The Celebrity (10 page)

He poured his milk and gulped it down. The consternation of the three of them had lessened at last when Abby pointed out that there
must
be some arrangements at all publishing houses to advance a part of so vast a sum, ordinary practice on ordinary royalties to the contrary notwithstanding. They could ask Thorn first thing in the morning. Gregory had reminded her of their lifelong self-control about not asking for advances from Digby and Brown; she had-answered comfortably that it was a mighty different matter for a publisher to advance your own money, not his.

Unarguable, Gregory Johns thought now. He restored the milk bottle to its rightful place, restacked each of the things he had painstakingly removed, and saw that the other shelves were just as crowded. He reflected that for over fifteen years Abby had gone through this process a dozen times every day, and tried in his head
to
multiply twelve by three hundred and sixty-five by fifteen.

The threatening growl changed to a deep roar.

He slammed the door and marched to the cabinet where tools were kept. Ignoring the small voice in his mind which murmured something about its being after five o’clock in the morning, he opened a folding six-foot rule and began a meticulous measurement and notation. Seven inches wider, four inches deeper, and six inches taller, with appropriate increases in shelf space, ice cubes, salad bins—Abby should see the damn thing shining at her before the week was out.

A strength and sureness raced in him; he was, after all, the good provider, the dispenser of largesse. He suddenly felt more powerful, more male, more truly the head of a family. He wished Abby were awake, so that he could tell her how much he loved doing reckless, impulsive things like ordering iceboxes for her and colleges for Hat. This was a husband’s role, a father’s role, and only successful men could play it. He had never envied them, but now that he was one—

Gregory Johns stopped short. So soon? he thought. This surge of self-love—so soon?

He stood motionless, gazing down at the measuring stick, still open in his hand. The day before yesterday his book had been the same book, the same black words on the same white paper; he had; been satisfied with it and not dissatisfied with himself. Now a golden ribbon adorned the book and he was at once painting out the old canvas of himself and substituting an image on a grander scale. The larger image or the greater audience—which had he hungered for? He had thought of himself as a reasonably contented man; had he merely been a blind one?

He closed the folding rule decisively; each six-inch segment snapped to with a hard positive click. He set it down on the table and stared at its collapsed smallness.

Then he winked at it, as if it were a person. A little vanity wouldn’t kill anybody, a little stretching out of the old ego at 5
A.M
. After all, the words on the paper were
his
words and not somebody else’s.

Whereupon Gregory Johns was suddenly seized with curiosity. What part of the book had the judges liked best? Did they respond to it from the first page or had they been won over later, as it developed? The opening lines had always seemed to him too stiff and inflexible, too abrupt a thrust at the reader’s imagination, and he had rewritten them so often that he must have stripped all grace from them. He looked at the ceiling, trying to recall the first paragraph.

Against the rosy sky, the beams and girders of the Empire State Building made a weaving, twisting filigree of steel. Barlowe glanced from it to his televisioned wristwatch and longed for a second hour of sleep. At seventy, with half the lifespan gone, a man might begin to avoid undue strain. The unwelcome notion sent his glance to the ticking calendar on his desk. Somebody, perhaps himself, had blacked out the three zeros, leaving a flash impression that the day was October 2 in the year 2.

Gregory Johns tried to imagine one of the judges reading it for the first time, knowing nothing of the fifty other versions which had gone before, some shorter, some longer, some pausing to include the line about Hormoneutron Longevity Capsules, and others ignoring that but referring to World War Five and the loss of ninety million people.

Confusion blew across his mind.
Had
the final version included the capsules or the deaths? He had to know immediately; he could not sleep, not knowing.

He opened the door to the living room. Hat would never wake; she always slept as if the sofa were the downiest bed in the world, and tonight a shout wouldn’t make her stir. He went to his desk, pulled gently at the lower left-hand drawer, and drew out the cardboard box which had once held a ream of blank paper. If anybody saw me, he thought. The loving author, admiring his own work, keeping nocturnal trysts with it.

He took the box with him and, moving almost stealthily now, returned to the kitchen. He lifted out the manuscript, set it on the table, and then stopped short. That pile of typewritten sheets, 8
¹
/
₂
by 11 in linear measurement and perhaps four inches in depth, had been adjudged by—God knows who the judges were—had been priced at more than a hundred thousand dollars.

It was a paralyzing idea. He gulped, and hastily backed off a step or two. Suddenly he wanted nothing but to get back beside Abby and sleep.

Just the one paragraph, he decided.

Abby awoke uncertainly. Was that bell ringing in a neighbor’s apartment or in their own? Gregory was still deeply asleep on his back, his lips slightly open, and she glanced at her watch. It was past eleven. The bell rang again.

She caught up her bathrobe and went to the door. The fact that it was another telegram did not astonish her and she was amused that a wire should so quickly seem no exceptional thing. Since Digby had already wired, this one would be from somebody else at the firm who had just discovered the dazzling virtues of
The Good World.

Abby smiled peacefully and went to the kitchen. She set the percolator going, tidied up the usual mess of Hat’s breakfast dishes, and put the folding rule back in the cabinet. She could imagine the flowery declarations which would now issue forth at D. and B.; she could picture the salesmen rushing in on Ed Barnard all this morning to discuss “his author,” pouring out praise for “developing Johns,” asking him to guess what
The Good World
would “do,” and demanding to read it at once, though normally they wouldn’t be caught dead with the long slippery pages of galley proofs. Ed would listen, refuse to hazard predictions, thank them, and say mildly that editors could do everything for authors except write their books.

Ed always said things mildly and felt them vehemently. He was fifty, had been an editor for nearly thirty years, and unlike many editors was not a disappointed writer. His appearance was an anomaly, for he had the ascetic face of a monk and the massive body of a pugilist. His gray eyes were always clear and rested, despite ceaseless reading of typed manuscripts and published books of a hundred authors, American, British or French, obscure or well known. He loved writing; he loved writers.

Ed had told her several times that Gregory was as creative a writer as any he had ever known, and had predicted a larger recognition for his work as time went on. But now, being Ed Barnard, he would refuse to triumph openly over the saleschart worshipers at D. and B. To Abby this seemed regrettable and she found herself hoping, with an unexpected fervor, that he would at least entertain a private smugness for never having written Gregory off as “a minor author.”

Years and years ago, when
Partial Eclipse
and then
Horn of Plenty
had failed to become best sellers, Luther Digby’s letters had grown more infrequent, less eager for news of work in progress. Then they had stopped nearly altogether, except on business matters. In the beginning, Digby used to talk endlessly—how well she remembered it—about the vital function of the publisher, the duty, the privilege—to discover the new writer, to encourage him, to bring forth his work, even if it might appeal only to a limited public. Perhaps in those days Digby had meant it. After
Horn of Plenty,
Gregory had dismissed this talk as so much pious wind. “The truest function, duty, and privilege within Digby,” he had once remarked, “is the marketing of commodities for as much profit as possible.”

Apparently others had come to feel the same way. College texts and classics were marketable indeed, but when it came to general publishing, Ed Barnard and Alan Brown were increasingly willing not to “bother” the President of their firm. As for launching serious new writers, they knew he would balk at and often veto, always for the loftiest reasons, virtually every manuscript they believed in, unless it were by a European upon whose work some foreign publisher had already risked pounds or francs.

Abby thought, Ed and Alan are probably as glad as we are that Luther Digby isn’t the whole firm. Whatever he had, besides capital, when he started it thirty years ago, certainly vanished long ago, and if he hadn’t gone over to the business and sales end, D. and B. would practically be a textbook house by now, and Ed Barnard never would have stayed on. She smiled once more, picked up the telegram, and started for the bedroom. The living room was tidy and neat; Hat had restored the sofa to its daytime incarnation, put away sheets and blankets, even emptied and washed the ashtrays. No sudden metamorphosis, Abby thought stonily, about doing chores, no talk yet about a maid. We’ll have to straighten Miss Hat out a bit, I can see that. What was she doing with that measuring stick anyway?

She stopped, her hand on the knob of the bedroom door. That was odd, finding it on the kitchen table; it hadn’t been there last night. But Hat, gulping down her cornflakes and milk, before dashing off for school, certainly had no thought of measuring anything.

Abby glanced back toward the kitchen and then went in to Gregory. She stood watching him and thinking about the measuring stick.

But I won’t let him, I mustn’t, I must make him see it. This is the danger point for all of us, right here, this first lovely inch of new territory where plenty of money lies at our feet. “Gregory,” she whispered.

He stirred, but went on sleeping. How unmarked his face always looked when his eyes were closed, how tranquil and contented. How wonderful it was that he was not a restless man like Thorn. They were so unlike, and yet able to remain so close, as if each needed the characteristics of the other to become a complete person. Would Gregory agree that for all Thorn’s big hearty manner, he was a sad man, seeking, searching, never at rest? She had begun to think that about Thorn the day she had been downtown and had dropped in at his office and then let him persuade her to go along to his club where he was to be in charge of a luncheon meeting. She had watched and listened and applauded with the rest, but she had guessed the truth. If it were the truth.

“Gregory,” she said again. “Wake up.”

He opened his eyes. “Hi.”

“Here’s a telegram.”

“Who from?”

She gave it to him and said, “Whom from.”

“Nonsense.” He put on his horn-rim glasses and held the message so she could read it with him. It was from Ed Barnard:
“NOW MORE PEOPLE WILL KNOW. CAN YOU GET IN HERE THIS MORNING
?”

“That Ed,” Gregory said after a minute. “I’ll get up and get started.”

“It’s nearly noon already.”

“Five hours isn’t enough, but all right.” He got up, yawning.

“Five?”

“I did the damn foolest thing you ever heard of after you fell asleep.”

“With a yardstick?”

He looked blank. “And the most conceited thing,” he said, without apology. “I read a hundred pages of the manuscript.”

She smiled. “Why shouldn’t you?”

“Pretending I was one of the judges at B.S.B.,” he went on, “coming on everything for the first time. It sort of worked too. Everything read differently.”

“Better?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I honestly don’t.”

Without transition she said, “Darling, we
had
to do college for Hat, and we
will
get an apartment, but we can’t begin to say, well, the icebox too, and well, just a small car and maybe just a cheap fur coat. We can’t.”

“We won’t say all that.”

He glanced uneasily about the room, avoiding her eyes, and she thought, His mind is about as hard to read as a headline in the
Times.
She waited for him to look at her but he didn’t. “Where’d you write down the measurements?”

“What measurements?”

“Gregory, really!” She laughed and he looked aggrieved and then unwillingly amused.

“You’re too damn smart,” he said.

“The things I
want
,” she went on, suddenly intense, “aren’t things you buy in stores and wrap up and send home, anyway.”

“No,” he said.

“For the next five years what I
really
want is to never see you interrupt a manuscript every minute to do reviews and articles—”

“And me, never to see you add up the stubs twice over before you dare to write a check for six dollars—”

“And you not to go to the Public Library if you need the Britannica—”

“Imagine seeing all the plays we want to.”

“And hearing all the concerts.”

“We might take a tourist boat to Europe sometime.”

“Oh, Gregory,” she cried, “let’s remember, let’s don’t forget, let’s—”

While she was speaking, he came toward her and put his arms around her and leaned his head hard against hers. The thick earpiece of his glasses hurt her temple, but she didn’t move back or say anything.

If not Sam Goldwyn, Luther Digby mused, then maybe Darryl Zanuck. He would rather get to Zanuck first, but Alan Brown’s brother was married to a relative of Mrs. Goldwyn, so that call should be a cinch, whereas it might take finesse and proper introductions to pave the way to Zanuck. Not too much finesse; those fellows out there were dog-eat-dog about big books and no important publisher need go begging when he had one. In the past few years he had forgotten that.

Ever since 5
A.M.
when Alan had answered The Question, his mind had functioned with a thrilling sharpness. His headache had disappeared, he had gone back to bed for a few hours, slept through his early appointments, and then waked, free from hangover and with a grand strategy laid out in his mind. He had shaved, showered, dressed, and ordered a large breakfast with lots of black coffee. His mirror had told him there was no sign of last night’s debauch; he looked closer to forty-five than fifty-five, and he felt nearer to thirty than either. This selling trip on the spring list had been his own idea and now he would ring up a brilliant total of orders.