One More Thing (5 page)

“Thank you,” said Julie and the warlord at the same time.

“Can I get you anything else? Another drink?”

“I really shouldn’t,” said Julie. “Are you okay to drive, by the way?”

“I have a driver,” said the warlord.

Julie ordered a fourth and final cocktail.

The Something
by John Grisham

John Grisham woke up shortly after sunrise in his large, light-filled house outside Charlottesville, Virginia. He put on a pot of coffee for his beautiful wife, picked up the fresh crisp newspaper from his driveway—he was still a print guy, print had been good to him—and flipped peacefully through the front section as he did every morning until he found something that nearly made him choke on his locally baked bread.

CONGRATULATIONS TO AUTHOR JOHN GRISHAM, declared the full-page ad, which featured a smiling, handsome picture of his face from ten years ago, WHOSE NEW THRILLER
THE SOMETHING
DEBUTED THIS WEEK AT #1 ON THE
NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER LIST. CONGRATULATIONS FROM EVERYONE AT RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING. Then, in smaller letters:
CHECK OUT
THE SOMETHING
AND OTHER JOHN GRISHAM BESTSELLERS AT RANDOMHOUSE.COM
.

Nothing happened for a minute. Birds chirped.

John Grisham picked up the phone.

“Dale. John Grisham. Call me back. Call me back ASAP. Thanks. Looking forward to your call. This is John Grisham.”
Then a minute later he texted to the same number:
Call me. 911. JG
.

A minute later his home phone rang.

“Hey, Dale.” Dale was John Grisham’s new editor. Art was still his editor officially, but he had handed off most day-to-day duties to this new guy Dale seven months ago, and so far, there had been no problems. But so far only goes so far, as the protagonist of his latest book liked to say; so far only goes so far.

“First things first: congratulations!” said Dale. If Dale was at all surprised that John Grisham was calling him and texting
911
to his cell phone at 5:55 a.m., he did a very good job hiding it. “Can we pause to appreciate this for a second? I know this is par for the course for you, but: number one for
The Something
in its debut week? I hope you give yourself a second to really—”

“Where did you send the galleys?” asked John Grisham.

“For you to proofread? Uh, we sent them to your farm in Mississippi on, let me check … August fourth. Does that sound right? You always spend July and August on the farm, correct?”

“Not this August. I was here in Virginia.”

“Ah. My apologies. Right, the weather, that makes—yeah. Well, we didn’t hear back for a couple weeks, and word around here is that you never really weigh in on galleys anyway, right? I mean, that’s what everyone told me. So after a couple weeks—we were up against this holiday deadline, and, hey, congratulations again, because obviously there could not be a better time to debut at number one than the Christmas season … I’m sorry, John. Obviously, I should have double-checked. I just didn’t want to disturb you and, like, hound you, especially being the new guy here, and again, I was told you really never weigh in on galleys. Is there anything you wanted to change? I can definitely see about changing it for the paperback, or—”

“The title of the book is not
The Something
.”

There was a long silence.

“What?”

“The title of my book is not
The Something
,” said John Grisham.

“I … am looking at this manuscript right now, sent in by you to us, dated July second:
The Something by John Grisham
.”

“I just meant ‘The … Something,’ ” said John Grisham—careful to calibrate both his emphasis and his anger precisely, not letting either cloud the other. He then repeated what he had just said with every possible intonation, approaching it like the methodical defense attorney he once was, just so it would be entirely, one hundred percent clear to this person named Dale. “ ‘The …
Something.
’ ‘
The …
Something.’ ‘The SOME-thing.’ Do you get it, Dale?! It was going to be ‘The … … …
SOMETHING
’!!! I was going to decide that part later!”

“Huh. .… Okay.… I think … Why didn’t … Okay.”

John Grisham could practically see the excessive blank space between Dale’s words: more typos, these ones over the phone.

“I gotta tell you, John,” said Dale, finally, starting again: “I gotta say, people have actually really responded to
The Something
. It feels … deliberately ambiguous. You know? It’s elegantly vague. It basically lets people project whatever—”

“The book,” said John Grisham, “is about a civil rights attorney who is blackmailed by the El Salvadoran maid he risked his career for in order to sneak her children into the country. Okay? It is not meant to be
elegantly vague
. This is about
right
and
wrong
, about the
limits
of the
law
, about
concrete legal issues
and
specific personal actions
. A good title would have been, oh, I don’t know, Dale, off the top of my fucking head?
The Case
?
The Betrayal
?
The Immigrant’s Trial
,
The Immigrant
,
The Threat
,
The Letter
,
The Lawyer’s Pen
,
The Blackmail
? Just to name a few?! Or,” he said, trying to sneak this one in there, the one he really
wanted but was a little shy to bring up, “I thought
So Far Only Goes So Far
wouldn’t be the stupidest title in the world, if we wanted to go for something different?”

“What would that refer to?” asked Dale.

“Oh, like
The Something
refers to
anything
!” exploded Grisham. “The point is … Look, forget
So Far Only Goes So Far
, it’s stupid, it’s pretentious, it’s not what I do—look. Look. This isn’t a
ghost
story, Dale, okay?
The S-o-o-o-o-m-e-t-h-i-i-i-i
—no.
No!
This is about concrete issues of our time maybe more than anything I’ve written since probably
Pelican
. And thematically, it’s about the unforeseeable consequences of the compromises we all make. In any case,
The Something
is, on every level, a
completely inappropriate
title. Okay? Okay, Dale? Do you understand that now? How if you were to get any two words wrong in this book, these are two pretty fucking important ones?”

“Yes,” said Dale. “Yes. I do.”

John Grisham exhaled, feeling his breath leave his body as he did, like his wife’s yoga instructor had taught him to do that one time. He never went back to that yoga instructor, but he still thought about that session sometimes.

“I do want to say one very small thing—not to defend myself, at all, but just to make you feel a little better while we sort all this out,” said Dale. “For what it’s worth—and the answer may be nothing—people have not mentioned the title once. Really. Not once. Reviews have been good. You know, considering—you’re an extremely popular writer, and some reviewers are naturally going to hold that against you, but … really, I read all of them. All of them. Everything. I have not read one review that has brought this up.”

“Okay. That’s good,” said John Grisham.

“Not one blog—nothing. For whatever reason—and I know it was a huge mistake on my end—a monumental one that will
probably … Yeah. Just, for your own peace of mind, you should know that the reaction has been one hundred percent okay so far.”

John Grisham said nothing.

“I’ll tell everyone to hold off on the next printing immediately until you’ve had a chance to figure out what you want to do here. It’ll be a big deal—first printing is a million, as I’m sure you know—but this is my fault, and literally nothing is more important to this company than you being happy here. Think about what you want to do, okay?”

“Okay. Thank you, Dale.”

“And John?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

John Grisham hung up the phone and looked out the window.

The Something
? Were they fucking kidding him?

And, also: number one. Again. Not bad. Expected, but still. Number one. He hadn’t taken a moment to let himself enjoy that. He took another sip of coffee, and as he did, he quietly wished himself a tiny, formal congratulation.

“Congratulation”? “Congratulations”? What was the singular? John Grisham wasn’t sure. He didn’t need to know. Guys like Dale were paid to know things like that.

Although apparently guys like Dale were paid to do a lot of things they didn’t do right.

John Grisham took a sip of coffee as he thought about what to do.

The coffee tasted good. After all these years, he finally knew how to get the proportions right.

John Grisham walked over to his bookshelf. He pictured the hard new spine of a book called
The Something
on his shelf, right next to the other number one bestsellers he had written,
like hard, humble trophies, right next to his favorite trophy, an actual trophy, the division championship trophy of the Little League team he had coached back when his kid was a kid, and when people could hardly believe that a successful guy like John Grisham really did coach Little League, let alone was a really good coach, let alone was the coach of the division champions, the Reds.

It looked okay, on the shelf in his mind.

The Partner
,
The Racketeer
,
The Runaway Jury
,
The Something
,
The Street Lawyer
.

Not great—just okay.

But okay.

But only okay.

But still okay.

If he couldn’t enjoy a morning like this, wondered John Grisham; if he couldn’t appreciate learning about his own number one bestseller in a crisp rolled-up newspaper delivered right to his front door, even now, deep into the internet age; if his book was number one yet again and the reviews were actually perfectly kind … If he couldn’t shrug this off and move on with his morning and have mercy on a perfectly decent guy like Dale who had made a mistake and felt terrible about it … then what was the point? What was it all for?

On the other hand: how did John Grisham become John Grisham? By caring about every single detail. By never letting a single comma go unquestioned. Calling an entire book
The Something
, by accident? What would the man in the photo in the ad from this morning’s paper—the handsome, ambitious self of ten years ago, still dressing up for photo shoots, still bringing it after twenty-odd bestsellers—what would he think of that?

Manager
, John Grisham suddenly remembered. That’s what they were called. Not coach. You coached Little League, but
you called yourself a manager, just like in real baseball. Or at least John Grisham did, because he cared about things like that. Or did he just care because the kids cared?
Did
the kids care? And now that he thought about it, his official biography on the dust jacket always referred to him as a Little League coach, not a manager, and he had never thought to correct it.

John Grisham ran his finger along the trophy and thought back to that championship season, and soon found himself thinking back to the day, years later, when he realized with more suddenness than sadness that he had to call Random House to have them take that part out of his bio because his son was in high school and hadn’t played Little League for years—even though John Grisham still thought of himself, all that time, as a Little League coach.

Manager
.

Little League manager.

It really has been a long time, thought John Grisham.

Now he heard the clock tick. Were some ticks louder than others? How come you sometimes heard a clock tick? Shouldn’t it be always, or never? Why sometimes?

John Grisham decided to let this one slide. But just this once.

He thought of his life, and smiled.

Then stopped.

It had been a pretty nice day so far, thought John Grisham; but so far only goes so far.

The Girl Who Gave Great Advice