Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42

by A Likely Story (v1. 1)

  “Oh, come on, Mary, you’re just imagining—”

  “Oh, no, I’m not,” she said. “He kept looking at my body, you know the way I mean? And then he’d stroke his hammer like this.” Her hand made an 0 and stroked a nonexistent something, possibly a hammer.

  “No,” I said. “While hammering nails! He couldn’t.”

  “He had a big tool belt, you know,” she told me, “slung low around his hips like in westerns.”

  “Gun belts.”

  “That’s right. The hammer was in a loop on the side, hanging down, and he kept turning sideways and holding the hammer out so it looked like it was between his legs, and then he’d look at my body and stroke the hammer like this.” And she did that movement again.

  The worst of it was her calmness. If she’d been upset, or frightened, or outraged, or even turned on by it all, I could have handled the problem—dealt with the problem, I mean—calmly and reassuringly, from my more experienced masculine perspective. But she was the calm one, which left me ... I don’t know' where it left me. Despite myself, knowing it could only get w^orse, I said, “Did he, uh . . . He didn’t say anything, did he? It was probably just an unconscious gesture.”

  “I offered him some coffee,” she said, “and he asked me if I had any jelly.”

  “Jelly?”

  “I looked in the refrigerator, right there, and he w^as over here, and I bent dowm to look in the low'er shelves, and wdien I looked back he wras staring at me, and doing this with the hammer.”

  “Don’t do that!”

  “Well, I told him I had raspberry jelly, and strawberry jelly, you know, wrhat the kids like, and he said, ‘Don’t you have any other kind of jelly?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘I sure do like jelly, I like to lick it all up,’ and then he did this again.”

  “I have to go now,” I said, and came back to my own valentine, who had been having a telephonic fight with Lance about money. It was moot for a while as to whether Ginger would now transfer the fight to me, as being another sonofabitch male, or would become very warm and loving and sexy with me, as revenge against her husband; fortunately, the latter impulse won.

  As for The Christmas Book, that continues apace. I have actually received three submissions, one of which I unfortunately had to reject:

  Dear John Irving,

  'The Stars Wink,’ your short-short story about a bear whose eyes are put out by feminists on Christmas Eve, is certainly a powerful piece of writing, right up there with the rest of your work, and I for one would be proud indeed to publish it under any circumstance at all. Unfortunately, / don’t always have final say on these matters, and the feeling at Craig, Harry & Bourke was that the date of Christmas Eve in the story was merely happenstantial (apparently typed in later once or twice, in fact), that the story had very little to say about Christmas qua Christmas, and that all in all the tale was rather more depressing than we prefer for the contents of The Christmas Book. Your suggestion that Tomi Ungerer illustrate your story would be an excellent one were we to publish the story, except that we already have approached Mr. Ungerer to do something rather different and more Yulesque.

  Otherwise, Isaac Asimov’s piece about the aerodynamic qualities of Santa’s sleigh, and Andy Rooney’s piece about how there weren’t all these different sized batteries when he was a child, were both slight but puckish, and I was pleased to take them. That is, Ive sent them on to Jack Rosenfarb for approval and payment, and have no doubt he’ll accept them.

  “How much?” letters have now been received from Russell Baker, William F. Buckley, Jr., Truman Capote, Carl Sagan and Kurt Vonnegut, and have been answered. And this came from Mario Puzo’s secretary:

  “Mr. Puzo has asked me to tell you that he is tired of people trying to capitalize on his alleged relationship with the Mafia. He has not the slightest interest in writing about the Mafias view of Christmas, nor if he did have such an interest would he be willing to share his thoughts with you. ”

  Well, I just sent sent him the regular form letter, didn’t I? I never mentioned the Mafia! Enraged, I sat at my typewriter and wrote:

  Dear Mr. Puzo:

  Thank you for your prompt response to my query letter concerning The Christmas Book. If you have nothing at the moment about the Mafia vis-a-vis Christmas, perhaps you'd like to give us a few words on Christmas in Las Vegas (though we do have a shot at Carol Doda on that topic), or maybe even a thinkpiece on the Christmas presents exchanged by Superman and Lois Lane. Or it could be you have in the trunk something about Easter or the Fourth of July that could be adapted. Looking forward to your response.

  Well, I didn’t send that letter, of course; Puzo’s name would be damn useful in the book. A bit later, calmer, I wrote a letter apologizing for having created the misunder-

  standing and assuring Mr. Puzo I had no thought of confining his creativity in re Christmas to any specific area; anything at all about Christmas, honest (except blind bears, I didn’t add).

  And just to make life complete, today I got Scott Merediths dead-bone collection again! It seems Arthur C. Clarke is a client of his. “Oh, was that you?” said a female voice there when I phoned them to re-send their messenger.

  I have now sent the solicitation letter to five more writers—Pauline Kael, John Leonard, Sam Shepard, John Simon and Calvin Trillin—and five more artists—Jasper Johns, David Levine, Roy Lichtenstein, Saul Steinberg and Tomi Ungerer. I back-dated the Ungerer letter.

  Monday, March 21st

  DISASTER! Jack Rosenfarb QUIT this morning!

  This is the worst thing that can happen in the publishing industry, bar none. It is worse than a bad dust jacket or a low ad budget or even another book on the same subject coming out two months ahead. It is much worse than a libel suit or a Publishers Weekly slam or a paperback auction to which nobody comes.

  Here’s the problem. Your average publishing company is the last existing model of the feudal system at (semi)work. Every department is its own fiefdom, jealous of its windows and its telephones and its supplies of paper clips. No one is in overall charge, no one. Publishers themselves have nothing whatsoever to do with books—would you expect Mr. Standard to hang out with his toilets?—and what the hell do employees care?

  Publishing is the only industry I can think of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don’t know how to do their jobs. “I don’t know how to sell this,” they complain, frowning as though it’s your fault. “I don’t know how to package this. I don’t know what the market is for this book. I don’t know how we’re going to draw attention to this.” In most other occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for, the job.

  Out of the thousands of people in an entire huge publishing empire, the only one who cares at all about your book is the editor who bought it. He spent the company’s money, he made a commitment, and his ongoing reputation—within the firm and within the industry—depends for the moment on your book. When the flacks in publicity fail to tell the difference between the “Today” show and WBAB, Babylon, Long Island, it is the editor who strolls down the hall and chats with the nitwit there. When the art department gives you a jacket that would have looked tired on a Literary Guild selection in 1953, it is the editor who gently suggests that maybe somebody other than the associate art director’s roommate might be the best illustrator in this case. When the salesmen scratch their heads and say, “I dunno how to pitch this book. What is it, anyway?” it is the editor who explains what the goddam book is, in words clear enough for each salesman to deliver (as though his very own) to book dealers across this mighty land. When the accountant behind the publisher’s desk decides four thousand back orders aren’t enough to suggest a second printing might be in order, it is the editor who crawls across the Persian rug and says, “Please, Murray, please.”

  No, the writer cannot do this for himself. Who in the publishing comp
any will listen to a writer? The writer can be expected to be emotional and non-businesslike about this child of his; only the editor can be accepted as a hardheaded professional.

  When the editor who bought the book leaves the company before the book is published, the winds blow very cold. In the trade, such a book is called an “orphan,” and the word barely suggests the Dickensian—nay, the Ho- garthian—horrors that await such a creature. Who shall defend these pitiful pages? Who shall raise this tattered banner from the Out basket? No one.

  A new editor is “assigned” to the book, the way homework is assigned to reluctant schoolchildren, and the futility is evident in the word itself. What commitment has this assigned editor in this book? None. How much time and thought will he divert to it from the books he chose for the company to publish? Guess.

  My gravedigger hasn’t been assigned yet. Jack Rosen- farb is to stay on for two more weeks, tidying up his affairs. He assures me he’s very excited about the new job that has been offered him by the pay-TV company. May he rot in hell.

  And things had been going so well. Jim Davis contributed a drawing of Garfield in a Santa suit that’s so charming and cynical at the same time that I’ve almost lost my hatred for that cat, and Gahan Wilson’s drawing of a Christmas tree decorated with any number of tiny hanged men, women and children gave me pause at first, but the more I look at it the more I like it. (I considered asking him to redo it in color, but on second thought that might be dangerous.)

  The writers haven’t been lax, either. Truman Capote came through with a “Christmas Eve on Death Row” that is touching and strong and a million miles above the staleness of the subject. Arthur C. Clarke sent along a wonderful story about another Christ being born to another species in another galaxy, and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a reminiscence of a childhood Christmas in Canada that made me smile all day after I read it. Jerzy Kosinski’s fantasy about a couple of children living inside a kaleidoscope at the North Pole is maybe a touch too cute, but it looks as though he wrote it all himself, and I’m taking it. I don’t know quite what to think about Kurt Vonnegut’s submarine story, “Captain Nemo’s Christmas,” and just last Friday I sent it to Jack Rosenfarb for his opinion. Now, of course, he can take his opinion and shove it.

  I have also received several polite turndowns, from (or from the secretaries oft Helen Gurley Brown and Annie Dillard and Gerald Ford and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Joan Rivers and Isaac Bashevis Singer (“It is not my subject; I’m sorry”) and Jonathan Schell and Jamie Wyeth. The “How much?” letter has been received from Ann Beattie. E. L. Doctorow, Richard Nixon, Tom Wolfe, John Simon and Calvin Trillin. A brief typed note from Mickey Spillane said, “You gotta be kiddin .” I wrote him that indeed I was not.

  Isaac Asimov has sent me another article, this one on the calendar dating of Christmas. I’d already told him I was taking the aerodynamics-of-the-sleigh piece, so I don’t know why he sent another, but he did; anyway, I liked the first one better, so I sent the calendar piece back.

  In the middle of all this, Pia Zadora’s agent phoned to say his client might be persuaded either (a) to give me a Christmas-theme photo spread, or (b) to contribute a Christmas song she’d written. I said I’d take it up with the staff.

  As winter fades, it’s becoming harder and harder to think about Christmas. Here it is the end of March, little round pregnant buds protrude from every branch, there’s a smell of mud and mildew in the air, spring is on the way, and in the apartment hallway Bryan and Joshua simultaneously play baseball and soccer. The sight of a pair of boys dressed in Mets caps and first baseman’s mitts kicking a soccer ball back and forth is rather too heartwarming and Norman Rockwell for somebody who’s spending all his waking hours with Christmas anyway, but there they are.

  On the other hand, it is nice the way those two boys get along. My Bryan is nine and Ginger’s Joshua is ten, and I think maybe they have the best alliance of any of the teams involved in this over-extended family. As is so often the case, their relationship started when they went to bed together. Ginger and 1 don’t have a lot of extra space in this apartment, so whenever my kids stay over Bryan bunks in with Joshua. (Eleven-year-old Jennifer, who does not hang out with eight- year-old Gretchen, sleeps on blankets on the floor in Gretchen’s room on those occasions.) The boys early discovered a mutual interest in sports and truly rotten television reruns, and have been fast friends ever since. I think I may have to take them to the Mets opener.

  But what’s going to happen to The Christmas Book? With Asimov and Capote and Kosinski and Rooney and Vonnegut and Clarke and Galbraith and Davis and Wilson I’ve already got name-strength; they cant let the book languish now, can they?

  Sure they can.

  But they’ve got so much money committed.

  Sure they can.

  But it’s such a great idea.

  Sure they can.

  But I’m working so hard.

  Sure they can.

  But it’s their one best hope for a Christmas book.

  Sure they can.

  Sure they can.

  Monday, March 28Ih

  TOMORROW is the first day of Passover. My new editor told me so today at lunch, several times. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that the purpose of our having lunch had nothing to do with The Christmas Book—which was barely mentioned—but that we had gathered at the Tre Mafiosi for sole and chablis so that Ms. Douglas could explain to me what tomorrow, the first day of Passover, meant in the ongoing troubled relationship between herself and her mother, who lives in Fort Lauderdale. I feel I know both mother and daughter very well by now; far too well.

  Vickie Douglas is a hotshot younger editor, or at least she was until a year or so ago when she crossed the Rubicon of thirty. About five years back, she was the one who plucked out of the slush pile the ex-hookers diet-and-pornography book which became known in the trade as Fuck Yourself Thin, but which Ms. Douglas herself (it is rumored, or claimed) titled How a Better Sex Life Can Lead to a Slimmer You. With the ex-hooker’s national tour, plus the rather sensational nude exercise photos in the book, it became a monstrous bestseller (I choose my words carefully) and Vickie Douglas immediately left that publisher (and the other not-yet-published books she’d bought there) for a different publisher and a better salary. She’s been at a number of houses the last several years, and came to Craig, Harry & Bourke after leaving Metronome House last fall during a flap that even got reported gingerly in Publishers Weekly (the Junior Scholastic of this tiny world); it was a dispute over the title Qf a famous lesbian golfer’s autobiography Ms. Douglas had insisted it be called Different Strokes, while the publisher even more strongly demanded it be called The Carol Murphy Story. (Around the business, it was generally known as “I Can Lick Any Woman on the Tour.”)

  A tall, skinny, dark-blonde woman with a very large head provided with prominent facial features, Vickie Douglas is attractive in an acrylic sort of way, until she starts talking, and smoking, and knocking her bulging leather bag over, and dropping ashes in the water glass, and putting her elbow in the salad, and jangling her bangles, and staring wide-eyed like someone who’s just received a dirk in the back in a Hitchcock movie. Her voice is loud and breathy at the same time, and she talks very fast like a mother lying to the truant officer, and her self-involvement is so total I don’t understand how she can bear to release herself after she puts a sweater on.

  This is the creature who came to bury The Christmas Book, not to praise it. “You’re doing a fine job,” she told me, her wide eyes glazed as she thought about her mother. “It’s a very interesting concept,” she mumbled, looking around for her roll (it was in her bag). “I don’t want to second-guess you, just keep going on as before,” she suggested, grapes from her sole Veronique rolling across the table.

  But intermixed with these platitudes were a few zingers. Frowning at a nearby waiter as though measuring him as a potential stepfather, she brooded, “It’s hard to know what the thrust of the book is, what i
ts argument is.” Wiping coffee from her blouse, she mumbled into her chest, “I’m afraid Mr. Wilson isn’t very impressed by the kind of contributor you’ve come up with so far. Capote, Galbraith; these are all rather yesterday, aren’t they?” Staring at the American Express credit card slip, trying to do gratuity mathematics in her head, she mused, “Perhaps the problem is Christmas itself. Perhaps it’s just too ordinary.”

  What am I going to do about this woman? I have to do something about this woman, but what? If I kill her, they’ll only assign another editor, and I know what they’d give me next (assuming I didn’t get arrested for murder, which I surely would). What they would give me next would be some hundred-year-old, pipe-smoking fart with a wonderful shock of white hair and a brain that died in the late nineteenth century, during his second year at Exeter. He would be named something like Raymond Atherton Swifft or Hamble- ton Cudlipp the Third, he would not have actually done anything at the firm within living memory, and once we had become fast friends he would tell me his one anecdote; the time he got drunk with John O’Hara, missed his train to Croton, and had to take the 7:10.

  So Victoria Douglas is not the worst possible disaster that could befall The Christmas Book she’s only the second- worst.

  I have to do something. There’s nothing to do. But I have to. I have to do something about this woman.

  Monday, April 4th

  ANNIE phoned late this afternoon, and said don’t worry. But then she said, “That’s bullshit, of course.” I have been cursed with an honest agent.

  Last Thursday, after brooding about Vickie Douglas for three days, I finally went to see Annie in her office. She listened to my tale of woe, and shook her grizzled head and sighed a grizzled sigh, and said, “Well, Tom, it never comes easy.” (We were meeting in the morning.)