When she glanced at the time, she discovered in amazement that she’d been hacking and slashing for two and a half hours. The first page had flown from her fingers to the screen. On the second one, she’d kept going round and round, putting words in, taking them out, fiddling with commas and semicolons. Everything had to be perfect. Then, a minute later, she’d decide it wasn’t perfect after all and change it some more.
“Later,” she told herself. She saved the story to the hard disk and to a couple of flash drives. She was conscientious—hell, she was fanatical—about backing up.
She meant to get back to the piece when she came home the next day, but she was too damn tired. The same thing happened the day after that. Then the weekend arrived, and she had to run around and do all the shit she couldn’t do during the week because she was stuck at the stinking widget works.
Monday, Mr. Gorczany was particularly fuckheaded. Vanessa swore in English. She swore in Serbo-Croatian. She swore in the half-remembered bits of Armenian she’d got from her rug-merchant ex-boyfriend. She would have sworn in Swahili had she known any. Her face must have been a sight—nobody on the bus wanted to sit next to her.
After she choked down another uninspired supper, she turned on the laptop again. “There’s got to be a better way to make a living,” she said once more, grimly. “I mean, there’s fucking got to be.” She was talking to herself, but that was all right. She was the one she needed to fire up.
She opened the story and read what she’d written before. She made a face. It was melodramatic. The prose felt purple. She’d have to clean it up before she went any further. An hour later, it didn’t seem that different. She wanted to make some progress on the night, so she wrote a couple of new paragraphs. Then she stopped and tried to neaten them up.
“Hell with it,” she said at last. She saved the document and went to bed.
Bronislav was in town the next weekend, so she couldn’t very well write then. She could grumble about how the story was—or rather, wasn’t—going, could and did. He listened with grave attention. That was one of the things she liked about him. When she finally ran down, he said, “Will you let me see this story, please?”
Vanessa hesitated. Some ways, that request was more personal, more intimate, than a lot of what they did in the bedroom. Yes, she wanted people to read what she’d written… after she got it just the way she wanted it. If she ever did. If she ever could. Till then, showing it off was like walking down the street not only naked but without any makeup. Who wanted to show off the zits on her ass?
If Vanessa had zits on her ass, Bronislav had seen them. She sighed. “Okay,” she said—reluctantly, but she did. She started the computer and opened the filled she’d named Story1.docx. “Here.”
While he read, his face showed nothing of what he thought. He would have made a dangerous poker player. He probably did, at truck stops along I-10. He scrolled through the piece, then said, “You should finish. Is good.”
She would have put more faith in that if English were his first language. How many subtleties flew over his head? Still, she knew she would have been horrified—to say nothing of furious—if he’d told her it was lousy. That he could see the same thing, and that he could see which side his bread was buttered on, never crossed her mind. What surer sign she was in love?
“I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it,” she said. Up till now, she hadn’t admitted that to herself, much less to anyone else. Love, indeed.
“You will find way to do it.” When Bronislav said something like that, he sounded as certain as a judge passing sentence. When he said it, he sounded certain enough to make Vanessa believe it, too. Whether she’d keep on believing it once he had to go back on the road… Well, she’d find out after he did.
When the computer worked, Marshall Ferguson lurked on several boards for writers and wannabes. Some of them were just sad—the blind leading the deaf, so to speak. Others, though, offered what seemed like good advice. One bit that struck him as sensible was to start at the top when you were trying to sell something, to aim for the highest-paying, most prestigious markets. If they said no, you could set your sights lower. But if you started with the bottom feeders, you’d never find out for sure how good you could be.
So Marshall first submitted his stories to either The New Yorker or Playboy, depending on what they were like. This latest one, called “Almost Sunset,” went to Playboy, because it had a guy and a girl in it and they were fooling around while a spectacular post-eruption sunset painted the walls of the guy’s place. Marshall wondered what had happened to Jenny, the girl at UCSB he’d fooled around with at a time like that. He couldn’t remember her last name, which meant he couldn’t find her on Facebook—and, if she’d got married since then, she might have a different last name anyhow… and might not want to be found by people like him.
He didn’t think that much of Playboy. It might have been cool when his dad was his age… or it might already have jumped the shark by then. But he totally admired the kind of money the magazine paid. Some postage and a wait till the story came back were a reasonable investment. It was like buying a lottery ticket, only with somewhat better odds.
Since he’d moved back in with his father and Kelly and now Deborah, he was almost always the one who went to get the mail. In Animal Farm, which he’d read for Western Civ, the “liberated” farm beasts had learned to bleat Four legs good, two legs bad! His bleat when he opened the mailbox was Little envelopes good, manila envelopes bad! A manila envelope was his story coming back rejected. A little envelope might be an acceptance letter or a contract or a check. It usually wasn’t, but it might be.
He didn’t think anything special was up when he grabbed the mail on a day that was trying to be springlike but didn’t quite remember how. A couple of bills, a couple of catalogues, a Netflix DVD for Kelly to watch while she was up in the middle of the night with Deborah (if there happened to be power), and an envelope from Chicago he didn’t even notice as he carried the stuff to the house.
Deborah pointed at him when he went inside. “Masha!” she announced. She came closer to his real name every day. Dad said little kids weren’t human till they got potty-trained, but she was gaining on it.
He pointed back at her. “Vacuum cleaner,” he said.
She shook her head. “No! Deb’ah!” She giggled. She knew who she was. She also knew part of her big half-brother’s job was trying to mess up her mind.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Pork rinds.”
“No! Deb’ah!”
“You’re bizarre, Marshall,” Kelly said, more affectionately than not. “So what did the Post Awful inflict on us today?”
“You’ve got the latest Hornblower from your Netflix queue,” he answered, which made her squee—she thought the actor who played him was majorly hot. Marshall went on, “Some people trying to sell us stuff, some people who want money, and… whatever this is. Oh, it’s for me.” He opened the envelope from Chicago.
He’d forgotten Playboy’s editorial offices lived there. The rabbit logo on the letterhead reminded him in a hurry. He read the letter. The farther he went, the more his jaw dropped.
“You okay?” Kelly sounded anxious. “You look kinda green around the gills.”
“They’re… They’re…” Marshall had to try three times before he could get it out. “Playboy’s gonna buy ‘Almost Sunset.’ Holy crap! I mean, holy crap!”