I thought for a minute. I tried to imagine myself in a pattern like that — married, kids, a little white house with green shutters. The picture wasn’t bad.
I realized with a start that the gal in the picture was Marcia Banks.
“Why don’t you chuck it, Dan? Why don’t you marry some broad and get a job as a plumber?”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s a funny thing,” he went on. “Every field of work has some other field of work that a guy thinks about when he’s walking around in a brown study. Ad men always want to get a farm in New England and get back to nature. The PR boys get a yen for a general store when they want to chuck public relations to the dogs. And writers — God knows why — writers always get the idea of plumbing. A stillson wrench and hunk of pipe. I don’t know.”
“So you think I should be a plumber?”
He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it silly in the ashtray. Then he pulled out another one and stuck it where the first one came from and lit it with another wooden match.
“You don’t want to be a plumber?”
I shook my head.
“Good money in it. Four bucks an hour, work your own hours, good union. You sure?”
“Positive.”
He dragged on the cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “You’re a damned fool,” he said cheerfully. “That’s my business — damned fools. What are you going to do now?”
“Write.”
“What?”
“That’s why I came to see you.”
He leaned back and looked at me. You could see the strength in him — the strength that let him start out owing somebody carfare and wind up owning and running the world’s top literary agency. He was the kind of man that nothing could stop. When he wanted something he got it, and he had the guts to want things.
“Write me a book,” he said.
“Paperback?”
“That what you want to write?”
“I want write whatever you want to sell.”
He stubbed out the cigarette and reached for another. “Whatever you want,” he said. “You can write paperbacks, so write paperbacks. Write me a nice solid novel with sex in it and substance to it and blood and guts and women with tits on them and I’ll sell it. You’re a writer, Dan. I don’t have to tell you what to write. I’ve got a whole stable of idiots that I feed plots to, but you’re no idiot. I don’t have to spoon feed you. You’re a writer. So write me a book.”
“Any percentage in writing short stuff?”
He thought for a minute. “There might be, if you could write Saturday Evening Post stuff. But you’re not an SEP writer, Danny boy. You’re too gutsy for that sort of stuff. If you want cigarette money you can knock out slush for the pulps. But write me a book.”
That’s what I wanted to do anyway. The pulps are always a temptation — there aren’t many left, but a fast check and a 5000-word story are incentives. But I wanted a book. Fifty bucks would help, but I needed more than that to get started. And a book would be easy.
“You ought to be a plumber,” he said. “You really should. It’s a better life, Danny boy.”
“Why aren’t you a plumber?”
“I should be,” he said. It would be easier. But I get too keyed up, Danny. I get too excited. My wife wants me to quit. My kids want me to quit. My son Billy would like me to have a catch with him in the evenings. It’s nice,having a catch with your kid, tossing a baseball around. Billy could be a good little ballplayer if he had some practice.
“But I get too keyed up, Danny. I get too hot and bothered. The pressure is too much in this business, but I can’t live without pressure like this. Can you imagine me without pressure?”
I couldn’t, and I told him so.
“Neither could I. I’ve been living like this too long, Danny. People talk about what a great business I own. Hell, I don’t own the business. The business owns me. But I love it. I suppose I love it. Can a man love a business, Danny?”
“If there’s nothing else to love, I suppose.”
“And what else is there?”
I grinned again. “You could try the girl at the front desk. She looks like the loving type.”
He got a guilty look on his face which anybody else would take to mean that he’d been doing just that. I knew it just meant he would like to. Lou never mixed business with pleasure — it made him reluctant to fire a girl if he was sleeping with her, and Lou liked to be able to fire anybody without thinking twice about it. “Never crap where you eat” was his motto and his last word on the subject.
We talked some more and he said, “Write me a book, Danny. What else can I tell you? Write me a book and I’ll sell you a book and we’ll be in business again. Okay?”
I nodded. I was anxious to go now, anxious to start banging away at the new typewriter. “Lou,” I said, “I’m short right now. If you could let me have a small advance against future sales...”
His expression turned into a frown. “Suddenly this is a bank?”
“Well...”
“Look,” he said, his eyes softening, “it’s something I don’t do. You know that, Danny. Hell, I don’t do it for any of my writers if I can help it. An advance against a pending sale, that’s different. An advance while an author is waiting for the check to come through. But against future sales...”
“You’re afraid I’ll drink up the money?” I could feel my pulse quickening and my blood pressure going up.
“It’s not that, Danny. Hell, you can come back, I know you can. But what’s the sense of making it easy for you to...”
I stood up, aching to take a swing at him and struggling to control myself. A second later the feeling passed and I got control of myself. “Sorry,” I said. “You’re right. Take it easy.”
I turned and headed for the door.
“Danny!”
I turned around.
“Write me a book,” he said, reaching for another cigarette. “A good one.”
But when I got home I didn’t feel much like writing a book — a good one or a bad one. Hell, Lou was right. In his place I wouldn’t advance a nickel to a bum like me, no matter what my policy was on that kind of thing. It didn’t make sense. No sense at all.
Because the odds were I never would write that book.
Oh, comebacks happen. Scott Fitzgerald did it, for one — and it’s been done by others. Fitzgerald wrote himself out of debt when he was swilling God knows how much Scotch a day, knocking out Post stories one after the other.
There aren’t too many Fitzgeralds.
The typewriter felt like a sack of lead when I got back to my room and I put it down on the table very gratefully. But I didn’t want to look at it, not just then. I had a ream of typing paper and carbon paper and copy paper, but I tossed them on the bed so I wouldn’t have to look at them either.
I wanted to look at Marcia Banks, and I wanted to look at her for a good long time.
She was in her room with the door closed. I called through the door and the first time she didn’t answer, and I called a second time and she asked me what I wanted.
“You,” I said. “I want you.”
“Not today,” she said. “Not today, Dan.”
“I just want to see you,” I said. “Just to talk to you.” It was a lie, but you have to lie some of the time in this world.
“Just to talk?”
“Yeah.”
There was a pause. “Not today,” she said finally. “Tomorrow, maybe. But I don’t want to see you today, Danny — not even just to talk.”
“Look...”
“I mean it,” she said, her voice seeming to come from very far away. “I told you how it had to be, Dan.”