On Monday, feeling better, Jude did some book publicity.
He was still a little mystified by Death Mask's success, thanks in part to the gobs of promotion dished out like scoops of mashed potatoes and gravy. The publisher, coincidentally Tibbett's own company, had gone so far as to mail tiny white death masks to the major reviewers. Jude had to admit he was impressed.
During the day, he gave interviews about the book. He found it trying — he was accustomed to asking questions, not answering them, and it bothered him that with each interviewer he fell into a set piece of patter. The whole thing was more than a little unreal. He would hear a tape of himself speaking; the words were recognizable, he remembered saying them, but his voice sounded like a stranger's. It was like seeing his picture turning up in the newspaper ads; when he came upon it out of the blue, the sensation was strange, almost as if he were looking at a photograph of someone he vaguely knew
Christ, he thought. Get a grip on yourself.
The book signing that afternoon at Words Ink down in SoHo had all the earmarks of a disaster. Jude got there late, trapped in sweltering heat for twenty minutes while the number six train sat in semidarkness between stations and a voice on the p.a. system told them what they already knew — that the train was delayed. He got out at Astor Place, and at that precise moment, the sky opened and let loose one of those torrential summer downpours.
He ran to the store and burst through the door out of breath, his hair plastered down and water streaming from his brown corduroy jacket onto the thickly polished wooden floor. The manager, a woman in her fifties who wore her hair in a tight bun, greeted him with a bony handshake and a pinched smile. He looked around: a small writing desk with a leather top had been set up near the window with a stack of his books to one side; a poster was draped across the front showing his picture and the ubiquitous white death mask. Across the way was a sideboard with crackers laid out in a circle and cubes of bright yellow cheese, cracked like parched earth. Next to them was a cluster of green wine bottles and a battalion of plastic glasses — many more, he could see in an instant, than there were people to drink from them.
The manager followed his eyes and read his thoughts.
"We don't usually have signings for…" — she was searching for the right word—"your kind of book."
It sounded like an accusation, and any doubts that he had on that score were swept away by her next statement:
"The pressure from our uptown office was intense."
Jude was still working on a clever retort when she cupped her hand under his elbow, guiding him to the desk. "Why don't we just position you here?" she said, in the officious tone of a teacher taking a new boy into the classroom.
"I need a glass of wine. To steady my nerves."
Since she thinks I'm Jeffrey Archer, Jude thought, I might as well play at being Dylan Thomas.
"Certainly. We'll bring it to you."
He wondered who the "we" was. Aside from the two of them, there was one clerk and a few scattered customers, skulking around the Travel and Biography sections. The scene was every author's nightmare: a stack of unsold books and no one to sign them to. He downed the wine in one gulp and held out the plastic cup for a refill. She carried the glass to the sideboard, her face drawn in disapproval.
Jude draped his wet jacket on the back of his chair and settled in behind the desk. It was made of fine mahogany and so comfortable it almost inspired him to want to write something, maybe in longhand with a quill pen. He wished a customer would come by so that he could compose a florid inscription. The rain outside was still pounding down. He picked up a book off the top of the stack, opened the page at random and started to read. The prose struck him as overwritten and amateurish, so he closed the cover loudly and downed another cup of wine. This time he got up and replenished it himself. He picked up a book on the way back, a copy of Catch-22.
A young woman in a green trenchcoat with the belt tied at a jaunty angle came in, wandered over to the desk, and looked at the poster, then at Jude, then back at the poster.
"Yes, it's me," he said, in what he took to be a droll voice.
"It's I."
"Beg your pardon?"
"If you're a writer, you should know the correct way to say it is: It's I."
"I'm not that kind of a writer," he said.
"What kind are you?"
He hadn't expected that question, and said the first thing that popped into his head.
"A people's writer. Ungrammatical. Idiomatic."
"I see."
She picked up a book and leafed through it, her brow furrowing. Jude tried to read her forehead: was it concentration or disdain? Then to his amazement, she carried it to the cashier, paid for it and held it out to him to sign it, her slender fingers cradling the spine as if it were a delicate animal.
"Jude Harley," he wrote in expansive slanted letters. "Power to the People. Seize the Day."
"Unusual first name," she ventured, quizzically.
"It's short for Judas. From Judas Priest. The heavy metal band. My mother was a groupie."
She smiled uncertainly, closed the book and left, closing the door gently behind her. Jude took another cup of wine and realized that he felt terrific. Judas Priest: he was going to have to use that one again.
Over the next forty-five minutes, a dozen or so people came in, and three of them bought his book. Between sales, Jude read Catch-22 and practiced a disinterested, poet maudit slouch, and now that he was on his eighth cup of wine, he was feeling no pain.
Then a remarkable thing happened. A tour bus parked down the street, and the store was invaded by a throng of sightseers, glad to be in out of the rain and laughing and joking in broad Midwestern accents. They seemed bigger than the shop itself. And when they saw Jude behind the desk, they were fascinated, approaching him with a mixture of curiosity and caution, as if he were an exotic dog chained to a stake.
"Well, look at this," said one gentleman, wearing glasses with no-nonsense clear plastic rims.
Jude grinned uncertainly.
A gray-haired woman posed two friends next to him and took a snapshot, the flash of the camera temporarily blinding him.
"Emma, I know you'll have a story to go with this one," piped up one of them cheerily. They all laughed.
"You bet," Emma shot back.
She walked over to the desk and picked up a book, weighing it with one hand as if it were a cucumber.
"What's this about, young man?" she demanded.
Jude did some cold calculating. "New York in the nineties. The night creatures, the bars, the netherworld. Life in the belly of the Beast."
"Is there sex and violence?"
He calculated some more. "A little."
"Of which?"
"Both."
"Sold," she proclaimed, loud as an auctioneer, and the others laughed, crowded around and grabbed at the stack. He was signing away like a man possessed, engaging in chitchat, tossing off clever ripostes, asking first names, writing "to Vickie" and "to Herman" and "for Babe" and "with best wishes" and "fondly" and "with memories of New York" and even throwing in the odd quote from Catch-22, when he chanced to look out the window.
The rain had turned into a downpour, a solid curtain of water pounding onto the pavement. Looking at it from inside was like looking out through a waterfall — everything was blurred and smudgy, an Impressionist painting. Suddenly, in the middle of it, a face appeared. Jude froze and stared. He felt from some instinct, as surely as if chords of music had sounded, that this bleary vision would prove meaningful. He stared harder. It was a man, drenched and hunched over. The figure moved closer to the window through the curtain of rain, so that gradually its features became more distinct. And as Jude stared, his mouth dropped open. He thought it looked exactly like him, his own visage staring back at him. The face was perhaps a little younger, but that was hard to tell — it was unshaven, grisly, deranged-looking. Their eyes met for only a second, and Jude thought he detected a current of recognition. Then the figure backed away, became blurred again and was gone as quickly as it had appeared.