Ithaca (4 page)

Unfortunately for him, neither woman sees things exactly the way he would like them to. Julia doesn’t seem ready to fully trust him yet and Mandy doesn’t seem ready to let go. In the past he would have been able to leave Mandy without too much trouble, but this time around he is finding it unusually difficult to break up – possibly because his view of relationships has changed and he has begun to gain a measure of understanding of what it means to be denied the opportunity of being with someone you want to be with. Or it might simply have to do with growing older and being less able to deal with the fallout of a breakup?

How he thinks he can sort out that situation and everything else about his miserable life by hanging out in a restaurant in Thimphu watching a dancing policeman, he does not know. At least back in London he could fill every waking moment with work, prevent himself from thinking too much. He doesn’t have that option now: he has hoped for so much from this holiday that he has even left his BlackBerry behind. The waitress brings him the bill, he pays, is rewarded with a smile that seems genuine enough (Mandy says most wait staff fake it), but it only serves to deepen his anxiety and ill humour. He remembers a Finnish editor friend of his, Kaisa, telling him at a drunken Frankfurt dinner several years ago, after he had been moaning on about a particularly
bad breakup, to embrace his misfortune because, as they said back in her country, “Celebrate the bad times for they won’t remain bad forever, be wary of the good times for they will end.” But he is not a fucking Finn, what do they know anyway, don’t they all kill themselves regularly, or is that a Danish trait? No matter, a pox on all nuggets of grandmother’s wisdom!

His annoyance with himself grows.
What the hell am I doing here?
I have no desire to see the sights, I know no one who might be able to divert me from my troubles, and I doubt that there is even a decent bar I can drown my sorrows in. He turns decisive, thinks there is no point in making himself more miserable than he deserves to be – he will just take an earlier flight home. He will not tell anyone he has slunk back to London a day after he got to Thimphu, spending more time travelling than he actually spent at his destination! He remembers a self-important academic telling him at a company bash that the truest sign that you had made it was when you spent more time travelling to and from a destination than the amount of time you had actually spent there (he had just returned from a conference in Melbourne). He had thought that the professor was full of shit then, and now that he is about to put his theory into practice he finds no reason to revise his opinion. He asks the waitress for directions to the nearest travel agency and is told that it will be probably be closed for the day. If he is going to be stuck here for another night, the least he can do is get himself some decent food. He enquires where the Swiss Bakery is; TripAdvisor says it makes decent sandwiches and patties – better to get
something that he finds edible rather than face the prospect of eating ema datse in the hotel restaurant – he had found the fiery national dish of chilies and cheese too hot to handle the first and only time he had tried it.

At this hour of the evening Norzin Lam is moderately busy – Thimphu’s version of rush hour. As he threads his way through the crowd of locals and the occasional tourist he thinks, not for the first time, that the Bhutanese are an exceptionally attractive people – their natural good looks are accentuated by the national costume most wear, the men in wraparound ghos and knee-length stockings, and the women in full length kiras, garments as effective as saris and kaftans in hiding physical infelicities. As he walks along his mood gradually begins to improve, it’s hard to keep glowering when almost everyone looks you in the eye with a smile. A Maruti van screeches by, a pack of stray dogs angles across the street unmindful of traffic or pedestrians, and up ahead a shimmer of Buddhist monks lights up the gloom in maroon and crimson robes. Most of the business establishments have shut for the day, but he spots what looks like a bookshop and darts in to see if he can find any books by local talent. To his disappointment, the selection is poor – eccentric is probably a better word for it – with an unusually large quantity of Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
sharing space with a clutch of Indian novels and a rather battered paperback of
The War of Angels
.

The novel spent two years on the bestseller lists, and ended up selling six million copies in various Litmus editions. The company made several million pounds more from the sale of foreign rights, and the movie tie-ins brought waves of new
fans to the Seppi brand. The studio was getting impatient for the fourth book, as was everybody else who had a stake in the author, but now, unexpectedly, there was a problem. Seppi, who had so far delivered a book a year, exactly on schedule, had overshot his deadline for Book 4,
Angels Falling
, by six months. Despite repeated reminders, Zach had no word about when he could expect to receive the manuscript. Gabrijela and he talked daily about the situation. The
Angels Falling
hardcover was their biggest autumn release, but there was only so much pressure they could bring to bear on their most important author. Moreover, they could not ignore the fact that Seppi had been a model author thus far, especially when it came to meeting deadlines – he remembers Gabrijela’s telling him about an author at her previous company who had overshot his deadline by seventeen years. They had finally decided to make one last concerted effort, before giving up, to publish the novel on schedule – marketing, publicity, and sales commitments had been locked in almost nine months earlier, and if an author as big as Seppi defaulted everyone’s year would be affected. Zach was told by Gabrijela to go to Toronto to reason with his star author. This was easier said than done.

Great novelists are seen to best effect on the page, but in our time they are expected to be equally adept at performing and enjoying themselves onstage. Most are pretty awful when it comes to public performances or interacting with the media or their fans, but in the relentless, marketing- and publicity-driven business that twenty-first-century publishing has become, no one is spared. Massimo Seppi was no
Dylan Thomas; his was not an inspiring stage or media presence. They had shipped him to a few festivals and bookstore readings when the first two
Angels
books were published, but none of them was a success and Seppi was miserable. When his star began to rise, he told Litmus firmly that his publicity effort would be limited to one interview apiece for newspapers, radio, TV, and the company’s microsite devoted to him. In common with some of the biggest authors on the planet, as his image waxed and grew gigantic, Seppi became reclusive to the point of near invisibility. As an unknown literary author his anonymity had been guaranteed; after his rise to fame he ensured it was.

Zach had met with Seppi fairly frequently during the publication of the first two books of the quartet, but he had seen him only twice since
War of Angels
was published. This was something he regretted; in his years as an editor, one of the things he had liked the most about the job was the time he spent with his authors, those brilliant, fragile, unpredictable people, each of them a character in his or her own right. Some became close friends, he’d had a destructive relationship with one of them, there were others to whom he was nothing more than a professional associate, and there were those with whom the connection was even more tenuous, mainly overseas authors or those he had published but once. But he missed those days – he edited only a couple of authors now, and it bothered him that he had so little to do with Litmus’s most famous author and the very first author he had published. This was partly to do with the fact that Seppi lived abroad, partly because he published Seppi in
translation and therefore passed on all his editorial suggestions to the translator, who then discussed them with the author, and partly because since he became publisher the constraints on his time had grown. For some time now Seppi and he had communicated mainly by e-mail and over the past year and a half even that connection was intermittent, with the translator, a woman named Caryn Bianchi, taking over much of the correspondence. His relationship with Caryn had grown strained after she had begun acting as Seppi’s agent and discovered that her author had signed over all rights in the quartet to Litmus; it had got downright nasty after Litmus rebuffed her every attempt to pry rights free, or at least increase royalties. Finally, Seppi himself had had to intervene to patch things up.

Now she was getting her own back. Zach had spent weeks trying to get Caryn to arrange a meeting with his author, and was on the point of giving up when his phone rang one day and Seppi asked him politely whether he could fly to Toronto for a meeting next week.

Unlike the last two meetings, which had taken place in Seppi’s house, this time they were to meet in a coffee shop in Little Italy. When he got there he found that Seppi and his translator had already arrived. He hurried over to their table, disbelieving of what he saw. Gone was the neat spare man in chinos and blue work shirt he had met barely two years ago. In his place was a bloated figure, bald and pasty-faced, and very obviously ill.

“My God, what happened to you? I had no idea –”

“It’s nothing … I’ve just been a little ill,” Seppi said.

“With what –” Zach began.

But Seppi shrugged off his concern, turning to his translator. “You’ve met Caryn, yes?”

“I haven’t actually but we’ve been corresponding.”

Zach had paid no attention to the woman who sat at the table but now he turned his attention to her. Even if he hadn’t been feuding with her, he would have been put off by the scowl on her face and the deeply inset eyes, and thin lips that seemed to be set in a permanent expression of disapproval. He turned back to Seppi, and asked again after his health. With obvious reluctance Seppi told him about the pancreatic cancer that was discovered too late to respond effectively to treatment. Neither his translator nor he was willing to say anything more about his illness, and as the effete waiter brought them their cappuccinos the conversation moved to the fourth book. He could not concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time, Seppi said, and it was therefore taking him longer than expected.

“You shouldn’t bug him so much, he’s a dying man – you publishers are all alike,” the translator cut in unexpectedly. Seppi silenced her with a glance and said simply, “You’ll get the book by Christmas.” Seppi hadn’t touched his cappuccino and looked exhausted. Zach felt deeply sorry to be putting pressure on someone who was so obviously ill. The table fell silent until Seppi suddenly said, “Zach, tell me about your favourite meal.” This was unexpected; their conversations had never been about anything but professional matters. Seppi wasn’t an author he would count as a friend exactly, so he fumbled around for a reply. He remembered a
meal at Nobu with an especially high-powered Egyptian publisher with expensive dining habits, and had begun talking about the exquisite unagi he’d eaten there when Seppi had interrupted, looking puzzled: “You’re Japanese?”

“Umm, no, sorry – I don’t understand.”

“I was just wondering what your favourite food was, from your growing years, your childhood?”

“Ah …”

The thought rose in his mind of his grandmother in Kanyakumari making puttu, steamed and fragrant, that he would dissolve in coconut milk or meat stew; he hadn’t eaten it in three decades but the taste was rich and warm in his mouth.

Before he could reply, Seppi had begun to speak again, almost to himself. “In Palermo,” he said, “the bay lies before the shore like a discus hand-painted by the gods, in blues so shimmering and mysterious the eye cannot quite comprehend them. It is so inviting that you have no option but to jump in, though you have to be careful where you swim, there is so much seaweed in the water. It held no terrors for us, though, my friend Luigi and I grew up swimming in that bay.

“Hours and hours of just swimming, and diving and calling out to the beautiful girls in the tourist boats who would smile and wave out to us, two skinny ten-year-olds who were having so much fun. When we’d had enough we would head back to shore and go in search of street vendors serving our favourite food, babbaluci. For just a few lira we would get a big helping of snails marinated in olive oil, parsley, and garlic, fried in a pan that hadn’t been cleaned for a few centuries,
giving everything a rich flavour. The vendor would tear off a sheet of the previous day’s
Giornale di Sicilia
, twist it into a funnel, and pour the smoking hot snack into it and hand it to us, and we would wander off to explore the evening’s delights crunching the fat, juicy, perfectly cooked snails between our teeth, letting that glorious taste slide down our throats.”

He fell silent, caught up in the sensuousness of his remembering eye, his best memories his last defence against dying.

You might publish a hundred writers, a thousand, but it is the few who complete you as an editor, Zach thinks, as he turns the pages of the worn paperback in the cluttered Thimphu bookshop with affection and sadness.