s a test of character,” he told me, although he likely mentioned this later on, so it wouldn’t seem didactic. I don’t remember. But good storytellers understand that what may sound corny one moment may sound wise the next, and Frank was a good storyteller. He kept the action simple and direct.

  “You want to teach here this summer?” he asked me.

  “Sure.”

  “You’ve sold your house, right?”

  “We move out June 1.”

  “Well, you can live in the new house June through August.” He and Maggie had bought it with Body & Soul’s latest advances.

  “You’re sure?” I said.

  “Of course. We’ll call it seven hundred a month for three months.” With that, Frank reclaimed one-quarter of my salary and had his utility bills and a portion of his mortgage paid every thirty days. But, in the process, he rescued me.

  My fortunes plummeted while Frank’s soared. He’d submitted the first half of Body & Soul to Sam and Candida, who mailed copies to foreign publishers and U.S. film companies. Within days, offers from overseas arrived by fax, and producers phoned in bids. Dustin Hoffman wanted to play Claude’s childhood piano teacher and substitute father, the angelic Mr. Weisfeld. “The problem is,” Frank complained, “Dustin Hoffman ties up the rights and never makes the movie.” Spring Creek Productions, known for making high-quality films, topped Hoffman’s bid. Several countries bought the novel’s translation rights. Soon, and unexpectedly, Frank had multiple six-figure advances in hand.

  Joking over drinks one night, he said to Jody, “My son tells me I’m a very rich man and I should buy myself a new car.” He did, along with the new house that sat atop a hill west of the river.

  Trees lined the neighborhood’s grassy curbsides. Sidewalks were tidy and wide, and laid, seemingly, for no one. As I drove, I didn’t see a single pedestrian. Polished cars stood in driveways, rather than being parked on the street. And green hedgerows hid some front yards, while yellow daises, white roses, pink carnations, and purplish-blue irises bordered others. I believe the neighborhood was called, quite simply, “The Heights.” Understated, tasteful. Compared to “Chula Vista,” which meant, but didn’t offer, a “beautiful view.”

  As a boy, Frank had lived there, on a marshy island, “well hidden in the woods,” near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In Stop-Time, he writes, “The view in all directions was exactly the same. Flat, sandy land, underbrush, and stunted pine trees. Dismal, to say the least.” His mother and stepfather “bought two lots.” But to build their house, they had to clear the land. “The young pines fell easily under a sharp ax or machete,” Frank continues, describing the work, “but the palmettos were more difficult. Showing only a knee-high fringe of palm above ground, these plants were in fact immense subterranean growths of appalling toughness. Their fat, hairy roots joined together in deep sand, so that when you’d worked your way down to the bottom of one plant you sometimes had to work your way back up along another.” The floor of the house was “a twenty-five-by-twenty-five-foot platform set on concrete blocks in the sand. After the floor came the framework of the walls and roof, then the lathing, roofing, windows, and finally two coats of paint outside. The interior was never finished.

  “The house was actually one large room. The kitchen was hidden by a curtain and Alison [his sister] and I slept in a double-decker bed behind a partition. There was a pump in the yard and a privy in back.”

  Frank and Maggie’s house, the second one from the corner, sat on the north side of the property. Its massive, two-story-high, dark-hued brick exterior looked fortresslike. To the south, a green meadow, rimmed by hedges, sloped away from a thick-trunked maple tree whose branches extended twenty feet and shaded the front yard. Bolted to the brow of the garage, a basketball hoop lent a touch of classic Americana. Inside, there was a semifinished basement, equipped with a washer-dryer. Up four steps from the back door was a large kitchen, with an adjacent breakfast nook. An archway separated the kitchen from a dining room with a mahogany table that sat twelve. To the left, a spacious TV room overlooked the yard. Directly ahead was a large sunroom. To the right was the living room, in which a long couch flanked by two Colonial wing chairs stood before the fireplace; behind them was Frank’s glossy black Yamaha grand, its lid open like the mouth of a crocodile. Across from it, a glass-paned bookshelf held a first edition of Stop-Time . Two sets of French doors opened onto an enclosed porch with a desk. Yet Frank wrote in the dim, second-floor room facing the street and the driveway. In it were more bookshelves, and another desk. Off the corridor were Frank’s five-year-old son Tim’s bedroom, a guest room, and a bathroom. Behind a white door was a dressing room and, finally, perched above the yard, the master bedroom and bath—all of it a long way from Florida.

  Still, Frank had to finish the novel, and his work pace accelerated. Writing its first two hundred pages took him three years; writing the second two hundred would take less than one.

  Writing
Season’s End had taken thirteen months. Maybe the number cursed the novel. I’ll never know.

  To forget the cumulative disaster its publication had become, Jody suggested that we drive to Wyoming and hike the Teton Range. We stayed at a Jackson Hole hotel. I’d given Eric the number. One afternoon, he left a message. Frank had called him. The Whiting Foundation wanted to read a new play I’d written.

  Since Spec had won a Los Angeles Drama-Logue Award for Best Script, I assumed he’d sent it to the foundation’s judges.