The magic was not always there. His best books had parts that lacked it. His worst ones — the ones he liked least, which was no criterion of their critical or popular reception — always had parts that worked perfectly. Sometimes he thought the whole thing was illusory. There was no magic. You got the words down and part was good and part was bad and it didn’t matter what you did or how you did it.
For seventeen days he wrote every day. That was not uncommon for him at the beginning of a book; he dreaded breaking for a day for fear of losing the handle. In those seventeen days he wrote one hundred and eighteen pages. His novels normally ran close to eight hundred pages, sometimes longer. Cutting reduced this length by as much as a third in some cases, but several of them had been published virtually as written.
On the eighteenth day he sat at the desk and typed “119,” at the top of a page. For two hours he sat without typing anything further. It was time for a break, time to take a week or more off, and he had known it from the moment he had finished the previous day’s writing. He fought it because he could not begin a book without a fierce urge to see it finished, but he knew better than to fight it any longer. He was drained for the time being. He could not write what he could not imagine, and his imagination was out to lunch. He dropped page 119 in the wastebasket and covered his typewriter. It had not been covered once since he began the book.
He drove to Trenton, caught an express train to New York. He lunched with his agent, Mary Fradin, an intense woman who chainsmoked and consumed endless cups of strong black coffee. She had represented him far the past dozen years, inheriting him from Jerry Geller, who had retired to Florida and died within two months, presumably of boredom. On their first meeting after Geller’s retirement, she took him to Orsini’s and Downey’s, and he took her to the Algonquin and to bed. All night long conversation had been a trial, and little about her had appealed to him personally or professionally. He made a pass at her less out of desire than with the thought that she might recoil violently, providing him an excuse to find another agent. She surprised him twice, first by going to his room, then by revealing a talent and enthusiasm beyond his fondest dreams.
After the first time he lay back exhausted, too spent even to laugh at his own astonishment. She said, “Ready to sleep?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s what you think. You look better naked than I thought. A little pudgy, though. You should get more exercise out there in God’s country. Chop some wood, do you good, just like the song.”
“Song?”
“Never mind. Let me know if you don’t like any of this.”
“Any of what?”
“Shhhh.”
She began to kiss and lick various parts of his body. For the most part these consisted of areas he had never considered erogenous zones, and for the most part he found out he’d been wrong. At the end he raised his head to watch her mouth working greedily on him. The expression on her face was the most erotic thing he had ever seen. And then at the very end he had to put his head down and close his eyes because the pleasure was too intense to be borne.
“When you come good,” she said, “you like to make noise, don’t you?”
“Jesus.”
“And you thought you were ready to go to sleep. Now you can sleep.”
He sat up. “I’m not sure I can now.”
“Of course you can.” She was off the bed and dressing. “God, don’t tell me I shocked you. You should have figured. Cigarettes and coffee all day long. Very oral. Read your Uncle Sigmund. Something you should know, I don’t sleep with clients.”
“That’s why you’re going home now?”
“Correction, I don’t fuck clients. But you were obviously ready to look for someone else anyway, and I had the feeling we’d be good together.”
“So?”
“So don’t think you have to stay with me so we can do this again. Because if you do stay with me, it means we won’t do this again. Although I have the feeling we wouldn’t anyway. I don’t think you’ll want to.”
“I want to right this minute, and I haven’t—”
“Yes, right this minute, but you also have a wife and you’re not looking to get involved with anybody. You won’t pass up a quick jump but you don’t want an affair. Neither do I, as far as that goes. So don’t stay a client thinking we’ll do this on alternate Thursdays, because we won’t. At all. And for that matter don’t find a new agent because you think I’ll unzip your pants every time you walk into the office.”
“Why should I?”
“Why should you what?”
“Stay a client.”
“In twenty-five words or less? And without the bullshit? Because you were evidently satisfied with Jerry, and I’m twice as sharp as Jerry and a lot more honest. No, he never cheated you, but there were things he did that you never knew about. I’m not going to tell you what. I can get you as good terms as anyone and I’ll never give you any shit. And I’ll leave you alone. Jerry used to call you just to talk and I know you didn’t like it. He was your agent and I already know more about you than he ever did.”
“I never went to bed with Jerry. Anyway, that’s more than twenty-five words.”
“I don’t get paid by the word. Think it over.”
“I already did.”
“And?”
“Come to bed one more time and I’m your client far life.”
She looked at him. Then she said, “Well, I’ve done a lot crazier things,” and took off her clothes again. “I feel a little like a hooker, but that’s not the world’s worst feeling. What do you want to do?”
“What we just did.”
“You mean what I just did. I ought to be able to get on the Sullivan show with this. Don’t get used to it, Hugh, this is the last time for us.”
“Then make it a good one.”
She did, and it was the last time for them. She was, as far as he could tell, as good an agent as Jerry Geller had been. He stayed away from New York as much as possible, paid minimal attention to contracts and options, but over the years he had learned to trust her. It was possible that Jerry had been cheating him, and it was equally possible that she was cheating him, but there was that possibility with any agent. He trusted her.
Once, during the turmoil after the divorce, he had tried to get her to bed. She sidestepped neatly. “You don’t want me,” she told him. “You really don’t. I’m flattered, sweets, but I’m not what you want right now. But there’s a friend of mine you’ll love, and she’ll love you. Wait here while I make a phone call.”
“I couldn’t go through the getting-to-know-you number right now, Mary.”
“You won’t have to. I have senses about people. ESP. The two of you are going to take a look at each other and jump into bed. Just like that.”
She sent him to an apartment on East Fifty-fourth Street where a Eurasian girl met him at the door. He spent the next three days and nights in her bed. It was three months later that he found out the Eurasian girl was a hooker and Mary Fradin had picked up the tab. From then on there wasn’t a thing she could do wrong.
After lunch he walked her back to her office, then took a cab to his publishers. His editor showed him some rough flap copy and asked polite questions about the new book. Hugh gave him polite answers in return. His editor was under thirty and wore mod clothes, and could get excited talking about books by New Left activists and aspiring black writers until he remembered Hugh wasn’t interested in them any more than he was interested in Hugh. He left as quickly as he could and checked in at the Algonquin. Then he called a number he had called in the past and gave his name and the hotel and room number and said he could take immediate delivery of fifty cases of hairpins.