Letters to Jenny (29 page)

At noon I went to the panel on
Marketing Your Writing
which I shared with my agent Kirby McCauley and Ricia Mainhardt, also an agent. My name was underlined, which meant I was the moderator. Ha! I grabbed the mike and started joking about agents. But I think we did manage to provide some solid comment and advice for hopeful writers, and I think it was a good panel.

As soon as it was over, we bugged out. I had a date with Jenny at the hospital. Her father drove me up there; it was about seventy-five miles through lovely autumn-turning forest. It was a nice place, in a parklike setting, with a number of separate buildings. Jenny’s ward was much like a nursery school, only with children of all ages. All of them are there for rehabilitation; their degree of incapacity differs. I suspect that two with the greatest body limitation and most alert minds are Jenny and her former roommate Kathy.

I asked whether Kathy could join us, and she came in her powered wheelchair, which she can control with her right hand on a button. Her range of motion seems almost as limited as Jenny’s, but she can control the wheelchair and also use her little computer to activate preprogrammed sentences. Her ailment has drawn her mouth up so that her upper teeth and gums show, and she is smaller than Jenny though about six years older. What she lacks in appearance she makes up in personality; she is a sweet girl. It is a fault of our species that we tend to judge by physical appearance rather than inner nature, and folk like Jenny and Kathy suffer unfairly. I had the impression that Kathy was thrilled to have been invited.

I showed Jenny the original drawing from
Visual Guide to Xanth
that Todd Hamilton gave her. I gave her the copy of the
Visual Quide
which Todd and I had autographed for her. Then I presented a little gift of my own: a “magic” quartz crystal, set with a small purple amethyst, on a silver chain. “You expected a
red
amethyst?” Jenny finger-spelled archly to her father. I put it on her, fumbling with the tiny catch. I gave another to Kathy, with a red garnet inset, surely surprising her. Then we went into Jenny’s room so I could read to them in private.

What I read was “Tappy,” a story I wrote twenty-six years ago and wasn’t able to sell. I regard it as the most sensitive one I have done. Two years ago I placed it as the first chapter of the ten-author
Light Years
novel, but when that project foundered I bought it back (actually I’m buying the entire project) and converted it to a collaboration with Philip Josée Farmer, in which we alternate chapters. Why go to all this trouble for a story? Well, it’s a special one, and who would pass up a chance to collaborate with Farmer, one of the remarkable authors of the genre?

So I read it to the two girls, and I believe they liked it. It is an adult story about Tappy, a thirteen-year-old mute girl who was maimed and blinded in the accident that killed her father, orphaning her as a child. The protagonist is a twenty-two-year-old hopeful artist hired to drive her to a clinic in another state. As he comes to know Tappy, his doubts about the nature of his job increase; he fears she is to be incarcerated in an institution so she won’t be an embarrassment to her guardians. He stops at a motel in the Green Mountains of Vermont, reads to her from
The Little Prince
, takes her hiking to a mountaintop that seems to fascinate her, and treats her like the human being she is. But he is too feeling; when he attempts to comfort her, he is swept by emotion and makes love to her. He is horrified, well understanding the law on statutory rape. But Tappy gains confidence as he loses it, and leads him up the mountain again at night. At dawn she draws him into a large rock which had been solid by day; it is a portal to elsewhere. Neither of them has reason to remain, in our world, and this is their escape. Phil Farmer, in the second chapter, describes the alien world they emerge in, with strange creatures and plants, and an enormous space ship. The novel is on its way.

I read this story because aspects of it are similar to Jenny’s situation: Jenny is thirteen, and severely hurt in an accident. Tappy is blind; Jenny is paralyzed. Both are mostly mute, but can hear and understand perfectly. The story’s protagonist is a hopeful artist; so is Jenny. Tappy faced the cruelty of indifference or censure by others, because of her condition; so does Jenny. It was a calculated risk, reading a story involving statutory rape to Jenny, but I felt that it is not appropriate to censor adult material that relates so nicely to her situation. The “safe” course would be to read Xanth, with its puns and simple elements, but how long can a person exist on only that level? “Tappy” relates to what is real, despite being the lead-in to what is fantastic. So I risked it, and hope that what I did was right.

Jenny said she liked the story, and I saw Kathy’s flash of pleasure when I described the phenomenal new world to which Tappy went. So perhaps the reading was a success. I have read to audiences of hundreds with less trepidation than this! I came to the convention to meet and talk to Jenny, and to read to her, and all the rest of the convention was less important to me than my interaction with Jenny. I never concealed this from the folk of the convention. Instead of being annoyed, they applauded my attitude.

Kathy touched a button on her computer, and it said “Please sign my point sheet.” They get points for good behavior and progress, and can use these points somewhat like money for privileges. It’s an incentive system that seems to work. The therapists have to sign the sheets, documenting the points earned in each session. What she wanted was an autograph, so I autographed the margin of her point sheet. Then of course Jenny wanted hers autographed too.

As I was leaving, Jenny spelled out something. Her father translated: I had called her Kathy instead of Jenny. Sigh; I do make such slips, and she had caught me.

On the drive back we saw a deer, a stag, standing by the side of the highway. He finally bounded back into the forest. Then we saw a cat who threatened to dash in front of the car, but finally got off the road. Jenny and her mother are vegetarians, as I am; nobody in her family runs over animals.

Back at the convention I talked with Jenny’s family, and we went to the late show: we had missed the Lindahns' slide show, but they were rerunning it for the convention personnel. I had not attended a single convention function other than those where I was onstage; I had been busy with autographings, Jenny, and meetings with professionals. Sometime I would like to go to a convention and see the sights and attend the programs, as ordinary fans do, but I fear that is not feasible. The slide show was of Ron and Val Lindahn’s paintings, with a musical background, and it was impressive and evocative. They are great artists and great people; I respected Richard Pini and Ron Lindahn before, but after seeing how they treated Jenny, I respect them more. I was also impressed with the convention itself, for similar reason; they all worked together to make this perhaps the greatest experience of Jenny’s life since the accident.

Ron Lindahn had me sign his autograph book, in which each person addresses the subject of the Meaning of Life. I pondered, and wrote: “Honor Compassion Realism” and signed it. Each of these words bespeaks volumes in my philosophy.

Monday morning I checked out, using my MasterCard for the first time; it actually worked! I had half expected it to malfunction, because that’s the nature of things when I try to handle them. I remember the one time I tried to make the ATM cash vending machine work; it kept giving me error messages, until my wife explained that it was registering cents instead of dollars, and it didn’t give out cents. Then why was it registering them? I was just supposed to know without being told that a machine that handled only dollars nevertheless registered numbers in cents. Evidently that makes sense (or cents) to the rest of the world. At any rate my bill was in order, except that they had charged me two dollars more for my restaurant breakfast than the bill had showed at the time. I had left a two-dollar tip on the table; maybe they added it to my bill. I don’t claim to comprehend the logic of the world. That two dollars for the tip was the only cash I spent on the trip, which perhaps suggests how I handle money.

Jenny’s father drove me to the airport, and this time it really was a ten-minute drive. Everything was going suspiciously well. Could my curse of traveling be giving out? After he left, they canceled my flight. Why I don’t like to travel—sigh. They don’t do that sort of thing when my wife is along, which is why I hate traveling alone even worse. I wound up on a plane bound north to Baltimore. I was just in time; I think I was the last person to board, and got the last seat available, and it took off right after. Jenny’s rose, pinned to my carried jacket, was taking a beating as I bundled in. I know it’s artificial; that still bothered me. It was as if Jenny herself was getting battered. I heard that three of us were being routed that way to Tampa. I heard the girl in the seat ahead of me mention Tampa, so I inquired whether she was one of the others. No; she turned out to be a stewardess. Ouch; I found such an innocent confusion acutely embarrassing. Then at Baltimore I inquired and found the gate for the plane to Tampa. They were in the throes of rerouting passengers for a canceled flight to Albany. USAir seemed to be canceling flights all over! I phoned Cam, and after several attempts with the newfangled computer-screened phone managed to get my collect call through to her. Phones don’t like me. I caught her about forty-five minutes before she was due to start out to meet the plane I wasn’t on. I don’t know how we would have connected otherwise. In short, this was normal traveling, for me. I’d rather stay home.

I read during the flights and delays, and managed to finish the Conan novel, and look at two fanzines I had been given along the way. One was
The Knarley Knews
, a small personal production, and the other was
Anvil
, its fiftieth issue, put out by Charlotte Proctor. That’s a solid production, but it runs the addresses of those who write it letters, so I won’t.

The new plane served a good meal for me. The flight started on time and arrived early. I had an aisle seat near the front; I got out fast and spied Cam studying the schedule to spot my plane, not realizing that it was already in. We hurried to the car and skimmed through the beginning of rush hour; that surely saved us a good chunk of time. That’s why I don’t check any baggage; not only would they lose it, because of my curse, I would suffer critical delay. As it was, we were an hour late feeding the horses; fortunately they were nice about it. Cam had during my absence put a new picture up in the family room, and set up and filled four new filing cabinets with my year’s correspondence. Twenty letters had piled up, and ten more came in the next day, and a dozen more the following day. It was evident that I would get little if any paying work done this week. Sigh; I was back in Mundania.

NoRemember 17, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Well, here I am safely back at home. Your folks probably told you how USAir canceled my plane flight after your daddy left me at the airport. That’s why I don’t like to travel. They wouldn’t do that to my wife, or to your folks, but there I was alone, so they did it. I had to go home by way of Baltimore: that is, I flew north, and then south. I was an hour late feeding the horses. Sigh. But I don’t need to go into all that here; I have written up a report on everything that I will send to my family at the end of the month. Yes, you get a copy. I just like to get things written down, before I forget the details. So if you want to know about the convention from my point of view, tell your daddy to read it to you. No, you don’t have to! I
know
you were there! Oh—that’s not it? I don’t know how to read your finger-signs. Do them again slowly. DOES IT INCLUDE—oh, yes, it includes what I said to you when we met. That’s a separate report, more private, titled “Let Me Hold Your Hand.” But why should you care about that? You already know what I said. Oh—you want to make sure I wrote it down right. It really doesn’t read as I said it; things that were important just look like dull words, and more time is taken on the trivia than on the essentials. But here’s a copy.

Yes, that’s what I meant: a copy. I printed one copy on the laser printer, and then took it down to the copy machine we bought yesterday. It’s a Mita DC 1205; I think the number means that it makes 12 copies a minute, or five seconds per copy. It does; I timed it. We realized that we have to do a lot of copying, and it’s a pain to go into town and feed money into the machine, so we shopped for a copier we could use at home, and this is it. It’s so simple to operate that even I feel at ease with it. So your Convention Report is a copy which looks just like the original. Sure, I could have run off more copies on the laser printer, but this is twice as fast, and anyway, I wanted to make sure it worked. The same day we got it, I received a letter from Philip José Farmer asking for a copy of his Chapter 2, which he no longer has; now I’ll be able to make it for him. That’s the second chapter of our collaborative novel; I read the first chapter to you and Kathy, remember? You don’t? When I visited you at the hospital, and accidentally called you Kathy—yes,
that
time. And you are never going to let me hear the end of it, are you! Farmer will now do the fourth chapter, because I’ve already done the third, and we’ll give it to my agent to sell to a publisher. My agent is Kirby McCauley, whom you also met; yes, I know you don’t remember, because it was only a few seconds, but he was there. So you see, you are involved, one way or another, in more than one of my projects. When we finish that novel I’ll send you a copy, so you can see how it turns out, if you’re interested.

Meanwhile, my nose is fauceting; another allergenic front came through, and antiallergy pills for me are like anti-motion-sickness pills for you: they make me sleepy without stopping the allergy. Sigh. Tomorrow McCauley and a man named Wil Nelson will be here, so I can see the five minute sample of the first Xanth video movie and decide whether it’s good enough to proceed with. No, that’s not the graphic version of
Isle of View
, silly; that’s what Richard Pini is doing. This is
A Spell For Chameleon
on video tape. If we do it. If things fall into place. And I’ll have a sore nose. This is what my life is like. Yes, I realize that it’s not your nose that’s sore! It’s still a nuisance and a pain.