Loonglow (6 page)

“There, you see?” said Louey, smiling. “Exactly what you wanted.”

Louey slept fitfully, the memories pouring over her like brandy on a willing tongue, lye on an open wound. They would walk down the street, the city glowing so brightly in the afternoon sun it was like being let in on a wondrous secret. Mia would slip a hand into hers, lighting her from within. Louey would start some silly complicated story, only to glance over and find Mia helplessly stifling laughter. “I'm trying to
tell
you,” she'd say, exasperated, but Mia's shoulders would be shaking and soon it would be hopeless; they'd be laughing so hard they couldn't stop—and at what?

Some nights she dreamt so vividly of Mia that for a second, just before she woke, she was filled with such happiness she thought she might laugh out loud. Then the truth would sink in, agonizing.

Weekends in the park, people would smile at them, and Louey would grin back, elated. How could people she would never know, how could strangers smiling at her, make her so happy? It was as if she were part of some magical universe, filled with souls who dared to show their feelings no matter what the consequences. And at her side was Mia, her bracing accomplice: able to grasp life by the shoulders with both hands, shock delight out of strangers, shake joy from the simplest pleasures.

And the world was filled with other women just like them. Louey remembered when she'd first discovered it: when the most unlikely candidates smiled at them in recognition and delight, Louey nearly stared back in amazement. How lucky she was to be shown this secret, to find people she was bound to everywhere she turned.

I
am
lucky, Louey thought. By the time sleep finally overtook her, she had nearly managed to remember why that was.

Clay rose at nine and put on the suit his latest stepmother had given him as a reward for creating what he suspected was the longest book the world had ever known. In two hours he was going to walk down to the office of the latest publisher his father had cleared of libel and plop 512 manuscript pages on the desk of some thin-lipped editor who chain-smoked and had plenty of untouched gray in his long, stringy hair. His father seemed to feel his friendship with the company's upper management guaranteed acceptance of Clay's work, but Clay suspected only trouble would result from this connection. No editor worth his stripes could bear to have his projects pushed on him by company counsel, that seemed clear.

“Finish the damn thing yet?” He should never have told his uncle he'd started writing; that had been his first mistake. Ever since beginning the project, he'd been hounded weekly by a guardian clearly overwhelmed to see Clay focusing on something concrete. Clay had known better than to reveal his book's subject to his uncle, but obviously he'd been less clear-sighted in taking Wynn's word that he wouldn't mention the project to Clay's father.

“What are you waiting for, my old age, boy?” No sooner had Clay sat with the fat pile of manuscript pages in front of him, rifling through it with some bewilderment that all of this had come from him, written and rewritten in the space of two years, than the phone rang and his father's aggressively complacent voice barged into his ear. Instantly Clay knew Wynn had betrayed him. A moment later he learned that his father had fulfilled his worst fears and arranged for an appointment with a midtown publisher the very next week.

“So it's all set, then,” said his father.

Clay had sat for seven days with the completed manuscript in front of him, unable to form any concrete plans as to his next move. “Wynn,” he'd nearly crowed the night his uncle called, “I finished it!” For days he had to stop himself from going back and tampering with what he'd written; the thought that it was actually done was unfathomable, somehow terrifying. Nor had a life of idleness prepared him for the richness and intensity that a week of freedom from work showed him. Now, after two year of inexplicable literary endeavor, he discovered that leisure was no burden but a precious gift, more wonderful than he'd had any reason to expect. That he could walk onto the street in the middle of the afternoon, letting the sun beat down on his face without a single obligation to meet, filled him with an elation that made him nearly dizzy. No wonder people had envied his liberty—he had scarcely understood why before his project had taken it from him.

“Maybe this should be my next topic,” he considered: the value of losing one's freedom in order to appreciate its true worth. He could write a play in which children were sent to camp only to find themselves in a nightmare of deprivation. Forced to use their own resources to escape imprisonment, they could ultimately discover that their parents had created the camp as a means to enrich their appreciation of life's most precious gifts. (Then they could kill and eat their parents.) At least his father would have no way of promoting a play; that alone was reason enough to consider the idea.

Clay wondered how long this newfound freedom would have the power to delight him. On the other hand, he might not have it for long. At best, this appointment would mean the beginning of extended servitude to a publisher; more likely, it would be the first in an endless string of discouragements.

As the hour of the interview approached, an unfamiliar feeling of anxiety overtook him. He'd never before been judged by a complete stranger, he realized; what if the man treated him with utter contempt, ripping him to shreds with scorn? Who did Clay think he was—why had he ever thought he could publish a book? The sight of his manuscript suddenly provoked a sensation of acute nausea. Had he wasted two years of his life on a delusion of his own talent, soon to be unveiled as the sham it was? Editors looked at hundreds of books and manuscripts a year, maybe even thousands. What made him think this one would care about what he had to say?

By the time ten-thirty approached, Clay was nearly green with revulsion and fear. If he hadn't been so out of practice drinking he would have taken some alcohol to steady his nerves, but the past two years had been so dry as to lower his once limitless tolerance to that of a baby. He tried to play the piano, with pitiful results. If only he smoked: anything to take his mind off what he was about to learn. He should have thought to go running; now it was too late, unless he wanted to try to postpone the interview. Now
there
was an idea—

The phone rang. Clay picked it up on the first ring, exhaling shakily into the receiver. A relieved voice asked if he was Clayton Lee, and if so, could he possibly reschedule the appointment, as his potential editor had suddenly been called to court? Clay wrote the date and time upon his table, assuring the immensely apologetic voice on the line that it was not the slightest bit inconvenient for him to reschedule; quite the contrary. He suggested canceling the appointment altogether, but the young woman assured him that this was the last thought he should be entertaining.

A moment later, Clay was left listening to a dial tone, once again alone. He hung up, feeling as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Then he went into the bathroom and threw up.

“On the other hand,” said Todd (Clay's twelfth or hundredth editor so far), “you might try Bjorn Torovil at Tendon & Leeds. His list is small, but this just might appeal.”

Clay rose and shook the young man's hand, his head still spinning. You wouldn't mind, he thought, if I don't follow your suggestion for a year or so? Some months of taking in the cream of publishing had left him slightly dazed; whenever he tried keeping straight which pieces of advice had come from whom, which editor came with which house, he had to stop and lie down. The past few months he'd gotten such conflicting (and equally assured) advice, he'd passed confusion and moved on to numb paralysis.

“Make it better.”

That had been the recommendation of the publisher his father had procured for him, though it had taken Clay over an hour to receive it. By the time Clay was ushered into the cavernous office where a tall, beady-eyed man sat (immersed in what seemed to be a terminal telephone conversation), Clay's nerves had settled from anxiety to the beginnings of mild irritation. The man motioned him to sit, barely looking up, then spent the next forty minutes swiveling in his chair and arguing over the telephone. “Fire the asshole,” he said twice, glaring at Clay as if he were responsible for the asshole's presence on the planet. “I hear this bullshit every day. Who bought that piece of shit?”

Clay was beginning to wonder if he was up to the honor of being published by such a company when the man uttered an abrupt “Dump it!” and hung up, turning to Clay as if he were a delinquent employee about to be terminated. Clay met his gaze evenly.

“This crap”—the publisher motioned to the pile of Clay's manuscript, which his secretary had placed before him at one point in the conversation. “Make it better. Then we'll talk.”

Clay cleared his throat. “Is there anything in particular you'd like to see me do?”

“Fix it, fix it, for Christ sake just do it, I don't have time to tell you how to do your job!” The man fastened a burning eye on Clay. “You're wasting my time.”

By all means, Clay thought, unfolding his hands in his lap, let's have none of that. “You have no particular suggestions?” he tried. “Recommendations or …” The man's attention was now focused on a memo his secretary had placed in front of him, Clay noticed. He sighed, getting to his feet. “Well, sir,” he said, astonished by the brevity of the actual exchange. “Thanks for all your time.”

The other man squinted up at Clay as if his tone had been sarcastic. “Shit,” he said. “You don't look a thing like your father. Some milkman's bastard, probably.”

“That's entirely possible,” Clay answered, his eyes widening. “By all means share that theory with my father the next time you have a free moment before sentencing.” Resisting additional suggestions that crossed his mind, he left the office in a daze.

“Will you hold for Rick Miner?” Clay was surprised to find himself on the other end of a call from the editor two days later. Miner came on the line, barked someone's name, then took his leave with an economy of grace that left Clay short of breath. He hung up the phone and scrambled to write down the editor's name and number, his head suddenly light on his shoulders.

In no time at all, Clay found himself thrown in the midst of a network of editors who represented every kind of publisher imaginable, each happy to augment the list of future possibilities. First on the list was Rowena Merle, a plain-faced, possibly anemic woman of indeterminate age. Rowena wandered out to greet Clay dreamily and in the hour that followed barely allowed Clay the chance to utter two sentences in succession. “Of course I have so many wonderful authors I don't remotely have time to
edit
them, for heaven's sake,” she murmured. “Fortunately, I'm able to give my assistant the opportunity to line edit—it's all I can do to return my
phone
calls most days …” This did not come as much of a surprise to Clay, who was not fully convinced that she knew the workings of most of her office furniture, much less the name of any living soul beside herself (including his).

After twenty minutes, Clay surrendered to the rolling waves of speech, waiting for the flow to abate before he tried voicing any thoughts accumulated in the interim. Another forty-five minutes confirmed that even utter silence on his part was not enough to effect such a pause.

The editor Rowena recommended turned out to be a starry-eyed young gentleman with the well-rounded personality of a cartoon character (Brenda Starr, Clay decided). Judd Esterhaus was initially too dazzled by Clay's appearance to keep himself from staring (though, to his credit, he did blush becomingly as if to acknowledge this fact). Yet once he had regained his composure, he began to grill Clay about the personal motivation behind writing the book with a thoroughness Clay imagined would have served him well in the SS. Much as Clay tried to steer him to practical questions, Judd seemed reluctant to discuss any of the particulars of the book itself—what he thought its thesis about love and greatness really meant, or how he saw its chance of publication—refusing to believe that Clay couldn't provide more satisfying information as to how much of the book was based on personal experience, his or that of anyone he knew. “Don't you have some dirt?” he said at one point, piteously.

Judd's choice for him was a less waif-like but equally alarming six-foot-four boy editor whose collection of white teeth and doughy, plump cheeks gave him the appearance of an eight-year-old who'd been subjected to one too many hormone treatments. Clay found the young man's tone of voice so inexplicably intimate he was only able to concentrate on snippets of the editor's dialogue. “Just
entre nous
,” the giant said (Clay lost track somewhere in the middle of a rococo discussion about which publishers were sleeping with the same bestselling author).

The next few editors went by in somewhat of a blur. There was a woman named Missy whose appealingly snide assistant mentioned to Clay (just before showing him into the office) that she defined the phrase “editor from the waist down.” Shaking Missy's hand, he thought of asking her to spare his tender heart, but she seemed so ill at ease with the basics of human interaction he suspected she had difficulty removing her clothes in total privacy, much less in front of company. Next came a stiff-backed woman who ushered a tearful assistant from her office, patted the bun imprisoning her lusterless dark hair and then brought Clay inside. He seated himself in a chair across from her; yet when she fixed a smile on him, he found himself unable to concentrate on anything but the certainty that she was waiting for the perfect chance to sink her teeth into his flesh. After her came Genie, a tall, anorexic woman who extended a limp, bony hand, looked down to tuck in what appeared to be a boy's undershirt, and then surveyed her spotless office as if attempting to detect an overlooked speck of dust or excess of literature. As Clay spoke about his central theory (“… we project our deepest fantasies on people we think we love, not realizing that the way they make us feel, that power to do anything, doesn't come from them at all”), she seemed to be absorbed in something other than his words. Only when she stopped to ask him, “Who
is
J. D. Salinger?” did he know for certain she was listening.