Self-Esteem (6 page)

Lee begged Crawford’s pardon. He thought he said no more
Self
Series
.

“No more self-help at all.”

Without skipping a beat, Lee pointed out that
Self-Esteem
had already sold a half a million copies — in just two weeks.

Crawford said that he was glad to hear it, but it wouldn’t affect his decision.

Lee groaned. “I can’t believe I have to give you this pep talk every time we are looking at the next project.”

“We? Next project?”

“I’m your publisher, for Christ’s sake, not your high school football coach.”

Crawford pointed out he was a little of both.

“Please, Jim. Don’t quit now. Every book you’ve written since
Self-Confidence
has a guaranteed million-plus sale. It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.”

“Figure what out?” Crawford said, lifting his drink.

Lee felt like John Madden or Lou Holtz and it was time to give a pep talk that invoked the supernatural. “Figure out that this is what you were meant to do. This is what
God
created you for. And now you’ve decided to be a fucking
novelist
?” he said, taking Crawford’s drink from him.

Shit, Crawford thought.

Lee sat down on his desk to catch his breath. “What do you want?” he said, putting Crawford’s drink to his lips then putting it down.

“That’s what I want,” Crawford said calmly, “to do what I want.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Yes, many times.”

“You just hate the promotionals, don’t you? The Hershey show. Is that the problem?”

“I hate this Happy Pappy bullshit the most. That’s got to end.”

Lee laughed. “No, no, no. That discussion is over, my friend. Contractually we can’t get out of it. And besides, it brings in a ton of revenue for us and for nothing but a signature.”

“I don’t want it.”

Lee gave his best unyielding look. “You signed the papers, Jim.”

“Yeah. And I’m sorry I did. But it’s made me realize a few things.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’ve always wanted to be a
real
writer.” Lee leaned toward Jim and with rare sincerity said the problem was that Crawford never had the self-esteem to be a real writer. Crawford stood up to leave, but Lee stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Just give it a week or two,” Lee said. “You should keep writing these books while you can, while people are buying them.” He was starting to sound like a sensible parent. “It won’t last forever. You can always be a novelist later. That’s the bottom line.”

“The bottom line? I’m doing the Hershey show and then I’m done. No more self-help promotional book tours. No more prattle groups. That’s the bottom line.”

Lee was shaking his head. He couldn’t believe Crawford’s resolve. “Come on. Don’t you feel satisfaction from helping people?”

“Shit. Helping what people?”

“Me, for one,” Lee said.

He never helps me
.

Dorothy was unboxing a new blender she had purchased three weeks before but hadn’t opened because she had put it under the kitchen sink and forgotten about it.

Now, why did I buy this? she thought.

“Oh. It’s got twenty-four speeds. That’s why.” Their old blender only had twenty. She unboxed the new one with the conviction of an economist who touts the importance of consumer spending.

And where does he go in the afternoon? Needs some time to think, huh. Yeah, I bet.
Dorothy didn’t really care about the blender. A saleswoman at the department store had suggested it to her, and out of sympathy more than anything she bought it. She was just using it to get her mind off a promise she had made to herself a long time ago:
If Jim ever starts drinking and cheating again, I’m leaving him. He can do one or the other, and I’ll do my best to help him stop. But both — no way. No more.

With Cal the clock was ticking. She didn’t want her son to emulate his father, which she believed would happen eventually. Dorothy took the old blender and placed a sticky note on it reading “charity,” and put the new one lovingly in its place. She sat down at the kitchen table and looked at it approvingly, wondering what she could blend. They hadn’t used the old one too much, after all. She seemed to recall Cal making a milkshake with it, but then he grew tired of milkshakes.

Dorothy began to cry. She was struck by how sad it was that she had thrown out the first blender she and Jim bought as a couple. And now she felt embarrassed that she didn’t even give it to charity. Jim was into margaritas at the time, and like someone who throws out all the ashtrays thinking it will get a loved one to stop smoking, she had scrapped the little five dollar contraption, and now she wanted it back — even though it only had three speeds.

I have thrown so many things away, she thought, wiping away her tears with a tissue. And she had. Since the Crawford family had made self-help millions, she had scrapped just about everything they had as a young, struggling couple. But there was just one thing she hadn’t thrown out — her husband.

“And he deserves to be thrown out,” she said out loud. “He goddam deserves it.”
He blames me for all the bad things and credits me for none of the good
. And since the subject had become a talk show cliche — men and the women they take for granted — it made her feelings all the more difficult to communicate. Not just to her husband, but anyone.

“Yeah, yeah,” she imagined Jim would say.

“I know, I know,” some of her girlfriends might say.

“You have it so bad,” they would all suggest.

She looked at the note that said “United Way” and thought before long she was going to have to donate her husband to charity — like that ghostly blender she now loved so much.

She put her head on the kitchen table and wept harder, wondering if pain really was the foundation of healing.

The traffic had improved, and Crawford was feeling pretty good about the way he handled Lee. What was he so worried about? It was
his
life. He had enough money to last a lifetime. It was a matter of priorities. He had been drinking lately. He had been unfaithful to his wife again. His son was spoiled rotten. He was at least
partially
to blame for those things and therefore he could change them.
Yes, I can do something.
Crawford could be incredibly optimistic after a bad night of drinking — not by deciding to take responsibility but by thinking of taking responsibility.

“Life is one big distraction,” he once wrote in
Self-Respect
. “You can distract yourself down or distract yourself up. Go ahead and distract yourself up.” Sometimes he thought that made sense.

I must have thought it made sense when I wrote it
.

It was one of his more popular aphorisms, and he occasionally tried to think of it when he felt unfocused and preoccupied.

Go ahead and… oh shit.

The mobile phone rang and he picked it up.

“Hello.” It was that voice again, the one he thought he dreamt that morning.

“I like your self-esteem,” it said.

It was a male voice but… artificial.

“What self-esteem?” Crawford said instinctively, his hostility set off. “Who the hell is this?”

“I’m using your program. And it’s already improving my self-esteem.”

“How did you get this number? Hello?”

“You once wrote, ‘If you want something bad enough, it will come to you almost automatically.’ I’ll just say it came to me automatically. You told me it would.”

“What will come to you, asshole?” Crawford asked.

“Everything,” he said quietly. “Everything you have. Everything will come to me. Everything.”

Crawford hung up, then threw his car phone at the dash where the bulky thing bounced into the passenger side floor. Right away it rang again and Crawford leaned over, bobbing his head up over the dash to drive, but he couldn’t reach it. Unbuckling his seat belt, he managed to grab it and hit the answer button. “Stop calling me!” he yelled, swerving toward the car next to him and back again. “Damn it!”

“I need to see you,” a woman’s voice said. “Jim?” It was Jenny. He’d almost rather have heard from the asshole caller. “I need to see you,” she said again tenderly.

Crawford concentrated on the road. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you that it’s polite to ask if it’s a bad time to call or not?”

“I need to see you,” she said.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just ignored the question. Those kinds of things don’t pertain to a person in love.”

“Pertain,”
Crawford thought rolling his eyes.
Controlling bitch
.

The traffic was starting to slow down again.

“What is it, Jenny? I can’t do this. I told you that. I told you…”

“Now, Jim,” she interrupted. I want you to come over
right now
.”

Jenny had a strange way of making Crawford feel obligated to her. It was something about her voice — sultry, but innocent — that made him lose the resolve he had to end it.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Just for a little while.”

“No.”

She hung up.

It was like the booze: he knew he would regret it later. He even tried to talk himself out of it while he was on the way to her place.

No, no, no. Don’t do it. Don’t do it
.

Jenny’s apartment and the liquor store — at times they were like the same place, together a perilous safe house that Crawford at once loved and hated. They even went well together. Warmth and confidence and spirit, armor against the forces of uncertainty. Like a womb with a disease. Quiet, smooth, safe, deadly.

There was no use in trying to talk himself out of it for too long. It was there, waiting.

Hmm, don’t pertain to a person in love
.

I could use that somewhere, Crawford thought.

Just being inside Jenny’s apartment could be as gratifying as the forbidden fruit of their lovemaking. It reminded Crawford of his younger days as an undergrad sitting in comfortably messy rooms drinking cheap booze and reading Steinbeck and Faulkner. More bohemian than his college digs, Jenny’s place was strewn with an assortment of bric-a-brac she regarded as fine art — paintings from friends and former lovers, black and white photographs she had taken in college, and various figurines she had been collecting since childhood. Crawford jokingly called her place “Harper’s Bazaar,” a play on her last name.

Crawford stepped into Jenny’s apartment still thinking about how he had accomplished something that morning — he had successfully told Lee he wanted a change (or rather, began the process of telling Lee he wanted a change), and for that reason he was feeling a weight off his shoulders. He also knew that since he was on a roll, he might as well cut this cancerous relationship with Jenny out of his life as well.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked nervously. “You’re not on the wagon, are you?”

“Not currently,” he said. “I’ll have one. Sure. Just one.”

Jenny gave a slight look of disapproval — not for his drinking, but for his demeanor as he awkwardly sat in a lone chair that divided the kitchen from the living room.

“Sit in the living room,” she said.

He moved toward the couch. No, he thought.
You’re not going to have power over me that easily
.
You’re not going to treat me like a child
.

As he was told, he walked to the living room and sat on the couch. He nervously moved his hands over his thighs, feeling a sense of dread about how this little get-together could develop once he revealed his new determination to end their affair.

“So why did you act so mad on the phone?” she asked, sitting across from him on a seventies egg chair she’d found at a garage sale.

Uh huh, passive aggression
, Crawford thought.
Always when she sits in that damn hippie chair.

“Jim?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

The couch was a large pillowy beast that made Crawford feel it was about to swallow him whole. “Sorry?” he asked, trying to retrieve one of the pillows from under one buttock, realizing she had made him sit on the couch for tactical reasons.

“You yelled at me on the phone.”

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled quickly.

“You yelled ‘Who the hell is this?’ Why’d you say that?”

“I don’t know. I just said it.”

“You just said it?” she said skeptically.

“I’ve been getting prank calls.” Crawford looked down at his drink. He knew he wouldn’t have just one. “Jenny, I got drunk last night in my study.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” she said.

Crawford put the drink to his lips, then stopped. “I know,” he said, putting it on the coffee table in front of him. “I know.” Jenny had an advantage when he was drinking, he knew. But she always had an advantage. He always drank with her.

“So how’s the novel?” Jenny said, as if grasping for something to say.

He looked at the ice cubes in the glass.
We can’t do this
.

“We can’t do what?”

Did I say that?
“We can’t do this,” he said, mustering just enough courage to look at her directly.

She swirled away from him in the egg chair, cocking her head back dramatically. “I thought we’d been through this, Jim.”

“I’m trying to be nice about it.”

“You’re trying to get rid of me,” she said, swirling back.

“Listen to me.”

Exterior, night, outside Jenny’s apartment. Crawford comes out of the door. He looks tired. He might be drinking again. Jenny follows behind.

“I told you I have to go,” Crawford yells at the young woman.

“You always have to go,” she yells back.

“I’m just supposed to walk out on everything, right? My son, my wife, everything?”

Jenny looks very determined.

“You’re so damn lucky I don’t tell everyone what a con man you are!”

Click.

They are facing each other, snarling, prizefighters outside the ring.

“Go ahead and tell them,” he says. He looks around nervously. He lowers his voice. “Anyone with any sense already knows!”