“Anyway, she’ll like that.”
“It’s true. Sad, but true. Anyway, getting back to your book. I’ve got a few problems with it, and I wanted to see if we put our heads together whether we could solve them. First, I don’t like it being set in New York.”
Fred nodded.
“I don’t like the sense,” Holder went on, “that it’s a poor man’s Philip Roth novel — you know, Jewish introverted hero who really, deep down, wants to be fucking his brains out, only he’s too guilty about the Holocaust or something. That’s a distraction from what we’ve discussed. We want this to be the male answer to The Women’s Room—”
“We could call it The John,” Fred said out of nervousness. He felt left out, lectured to, and he wanted to show he had some intelligence.
It must have been the right comment, because Holder banged his hand on his desk and laughed. Laughed hard, his mouth open, issuing staccato bursts of sound. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “Anyway, the point is, let’s stay away from any superficial resemblance to a whiny Roth book. Make the hero a WASP, set it in the Midwest or maybe California — LA might not be a bad idea, after all that’s where all the fads come from. What do you think?”
“I think you’re right.”
“Good,” Holder said, with a touch of surprise, as if he had expected a hassle. But the victory sat uneasily on his head. “You’re sure you agree? That’s not giving up anything important to you?”
This worried Fred. He wanted to make it clear he would do anything Holder wanted, but without seeming like a hack, a whore who would spread his legs for even a hint of payment. Instinctively Fred knew that no matter how much they junked up the plot of the book, he must convince Holder that he was a serious artist (I am, he insisted to himself), and make even the most calculated and topical novel read like literature. “Well,” Fred said, and pressed out his cigarette. He wanted to say: I can do it, whatever you want, I can do it. “The minute you said to me that the outline made it sound like a Roth novel, I understood. That isn’t what I’m going for. I guess I was worried people wouldn’t think I could do a non-Jewish, non-New York book. Fact is, I’d rather it wasn’t.”
“Good,” Holder said, now convinced Fred’s concession was sincere. “I have another problem with the outline.” He paused, as if this were a delicate moment. “I don’t think it should start in the late sixties and follow the couple up until our hero’s crisis. It should start with the crisis. And stay in the present, using all the current pop psychology that’s around.”
“You mean, start with him having an affair?”
“Or wanting to. Yeah.”
This bothered Fred, but his mind was blank as to why. He had adjusted to the notion of changing the setting and the ethnic background of the hero — after all, were those really changes? — but to throw out the first ten years the book was supposed to cover …?
“I’ll tell you why,” Holder said after Fred’s silence had gone on for a while. “You want the book to be about this biological incompatibility between men and women, right? Men aren’t monogamous, that’s your thesis, right?”
Fred nodded uncertainly, like a witness being interrogated by a crack lawyer, afraid to admit even the most harmless and obvious fact, lest it lead to a damning conclusion.
“See,” Holder said, leaning forward earnestly, pleading his point, “then doing it with our hero being young, meeting his wife, marrying her, and so on, takes you down the wrong road. You want it to be that he’s happy, he’s settled, all that crap. Deciding to get married, establishing a career, is behind him. His life is settled, he’s okay. He’s got it all. Only—” Holder held up his finger suspensefully and lowered his voice ominously. “Only he wants all those beautiful young bodies out there!”
Fred was smiling and nodding throughout all this, as if he loved it, and agreed. Agreed so heartily that he was on the edge of his chair, almost ready to leap into Holder’s arms. “Un-huh,” he said, not wanting to say anything, because he didn’t know what he thought, he just wanted to encourage Holder’s enthusiasm.
“See what I mean? Starting it in the present focuses it. Makes it an advocate for your statement. And that gets us a tight narrative and”—he winked cynically—“maybe on the Phil Donahue show.”
Fred nodded solemnly and looked thoughtful. However, his only thought was: I have to rewrite the whole outline. Nothing has been accomplished.
“I know that makes the book shorter, but that’s good, I think,” Holder went on.
“Definitely,” Fred said.
“So basically you’d start the novel about halfway through your outline.”
“Okay,” Fred said, bobbing his head like a doll.
“Okay. Now that’s settled, I’ll tell you my plan. We usually submit proposals to the ed board — which I’m on, along with five other editors and Tom Paulson. But I can go to Paulson directly if I tell him we only have your outline exclusively for twenty-four hours. That’s what I’m gonna do. So you should have an answer by tomorrow morning. How’s that?”
The Resurrection of Christ, Bobby Thompson’s home run, the Parting of the Red Sea — no reversal of fortune in history could compare with the shock, followed by delight, in Fred’s heart at this statement. He said, “Great,” with his first natural smile of the meeting, and floated out back onto the street feeling as if he had never lived before, never seen the intense beauty of real life, never known true respect for himself.
Finishing the chapter excited Patty. She calculated that if she were able to type it quickly, she could deliver it before five to Joe McGuire, the editor in chief of Shadow Books. She was a fast typist, the only skill she possessed that her old boss Gelb never found fault with, and even going slowly (to be sure there was not a single typo), she had the twenty pages done in an hour. It was two-thirty.
A pause of insecurity slowed her progress to McGuire’s office. After all, Betty knew what he would want, and she was on the floor above, so Patty called from the lobby extension and got Betty, asking if she could read the pages immediately.
“Sure. But what’s the rush?”
“Don’t we want to get it in and over with? You know how we hate suspense.”
“We sure do,” Betty agreed, laughing. “Okay, I’ve got a meeting at three. So let’s do it.”
Patty went upstairs and paced restlessly back and forth past Betty’s window while she read. Twice Betty told her to sit down and once she burst out laughing at something in Patty’s chapter. “Whoa, that’s hot,” Betty said toward the end of the chapter, and Patty knew she must have reached the moment where the heroine was roughly kissed by the dark, handsome, and possibly brutal love interest.
At last Betty swiveled in her chair and said, “It’s great! I knew you could do it.”
“Okay. But what should we change? What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing! Absolutely nothing. It’s fine.”
“Come on,” Patty said, frowning. “I need this to come through. I can’t start a relationship with a man and be broke. I don’t want to depend on him for money.”
“It’s that serious?” Betty asked, not concealing her amazement. After all, only last week Patty hadn’t even discussed David with her. To Betty no weekend, no matter how magical, could be that dramatic.
“I told you I was in love. I don’t know. Am I crazy?” Patty’s eyes looked big and forlorn, like those of a misbehaving dog approaching head down, asking for reassurance from its owner.
“I didn’t mean that,” Betty hurried to say. But she did.
“I feel like it’s serious,” Patty said in an unusually somber tone.
“That’s terrific.” Betty said, and felt moved for Patty. In all the years she had heard Patty discuss men, never before had she allowed herself to speak so simply, to make it clear that she was vulnerable. Several times Betty had concluded that Patty was incapable of real feeling, of being in love unselfconsciously, without burlesque. It had made Betty think less of her, and so this moment was impressive. “Well, I think Joe will give you a contract on this.”