Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 (4 page)

           
“Somebody’s been—
Well
, never mind. What can I do for you, Tom?”

           
I was glad it was one of her good
days; on the bad days she calls me Tim. Succinctly I described my book idea, my
negotiations with Jack, and the current situation. She listened, with
occasional grunts,
then
said, “I don’t get it. What
kinda book is this?”

           
I told her again. She said, ‘’Everybody’s
idle thoughts about Christmas.”

           
“Every
famous
body’s idle thoughts about Christmas.”

           
“If you give
me
one of those
books next Yuletide,” she said, “I’ll fling it in your face.”

           
“Annie, you inspire me.”

           
“As I understand the situation,” she
said, “you have now placed me in the position of agenting for the entire
western literary world, all at once.”

           
“Don’t forget the artists.”

           
“And
the
artists.
I’ll call Jack Rosenfarb and find out if he’s really fallen for
this one.”

           
“Thank you, Annie.”

           
“You’ll hear from me,” she said
vaguely, and hung up.

           
So the only question left is
,
what idea am I going to peddle to Hubert Van Driin?

           
SO here’s their opening offer, and
even as an opening offer it stinks.
Five thousand dollars on
signature, twenty thousand when I have commitments from five “individuals
mutually agreed to be prominent,” and another twenty-five thousand on August
first.
If I don’t have those five prominent noses by June first the deal
is off.

           
Out of this lavish fifty thou, I’m
supposed to pay all the contributors! (There’s an additional five thousand
they’ve agreed to pay for “research and secretarial” expenses, upon receipt of
receipts.) And, as Jack himself pointed out, I’m not running a charity
here,
I do want a little something for myself.

           
One good thing about Annie; she’s
involved.
When she saw Craigs insulting offer, she smiled thinly and decided to get
serious. Annie, who began in publishing as somebody’s secretary during the
Adams administration—the elder Adams—and who apparently in her youth screwed
most of the literate men on the Eastern Seaboard, has aged into a scrawny
bad-tempered old buzzard who knows everybody, loves to fight and has been known
to get blood from a stone simply by squeezing hard enough. What can be done,
Annie will do.

           
On the home front, Ginger is very up
and positive about
The Christmas Book
and is saying maybe we can take a
winter vacation after all. (Last year we did a week at a condominium on
St. Croix
, splitting the cost, but this year money
has been tighter for both of us.) Ginger’s eight-year- old daughter, Gretchen,
is also excited and is doing me watercolors of Christmas scenes “for the book.”
She’s a nice kid, Gretchen, and if it’s possible to say that an eight-year- old
is talented, Gretchen is probably talented along graphic arts lines—maybe
someday she’ll go to the High School of Art and Design—but I’m getting a little
tired of primitive Nativity scenes and Santa Claus getting out of taxis and all
this stuff. I hope and expect that boredom will set in soon— on her part, I’m
already bored—and save me.

           
Ginger is also being active on the
project, but in a more useful way. She’s copy editor at Trans-American Books, a
paperback house, and is a very good line editor; she’s rewritten my
solicitation letter—the one to be sent to prominent noses—and I have to admit
she was right with most of the changes she suggested.

           
For instance, she pointed out that
it wasn’t until the third paragraph that I got to the point of the letter,
asking for original material. “Until then,” she said, “it sounds like you’re
trying to sell them a copy of the book.” So now, with some necessary
adaptation, the third paragraph is the second and the second is the third.

           
Also, with Ginger’s help, I did a
variant letter aimed at photographers, illustrators and graphic artists.
(Other than Gretchen.)
I’m hoping they’ll be cheaper than
the writers.

           
The question is
,
when do I actually get to send out these letters?

           
A full week of negotiation, and I am
not entirely happy at the result, but Annie says it’s the best we can do, and
too late to try any other house this year, so this morning we said yes and Jack
Rosenfarb messengered to Annie’s office a letter of intent outlining the
agreement; that was so I could get started without waiting for contracts to be
drawn.

           
Anyway, the deal.
I get twenty-five thousand on signature, another twenty-five June first
(dependent on yesses from those five celebs), and the rest August first. The
full advance is on a sliding scale between seventy-five and one hundred
twenty-five thousand dollars, with sixty percent going to the contributors and
forty percent to me.

           
And, if the deal falls through, five
thousand of the first advance is mine anyway, to pay for my time and effort. So
no matter
what
happens, this idea has at least earned me five grand.

           
Annie, whose office is a janitor’s
closet on a low floor of the
Empire
State
Building
, took me to lunch in her neighborhood and gave me a copy of Jack
Rosenfarb’s letter, and I actually saw her smile a bit. She had a Jack Daniels
and two glasses of white wine and became vague toward the end of the meal,
calling me “Tim” and saying sentences that almost seemed coherent until you
looked back at them. For instance, she allowed as how she’d been warming to the
idea of
The Christmas Book
over the last week or so, from her initial
negative reaction, and by now was quite fond of the notion. “The best books,
like the best women, are all whores,” she went on. “Never trust an amateur at
anything.”

           
“Okay,” I said.

           
I walked her back to her office,
happy she wouldn’t be doing anything on
my
career’s behalf this
afternoon, and then came home to start work. Yesterday Ginger ran off on the
Xerox machine at work a hundred copies of my two solicitation letters, with a
blank for me to type in the victim’s name, so I have just sent the writer’s
letter to these forty people:

           
Edward Albee, Woody Allen, Isaac
Asimov, Russell Baker, Ann Beattie, Helen Gurley Brown, William F. Buckley,
Jr., Leo Buscaglia, Truman Capote, Jimmy Carter, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie
Dillard, E. L. Doctorow, Gerald Ford, William Goldman, John Irving, Stephen
King, Jerzy Kosinski, Judith Krantz, Robert Ludlum, Norman Mailer, James A.
Michener, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Nixon, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario
Puzo, Joan Rivers, Andy Rooney, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, Isaac Bashevis Singer
(what the hell), Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Diana Trilling, John
Updike, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Wambaugh, Tom Wolfe and Herman Wouk.

           
The illustrator’s letter went to
these ten people:

           
Charles Addams, Richard Avedon, Jim
Davis, Jules

           
Feiffer, Edward Gorey, Robert
Kliban, Jill Krementz, LeRoy Nieman, Charles Schulz and Andy Warhol.

           
I was just typing
Carl Sagan
when Hubert Van Driin called to say he thought we’d had a nice and productive
chat on Monday, but on reflection he was deciding to say no to
The Wit and
Wisdom of Clint Eastwood.
It’s probably just as well.

           
BACK to a
blizzard.
It took
three hours
to get home from
Kennedy
Airport
last night, during which Ginger and I finally had the big fight that
had been brewing all week in
Puerto Rico
,
and the cabdriver
took her side\
The
son of a
bitch. With the two of them ganging up on me, I gathered my dignity like the
tattered cloak it is, stepped out into the storm, and swore to walk home.

           
Well, I stomped through the snow and
the wind and the stalled traffic and the slush on the Van Wyck Expressway for
about two minutes before realizing I could die out there, which was carrying
hurt pride too far, so I went back to the cab—which, of course, hadn’t moved an
inch while I was away—to find Ginger arguing with the
driver. W.
2
\\-hah\
I sat in my corner, silent, arms folded, a superior smile on my triumphant face
while they squabbled, and my feet, in wet socks, slowly turned to marble and
fell off.

           
Eventually the three of us made up,
Ginger explaining to the driver that it was just that I was worried about
money. I know her well enough by now to understand that statement as her form
of apology. In changing the subject of the argument to something less volatile
and dangerous, she was in effect saying she didn’t want to argue any more.

           
While it is true that I’m worried
about money—we are spending Craig, Harry & Bourke’s advance before
receiving it and without regard for the fact that I’m going to have to pay
other people for contributions to the book—in truth that wasn’t what the fight
was about. The fight was about children, hers and mine, but because that
problem is too delicate and insoluble to deal with directly we tend just to
gnaw at its fringes.

           
None of these kids are going to go
away, and all of them are going to live with their mothers till they grow up,
and this means that more and more men are going to be surrounded by children
they aren’t to blame for. Meanwhile, their own kids are eating popcorn with
other males. It all creates tension.

           
The specific of this fight was
whether Ginger’s kids should come back from Lance right away last night, as
soon as we ourselves got home, or should they come back today, after school.
The fight had been poised for birth ever since the Saturday before last, when I
took Gretchen and Joshua to their father’s apartment to stay while Ginger and I
were in Puerto Rico, but neither of us had wanted to spoil our departure—nor
our vacation—so the dispute merely seethed and bubbled beneath the surface,
present but not active. The image of a volcano seems appropriate. Returning to
New York amid a snowstorm and a monumental traffic tie-up had at last given the
fight a soil in which it could grow (to mix my imagery just a teeny bit), and
thus it all came about.

           
(What Ginger fought with the
cabdriver about was
Puerto
Rico
, he being an
emigrant from there.)

           
That the rotten weather made the
whole question of the kids’ return academic merely gave the fight added
virulence. We would be lucky to get
ourselves
home on Sunday night,
never mind the kids. Since I had been the one pressing the point of view that a
brief overnight transition for the two of us between traveling and children
would be a good idea, I was accused in the taxi of gloating over the storm, and
off we went.

           
Well, it all calmed down en route,
though it did threaten to blow up all over again when two of the messages
awaiting us on the telephone answering machine at home were from Mary, and both
about
her
kids. That is, our kids. Bryan having been given a clarinet
for Christmas—don’t ask me why kids want this or that, I’ll never fathom it—(a
used clarinet from a pawnshop on Third Avenue), it now seemed a potentially
good idea to give him clarinet lessons, so one of Mary’s calls was about the
thirty-five-dollar-a-month lessons available through the school. The other
message was about the police wanting Jennifer to make a statement about her
mugging, and did I think it was a good idea for the kid to involve herself in
all that any further.

           
Ginger’s nostrils were flaring by
that point, and she’d narrowed her eyes so much she looked like a leftover
alien from
Star Wars.
We could have had round two of the day if the
calls hadn’t annoyed me just as much as they did her. Mary had known I was in
Puerto Rico
, she knew when I was coming back, and
dropping those two “innocent” messages on the machine was just another way to
turn the knife of pseudodomesticity. I expressed that opinion aloud, Ginger’s
eyes and nose returned to their accustomed shapes, and we went to bed to have
the kind of sex that makes it all worthwhile, as outside the storm raged
unabated.

           
None of the other answering machine
messages had been of much import, but when I finally got to the mail this morning
there were seven responses to my solicitation for
The ChristJnas Book,
and I don’t know if I’m encouraged or not.

           
Two of the letters, from Diana
Trilling and Andy Rooney, merely asked, in one way or another, how much I was
offering to pay.
In fact, Andy Rooney’s letter, in toto,
said, “Dear Mr. Diskant, How much?
Yours, Andrew A.
Rooney.”
Now, that’s what I call a few words from Andy Rooney!

           
But it wasn’t the shortest letter.
That came from Joan Rivers, and it went:

           
January 25

           
Dear Thomas J. Diskant:

           
What?

           
Joan
Rivers

           
The longest response came from a
literary agent named Scott Meredith, and for quite a while I couldn’t figure
out what was going on. It was a box, a big manuscript box about twice the
normal depth, absolutely crammed full with manuscripts of short stories and
articles and poetry. Some of the pieces seemed fairly recent, others were on
yellowed dogeared paper with various stains, but all of them, by golly, were on
the subject of Christmas.

           
A letter from Scott Meredith had
come with this armada of failed hopes, and in it Meredith explained that he was
Norman Mailer’s agent, that Mailer might be interested in doing a small piece
for
The Christmas Book
if the price were right, and in the meantime
these other works by “outstanding writers, clients of mine” were probably right
down my alley.

           
No.
Definitely
not.

           
The remaining three responses were
also loony, each in
its own
way. Stephen King wrote a
long enthusiastic sloppy letter saying
The Christmas Book
was a
wonderful idea and he’d love to do something for it if he could think of
something, and in the meantime he had these suggestions of other absolutely
wonderful things I ought to put in the book, like “Death On Christmas Eve” by
Stanley Ellin and “Christmas Party” by Rex Stout, and on and on.

           
From Jimmy Carter I got permission
to do the book, I think. I’m not sure what his letter was, some sort of
proclamation about the good and worthy work I was undertaking, but I began to
believe he failed to understand the thrust of my original letter. (Or whoever
actually answered it did.) And from Charles Schulz I got, in triplicate, a
contract I was to sign which made it clear that I would not participate in any
subsidiary rights to anything by him or about him or any character created by
him that might appear in
The Christmas Book
or its promotion or
advertising. Sheesh!

           
So.
I
dropped lines to Trilling and Rooney saying I would pay “in the neighborhood
of” a thousand dollars for a thousand words. I sent a note to King thanking him
for all his suggestions and adding that what I was really looking forward to
was his own original contribution to
The Christmas Book.
I wrote Carter
that I hoped he could see his way toward contributing some personal thoughts on
the subject of Christmas, and I penned a missive to Rivers saying that since
she had dealt with motherhood twice, in her movie
Rabbit Test
and her
book
Having A Baby Can Be A Scream
, maybe she had a stray thought or two
about Christmas as well, and would she be willing to share it? I phoned the
Scott
Meredith
Agency
to request a messenger to come pick up
these huddled masses they’d sent me, and included in the package a note
describing my thousand dollar neighborhood, for Mailer’s consideration.
Schulz’s contract I sent to Jack Rosenfarb, with a note saying, “You’ll
probably know what to do with this.”

           
Next, feeling virtuous from all my
activity, I phoned Mary, who worked very hard at being a downer; not like her,
but I think she was annoyed both by winter and by my having been away from it
for a week. She said things like, “
Bryan
needs
to see more of you,” and, “I think Jennifer feels the lack of a father
particularly at this time, after the mugging,” and so on. I handled it well for
a while, and then I didn’t handle it well at all, and then I hung up.

           
While in Puerto Rico I’d thought of
some more famous people I should hit on, so after the emotional upset of the
Mary call I soothed myself by^sending the writer’s letter to ten more
possibles: Arthur C. Clarke, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, John Kenneth
Galbraith, Garrison Keillor, Henry Kissinger, Jonathan Schell, Mickey Spillane,
William Styron and Paul Theroux. Plus the illustrator’s letter to these five:
Roddy McDowall, Helmut Newton,
Francesco
Scavul- lo,
Gahan Wilson and Jamie Wyeth.

           
Lance just called. Gretchen and
Joshua have arrived at his place from school, and he wants me to come get them.
The storm
continues,
that’s why; if the weather were
decent, he’d cab them across town himself.
Selfish bastard.