Bag of Bones (5 page)

I thought I was probably inviting another storm of grief—maybe the worst storm—but I went ahead anyway . . . and our emotions always surprise us, don't they? There was no weeping and wailing that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of loss—the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.

I poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up. “I'm done, Jo,” I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. “So
that's
all right, isn't it?”

There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that's worth repeating—there was no response. I didn't sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.

I drank the champagne, put the glass back on the Coke tray, then filled the other one. I took it over to the Mac and sat down where Johanna would have been sitting, if not for everyone's favorite loving God. No weeping and wailing, but my eyes prickled with tears. The words on the screen were these:

today wasn't so bad, she supposed. She crossed the grass to her car, and laughed when she saw the white square of paper under the windshield. Cam Delancey, who refused to be discouraged, or to take no for an answer, had invited her to another
of his Thursday-night wine-tasting parties. She took the paper, started to tear it up, then changed her mind and stuck it in the hip pocket of her jeans, instead.

“No paragraph indent,” I said, “this continues.” Then I keyboarded the line I'd been holding in my head ever since I got up to get the champagne.
There was a whole world out there; Cam Delancey's wine-tasting was as good a place to start as any.

I stopped, looking at the little flashing cursor. The tears were still prickling at the corners of my eyes, but I repeat that there were no cold drafts around my ankles, no spectral fingers at the nape of my neck. I hit
RETURN
twice. I clicked on
CENTER
. I typed The End below the last line of prose, and then I toasted the screen with what should have been Jo's glass of champagne.

“Here's to you, babe,” I said. “I wish you were here. I miss you like hell.” My voice wavered a little on that last word, but didn't break. I drank the Taittinger, saved my final line of copy, transferred the whole works to floppy disks, then backed them up. And except for notes, grocery lists, and checks, that was the last writing I did for four years.

M
y publisher didn't know, my editor Debra Weinstock didn't know, my agent Harold Oblowski didn't know. Frank Arlen didn't know, either, although on more than one occasion I had been tempted to tell him.
Let me be your brother. For Jo's sake if not your own,
he told me on the day he went back to his printing business and mostly solitary life in the southern Maine town of Sanford. I had never expected to take him up on that, and didn't—not in the elemental cry-for-help way he might have been thinking about—but I phoned him every couple of weeks or so. Guy-talk, you know—
How's it going, Not too bad, cold as a witch's tit, Yeah, here, too, You want to go down to Boston if I can get Bruins tickets, Maybe next year, pretty busy right now, Yeah, I know how that is, seeya, Mikey, Okay, Frank, keep your wee-wee in the teepee.
Guy-talk.

I'm pretty sure that once or twice he asked me if I was working on a new book, and I think I said—

Oh, fuck it—that's a lie, okay? One so ingrown
that now I'm even telling it to myself. He asked, all right, and I always said yeah, I was working on a new book, it was going good, real good. I was tempted more than once to tell him
I can't write two paragraphs without going into total mental and physical doglock—my heartbeat doubles, then triples, I get short of breath and then start to pant, my eyes feel like they're going to pop out of my head and hang there on my cheeks. I'm like a claustrophobe in a sinking submarine. That's how it's going, thanks for asking,
but I never did. I don't call for help. I
can't
call for help. I think I told you that.

*   *   *

From my admittedly prejudiced standpoint, successful novelists—even modestly successful novelists—have got the best gig in the creative arts. It's true that people buy more CDs than books, go to more movies, and watch a
lot
more TV. But the arc of productivity is longer for novelists, perhaps because readers are a little brighter than fans of the non-written arts, and thus have marginally longer memories. David Soul of
Starsky and Hutch
is God knows where, same with that peculiar white rapper Vanilla Ice, but in 1994, Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Norman Mailer were all still around; talk about when dinosaurs walked the earth.

Arthur Hailey was writing a new book (that was the rumor, anyway, and it turned out to be true), Thomas Harris could take seven years between Lecters and still produce bestsellers, and although not heard from in almost forty years, J. D. Salinger was still a hot topic in English classes and informal coffee-house literary groups. Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative
arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled onto the bestseller lists by the magic words
AUTHOR OF
on the covers of their books.

What the publisher wants in return, especially from an author who can be counted on to sell 500,000 or so copies of each novel in hardcover and a million more in paperback, is perfectly simple: a book a year. That, the wallahs in New York have determined, is the optimum. Three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every twelve months, a beginning, a middle, and an end, continuing main character like Kinsey Millhone or Kay Scarpetta optional but very much preferred. Readers love continuing characters; it's like coming back to family.

Less than a book a year and you're screwing up the publisher's investment in you, hampering your business manager's ability to continue floating all of your credit cards, and jeopardizing your agent's ability to pay his shrink on time. Also, there's always
some
fan attrition when you take too long. Can't be helped. Just as, if you publish too much, there are readers who'll say, “Phew, I've had enough of this guy for awhile, it's all starting to taste like beans.”

I tell you all this so you'll understand how I could spend four years using my computer as the world's most expensive Scrabble board, and no one ever suspected. Writer's block? What writer's block? We don't got no steenkin writer's block. How could anyone think such a thing when there was a new Michael Noonan suspense novel appearing each fall just like clockwork, perfect for your late-summer pleasure reading, folks, and by the way, don't forget that the
holidays are coming and that all your relatives would also probably enjoy the new Noonan, which can be had at Borders at a thirty per cent discount, oy vay, such a deal.

The secret is simple, and I am not the only popular novelist in America who knows it—if the rumors are correct, Danielle Steel (to name just one) has been using the Noonan Formula for decades. You see, although I have published a book a year starting with
Being Two
in 1984, I wrote
two
books in four of those ten years, publishing one and ratholing the other.

I don't remember ever talking about this with Jo, and since she never asked, I always assumed she understood what I was doing: saving up nuts. It wasn't writer's block I was thinking of, though. Shit, I was just having fun.

By February of 1995, after crashing and burning with at least two good ideas (that particular function—the
Eureka!
thing—has never stopped, which creates its own special version of hell), I could no longer deny the obvious: I was in the worst sort of trouble a writer can get into, barring Alzheimer's or a cataclysmic stroke. Still, I had four cardboard manuscript boxes in the big safe-deposit box I keep up at Fidelity Union. They were marked
Promise, Threat, Darcy,
and
Top.
Around Valentine's Day, my agent called, moderately nervous—I usually delivered my latest masterpiece to him by January, and here it was already half-past February. They would have to crash production to get this year's Mike Noonan out in time for the annual Christmas buying orgy. Was everything all right?

This was my first chance to say things were a country
mile from all right, but Mr. Harold Oblowski of 225 Park Avenue wasn't the sort of man you said such things to. He was a fine agent, both liked and loathed in publishing circles (sometimes by the same people at the same time), but he didn't adapt well to bad news from the dark and oil-streaked levels where the goods were actually produced. He would have freaked and been on the next plane to Derry, ready to give me creative mouth-to-mouth, adamant in his resolve not to leave until he had yanked me out of my fugue. No, I liked Harold right where he was, in his thirty-eighth-floor office with its kickass view of the East Side.

I told him what a coincidence, Harold, you calling on the very day I finished the new one, gosharooty, how 'bout that, I'll send it out FedEx, you'll have it tomorrow. Harold assured me solemnly that there was no coincidence about it, that where his writers were concerned, he was telepathic. Then he congratulated me and hung up. Two hours later I received his bouquet—every bit as fulsome and silky as one of his Jimmy Hollywood ascots.

After putting the flowers in the dining room, where I rarely went since Jo died, I went down to Fidelity Union. I used my key, the bank manager used his, and soon enough I was on my way to FedEx with the manuscript of
All the Way from the Top.
I took the most recent book because it was the one closest to the front of the box, that's all. In November it was published just in time for the Christmas rush. I dedicated it to the memory of my late, beloved wife, Johanna. It went to number eleven on the
Times
bestseller list, and everyone went home happy. Even me. Because things would get better, wouldn't they? No one had
terminal
writer's block, did they (well, with the possible exception of Harper Lee)? All I had to do was relax, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. And thank God I'd been a good squirrel and saved up my nuts.

I was still optimistic the following year when I drove down to the Federal Express office with
Threatening Behavior.
That one was written in the fall of 1991, and had been one of Jo's favorites. Optimism had faded quite a little bit by March of 1997, when I drove through a wet snowstorm with
Darcy's Admirer,
although when people asked me how it was going (“Writing any good books lately?” is the existential way most seem to phrase the question), I still answered good, fine, yeah, writing lots of good books lately, they're pouring out of me like shit out of a cow's ass.

After Harold had read
Darcy
and pronounced it my best ever, a bestseller which was also
serious,
I hesitantly broached the idea of taking a year off. He responded immediately with the question I detest above all others: was I all right? Sure, I told him, fine as freckles, just thinking about easing off a little.

There followed one of those patented Harold Oblowski silences, which were meant to convey that you were being a terrific asshole, but because Harold liked you so much, he was trying to think of the gentlest possible way of telling you so. This is a wonderful trick, but one I saw through about six years ago. Actually, it was Jo who saw through it. “He's only pretending compassion,” she said. “Actually, he's like a cop in one of those old
film noir
movies, keeping his mouth shut so you'll blunder ahead and end up confessing to everything.”

This time I kept my mouth shut—just switched the phone from my right ear to my left, and rocked back a little further in my office chair. When I did, my eye fell on the framed photograph over my computer—Sara Laughs, our place on Dark Score Lake. I hadn't been there in eons, and for a moment I consciously wondered why.

Then Harold's voice—cautious, comforting, the voice of a sane man trying to talk a lunatic out of what he hopes will be no more than a passing delusion—was back in my ear. “That might not be a good idea, Mike—not at this stage of your career.”

“This isn't a stage,” I said. “I peaked in 1991—since then, my sales haven't really gone up or down. This is a
plateau,
Harold.”

“Yes,” he said, “and writers who've reached that steady state really only have two choices in terms of sales—they can continue as they are, or they can go down.”

So I go down,
I thought of saying . . . but didn't. I didn't want Harold to know exactly how deep this went, or how shaky the ground under me was. I didn't want him to know that I was now having heart palpitations—yes, I mean this literally—almost every time I opened the Word Six program on my computer and looked at the blank screen and flashing cursor.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Message received.”

“You're sure you're all right?”

“Does the book read like I'm wrong, Harold?”

“Hell, no—it's a helluva yarn. Your personal best, I told you. A great read but also fucking
serious shit.
If Saul Bellow wrote romantic suspense fiction, this is
what he'd write. But . . . you're not having any trouble with the next one, are you? I know you're still missing Jo, hell, we all are—”

“No,” I said. “No trouble at all.”

Another of those long silences ensued. I endured it. At last Harold said, “Grisham could afford to take a year off. Clancy could. Thomas Harris, the long silences are a part of his mystique. But where you are, life is even tougher than at the very top, Mike. There are five writers for every one of those spots down on the list, and you know who they are—hell, they're your neighbors three months a year. Some are going up, the way Patricia Cornwell went up with her last two books, some are going down, and some are staying steady, like you. If Tom Clancy were to go on hiatus for five years and then bring Jack Ryan back, he'd come back strong, no argument. If
you
go on hiatus for five years, maybe you don't come back at all. My advice is—”