The Pursuit of Happiness (2001)

by Douglas Kennedy

  Because that was the night I had promised to treat myself to that rarest of Manhattan pleasures: eight unbroken hours in bed.

  Three sentences. Thirty-six words. I read through them again. Punchy. Direct. A hint of wryness creeping into the last line. The language was simple, with no excess verbal baggage. Not a bad start. Not bad at all.

  I reached for the coffee cup. I downed the remaining contents in one go. I went over to the stove and refilled the cup. I fought the momentary urge to run out the door. I forced myself back to the kitchen table. I sat down. My fingers recommenced their manic rat-a-tat drumming on the table.

  Three sentences. Thirty-six words. A full double-spaced typed page usually contained around two hundred words.

  Well, go on, finish the page. It’s just another one hundred and sixty-four words. Hell, you wrote those thirty-six words in ten minutes. An additional one hundred and sixty-four words should only take you …

  Four hours. That’s how long it took. Four long, dreadful hours - during which time I ripped out five sheets of paper from the roller, drank another pot of coffee, paced the floor, chewed on a pencil, made notes in the margins, and eventually, miraculously, made it to the bottom of the damn page.

  Later that night, after supper, I nursed a glass of red wine while re-reading what I had written. It flowed reasonably well. The voice seemed approachable (or, at least, not off-putting). Stylistically, it had a bit of bite (without sounding too smarty-pants for its own good). Most importantly, the narrative took off quickly. The story had momentum. It was a plausible start.

  But it was only one page.

  The next morning, I was up again at sunrise. A fast breakfast, a brisk hike down the beach, a pot of coffee on the stove, and I was sitting in front of the typewriter by eight thirty.

  By noon, I had the second page written. Later that night - just before slipping into bed - I re-read my two finished pages. I excised around thirty extraneous words. I tightened up several descriptive passages. I rewrote an awkward sentence, and eliminated one clunker of a metaphor (‘His eyes had the seductive glow of a Broadway marquee’… changing it to: ‘He had bedroom eyes’).

  Then, before I could start having a crisis of confidence, I placed the pages face down on the desk.

  Up again with the sun. Grapefruit, toast, coffee. The beach. More coffee. The desk.

  And I remained at the desk until I finished that day’s page.

  A work pattern was emerging. My day now had a structure; a purpose. As long as I got a page written, I would feel as if something had been accomplished. Everyone talks about the heady creative pleasures of writing - everyone except those who’ve actually tried to do it. There’s nothing heady about the process. It is a task. Like all tasks, it is only pleasurable in retrospect. You are relieved to have met your daily quota. You hope the work you did today is of a satisfactory nature. Because, come tomorrow, you have to blacken another page at the typewriter. Willfulness is required to get the job done. Willfulness … and a strange sense of confidence. As I was discovering, writing was a confidence trick you played on yourself.

  A page a day, six days a week. After the second week of work, I sent a telegram to Eric:

  Have decided splendid isolation suits me. Stop. Will be here for another few weeks. Stop. Am doing some writing. Stop. Don’t be horrified. Stop. It actually goes well. Stop. Please keep checking my mail for news from Europe or the Department of Enlisted Personnel. Stop. Love, S.

  Forty-eight hours later, a Western Union man showed up at the door of the cottage, with Eric’s reply:

  If you’re happy doing something masochistic like writing, then this fellow masochist is happy for you. Stop. I’ve been checking your mail twice a week. Stop. Nothing from Europe or Washington. Stop. File him away under ‘mirage’ and move on. Stop. I hate Joe E. Brown. Stop. And I miss you.

  For the first time in months, I didn’t feel a sharp stab of sadness about Jack. More of a dull discomfort. Tell yourself it wasn’t meant to be. And while you’re at it, get that next page written.

  Another week. Another six pages. As usual, I took Sunday off. I returned to work on Monday. Having spent the first three weeks eking out every page - spending an hour worrying about the construction of a sentence, or scrapping one hundred and fifty words right when I neared the end of a page - I started sprinting at the typewriter. I pounded out three pages on Monday, four on Tuesday. I was no longer obsessively worrying about form, structure, rhythm. I was simply running with the material. It had taken over. It was writing itself.

  And then, at 4.02 p.m. (I glanced at my watch) on Wednesday afternoon, April 20th 1946, I came to a halt. For a moment or two, I simply sat bemused in my desk chair, staring at the half-blackened page in the typewriter. The realization dawned.

  I had just finished my first short story.

  Another few minutes passed. Then I forced myself up, grabbed my coat, and hiked down to the water’s edge. I squatted down in the sand, and stared out at the metronomic rhythm of the Atlantic surf. I didn’t know if the story was good or bad. My self-deprecating Smythe family instincts told me to accept the fact that it probably wasn’t worthy of publication. But, at least, it was completed. And I would revel in that achievement - for a moment or two anyway.

  The next morning, I sat down at the kitchen table and read through the twenty-four-page story. It was called ‘Shore Leave’ - and, yes, it was a fictional reworking of the night I met Jack. Only in this instance, it was set in 1941, and the narrator was a thirty-year-old book publisher named Hannah: a single woman who has always been unlucky with men, and has started to write herself off as someone who will never bump into love. Until she meets Richard Ryan - a Navy lieutenant, on shore leave for one night in Manhattan before shipping out to the Pacific. They meet at a party, the attraction is instantaneous, they spend the night walking the city, they fall into each other’s arms, they take a room for a couple of hours at a cheap hotel, there is a stoic goodbye at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, and though he promises his heart to her, Hannah knows that she’ll never see him again. Because the timing is all wrong. He’s off to war - and she senses that this night in Manhattan will soon be forgotten by him. So she’s left with the knowledge that, having bumped into her destiny, she’s lost him within twelve hours of finding him.

  I spent the next three days editing the story, making certain that the language was spare and devoid of mawkishness. What was it that Puccini said to his librettist when they were working on La Boheme? ‘Sentiment … but no sentimentality.’ That’s what I was striving for - a certain poignancy that didn’t edge into schmaltz. On Sunday, using carbon paper, I typed two clean copies of the edited story. Late that night, I read it through for a final time. I really didn’t know what to think of it. It seemed to move along, and evoke a certain bittersweet mood … but I was too close to the story to discern whether it was any damn good. So I took the top copy of ‘Shore Leave’, folded it in half, and placed it in a manila envelope, along with the following note:

  Eric:

  Here it is - the first out of the bottle. And I want you to be dead honest with me about its lack of literary merit.

  Expect me in Manhattan in around ten days. Dinner on me at Luchows the night I’m back.

  Love,

  S

  I cycled to the local post office the next morning, and paid an extra dollar to have this envelope sent Express to Eric’s apartment. Then I used the post office phone for a trunk call to Boston. I spoke with a college friend - Marge Kennicott - who was working as a junior book editor at Houghton Mifflin, and living on Commonwealth Avenue. She seemed delighted by the idea of putting me up for a week or so (‘… if you don’t mind sleeping on the world’s lumpiest sofa’). I told her to expect me in forty-eight hours. As soon as I hung up, I called the railway station in Brunswick, and reserved a seat on the train to Boston for Wednesday morning. Then I cycled over to Ruth’s house and told her I was leaving in two days’ time.

  ‘I’m going t
o miss you,’ she said. ‘But you look ready to go back.’

  ‘Do I really look cured?’ I said with a laugh.

  ‘Like I’ve told you before, you’ll never be cured of him. But I bet you now see it for what it was.’

  ‘Put it this way,’ I said. ‘I’ll never let myself fall so hard again.’

  ‘Someone will come along and change your mind about that.’

  ‘I won’t let them. Romance is a game for saps.’

  I truly meant that. Because what so unnerved me about this entire episode was how it undermined all sense of control - to the point where I could think of little else but the object of my infatuation. In my short story, Hannah comes away from her night of accidental passion feeling bereft - but also with the realization that she can fall in love. I knew that now too … and it bothered me. Because what I now realized was that I hadn’t really been in love with Jack Malone. I had been in love with the idea of Jack. I had been in love with love. And I vowed never to make such a misjudgment again.

  I packed up my trunk and typewriter, and had them shipped on ahead of me to New York. I took a final walk on Popham Beach. Ruth insisted on driving me to the train station in Brunswick. We embraced on the platform.

  ‘I’m going to expect a copy of whatever you’ve been writing when it gets published.’

  ‘It’ll never get published,’ I said.

  ‘Sara - one of these days you’re going to actually start liking yourself.’

  I spent a perfectly pleasant week in Boston. Marge Kennicott lived in a perfectly pleasant apartment in Back Bay. She had perfectly pleasant friends. She had a perfectly pleasant fiance named George Stafford, Jr - who was the heir apparent in his family’s stockbroking firm. As always, Boston was a perfectly pleasant city - pretty, snobbish, dull. I resisted all of Marge’s attempts to fix me up with perfectly pleasant eligible bachelors. I said nothing about the events that had driven me to Maine for seven weeks. After seven days of austere Brahman gentility, I was longing for the jangled disorder and chaotic exuberance of Manhattan. So I was relieved when I finally boarded the train back to Penn Station.

  The day before I left Boston, I’d phoned Eric at home. He said he was going to be at work when my train arrived, but would meet me at Luchows for dinner that night.

  ‘Did you get the envelope I sent you?’ I asked nervously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’

  There was a huge pile of mail on the doormat outside my apartment. I sorted through it, expecting nothing from Jack. My expectations were met. But there was a letter from the Department of the Army/Office of Enlisted Personnel, informing me that Lieutenant John Joseph Malone was now stationed at Allied HQ in England. They also enclosed a postal address at which he could be reached.

  I only read through the letter once. Then I dropped it in the trash basket by my desk, thinking: misjudgments are best tossed out of your life.

  There was another letter in that pile of mail which caught my immediate attention - because the return address on the envelope said Saturday Night/Sunday Morning: a well-known magazine with which I had never corresponded, nor knew anyone who worked there. I tore back the flap. I pulled out the letter.

  April 28th, 1946

  Dear Miss Smythe,

  I am pleased to inform you that your short story, ‘Shore Leave’, has been accepted for publication by Saturday Night/Sunday Morning. I have tentatively scheduled it for our first September ‘46 issue, and will pay you a fee of $125 for first publication rights.

  Though I would like to run the story largely uncut, I have one or two editorial suggestions that you might be willing to consider. Please call my secretary at your convenience to set up a meeting.

  I look forward to meeting you, and am delighted your fiction will be appearing in our magazine.

  Sincerely yours,

  Nathaniel Hunter

  Fiction Editor

  Three hours later - as I sat nursing a glass of champagne with Eric in Luchows - I was still in shock.

  ‘Try to look pleased, for God’s sakes,’ Eric said.

  ‘I am pleased. But I’m also a little stunned that you engineered all this.’

  ‘As I told you before, I engineered nothing. I read the story. I liked the story. I called my old Columbia friend, Nat Hunter, at Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and told him I’d just read a story which struck me as perfect Saturday/Sunday material … and which just happened to have been written by my sister. He asked me to send it over. He liked it. He’s publishing it. Had I not liked it, I wouldn’t have sent it to Nat. Had Nat not liked it, he wouldn’t be publishing it. So your story’s acceptance was completely free of nepotism. I engineered nothing.’

  ‘Without you, however, I wouldn’t have had direct access to the fiction editor.’

  ‘Welcome to the way the world works.’

  I reached over and clasped his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Much obliged. But, hey, it’s a good story. You can write.’

  ‘Well, dinner’s on me tonight.’

  ‘Damn right it is.’

  ‘I missed you, Eric’

  ‘Ditto, S. And you’re looking so much better.’

  ‘I am better.’

  ‘As good as new?’

  I clinked my glass against his. ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  The next morning, I called Saturday Night/Sunday Morning. Nathaniel Hunter’s secretary was exceedingly friendly, and said that Mr Hunter would be delighted to take me out to lunch in two days’ time, my schedule permitting.

  ‘My schedule permits,’ I said, trying to sound blase.

  I also checked in with Leland McGuire at Life. His assistant answered the phone, then put me on hold after I asked to speak directly with my erstwhile boss. After a moment she came back on the line.

  ‘Leland asked me to welcome you back to New York, and to say he’ll be in touch as soon as he has an assignment for you.’

  It was the reply I expected. I now knew for certain that, a few months from now, the dismissal notice from Life would land on my doormat. But with that $125 in my pocket from Saturday Night/ Sunday Morning, I’d be able to survive for a month or so beyond that time. And maybe I could convince this Nat Hunter to give me a journalistic assignment or two.

  Naturally, I was nervous on the morning of my lunch with Mr Hunter. By eleven I was tired of pacing my little apartment - so I decided to kill the remaining hour and a half before our meeting by walking all the way uptown to Saturday/Sunday’s offices on Madison and 47th Street. As I was locking my apartment door behind me, Mr Kocsis walked up the stair, a stack of letters in his hand.

  ‘Mail early today,’ he said, handing me a single postcard, then heading down the corridor, depositing letters on my neighbors’ mats. I stared down at the card. Though the stamp was American, it was franked ‘US Army/American Occupation Zone, Berlin’. My stomach was suddenly in knots. Quickly I turned the card over. Three words were scrawled on the reverse side.

  I’m sorry.

  Jack

  I stared at this message for a very long time. Then I forced myself to head downstairs and out into the bright spring sunshine. I turned left outside my front door, and started heading north. The card was still clutched in my hand. Crossing Greenwich Avenue, I walked by a garbage can. Without a moment’s thought, I tossed the card away. I didn’t look back to see if it landed in the can. I just kept walking.

  Five

  THE LUNCH WITH Nathaniel Hunter went well. So well that he offered me a job: assistant fiction editor of Saturday Night/Sunday Morning. I couldn’t believe my luck. I accepted on the spot. Mr Hunter seemed surprised by my immediate answer.