“I don’t want her,” I said.
Murray was tremendously relieved. Then he said, “The money—”
“I don’t want the money, either,” I said. I pushed back my chair and turned away from him. I didn’t want to look at either Murray Rogers or Joyce now.
I got out of there and closed the door.
I traveled as far as a drug store and called a cab from there. He travels fastest who travels alone, I thought. But I wasn’t in such a hurry now. There were more important things than traveling fast.
The cabby found the high school and let me off in front of it. In the lobby a girl with straight hair and braces on her teeth told me how to find Mrs. Lambert’s classroom.
Barb was standing at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in her hand. She looked as fresh and sweet as a mouthwash ad. I stood in the doorway for a few seconds and gazed at her. She didn’t see me.
I thought, Jesus, go away, leave her alone.
But I stepped into the room and she turned and stared.
And I said, “Did you mean it? The whole whither-thou-goest routine?”
“I meant it.”
“All the way?”
“All the way. Bill, I—”
“Have you got a car outside?”
“Yes,” Barb said.
“Are you ready to go?”
“I’ll have to pack. I—”
“No time. You can buy things.”
The kids in that class could never have understood. They sat there with their eyes bulging out of their heads while I took her by the elbow and steered her out of the room. We rushed past everybody and into her car and got going. We were on the road.
“This is crazy,” Barb said.
“I know.”
“All my clothes and everything. And just rushing away like this. Maybe we ought to stop.”
“We’ll stop.”
“We will?”
“Sure,” I said. “As soon as I find a motel.”
So here we are. The town is Phoenix, although we’re never in one town long enough for it to matter too very much where we are. And Barb’s last name is Maynard, thanks to a Baptist Minister in Orchard Falls. But she uses her maiden name in the act.
The act is nothing too very special. We’re playing a small club called the Desert Points now. I’m Maynard the Magnificent, deft and agile as always, and Barb is my assistant, the girl I saw in half, the girl who drags out the prop wagon and enchants the customers with her mammary development. We go on before the stripper and after the female impersonator. We’re not exactly the World’s Fair, but we like it.
Sometimes I meet someone who knows me as Wizard. Once in a while somebody from the bad old days wants to know if I still like to take a crooked hand in a crooked game. I don’t. Some of them discourage easy and some of them try to push, but they all give up sooner or later.
The money is nothing exciting and the life itself is chaotic and uncertain. But we like it. Barb doesn’t seem to care about heavy furniture or charge accounts. There will be a kid or two some day, but we figure they can get used to the life. They may miss out on some schooling, but they’ll learn their geography first-hand. And they’ll be pulling rabbits out of hats before they’re toilet-trained.
It could be worse. Hell, it has been worse.
It’s never been better.
A New Afterword by the Author
Sometime in late 1963 I had a falling-out with my agent. I’d been represented by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency ever since I took employment there as an editor in the summer of 1957. I had left the job and returned to Antioch College after nine or ten months but remained a client of the agency until I chafed at some crap assignment and wound up suddenly agentless. My primary market at the time was Bill Hamling’s soft-core operation, Nightstand Books, and it was a closed shop; Scott Meredith (under a deep corporate cover) filled all their editorial needs. I had a wife and a mortgage and two kids under three years old, and no college degree or marketable skills except the ability to make up stories and string words together.
That sounds fairly dire, and I suppose it was, but it was decades later before I realized it didn’t have to be. I could have mended the fences. One phone call to Scott, a mumbled apology, and I’d have been back in the fold. In fact there was a phone call—from Scott—to clear up some unfinished business, and at its conclusion he suggested I return to the fold. And I declined. Does that sound like a principled stand? Or like wrongheaded obstinacy? I have to say it was neither, just an inability to perceive options. How could I go back to being a client? You know, I always did well on IQ tests and, when I put my mind to it, at schoolwork. But in certain basic respects, I really wasn’t terribly bright, was I?
Never mind. I had a living to make, and only one way to make it, and I went to work. I was living in a Buffalo, New York, suburb at the time, out of touch with the world of publishing. We probably should have moved back to New York City, but we stayed put and I worked to develop new markets for myself. I’d written a number of books for Harry Shorten at Midwood Tower, and that was not a Scott Meredith closed shop, but did I give Harry a ring and try to set something up? No, never thought of it. Instead I established a new identity as Jill Emerson, wrote a sensitive lesbian novel, and sent it to Midwood as an over-the-transom submission. (They bought it and launched Jill Emerson’s checkered career, but that’s another story; you’ll find it in the afterwords to Warm & Willing and Enough of Sorrow.)
I’d written some psychosexual nonfiction (made up case histories) for Lancer Books, and I knew Larry T. Shaw well enough to call him up and propose a book. So that was a market. I knew something about coins, and knocked out a book on coin investment that Frederick Fell published. I sold articles to a batch of numismatic (currency) magazines: Coins, Numismatic Scrapbook, and The Whitman Numismatic Journal.
And then there was Beacon.
Before there was Midwood or Nightstand, Beacon Books had essentially created the genre of widely distributed soft-core paperback fiction, with Orrie Hitt their leading writer. I believe A Diet of Treacle was my first book for Beacon, although it didn’t set out to be; I had more ambitious aims for the book, set in the beat/hip demimonde of Greenwich Village. But when other publishers passed, my agent sent the manuscript to Beacon, where it was published as Pads Are for Passion by Sheldon Lord. That was the pen name I’d put on my Midwood titles, and I decided to use it at Beacon as well.
I wrote two more books specifically for Beacon, April North and Community of Women. The latter was a Beacon editor’s idea; he must have been a commuter, given to fantasies about daytime life in his suburb after all the men had caught the 8:02 a.m. train to Grand Central Station.
When the books came out, I made the mistake of having a look at them; when some sentences struck me as unwieldy, I checked my carbon copies. Beacon was a strange publishing house indeed. The publisher, a fellow named Arnold Abramson, came out of the world of pulp magazines and took it as an article of faith that anything he bought from a writer had to be rewritten by an editor. And so he had a whole roomful of editors whose job it was to change the manuscripts they bought, whether they needed it or not. If the editors didn’t make abundant changes, they’d be out of a job. So they changed my compound sentences to simple sentences and hooked my simple sentences together as compound sentences and so on, all the way through to the end. They certainly didn’t make the stuff better, and I don’t suppose they made it a great deal worse, but the whole business annoyed the hell out of me. The pay wasn’t all that good, so I figured I’d write for somebody else.