Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (3 page)

           
If I peddle it to somebody else, who
should
that
be? Hubert Van Driin? The editor-publisher
for whom I did the Jack Oakie book, Hubert Van Driin is an insane right wing
psychopath, and his company, Federalist Press, is much smaller than Craig,
Harry & Bourke, but my Christmas idea just might connect with the nostalgia
side of him. I could promise a still photo from a Wilderness Family movie;
surely
those
people have done at least one Christmas-in-the-cabin
sequence. On the other hand, Hubert is RC, from the

           
Torquemada branch, and he might well
get all pop-eyed and incensed at the secular side of Christmas.
Hard to know, hard to know.

           
Dear :

           
In conjunction with the publishing
company of Craig, Harry & Bourke, I am compiling a book about Christmas.
This is not intended, either by the publisher or myself, to be merely another
standard compilation of the over-familiar and the over-anthologized, i.e.,
Dickens, Dylan Thomas, “Twas the
night.
. . , ” etc.

           
Christmas is many things to many
people. The Christmas Book will reflect that, presenting the full panorama of
western mans most popular and meaningful holiday in a colorful,
carefully-prepared, seriously-inten- tioned volume which we confidently expect
will find its way under most every Christmas tree in America in the years to
come.

           
In addition to Christmas art through
the ages, and such rare and unknown treats as Kipling's “Christmas in
India
,” the publishers and I intend a strong
contemporaneous flavor by actively seeking out original stories, essays,
reminiscences or whatever from the major writers and thinkers of our time. Your
name could hardly be left off such a list, which is the reason for this letter.

           
The Christmas Book will stand or
fall not on its callings from the libraries of the past but on the
contributions from people like
yourself
who will tell
us what Christmas means today, in modern
America
. Fees are negotiable, but would certainly
compare favorably with what you would expect for any equivalent piece in todays
market.

           
Since we intend to be in the stores
this autumn, our deadline for inclusion in The Christmas Book must be no later
than June 1st, although some small leeway might be possible in a very few
special cases. I hope you find this concept as intriguing as we do, and will be
inspired to give us your unique contribution to the literature of Christmas.
May I hear from you soon?

           
Sincerely,

           
Thomas J. Diskant General Editor

           
ABSOLUTELY insane! No more than
twenty minutes after I phoned to make my appointment to see Hubert Van Driin at
his office this Wednesday morning, Jack Rosenfarb called to say
Craig,
Harry & Bourke was “interested.”

           
A mingy word, that.
A cheap, sneaky, self-protecting fake of a word.
“Interested.”
Interest is like smoke; it may mean fire, or
it may dissipate in the wind.

           
“There’s a good deal of interest
around the shop in your idea,” is the way Jack put it. “But the feeling is
,
we’d like to see something on paper.”

           
There’s nothing an editor likes more
than reading words he hasn’t had to pay for. They’d
all
like to see
something on paper. When I was first in
New York
. . . .

           
Ah. When I was first in
New York
, what a wealth of things I did not know.
Entire encyclopedias of awful truths were unknown to me. What I brought with me
to the big city nineteen years ago was a truly awesome ignorance, a change of
clothing, and the belief that my memory of a pink- walled garage surrounded by
snow in sunlight was the most important thing on Earth.

           
That’s not how I would have phrased
it then, of course. I knew I was a writer, I knew that much, and I knew I’d
grown up in a small town in southern Vermont that was absolutely full to the
brim with
reality
, and I felt I could snare that reality in a net of
words, a great open-mesh net of all the words I’d ever learned in Vermont, that
net I would toss with a masterly flick of the wrist over that pink-w
^f
alled
garage, and pull the cord, and I’d
have
it!

           
I think it worked, actually. I did
office temporary work, and knocked out a few magazine articles to pay the rent
on the studio apartment on
West 101st Street
, and spent most of my time hunched over the typewriter, putting the
words down while that pink wall stood and gleamed in my imagination.
Pink-walled garage out behind Bill Brewsher’s house, with the white snow around
it in the sunlight. We got really good snow in
Vermont
, really white and glistening, not like this
trash around here. Every time I thought about Bill, or Candy, or Jack and Jim
Reilly, or Agnes, or any of them, I always saw them as bundled-up fevered
darknesses in front of that shining wall.

           
The Pink Garage Gang
was
bought for two thousand five hundred dollars by the fifth publisher who saw it.
Print order three thousand, no advertising, no publicity. No paperback sale, no
foreign rights sale. No movie interest. From time to time they sent me royalty
statements; the last one, eleven hundred dollars of the advance was still
unearned.

           
By the time
The Pink Garage Gang
was published I was more or less making my living with my typewriter. No more
novels, though. I actually didn’t have any more novels in my brain, I was too
busy. Then, a few years ago, back in Vermont, a Burlington & Northern
freight locomotive that somebody had forgotten to turn off or something got
loose all by itself one night and trundled at a few miles an hour all the way
up the state to the Canadian border before it stopped.
All by
itself.
You may have read about it in the paper. It was winter, and
everybody was in bed asleep, and the locomotive rolled slowly by, going north.
It went right through my town. It was a moonlit night, and a few people here
and there in the state looked out their windows, holding a glass of warm milk
in their hand, and they saw the dark bulk of the locomotive go by.

           
For a while, I thought about that. I
smiled sometimes, and thought about the locomotive basting a seam up through
Vermont
. God, that novel was real to me. I could
see
it, I could see everything in it,
I
knew everything in
the world about that story. It was all so clear and detailed, I can still
remember so much of it, that every once in a while there’s a split second when
I think I wrote it.

           
Jan 10

           
Jack Rosenfarb
Craig, Harry & Bourke
745 3rd Ave.

           
New York
,
NY
10017
Dear Jack:

           
As you recall from our conversation
of last
week,
and your telephone call to me this
morning, I have it in mind to do a large glossy gift-book anthology on the
subject of Christmas. I would combine already existing literature and artwork
on the subject with original material solicited from the most prestigious
writers and artists of our day, a list to include such as Norman Mailer, Joyce
Carol Oates, Andy Warhol, Jerzy Kosinski, LeRoy Nieman, Jules Feijfer and
Robert Ludlum, among many others. I see my own function as general editor of
this anthology, engaged both in selecting the materials from the past and
negotiating with the contributors of the present.

           
In my previous work, as you know, I
have frequently acted as a compiler and interviewer
,
experience which
will stand me in good stead in re
The Christmas Book.

           
As I mentioned to you last week, I
would very strongly want this book to appear this calendar year, early enough
for the Christmas season. Because time is relatively short, and because you
have expressed some doubt as to whether Craig, Harry & Bourke would be the
right publisher for this project, I have made a preliminary discussion with
someone from another house. My own feeling, however, is that
The Christmas
Book
would be given its most careful and conscientious presentation with
you as its editor, so I hope we can shortly come to a meeting of minds.

           
Yours.

           
Tom Diskant

           
WHAT a day. My daughter Jennifer got
mugged this morning, which may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Well, no,
I don’t mean it that
way,
I just mean it caused me to
postpone my meeting with Hubert Van Driin.

           
I was just about to leave for that
meeting—in fact, 1 was tying my tie—when the phone rang and it was Mary,
sounding more solemn than usual (she’s often serious, seldom solemn), saying,
“Tom, could you come over right away?” “Gee, I’m sorry, Mary,” I said. “I’m
just off to a meeting at Federalist Press.”

           
“Couldn’t you cancel it? I wouldn’t
ask, but Jennifer was mugged on her way to school.”

           
So I canceled, of course. Van Driin
took it well, with his normal reaction to the world we live in: “The barbarians
are among us, Tom. They came through the gates a long time ago, the liberals
just waved the bastards in.
Animals.
The Duke knew.”

           
“I’ll call you later,” I said, and
left the apartment, and went down to
17th Street
,
where I found Mary and Jennifer in the kitchen, both bravely not having
hysterics.

           
My kids go to public school because
that’s all I can afford. (That Ginger’s kids go to private school, at Lance’s
expense, is an unstated bone of contention between Mary and me,
never
mentioned.)
Bryan
had sixty cents taken from him at school
last year, which technically counts as a mugging though he wasn’t harmed or
actually threatened in any way, but this was Jennifer’s first experience of
street crime. Both the kids know enough not to offer resistance if you are
outweighed, out-meaned or outnumbered; still, an assault for money is a tough
experience for any person, and particularly so for an essentially nonviolent
kid, as both of mine are.

           
Upon arrival, I crossed the kitchen
to where mother and daughter sat at the table, and went down on one knee beside
Jennifer’s chair, resting my hand on her upper arm, saying, “How are you,
tiger?”

           
She tried a smile, but her voice was
shaky when she said, “I’m okay now.”

           
“There was a knife,” Mary said.

           
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, and clasped her
arm harder. “You weren’t cut, were you? You weren’t—”

           
“No, they just. ...” She shook her
head, frowned at her mother as though bewildered by some stray thought, then
said, “He just had it in his hand. He didn’t even say anything, he just held
the knife up and showed it to me and
grinned
real
mean, and the other one said gimme your money. ”

           
“Two of them?
Older boys?”

           
“Grown-up, kind of,” she said.
“Like you see playing basketball.”

           
“Twenty year olds,” Mary translated.

           
I could feel
Jennifers
skinny arm trembling, like when you hold a frightened cat. She said, “I just
thought, oh, wow, what if I don’t have enough for them?
Enough
money.
I mean, I only had, I. . . .”
Her face
scrinched up.
“Ohh,” she said, on a rising note.

           
Then at last she dissolved, and I
held her very close, and Mary came over to pat us both on the shoulder. I sat
on the floor, pulling Jennifer down onto my lap, curling her in against me
there, rocking back and forth and holding her while she cried herself out. I
said stupid things like, “There, there,” and “It’s all right now,” and, “Okay,
okay.” Mary made coffee for herself and me and Earl Grey tea for Jennifer, who
doesn’t like coffee, and after a while we got off the floor and sat around the
kitchen table instead and drank our stimulants and Jennifer went about
reconstructing her public persona as the hip existential city kid. “It was all
such a complete drag,” she said. “I had to tell the cops they were
black
guys, it was like I was making it up, you know?
An agent
provocatater.
And one of the cops was black, so it was really
embarrassing.”

           
I love both my kids, with a mad
helpless mute mortifying love that gets more bumblefooted the stronger I feel
it or the harder I try to express it. Realizing Jennifer already had too much
to bend her mind around at the moment, I mostly kept quiet,
so
she wouldn’t also have to deal with her father’s inadequacies. “The black cops
know,” was all I said at that juncture.

           
She managed a little grin, a
condensed version of her usual mode. “He looked real tough,” she said. “I bet
if
he
caught those guys, he’d beat them up a lot worse than a white cop,
wouldn’t he?”

           
“Maybe so,” I said, smiling back.

           
Mary said, “Jennifer’s staying home
from school today, I phoned the school and they know about it.
Tom, why don’t you stay and have lunch with us?”

           
“Let me take you both
out
to
lunch.”

           
Mary had to drape herself in cameras
before we left, which used to annoy me toward the end of our marriage but which
I now am becoming indulgent about again, as I had been when first we’d met.
Mary, out of
East St.
Louis
, had come to
New York
originally to be a photographer, having won
some awards and sold some pictures at the local or regional level. When I first
met her, at a magazine’s Christmas party, she was making a precarious living
doing freelance research for everybody and anybody: museums, book illustrators,
ad agencies. She would root around in libraries and morgues and find you just
the right daguerreotype to go with your pantyhose ad, or the eleven specific
paintings ripping off (or “homaging”) such-and-such a Rembrandt, or clear
photos of every kind of European tram at the turn of the century, or whatever
you want. Meantime, she was taking millions of pictures of her own, submitting
them everywhere, looking for an agent, and hoping for the best.

           
Which never came.
We married, we had the kids, she continued the research work to supplement my
income, and she went on taking pictures, but very few have been published.

           
The problem is
,
she doesn’t have a unique eye. Although she’s always surrounded herself with
hung copies of Diane Arbus photos, for instance, she herself has a much softer,
more sympathetic view of the world, and could never look through her lens as dispassionately
as Arbus. On the other hand, she has too much sophistication and selfawareness
to go for “pretty” pictures, calendar art, so her work is stuck somewhere in
the middle: too knowing to be sentimental, too gentle to be striking.

           
It used to bother me that she
couldn’t go anywhere without the cameras, because I knew she was just kidding
herself and wasting her time, but now that we’re apart she’s no longer my
problem, and I can see photography as merely Mary’s hobby. (If Mary herself
ever heard me use the word “hobby” in that context, she would take a gun and
shoot me. No fooling.)

           
So, with pauses for Mary to take
pictures of interesting gutter-rubbish and amusing company names on truck
sides, we walked down into the Village and had cheeseburgers in a joint where
we could watch the trucks thunder down
Seventh Avenue
and I could have a bloody Mary. My Mary had coffee, and Jennifer had iced tea.
The waitress stared at her, stared at January outside the window, and said,
“Iced
tea?”

           
“The cheeseburger’s hot,” Jennifer
pointed out. “And my father’s bloody Mary is cold.”

           
By the time lunch was over and we’d
walked back up to
17th
Street
Jennifer had
sufficiently rewritten history in her own mind as to believe she’d never
actually lost her cool through the whole experience. That belief was by now the
most important part of it for her, much more important than the lost
dollar-eighty or the capturing of the punks that did it. When, as we turned off
Seventh Avenue
, she said, “I figured, just so
they
didn’t panic, I was probably okay,” I knew the healing process was well under
way. What a terrific kid; tough and hip, like her old man.

           
Mary invited me upstairs, but I said
I had things to do. Jennifer said, “Thanks for coming down.”

           
“Hey,” I said, “what’s a father for?
Don’t answer that.” We kissed, and she said, “
You're
okay.”

           
“Here’s looking at
you
, kid.”

           
Mary kissed my cheek and looked
deeply in my eyes and I came back uptown where Jack Rosenfarb’s voice greeted
me on the answering machine, saying, “Tom, please call me. Got your letter,
thought I had an exclusive on this. Give me a ring as soon as you can.” The
unsettled sound in his voice was music to my ears.

           
So I gave him a ring and he said,
“Tom, you’re not putting me in a bid situation, are you?”

           
“Of course not,” I said. There is
nothing I would love more than to have two heavyweight publishers bidding for
my idea, but since I can’t figure out how to arrange such a scenario I might as
well claim the high moral principle: “I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

           
“Well, what’s with this ‘preliminary
discussion’?” He sounded actually aggrieved. “At lunch, you said I was the only
one you were talking to.”

           
“That’s true,” I said. “It was true
last week, but you really didn’t sound that enthusiastic, Jack, not at lunch
and not on the phone Monday. You know, talking about my track record and all
that. And the time factor is—”

           
“Tom, I was enthusiastic! But I had
to be sure the company would back me up. Tom, you don’t know what an editor has
to go through, they second-guess my judgment all the
time,
I could wind up with egg on my face, trouble with— Well. You don’t want to know
my problems,” he said accurately.

           
“Jack,” I said, “I’m sorry if you
feel I’ve behaved in an underhanded way or anything like that. The instant I
spoke to another—”

           
“You told me about it, I know that,
I know that. Just between you and me, who are you talking to?”

           
If I were to answer
Hubert Van
Driin
, Jack might merely laugh and hang up, so I said, “I probably
shouldn’t say, Jack. I haven’t told him your name either, but I’ve been just as
upfront with—”

           
“I know you, Tom,” he said
hurriedly, “you don’t have to tell me all that, you’re an honorable fellow, I
know that.
All right.
You want this thing to move
fast, I don’t blame you for that, so the instant I got your letter I took it to
Wilson
, and
he
took it to Bourke, and
assuming we can work out the money, we’re interested.”

           
“Interested?”

           
“We want to do the book!”

           
That was so terrific I just blurted
out the first thing that came into my mind:
‘’That’s
terrific!”

           
“Yeah,” he said, a bit sourly. They
hate to be rushed, editors, they’re cowlike in several ways, including being my
source of milk. Anyway, he said, “All we have to do is come to a meeting of
minds about the money.”

           
“I’ll call Annie,” I said, “and have
her call you.”

           
“Good. But one thing, about this
other house you were talking to. Tom, I have to tell you, we won’t get into a
bidding war, and that’s flat.”

           
Oh, yes, you would, I thought
,
if I only knew how to set one up. “Don’t worry, Jack,” I
told him. “As of this minute, they’re out.”

           
We exchanged one or two ritual coins
of mutual esteem, and then I phoned Annie, who was in the office and taking
calls. “Did you phone me?” she demanded, her ancient voice querulous and short-tempered.

           
“I’m phoning you
now
,” I
said.

           
“In the last day
or two.
And not leave any message.”
“Me, Annie?
I know how you feel about that.”