Foul Matter (14 page)

Watching them, he was cheered. There were men in the world in suits who still read books.

Sally sat at her desk in Mackenzie-Haack arranging and rearranging a vase full of deep blue delphinium. She was trying to work up the courage (if that’s what she needed) to tell Tom Kidd there was some sort of plan that would harm Ned Isaly. She hated to say “plot” against him. And maybe she was reading too much into what she’d heard.

Tom Kidd was talking on the phone. He could be talking right now to Ned, the way he sounded. Sally could usually work out who he was talking to even if she couldn’t hear the words. It was a contented mood she heard; it was a mood he fell into only when talking to certain people, all writers, such as Ned or Grace Packard or two or three others. Any other telephone “vampires” (Tom’s word, which included people like Kikki Cross, agent; Jani Gat, publisher of a trendy little house that was trying to make it on looks and couldn’t; or the would-be writers who managed to glom his phone number and pitch the books they hadn’t written and never would).

Sally lifted her head and listened. Yes, it was Ned, or about Ned, for Tom had said his name. She went around her desk to lean toward his open door, but Tom’s voice rose and fell, rose and fell, as gently as if he were lullabying a baby.

So it wasn’t Ned for he never needed the poor-baby treatment. Ned wasn’t a baby about his writing. Either Chris Llewelyn or Henry Suma, both wonderful writers, both babies about it. Chris would “go off” a novel in the middle and start whining about writer’s block. Tom Kidd couldn’t stand it when they started in on writer’s block, since Tom didn’t believe in it.

“You’re bored, that’s all
(Tom’s pep talk began).
Imagine being confined with a bunch of people who can’t think right, act right, and, worst of all, speak right. Mouths full of marbles, that’s them, and you have to keep watching what they’re doing and listening to them for months, for years. So just to be bored by this is a miracle. I’m surprised you don’t go off and shoot yourself.”

It was rare for him to deliver that message (since his empathy with writers was boundless), but when he did, it was delivered in Tom’s lullaby tone to counteract any sting they might feel. Such a message didn’t sound consoling, but it did seem to be to such a writer as Chris Llewelyn. All Tom wanted to do was talk them down from the high ledge of the Writer’s Block Building.

But with Ned, Tom never had to use any of his little tricks. He talked to Ned as if Ned were an adult—a writer-adult, that is—not a full-blown actual adult, that is, not from Sally’s point of view. Ned often gave the impression of zoning out on her the way teenagers do with their parents. They only pretend to be paying attention to the other guy; they were actually paying attention to whatever was going on in their self-centered, bookish little world—! and she was getting madder by the moment that Ned wasn’t taking this whole Bobby-Clive plot more seriously.

“What’s up with you?” Tom Kidd was standing by her desk.

“What? Me? Nothing.”

“You were gnashing your teeth.”

“No, I wasn’t. People don’t really do that.” She swung around to her computer screen and started hitting the keys. Gibberish.

Tom Kidd stood there. “That was Eric. He says he won’t meet the deadline because he’s going to burn the manuscript.”

Seeing he’d dropped her teeth gnashing, Sally swung back to face him. “That
would
interfere with the publishing schedule. Except Eric always makes fifteen copies, so I’m sure he’d put one aside. How much longer does he need?”

“Couple extra weeks. Can you imagine? Making yourself crazy just because you’ll be two weeks late?”

“Production will break out in hives if a book’s two
days
late. You know them.”

“Oh, them.”

“Yes, well, oh-them got on his case a couple of years ago because he didn’t get galleys back on time. I can think of a few other scripts Mackenzie-Haack might want to throw on the pyre.”

Tom smiled and leaned against the doorjamb. “Inform me.”

“Well, there’s Dwight Staines’s massive new book. Then—” There was nothing to do but tell him, though she felt the passing on of information gleaned from listening outside somebody’s door would work against her in the end. “I’ve got to tell you something. It’s—” Sally stopped.

Tom had lit a cigarette and was blowing the smoke away from her.

Why didn’t she say it? I think they’re trying to ruin Ned Isaly. What was that bird with the tongue of fire that, after delivering its burden of knowledge, fell to Earth with the flames extinguished? The thing that kept it soaring was what it knew.

Ned was trying to call Tom Kidd. The line was intractably busy. Even the busy signal sounded like one of those roadwork drills.

He turned to look out of the window, down at the park. A fringe of branches hid most of it; he couldn’t see the zinnia bed. A restless wind whipped the branches apart.

Was that Saul down there? The wind moved his line of vision and he saw that old cat that hung out walking on the path. They had never known where it came from, and it was never around when the tramp and his dog were. The cat looked well fed.

He’d leave in a moment. For now, Ned leaned his forehead on the cold glass and watched the wind tearing at the leaves and looked at the sky, thinking how dusk looked like dawn, and then thought of Pittsburgh’s smoggy dawns. City snow. He could see himself at the end of that bridge (what bridge was it?) ornamented by four panthers, two on each end. The bridge spanned Panther Hollow. He had stood looking at the statues, licking an ice cream cone with three scoops of ice cream. Chocolate. Strawberry. Vanilla. Well, he couldn’t be sure of that, could he? Was he even certain there’d been a bridge spanning Panther Hollow? Was he even sure about Panther Hollow?

Stupefied, as if he’d just come awake, he took down his wind-breaker, realizing he’d drifted a long way from the Jardin des Plantes.

If she didn’t tell him, Ned would have no ally with the power of Tom Kidd. He stood there, a slightly built man with milkweed hair and almost colorless eyes, the best editor in New York, one who knew what an editor was supposed to be. Tom was quixotic, a champion of the lost causes of literature.

Times she had been in Tom’s office on one or another pretext—reshelving books, picking up copy, looking terribly urgent, and pretending not to listen when Ned had been there—Ned or Chris Llewelyn or one of the other good Mackenzie-Haack writers—and she’d never heard a word said about sales, promotion, publicity, or the damned list. It was all writing and not necessarily their writing. Writing was everything.

All of this went through Sally’s mind in the time it took her to say, “Nothing. It’s not important.”

He waited (since it was obviously “important”) but did not prompt her. He said, “That’s a pretty bunch of flowers, Sal. You should always have blue flowers around.”

Tom walked away and she felt she had flunked some rigorous test. She covered her face and in a minute felt tears leaking through her fingers. Coward. She reached out and pulled the book she was reading over. Wiping her eyes on her blue sleeve, she opened the book, at the same time pulling open her desk drawer and getting out a Hostess cupcake.

It was Henry Suma’s new book, but it could have been any of a number of books. She read and ate and was calm once again.

Saul watched the old tomcat sit down in front of the two suits. He smiled. Story: here’s the cat; here’s the tension: the cat becomes the still point. Saul couldn’t help himself with a layout like this; what writer could? That was arrogant, he thought, maybe a lot could, wouldn’t think it worth thinking about.

Yet maybe that was it: we think like dreams. We throw all kinds of junk into the stew pot because we believe it will all go together, will cohere no matter how unlikely the match is. As fluid as a dream yet as fixed as the moon.

Focus: cat or zinnia bed, or books or suits. One or the other. As suits, he meant. The men inside them? They meant nothing. They were no problem.

Saul looked up at the sky at dusk. It was mottled, the faintest blotchy colors—yellow, blue, brown. He thought it was a New York sky. Only in New York would you see a sky like a bruise, darkening up. He checked his watch. Time for Swill’s.