Foul Matter Part 4

Bobby gave him one of those exaggerated who-me? shrugs.

Then Clive said, "How in h.e.l.l do you think we could trust Danny Zito, anyway? He's obviously the biggest snitch around. If he'd take on the Bransoni family, why do you think he'd keep quiet over a deal with us?"

Bobby slowly shook his head. "Bransoni didn't promise him a book contract. Only the other kind." Bobby found this a real howl. When he'd finished laughing, he said, "Come on, Clivey. Just do it."

Clive left Bobby's office, wishing people would stop f.u.c.king calling him that.

EIGHT.

Clive was back at his desk again, looking (again) at the Zito book.

Fallguy. Clive remembered the book proposal: one page, outline form.

It had been Danny's contention that the best way to introduce the reader to the life of a Mafia hit man was to use the format of a twelve-step program.

Admit to being helpless in the face of the Bransoni family.

Bobby had (and no wonder) thought Danny Zito was kidding and gulped back laughter all the way down the page until he got hiccups.

Clive wasn't so sure. Danny Zito could be as inscrutable as the Las Vegas Luxor. He had a poker face that could clean out the casino at Caesars Palace. Danny had said he couldn't figure out the approach his book should take: should it be the twelve-step program offered in the b.l.o.o.d.y garb of the Bransoni family? Or the Bransoni family reported upon in the guise of the twelve steps?

Danny and Bobby had stayed closeted for two hours in Bobby's office discussing this.

The book was insane, but wait a minute-no one, reviewer or critic, had been able to work out whether this was true or whether it was a h.e.l.l of a send-up both of the Bransonis, all of the twelve-step programs that had wound their way into everything people did, and, therefore, satire. Clive personally thought it more evidence of Danny's ego, total lack of talent, and ignorance of everything except what he did best: kill people.

But most of the celebrity books put out there you could say the same thing about, the worst of them often becoming instant best-sellers. Some of these success stories Bobby had given the go-ahead to. And one or two he'd told to get lost; ones that had appeared at first to be surefire hits had, in the end, gotten lost.

Clive sat staring at the jacket. By all that was right and holy, Peter Genero should have been the editor to handle this book. Genero was the celebrity maven, "celebrity" here including hit men, political a.s.sa.s.sins, tennis players, serial rapists, anyone who'd ever lived in L.A., leaders of coups, offsh.o.r.e banking, anybody with a scam or a dirty story to tell. These author manques were the ones who thought they were already wonderful enough and didn't need to write their own books.

This was right up Peter Genero's street, this job. But Genero was probably busy shoveling lunches into the mouths of his celebrity "projects," people who, having become recently famous, a.s.sumed what they should do is write a book about it. About their recent fame.

Clive detested Genero. It was not in the same way that he hated Tom Kidd. Even though he wished Tom would just vanish, he had a lot of respect for him, envied him for still keeping alive the old fire of publishing. Kidd was in his book-tiered office every day, sometimes on weekends, early morning until darkness settled. Peter, on the other hand, was hardly ever in. He conducted his editorial commitments-his projects-from an Upper East Side apartment or a spread in Great Neck. He clearly felt he was too prime time to be handcuffed to a desk, to inhabit anything that smacked of a nine-to-five working world.

He shared his luxury real estate with a brace of wolfhounds that he enjoyed dragging around Central Park and into his office when he did come in, and sometimes to Petrossian, where he liked to lunch when he had a "project" to manipulate.

Clive used to wonder how Genero had pulled the wool over Bobby's eyes. Then one day he realized Peter hadn't. Bobby had him doing exactly what Peter was good at, what he was fabulously good at (Clive had to admit), and that was to curry and nurture these instant celebrities until they swelled up like balloons to float over Central Park. They would then do what Peter Genero wanted them to do: not get drunk as a skunk before appearing on the Larry King show; not hire PR people and trumpet their books before Mackenzie-Haack had set its own show in motion; and most important, not attempt to write their own books.

There wasn't one amongst them who wasn't convinced he could write War and Peace over the weekend. When Peter was working on selling his celebrity-writers on how much Mackenzie-Haack valued them, how absolutely great it considered them, he was very careful never to say that their greatness encompa.s.sed any kind of talent for writing. "What we want from you is your story. You had to live it, why should you have to write it? Leave the writing to the hacks! (Toss back that third martini, baby.) It's all they're good for!"

Almost always, this worked. When it didn't, another of Genero's gambits-reserved for those hard-core budding Thomas Manns that he couldn't convince before dessert-was to go along with them: absolutely! If you want to write the book yourself, that's great! Let me have a chapter by Monday because, you know, we're bound by this ridiculous production schedule. By Monday, the Thomas Manns would call up and tell him he was right and to get one of the hacks to do the actual s.h.i.t work; they had more important things to do.

Because there was no doubt about it. Writing was s.h.i.t work.

Yes, Peter Genero was good at what he did.

Clive had stared at the dust jacket long enough to commit it to memory for all time. What he should have done was walk into Bobby's office and tender his resignation.

What he did do was look at the Rolodex card and pick up the phone.

NINE.

Swill's was an ordinary bar that had achieved cafe status (if such is an achievement) by the positioning of three or four metal tables outside that, in summer, were sometimes occupied by tourists who thought they were in the Village. The regulars in Swill's disdained, even complained about the tables as being at odds with the ambience inside. They especially detested the espresso machine, brought into play largely for the customers sitting outside. As for ambience, the owner (named Jimmy Longjeans) said he no longer believed that less is more, having had to deal with the regulars all of these years, where less was indeed less.

Swill's was a stripped-down, workingman's bar whose decor consisted of a blaze of beer ads like ships' insignia over the long mirror behind the bar. The bar itself had a copper top and was both beautiful and unusual. There was nothing else that garnered comment, the rest of the room being filled with ordinary wooden booths and tables and mismatched chairs that had never intended to match and were consequently thought to be chic.

This was Chelsea, not the Village. But then Ned thought Greenwich Village wasn't even the Village anymore. Thirty, forty years ago you could have drowned in a sea of writing talk in the old Greenwich Village. MacDougal Street. Greene. Houston. Swill's was patronized by a number of novelists and poets, a few painters, and the unknown person who played "A Garden in the Rain." Swill's still had a fifties-style jukebox, containing a wealth of forties- and fifties-style singers. Johnnie Ray was the star performer here, at least to the writer who played "Cry" over and over again.

Swill's had its regulars, but so does any bar that keeps its doors open for five minutes every day. It had nothing to do with loyalty, only with habit. Still, the ones who had been coming there for years liked to complain about the ones who hadn't. Lately, or over the past year or so, men wearing suits and carrying briefcases had drifted in after five o'clock, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by women wearing suits and carrying briefcases. The regulars didn't know who they were or why they were there, as if the place were off-limits unless you had a personal invitation from Jimmy Longjeans, who didn't care anyway as long as you had the money up front.

Somehow, word had gotten around that Saul Prouil had won all of these awards for one book and was possibly the only writer who ever lived to do so. This was why the table in the window at the front was known as Saul's table, and, by virtue of being both a writer and his friend, Ned's table, and by further extension, Sally's. Sally worked at Mackenzie-Haack, a.s.sistant to Ned's editor. But they had not met there, oddly. Saul and Ned and Sally had met in the little park when a page of Ned's ma.n.u.script had kited away in a stiff wind, and Sally, walking toward them, had made the most acrobatic jump they'd ever witnessed and caught it.

Every once in a while someone would shamble up to the table with a copy of the nine-year-old book and a request that Saul sign it. Most of these people had never gotten through an entire book in their lives and for the most part, such intellectualism was looked upon with deep suspicion. But having this award-winning writer in their bar, one in whom they had a proprietary interest, well, that was different. Saul had thus achieved a kind of Swillian celebrity.

There were the other writers, but none of them well known and most of them as yet unpublished, at least in book form. Three of these were poets: b. w. brill (who disdained a capitalized name, in the fashion of e. e. c.u.mmings, whom he resembled not at all), Alison Andersen, and John Laughlin. b. w. brill had actually published a book of his own and won a lesser known award. Before the prize he had been a pack-a-day Camel smoker. Now he smoked a pipe and wore corduroy jackets with leather elbows. The other two, Andersen and Laughlin, had thus far published only in little magazines and anthologies. It was therefore left to b. w. brill to steer the poetry table in the right direction. They flocked together in the back like pigeons to annoy one another. They talked about Stanford and Iowa and Bread Loaf and Yaddo.

Ned was thinking of this when he saw b.w. waving his pipe in the air either by way of saying h.e.l.lo or gesturing for him to come to the poets' table. Ned preferred to interpret it as the first and waved back.

"Were you ever at Yaddo?" Ned asked the others.

"Me? No," said Saul.

Ned shrugged. "Neither was I. What's that other one?"

Sally said, "You mean Bread Loaf. That's in Vermont, isn't it?"

"It's not Bread Loaf; that's one of the writers' conferences. You can buy your way into those. I'm talking about the retreats, where you have to be invited. You have to apply. Depending on the circ.u.mstances, you could stay for one month or six. Yaddo is one."

"The MacDowell Colony," said Saul.

"That's it."

"I hate those places."

"Why?" asked Sally.

"Because we love to complain about not having enough time, or that we lack a proper writing environment. We don't want any more time, and any environment will do, if we're honest. Writing's just d.a.m.n hard. It can be torturous. I don't want to torture myself any more than is absolutely required. Besides, can you imagine having to sit down to dinner with thirty or forty other writers?"

"Is that what they do?" asked Sally.

"You're in your room all day until dinner. Your lunch is delivered to your door," said Ned. "It sounds like a great deal for someone who's broke. Room and board and quiet."

"Until dinner," said Saul.

"But you guys are always complaining about distractions and not having enough time," Sally said.

"Then we guys are lying. It's what I just said. Writers always lie about things like that. I mean, really, look at me; I live alone. I have plenty of time and a five-bedroom house and no one to tell me what to do-"

"Five bedrooms. h.e.l.l, start another retreat," said Ned.

"I probably have the ideal environment; so does Ned. So if we talk about distractions and too little time, we're just lying. Anyway, as to these retreats-so called, I mean-I can't see many writers getting much out of them. Writing is an antisocial act. Dinner with thirty is not it."

"You probably don't have to go to dinner."

"You do, if you want to eat. Anyway, I leave those places to brill back there."

Jamie Flynn, disheveled and staring eyed, as if she'd just got up in a place she had no claim on and was trying to discover where she was, made more money than all of them put together-and this was a poor comparison, since all of them put together were not even within shooting distance of Jamie's royalties. Jamie wrote genre fiction, every kind of genre-mystery, science fiction, horror-but, naturally, used a pseudonym from her treasure trove of pseudonyms. She always published two or three books a year, and one year had done four.

What staggered Jamie was that Saul could write and write and then shove the ma.n.u.scripts all in a drawer instead of shoving them across an editor's desk. Any publisher would grab a new book by Saul. And here he was, not making money at it (except for the royalties-meager, but still coming for The End of It) after ten years.

Saul had said, "I haven't finished one of those books, Jamie."

She snorted. "Put a period."

Saul had laughed and told her that was the best advice he'd ever been given. But he was sick, neurotic, decrepit, and he couldn't do this.

Jamie couldn't understand it. "You don't think an editor would notice, do you? Besides, who in h.e.l.l would ever actually have the almighty gall to 'edit' one of your books? What, you think a reviewer would figure out you never finished it? Don't make me laugh."

Jamie's view of writing was completely outer directed, reader directed. She never entertained the notion that writing had nothing to do with money. Ned had said this once and Jamie had gazed at him, eyes wide with shock. How could he say that? Was he nuts?

"Look at Saul."

"Saul has money."

"Whether he's got money or not," Ned had gone on, "do you think money would motivate him? Saul? And what about b. w. brill and the others?"

"They're poets, for G.o.d's sakes! Everyone knows you can't make money writing poetry. Unless you're famous for something else, unless you're a celebrity-poet, and how many of those are there? The only famous poet's mostly a dead poet."

"We're not talking about fame; we're talking about money."

"Funny how the two of them go together. 'Rich and famous,' it's a lock." Jamie drank her boilermaker. That's what she did these days, tossed back the whiskey in one gulp, then went for the beer.

Ned wondered: when was the last time he'd ever heard of boiler-makers? Had he ever seen anyone drink one except for Jamie? For all of her money talk, for all of her disdaining the past, Ned thought Jamie was mired in it. In old times. He suspected Jamie's considerable output masked a considerable loss, one she could no longer sustain. He often wondered what it was. The death of someone, of course. Father? Mother? It was hard to get Jamie to talk about her past.

It was always coming at you, thought Ned, forcing you down paths you would never otherwise have gone.

She went on: "And all of that 'writing-is-torture' stuff, Saul. I'm amazed you'd stoop that low."

Saul raised his beer in a sort of salute. "Jamie, I wish I had half your confidence."

She dropped her head in her hands, shook it. "Christ, this from a man who's won the Pen/Faulkner, the National Book Award, the New York Critics' Award, and blah blah blah." She lifted her head and looked at him. "Do you really expect me to believe you need my confidence?"

"No."

"Haven't you ever had writer's block?" Ned asked. "Even when you were starting out?"

"Why should I? Why should anybody? You can't be blocked if you just keep on writing words. Any words. People who get 'blocked' make the mistake of thinking they have to write good words. I look at words the way whoever wrote Field of Dreams looked at that d.a.m.ned baseball field. 'Write it, and they will come.' "

Ned said, "You don't seem to think there's anything hard about writing."

"Oh, I sure do," Jamie said, picking at the label of her beer bottle. "Page numbering, that's the hardest thing to do: number the f.u.c.king pages. This one I'm doing now. I wound up with two 198s. I'm just lucky the first 198 is the end of a chapter and there are only two lines on it. That means all I have to do is excise the two lines."

Saul had laughed. "For G.o.d's sakes, Jamie. If you put in the two lines in the first place, I'd think you'd consider them a little necessary."

"Oh, pul-eze. Don't pull that pompous every-word's-set-in-stone writing c.r.a.p with me. The only two lines I think are necessary are the first two lines of 'Cry.' "

And she'd trotted off to Swill's jukebox to play it again.

TEN.

Ned was sitting that morning on the flaking green bench, always the same bench, in the little park, watching people going off to their jobs in other parts of the city, hurrying down subway stairs, rushing to catch buses just pulling away, stopping at newsstands, hailing cabs, lurching in and out of delicatessens and Krispy Kreme with paper cups and sacks and cartons. He liked to watch all of this. There was so much preparation for something other than jobs, something to take up the slack between desk and work, something filling-newsprint, doughnuts. There had to be something to move a person from the fecund mysteries of sleep, through the harried showering and shaving and dressing, to the harsh elliptical light above the desk. Something had to cushion the blow of a job.

Especially on a Monday, and especially one that promised to be oppressive, the sky cold and gray. He was happy to sit in isolation here (sometimes wondering why the park got so little foot traffic) and watch all of this. He felt lucky not be to be part of it. Yet he understood the need for that buffer between waking and settling into work. He had his own cup of coffee, cooling beside him on the bench, and watching all of this early-morning hurry was itself a kind of shield between him and his writing.

Ned picked up the part of the ma.n.u.script he'd been carrying, got out a pencil, clicked the lead into place. He enjoyed that click of a lead pencil or pen; it sounded so obedient, granting him control.

Which of course he didn't have, for the click was all there was.

Instead of Paris and Nathalie's dilemma, he was thinking of Pittsburgh. Ned was born in Pittsburgh. He remembered so little about it, and this haunted him. How can a person live in a place for seventeen years and not remember it?

After half an hour of this, of thinking about Pittsburgh instead of proofreading his ma.n.u.script, he decided to go to Saul's house.

Saul came to the door wearing slippers (calfskin), a cardigan (cashmere), and smoking a cigar (Cuban). No matter what time of day, whenever Ned saw him, Saul always looked dressed for something-some expensive, exclusive place no one else knew about. It was as if he had a men's club in his mind. But Ned knew Saul never strove for effects; this was simply the way he'd been brought up.

"How about some coffee?" said Saul. "Go on into the living room; I'll bring it in."

His great-grandfather had been rich; his grandfather had taken that and made the family richer; his father had reshuffled the money and made himself the richest yet. Ned did not know how much money Saul had, but he knew it was plenty. Lawyers, accountants, money managers-they handled things. Ned doubted that Saul even knew what he was worth. In any event, all of that entrepreneurial magic had ended with Saul. He spoke of himself as the end of it. He spoke of this so often that he'd finally used the phrase as his book t.i.tle.

Ned had not sat down yet. He liked moving about the room, looking around. The house was so beautiful, the rooms so tactile with their moss-brown velvets and rain-washed silks, and the history so abundant-Ned could touch it and taste it, like the smooth ripe fruit in the porcelain bowl on the marble-topped commode. He stood looking at the portraits that hung above the fireplace and to the right of the mahogany butler's desk at which Saul sometimes sat and wrote, liking its position near one of the long windows that opened over the street and whose thin curtains were buffeted by summer winds. He could sit and look out, he said.

The portraits were of his grandfather and great-grandfather; a third portrait of his father, the smile he wore in the picture that hung between the windows was particularly chilly, only barely a smile. All of them looked equally serious, as if a scowl were the only way to get the job done.