“I know it, Jack.”
“Excuse my saying this, Tom,” Jack said, his fingers walking gingerly among the silverware, to show he was pussyfooting, “but that isn’t your track record. The kind of advance you’re talking about here, you’ve never had anything like this before.”
Of course not. I am a journeyman writer; I will do a piece on repairing your own sink for Ms magazine, sexuality among female ministers for Cosmopolitan, the rapaciousness of football team owners for Esquire. I did the books Coral Sea and El Alamein for the “We Go To War!” subscription series. I did Golf Courses of America, subsidized by American Airlines and published by Craig, Harry & Bourke, which is how I met Jack in the first place, for whom I’ve also done The Ins and Outs of Unemployment Insurance and Hospitals Can Make You Sick.
Track record, that’s all these guys talk about. It’s one of their many ways to avoid original thought; if they can see what you’ve done before, they know what to think about you now. I had to get Jack past that bump in the road, and the only lever I could find was humility. “Sometimes, Jack,” I said, “a small guy can have a big idea.”
That shocked him into consciousness. “Tom, Tom,” he protested, “I never said anything like that. This isn’t you and me, this is the company. I’m thinking of the people I have to answer to, back in the office.”
“Don’t sell them me,” I suggested. “Sell them the idea.”
“There’s also execution of the idea,” he reminded me. “Tom, I know you can do whatever you set your mind to, but we’ve got Wilson to consider. Bourke himself. I’ll level with you, Tom,” he said, leaning close, looking at me with great sincerity. “If you were sitting there with a cute little idea, ten grand advance, maybe even twelve-and-a-half, one quarter on signature, we could do it in a flash. Within reason, I can close deals myself up to twenty-five grand, except even then they sometimes pull the rug out from under me. But this. You’re talking Judith Krantz, Gore Vidal, you’re talking money. And you need some for yourself, for God’s sake, you’re not doing this for charity.”
“Half,” I said.
He looked exceedingly blank. “What’s that?”
“I figured that’s the simplest way to handle it,” I said. “We treat it like a regular anthology. Half the advance goes to me, the other half goes to the contributors and the research assistants and so on.”
“Oh, come on, Tom,” he said. “For this page, we pay Gore Vidal and we pay you the same amount? Not on.”
“That’s not what you’re paying for,” I said. “You pay Gore Vidal for that page. Me you pay for that page and for the page with the fourteenth-century Madonna and Child and for having thought it up in the first place and for talking Vidal into doing it.”
“All right, possibly,” he said. “If we decide to go forward at all. If the company decides. Then we work out the details.”
“With my agent. I never talk details.”
“Still Annie?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she’s reasonable,” he said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I tell you what, Tom,” he said. “This is a very interesting idea, I won’t deny it. Let me take it back to the shop, talk to a couple of people, do you have a presentation on paper?”
“I can’t describe the contents before I send out my query letter,” I pointed out. “I could do you a two-sentence memo.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
“Jack. Jack, I came to you with this first. I did it for two reasons. I think you and Craig are absolutely right for it,” I lied, “and you’re almost the only person in New York I’d trust not to take the idea and run,” I lied again.
“Well, we’ll see.” Behind his jolly eyes, his brain was turning over like a submarine’s engines.
“And if I can start now,” I said, “we’re talking about this Christmas.”
“Tight. Tight schedule.”
“I know that. I’m up to it, Jack.” I smiled at him. “What the mind of man can conceive, this man can do.”
“I’ll talk it up around the shop,” he said. “And give you a call in a few days.”
And that was the end of the conversation. He didn’t seem wildly enthusiastic, but on the other hand he didn’t reject the idea outright. And at least I’ve let him know I’m thinking in terms of a tight deadline. I’ll give him till Monday. Or maybe Tuesday. But that’s the latest.
I came home from lunch too keyed up to sit still. Ginger was at work, the kids weren’t home from school yet, and I couldn’t think about any of the projects currently on my desk. There was nothing in my mind but The Christmas Book. Oh, if Jack would only come through!
I phoned Annie, my agent, and got her answering machine. “This is the literary agency of Annie Lecadeaux,” said the luxurious voice of Roger Brech-Lees, an English client, a writer of historical romances under various female names, and — I think — a closet queen. “Please leave your name and a phone number, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” Beep.
Knowing how Annie hates hang-ups — unsatisfied curiosity eats at her vitals like the fox under the Trojan lad’s tunic — I hung up without leaving a message, to punish her. Finally, I came in here to the office and started to type out the story so far. Just recounting what’s going on.
I really need the money.
Wednesday, January 5th
Twelfth Night. It’s another of those ancient counting things from before they got good at math, like Easter Sunday being the third day after Good Friday. Twelfth Night is the twelfth night after Christmas, but only if you count Christmas Eve as night number one.
Anyway, Twelfth Night is the eve of the Epiphany, which celebrates two major religious moments, being the baptism of Christ and the arrival of the Three Wise Men. (It’s also the date of the wedding feast at Cana, whatever that might mean.) In the old days, Twelfth Night marked the end of the religious feast of Christmas and a return to secular concerns, usually kicked off with a carnival. In medieval England there was a royal court masque on Twelfth Night, politically so important that foreign ambassadors would bribe and intrigue for position at it. The humbler folk celebrated with a carnival starting with a beanfeast involving a cake with a bean baked in it. Whoever got the slice of cake with the bean was master of the revels. (As for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, that doesn’t have much to do with anything at all, but was merely from his Neil Simon phase, one of his comedies in which a male actor playing a female role was then disguised as a boy, ho hum.)
Anyway, Twelfth Night. Neither Ginger nor I care about that sort of thing — we threw out our tree, along with several of its lights and ornaments, during our post-New-Year’s-Eve-party fight — but Mary of course is a goddam traditionalist all the way, so not only did she keep her tree until today but insisted I go over this afternoon to help her and the kids undecorate.
Naturally, Ginger was annoyed. “You don’t see me running off to Lance, do you?”
“He didn’t ask,” I said. “Besides, Helena wouldn’t like it.”
“And I don’t like it,” Ginger said, narrowing her eyes. She looks trampy when she narrows her eyes like that; I made the mistake of saying so once, so now she narrows her eyes all the way through parties and as a result spills her drink a lot. Now, narrowing her eyes without ulterior motive, she said, “What it comes down to is, Mary needs a fella.”