Jeremy Thrane (43 page)

“No hell is fresh,” he said snappily.

“It’s too early for another rejection letter, isn’t it? The mail hasn’t been delivered yet. Unless it arrived on Saturday.”

“This isn’t about a letter, Jeremy,” he said with his usual amiable tolerance of my attempts to leaven the rejection process with banter at his expense, as if he were responsible for this whole mess. “It’s about a call I just got a couple of minutes ago.”

“A call from whom?” I asked.

“Well, his name won’t mean much to you,” said Howard. “He’s a young assistant editor at Wilder named Bill Dexter. He’s the son of a friend of my aunt’s. He read your novel over the weekend.”

“As a personal favor,” I said darkly. “His whole weekend shot to bits. Poor kid.”

“Right,” Howard said with a chuckle. “He called me at, what, nine-twenty on a Monday morning to tell me he hated it? I don’t think so.”

“So then …” I said, squinching my eyes against the hope that leapt like a weasel against the trap of my rib cage.

Howard sighed, which made the weasel do a rabid flip. He seemed to sigh only when he had good news; he’d sighed when he’d agreed to represent me and since then I hadn’t heard him sigh again.

“He’s nuts over it, Jeremy,” he said aggrievedly. “He said this is the
novel he’d want to write if he wrote novels. Apparently, his own father was a crazy schmuck politico just like yours, dumped his wife and kids, went off to Latin America to convert the peasants, get them to overthrow whatever government was oppressing them. Long story short, he thinks this book is the shit. That’s the term he used, the shit.”

“The shit?”

“He wants to buy it, Jeremy.”

“He wants to
buy
it?” My mouth stayed open after I finished talking. I was holding the receiver so tightly, my hand was starting to ache. I didn’t loosen my grip. “You mean he wants to
publish
it?”

Frederick’s head levitated above the partition, his hair fluttering against his scalp, as if his excitement couldn’t be contained by his skull and was venting itself through his ears, creating an upward-wafting draft.

“That’s what he just told me,” said Howard, “two minutes ago.”

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.

“What’s wrong with him, he asks,” said Howard mournfully, and sighed again.

“No,” I said, laughing a little. “I mean, why did everyone else hate it so much?”

“They didn’t
hate
it,” he said patiently, “they just didn’t love it enough to buy it. Listen, nothing is set in stone yet. He doesn’t know how his higher-ups are going to respond. He’s a kid, Jeremy. He’s got very little power or clout. He’s just starting out; he doesn’t even have his own office yet. This would be the first novel he acquires in his publishing career. He can’t promise you a lot of money and he’s fairly certain you’ll have to do rewrites. But I know he’d be a very good editor for you.”

At this point, I felt as if the deli delivery guy would have been a good editor for me. “So now what?” I asked.

“Now he’s got to work up some figures, get second opinions from some colleagues, go to a couple of meetings, kick it around. But this is real interest here; this is good.”

“Great,” I said. My mouth was still open. I met Frederick’s eyes and shook my head dazedly. His eyebrows shot up, which caused his hair to
quiver on his scalp as if it might take wing any minute and fly away. To a poet, the notion of having an agent was otherworldly enough; the possibility of actual publication by anyone but a vanity press must have seemed as astounding as the discovery of fire to early man.

“Here’s an idea he put forward, a kind of offer,” Howard was saying. “He’d like to sit down with you during his own free time, just to brainstorm with you, give you his rewrite ideas, hear your own ideas for edits and revisions, see whether you two would be on the same page.”

“When does he want to meet me?”

“As soon as possible,” said Howard. “Tonight, if you’re free.”

As I thought the words “Henry Tolliver,” a lightning bolt zigzagged through my nervous system. “How about tomorrow?” I said as calmly as I could. “Unfortunately, I already have plans for tonight.”

“Can I have him call you at work?” Howard asked.

“I’ll be here all day.”

I stared at the phone for a moment before I hung up, then forced my mouth closed and replaced the receiver carefully and firmly.

“Now, what,” Frederick said, coming around to my cubicle, “in God’s name was that all about?”

“An assistant editor wants to talk to me about possibly rewriting my novel so he can have a better shot at buying it, if it comes to that,” I told him. Stated baldly like that, it didn’t sound nearly as thrilling as my adrenaline level seemed to think it was.

“My God,” Frederick said, cocking his head slightly to one side. “Do you have any idea what this means?”

“It means I’ll be strangled by the tentacles of the conglomerate beast,” I said.

He gave a ghostly smile. “It means you did it,” he said. “You did it for all of us.”

“All of who?”

“Whom,” he corrected me gently. “You did your best work, you put it forward, and it has been deemed worthy.” He gave a loose howl of a laugh; his limbs flung themselves about in a brief sort of jig. When he lunged for me, I was afraid momentarily that he intended to embrace or even kiss me, but all he did was clap me on the shoulder. “You know how
many writers there are in the world, this
city
, who work all their lives on books and plays and poems and stories, who will most likely die without ever seeing a single word they’ve obsessed over in print?”

“I didn’t sell it yet, you know,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “but you will. I feel it in my gut. Let me buy you lunch. Somewhere special. Where do you want to go?”

“All this talk about tentacles,” I said giddily. “I’ve got a hankering for the black squid rice at the Cuban-Chinese place.”

“Hey, you two,” came Daphne’s smoker’s growl from her own cubicle. “I don’t care who’s eating what at lunch or who’s the big new literary hotshot, you have work to do, so do it now. We gotta deadline, if you’ll recall. Jeremy, you leaving early again today?”

“No,” I said. “I promise.”

“And you can work late Thursday and Friday this week?”

“Till whenever you need me,” I said with a sunniness that surprised me.

At one o’clock Frederick duly squired me to Conchita Chan. We snagged ourselves a rickety, chili-and-soy-sauce-splotched table in the back, where we were served heaping plates of salty, greasy, wonderful food.

“A toast,” said Frederick, hoisting his glass of ice water. “May you be despised by the most petty and envious of your fellow writers.”

“What kind of a toast is that?”

“Trust me, Jeremy,” he said with his half-smile, his glass still aloft. “When your peers think you’re worth badmouthing, you’ve really made it.”

“No!” I said. “Please don’t wish that on me.”

“May they disparage, dismiss, and belittle you to the skies,” he said, ignoring me. “May they call you overrated and pretentious, may they roll their eyes at the mention of your name, may they take the time and trouble to write scathing one-star Amazon reviews in your honor. You deserve it.”

“Thank you,” I said, laughing a little as our water glasses met in midair. “I think.”

After the meal we felt a bit torrid; we had to take a short stroll around the neighborhood to get some sun and air after inhaling so much
steam from the vats of rice and exhaling so much perfervid banter. Shortly after we returned from lunch, one of the editors, the same male mannequin who’d directed Bianca Mantooth to my cubicle, dropped some fresh copy onto my desk, turned on his Pradashod heel, and then, just before he flitted away, murmured snootily, as if it were an afterthought, “Congratulations on your book.”

“Thanks, Jason,” I said. “But I haven’t—” I watched his willowy, linen-jacket-draped swayback recede down the aisle between the cubicles, then shut my mouth, which seemed to be catching a lot of flies today, and got back to work.

My phone rang a moment after Frederick had gone off in the direction of the candy machines. “
Downtown
copy,” I said.

“May I speak to Jeremy Thrane?”

“Speaking,” I said apprehensively. Frederick wasn’t in his cubicle, where he belonged, to eavesdrop on this important conversation and egg me on. I felt vulnerable and unprotected.

“This is Bill Dexter.”

“Bill,” I said, and swallowed. How did you talk to an editor who might be going to buy your novel some day? I found I had no idea. “Hi.”

“I think Howard has already talked to you, so you know who I am, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Then I’ll get right to it. I loved
Angus in Efes
. I’d like to meet you as soon as possible to talk about some ideas I have for the manuscript. Howard said you suggested tomorrow night, which is fine with me.”

“Tomorrow night would be great,” I said.

Very efficiently, we established eight o’clock as our meeting time, agreed on a coffee shop in the East Village, and described ourselves as identical-sounding brown-haired white men, after which we said “See you tomorrow” and “I’m looking forward to it” and “Great” and “Goodbye,” and then all of a sudden I had hung up the phone and was staring once again at the article I was copyediting. My heart was pounding so hard, it was almost squeaking. Almost automatically, I deleted an apostrophe, added a comma, queried the author’s use of the word “antipodean,” but as I did these things, the front of my brain was alight
with rapturous dread. He’d sounded so young. I was so old compared to him. I was very likely wholly dependent on this postcollegiate boy for whatever fulfillment and success I was going to have in my chosen career. Had I sounded too desperate and needy and cravenly eager? What changes was he going to ask me to make? What if I hated his ideas? What if I couldn’t bring myself to do a single thing he asked? What if I turned out to be not as good a writer as he thought I was? What if I failed?

Just after six o’clock I packed up for the day and rode the elevator down to the street with several secretaries in sneakers. We all pushed one by one through the revolving doors into a piercingly clear, effortlessly temperate evening. As I walked home, it hit me that in the course of this one day, three potentially life-changing things (I refused even to think the word “events” anymore) were happening to me. It seemed that this was how such enormous changes usually happened to me, several of them all at once. It reminded me, as it would have any American my age, of the slogan “When it rains, it pours,” written in white cursive under that little girl with her big umbrella on the blue Morton’s salt box. Of course, literally this meant that the salt wouldn’t cake in humid weather, but metaphorically it seemed applicable to my current situation. I found that I was singing inside: I was keeping my copyediting job! I was getting a new roommate named Andy! I got to listen to free jazz tonight!

My unexpected happiness at these mundane, improbable things made me think of a story my mother had told me when I was a kid about a man whose house was too small. He was miserable, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t hear himself dream or think. He went to the village elder for advice. The village elder thought for a moment, then said positively, “Well, you’ve got to move your cow into the house with you, that’ll solve your problem.” The man did as he was told, but this naturally made the house seem even smaller, and he found that he was now even more miserable. So back to the village elder he went, distressed and puzzled. “Move your goat into your house with you,” said the village elder after the man had complained at length about how cramped he was. The man did as he was told; this part of the story had always astonished me, not having had any comparable venerable elderly figures in my own life
in whom I had this degree of blind faith. But when the goat was underfoot, back the man trotted to complain once again to the elder, who told him to move another animal in, and another, until chickens roosted in the rafters, horses’ heads stuck out of every window, sheep baaed in the boudoir, and pigs nursed their piglets under the table.

At the end of his wits, the poor guy went back to the old man, whose wisdom he was finally beginning to doubt. “I asked you to help me make my house bigger, and all you’ve done is make it even smaller! I can hardly move any more! I’m going crazy! I’m ready to go sleep in the barn just to get a little peace!”

The old man said, “All right, now move all the animals out again.” The man dutifully moved his entire menagerie back to stable, yard, and barn.

And lo and behold, his house seemed bigger suddenly than he had ever dreamed possible, a palace, a spacious mansion, a wondrous haven of serenity and order, amplitude and comfort. And so he lived happily ever after in his same old house.

I got home ten minutes ahead of my sisters’ arrival. They entered the apartment looking sunburned, windblown, and wild-eyed, wearing sleeveless dresses and sandals and looking so much alike, I was shocked.

“We went to the Statue of Liberty,” said Lola. “And Ellis Island. We took our tourist husbands on an outing. And all the parents.”

“And Feckin,” said Amanda.

“And Amanda’s whole band,” said Lola. “The whole wedding party, practically, except for you, Jeremy. Shame you had to work today, it was grand.”

“We left at the crack of dawn,” said Amanda. “I haven’t been up so early in years.”

Laughing merrily at nothing that I could ascertain, they flung themselves onto Scott’s velvet and mahogany fainting couch as if it were a park bench.

“Did the guitar player go too?” I asked casually. “From last night. Henry.”

“Laura’s Henry? No, he had to work, like you.”

“Look at the little bird!” cried Lola.

“Hey, look at this furniture,” said Amanda, who for one reason or another had never been here before. “You never told me you lived in such a nice place.”

“It’s not mine,” I said. “All the nice stuff is moving out very soon. So is the bird.”

“Juanita?” said Amanda. “Under her own steam, or what?”

“I gave her away yesterday,” I said. “You and her both. Listen, are you really ready to do this? I’m sort of dreading it.”