Hope and Other Luxuries (6 page)

I had sensed Marak's presence in that twisted old forest even before Kate and Emily had stepped out of it. As soon as I saw that land, I knew it belonged to him. I am fond of every single character in each of my books, including many of the villains. But the goblin King is the oldest and best beloved of all my character children.

That day, Marak's story unspooled itself before my eyes, a movie that was playing just for me. The first time Kate, my Jane Austen girl, got a good look at him, his ugly face was peering at her out of her own mirror. While Kate stared at him, I forgot entirely that I had breakfast dishes to wash. I forgot that I had promised Joe I would iron him some shirts. I even forgot that I should probably make at least some sort of effort to defrost dinner.

What does a goblin look like?
I wondered.
What does Kate see?

Long hair—rough hair, like a horse's mane. Shrewd eyes in two different colors, one eye green and the other eye black. A lean, pinched face, bony forehead, sunken temples, deep-set eyes, and pointed ears that flopped at the tips like a dog's. Shiny gray skin, brown lips, and dark pointed teeth—teeth like tarnished silver.

Marak's hair was all one length, brushing his shoulders in a shaggy mane. It was pale beige. Or was it? The image came into clearer focus, and
I saw a palm-size patch of black hair growing in a cowlick over the green eye. That black hair cast long sooty streaks over the pale hair below.

While I sat and studied this brilliantly ugly monster, a sudden sound jarred me out of my reverie. The front door. The front
door
? It couldn't be! But it was. The workday was over, and Joe had come home to admire his newly cleaned house and ironed shirts.

“Oh, hey!” I called, jumping up. “So, I was thinking of French toast. How does that sound to you?”

Over the dinner we threw together, Joe said, “I thought you were going to clean today.” But he said it philosophically—almost dispassionately. After fifteen years of marriage, he had learned not to count too much on my homemaking skills.

Joe and I had met while I was earning my master's degree in library science and he was a young engineer working for the Navy. Like Valerie and Elena, he and I were opposites in almost every way: I had gotten degrees in Russian and Latin, with a strong focus on literature, while he had managed to steer clear of the liberal arts almost entirely. He was practical but hot-tempered; I was dreamy but reserved. He thrived on routine; my student days had no order whatsoever.

We fell head over heels in love.

Throughout our years of marriage, Joe has been the anxious nest builder, the one who says, “Where's the money going to come from?” And over the years, I've been the flighty adventurer, the one who says, “If not now, when?” Joe and I trust one another completely, but we also know what we can count on each other to do. If Joe calls home from a business trip and says, “I want to read poetry with you,” I know that he's telling me he misses me, not that he has a sudden burning desire to read Keats. And when I tell Joe the first time or two that I think I might get to the ironing, he knows that I'm about as likely to follow through and do that ironing as he is to sit down with that book of Keats.

So, that first evening the girls were away, I felt comfortable knowing, as Joe munched on his French toast, that he hadn't really expected ironed shirts
just
yet. Nevertheless, I felt I should explain.

“It's this new daydream,” I said. “It's keeping me from getting any work done.” (And was that a circle of ancient oak trees on that hill?)

“What's the daydream about?” Joe asked.

“I don't know. A goblin King.” (A king of what, exactly? And why
were
his eyes different colors?)

I didn't expect Joe to ask any more questions. He had heard me make similar complaints for years. I had been at war with my imagination for our entire marriage, and I had complained about it the whole time. Joe is reassuringly immune from this weakness, so I didn't expect goblins to interest him particularly, much less where they lived (jeweled caverns? Yes, and the twilit, indigo-tinted lands below the lake) or what they ate. (Sheep? Yes, sheep probably made the most sense.)

But this time, Joe surprised me.

“Why don't you write it down?” he said.

The idea didn't immediately appeal to me. It sounded suspiciously like work.

“Why?” I asked. “Who would bother reading it?”

“I would. You're always complaining about daydreams, but I never get to see what they're about.”

That made me feel grateful and more than a little guilty. Maybe I
would
get the shirts ironed after all.

The next morning, after I kissed Joe good-bye at the door, I took my coffee cup and wandered the house again. I paused for a couple of seconds by the ironing board, but then I went to the computer. There was work, and then again, there was
work
.

I sat at the keyboard and pondered. I thought about daydreams. I thought about stories. Writing is a bridge between two people, the writer and the reader. Who would be my reader? That reader would shape every single word.

Well, Joe, of course. After all, he had promised.

But would Joe really get around to reading a story? He was a busy manager, and I had never known him to read a work of fiction. He was just being kind.

(I really should get that ironing done.)

But if Joe wasn't my reader, who was? Who would actually enjoy this story?

Of course! Valerie and Elena!

The girls had loved the little stories I had made up for them when they were younger. Now that they were off exploring the world and having their own adventures, I could still reach out and share an adventure that belonged to us alone. I would send them their own story in letters, a chapter a week—a story no one else had ever read.

Working on that story was slow going at first. I hadn't written fiction in almost a quarter of a century, not since I'd had fiction assignments in middle school. As much as I had always loved books and writing, I had hated to share my stories. They weren't for the outside world. They were the very things that kept me safe from that outside world.

Now, as I watched this movie in my head, I struggled to find the best way to capture what I was seeing in words. “Not right,” I muttered as I backspaced over half an hour's hard work. “The sentences don't lead into one another. They stutter. The image they create is blurry. And right here, the word
dark
is too . . . flimsy. I need a heavier word.”

Because writing isn't just a question of setting down accurate images, as I had known from birth, and possibly before, if doctors are right that unborn children listen to their mothers' voices. There was the rhythm of the sentences to consider, the pauses for breath, and the placement of critical words. As a story unfolds, the words have to flow like a river. That's how a good book casts its spell. That's how the words and pages disappear completely and the reader falls into the writer's world. My literature-loving mother had taught my writer's ear to listen for balance.

As those spring days slowly passed, I sat at the keyboard and marveled at what was happening on the screen. I would agonize for hours, barely coming up with more than a page or two of prose, and the whole thing would seem like a hopeless waste of time. But the next morning, I would read those couple of pages, and the scene would unfold before my eyes, just as if I myself were reading a book I'd never read before.

What happens next?
I asked myself each morning when I came to the last sentence.
Let's get to work. I want to see what happens next!

That's how the first couple of weeks passed: hours of struggle followed by moments of sheer excitement. Then the goblin King stepped in, and I lost myself in the story. He was so much fun to write!

My new hobby enchanted Joe. He sat down with that day's new pages the minute he walked through the door each night.

“I don't know how you do it!” he gushed. “This is the best novel I've ever read!”

“It's just about the only novel you've read,” I pointed out. “You know you've never been a fiction guy.”

But that didn't make the compliments any less fun to hear.

Valerie and Elena were thrilled. They adored getting their letters. They called me up and pumped me for information about goblins, as if I were a paparazzo who followed around living people rather than a writer who made things up. Kate and Marak were as real to them as their own friends were—as real as they were to me, in fact.

“When I get a letter,” Elena told me on the phone one night, “I run off with it to where it's quiet. And then, as I read, it's like you're telling the story into my ear. I can hear your voice reading me the words.”

That brought tears to my eyes.

“Write lots!” she begged me as she said good-bye. “Write lots!” echoed Valerie as she took the phone.

After I got off the phone with my girls that night, I sat with that conversation for a while. I leaned in close and warmed my heart at it. Even though it seemed as if my daughters were far away, I could still sit by them in their rooms and whisper my story to them. We weren't apart while that happened. We transcended time and distance. We were a family.

By the time the girls came home for summer break, I had written hundreds of pages and made my way like a machete-wielding explorer deep into the crisis of the story. Writing had surprised me yet again: I was not remotely in control of this process. My characters were the ones who were in control. It took all I had to keep up with them.

Nothing about who these people were or what they did seemed to be my decision. All I could do was spy on them relentlessly, until I learned things about them that even they barely guessed. Along the way, those characters taught me lessons about hope, endurance, duty, and forgiveness. Their lives were a very serious matter to them. How could they mean any less to me?

Each day that summer, Valerie and Elena dashed by my computer as they played their high-spirited games—sophisticated teens they might be now, but they still were young enough to play. As they passed, they leaned over my shoulder to read the new paragraphs. “Write lots!” they shrieked as they dashed away.

The short German vacation was over in just six weeks. Full of excitement, Valerie and Elena packed their bags again. They gossiped merrily as we made the trek to take them back to school, and they joined the boisterous groups of girls without hesitation.

“Write lots!” they clamored as they hugged me good-bye.

A few more weeks of quiet passed, with just the sleepy dog and cat for company, and the goblin King's story was complete. I printed it out and read the whole thing through on a train to Paris while Joe watched sunny fields rolling past our window.

“What do you think I ought to change?” I asked Joe as the train rocked us gently back and forth.

“Why should anything change? It's a great story.”

“I just don't know if this is it yet, though. I need help with it.”

“But how could it change? It's finished. It's all already there.”

“No. That's only one way the story could be.” And I tried to convey to his tidy engineering brain how the story felt in my mind: like a map, maybe, or like a country covered over with dozens of different paths. Just as the train and the highway both connected our city to Paris, so one story path instead of another would cause the whole feeling of the story to change. But somehow, it was still the same place in my mind. The same country. The same world.

“I don't get it,” Joe said finally. “I wouldn't mess with it. I think it's fine the way it is.”

“Well, what do you think I should do with it, then?”

He looked very serious. “I think you should send it somewhere.”

“It's not a bad story,” I conceded. “I studied teen literature in library school, so I know what a young adult novel should look like. And I don't think I'm bragging here, either. It's really not bad.”

“Then do it!” he said. “Get it published. You could be a famous author and make me a million dollars. That would be amazing!”

“Oh, please!” I said. “It doesn't work that way. Everybody wants to be a famous author! Do you know how many people are trying to get published right this minute? Everybody's written a book.”

“I haven't.”

“Well, everybody else has, and they're all fighting to get their name into print. That takes years of hard work, rejections, begging, letter writing . . . You know me—I don't have that kind of patience.”

“Publishing doesn't look that hard,” Joe said. “I was on the web the other night, and there are these publishers all over the place who say they can help you get published. One of them could turn your story into a book.”

“So I could—what? Use it as a paperweight?” I countered. “That's not the way to get a book to readers. The publishers who get their books into bookstores aren't waiting to hold my hand. They're the big places in New York City: Scholastic; Simon & Schuster; Holt; Penguin; Harcourt; Little, Brown . . .”

As I said the names, they echoed back to me from my earliest childhood, from long summer days spent sitting in the corners of offices, listening to the literature professors talk. I had heard many conversations about the New York publishing companies, about their mergers and ruptures, their tastes and trends, and their triumphs and disasters. In my childish mind, these institutions had loomed large but mysterious: the venerable guardians of society and culture, like noble families lodged in great castles. Their logos—the farmer scattering seeds, the sprinting torchbearer, the boxy double
H
—had seemed to me no different from the quaint images on knights' shields in my mother's old books.

There was the House of Tudor, and there was Random House. The main difference, to my young mind, was that Random House seemed to use its wealth more wisely.