Who Made Stevie Crye? (21 page)

XXXIX

The editor-in-chief of the Briar Patch Press, Inc
., again chuckled heartily. “Oh, I’m still here, Mrs. Crye. We’re both still here, me up here in Hot’lanta and you down there in Bucolic Barclay.”

“Yes, sir, I suppose we are.”

“Could you drive up today? If you left now, you could be on Peachtree by one. We’ll take a business lunch at Bugatti’s in the Omni. Discuss editorial and contractual matters over veal Parmesan or scaloppine. I recommend the red bean soup as an appetizer, Bloody Marys for some delicious sippin’, and fresh Florida strawberries for dessert. I always enjoy strawberries in February. If you don’t come, Mrs. Crye, I’ll just have our PR gal tote in some Varsity chili dogs. You can imagine with what breathlessness I await your reply.”

“Today?” Stevie asked. “I have children in school. They’ll be home this afternoon, and I can’t make the whole trip in time to meet them or get dinner on.”

“Call in a sitter, ma’am. The Briar Patch is solvent. We’ll foot your bill.”

“It’s pretty late to find anyone. Teddy’s too old to be babysat by teen-age girls, and most older women around her are shut-ins. How about tomorrow or Wednesday?”

“Well, I’m awful excited about this, Mrs. Crye. . . . Might I call you by a less formal appellation? If you can’t get away, we’re liable to be talking over this contraption a spell. Mistering and missing folks has never been my strong suit, and my problem here is I don’t know what to call a nice lady named Stevenson. Adlai doesn’t seem politic, if you follow me, and Stevenson is a real mouthful.”

“Call me Stevie.”

“That’s appropriate. And I’m David-Dante.”

“That’s a syllable more than Stevenson.”

“But it’s two words. You have to give a fella with a two-word first name a little leeway.” He harrumphed a frog from his throat. “Listen, Stevie, your proposal came in this morning’s mail, first thing. Jennifer Thurman, my editorial assistant, brought it in and said I should read it. Jenny’s got a bloodhound’s nose for off-trail but promising properties. She keeps up with the by-lines in regional periodicals—part of her job. Anyway, two weeks ago—gospel truth—she told me we ought to go after a collection by a hard-boiled, lyrical newcomer publishing her stuff scattershot from Savannah to Mobile. Name of Stevenson Crye, Jenny said, the kind of tough-lady monicker makes you think of Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor. Names’re important, Jenny said, and this up-and-comer’s got a book-jacket dandy. Okay, I said, let’s keep her in mind. And here this morning, a cold day in Hot’lanta, in comes a package from the hard-boiled, lyrical mama we’ve already drawn a bead on. Fate or coincidence? Doesn’t much matter to David-Dante. I’ve read your proposal and I’m ready to deal, hands on the table, every card straight up. . . . You still there?”

“I’m still still here. I don’t believe it, though.”

“Listen, my competitors—some from overextended Big Apple firms—often say I talk like a carny with a Ph.D. in Southern Gothic lit., but I don’t go for
deceptive
fast talk. I talk fast because I’m excited. This morning I’m excited by the Stevenson Crye stuff I’ve just read.”

“I didn’t mean I didn’t believe you,” Stevie hurried to explain. “I just meant your calling me like this was . . . well, I’m flabbergasted.”

“Good, good. I wanted to flabbergast. It’s unsportin’ to bamboozle, but it’s okay to flabbergast. I’m a first-class flabbergastronomer, Stevie, that’s why we’re in the black. One reason. I make writers offers they don’t dare refuse.”

“What are you offering me?”

“Some preliminaries: If you’d come up here today, we’d’ve had a chance to size each other up eyeball to eyeball. We’d’ve formed important hunches about the other person, Stevie, and we’d’ve trusted those instincts because so often—
very
often—they’re eminently trustable. It’s harder to do that with just voices. Not impossible, but harder. I’m at an advantage in a phone conversation because I’ve read some of your stuff and talked about you with Brock and Jenny. I’ve got some info even better than eye tics. You, now . . . you’re probably trying to knead my voice into physical features and some sort of gut feeling about my probity and competence and so forth. Am I right?”

“Isn’t this call costing an awful lot?”

“I’m on a company phone for company business. We’d’ve spent a damned sight more at Bugatti’s, believe me. . . . Am I right? About my having you at a small disadvantage?”

“Well, I always wonder what a caller I’ve never seen looks like. It’s a
submerged
curiosity, though. Until we have view screens on our telephones, there’s not much we can do about it.”

“What about imagination, Stevie? In tricky situations I thought writers fell back on their imaginations.”

“I’m not a fiction writer.”

“But judging from the sample chapters in
Two-Faced Woman
, you’ve got that sort of talent.” David-Dante’s voice took on a tone almost conspiratorial. “Let me tell you an occupational prejudice of literary editors, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Most of us don’t like extended telephone-conversation scenes. They’re apt to become static, the characters involved in them can’t square off with boxing gloves or blackjacks, and the climax usually winds down to a slammed receiver. You don’t get a feel for place or physiognomy in a telephone scene—not usually, anyway. Writers who insist on running Ma Bell ragged, well, they also run the risk of anesthetizing their readers. They might as well staple a package of sleeping pills to the title page. ‘Take two at Chapter Thirty-nine and call me in the morning. We’ll chat about the section you fell asleep during.’ Anyway, most of us would prefer a grisly mass murder, a gang-bang, or an overflight of dragons to a telephone scene.”

“But you’re different? You wouldn’t?”

“Well, no, not when I’m dealing with manuscript submissions. As an editor I
hate
telephone scenes. Real life’s different, though. People actually
do
talk on the telephone sometimes, and sometimes they say absurdly important things to each other.”

“They do?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’d like you to remember this talk—this telephone talk—as one of your most absurdly important moments this year. See?”

“Mr. Maris, I don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

“David-Dante, Stevie.
David-Dante!
First, to bring a measure of parity to our relationship, I want you to satisfy yourself as to my looks. You’ve heard me snap-crackle-and-talk for a while now. Exercise your writerly imagination and try to describe me.”

“Describe you? Whatever I say would be wrong, Mr. Maris. Besides, wouldn’t it
increase
the advantage you say you have? My speculations would give you that much more grist for your character-analysis mills. Please, can’t we just talk about my proposal?”

“We’ll do that, I promise you. For now, though, indulge me.”

“But if I inadvertently insult you —”

“You can’t insult me, Stevie. I’m sitting up here on Peachtree Street in a lovely high-tension job, my Guccis propped on my secretary’s typewriter stand, my granddaddy’s World War I pocketwatch ticking away like a silver-plated time bomb, and I’m totally immune to insult. Imagine I’ve got a hunchback. Give me pockmarks, halitosis, a glass eye. Do with me as you wish. Describe me. Then we’ll be able to get down to business.”

“Mr. Maris—”

“Come on, Stevie. Invent, illuminate, portray.”

“You’re fat,” Stevie obliged him. “You’re fat, bald, and impotent. Your toenails are ingrown, and your nostrils have hairs hanging out of them as long as packing threads. You smell like a fertilizer factory.”

“Is that how I sound?” David-Dante Maris asked noncommittally.

A moment later Stevie said, “No, not really. I’ll have another crack at it if you’ll let me. It’s such a
strange
request.” Maris’s silence implied his willingness to give her another chance and his agreement with her final remark. “I’m sorry, David-Dante, but you do sound
large
—not fat, exactly, but hefty in a politely menacing way. Like a retired football player. A lineman, maybe.”

“Ah.”

“You’ve told me you’ve got expensive shoes and a pocketwatch. Maybe you’ve given away too much. Even though it’s February, I see you sitting there in a beautiful cream-colored suit. You’ve taken your jacket off, but you’re still wearing the matching vest. Your shirt is a faint orange with darker orange pinstripes, a magnificent silken shirt. It makes me think of the shirts that Daisy Buchanan starts crying over in
The Great Gatsby
—a gangster’s or a publishing executive’s shirt.”

“What about my face?”

“You’re forty-six or -seven. Clean-shaven. You have a wide forehead and cobalt-blue eyes. You wear your hair—which is still dark and abundant—combed back from your temples in an old-fashioned way. You don’t slick it down with hair oil, though. There’s gray in your sideburns, and sometimes it sparkles.

“Your lips . . . well, they’re a little heavy, the upper one with a soft beak of flesh in the middle. When you wrinkle your forehead, you look a lot like Willie B., the gorilla in the Grant Park Zoo. Just by smiling, though, you can look like a grown-up version of a gap-toothed kid in a Norman Rockwell painting. You’re smarter than you look, and I’m guessing, just guessing, that that hasn’t hurt you in your chosen profession.” Stevie paused. “That how I see you. How’d I do?”

“Perfect, Stevie. A hundred percent dead-on, even down to the color of my suit and shirt. Astonishing percipience. You could take that show on the road.”

“Right. I’m Barclay’s answer to Button City’s Sister Celestial.”

“Out of my territory, gal—but we’re almost even now, we’ve negotiated ourselves to character-assessment parity.”

“What could possibly be left?” Stevie asked.

“You know what I look like, but all I know about you is intellectual stuff. Describe yourself.”

Mildly exasperated, Stevie described a female adult with the bulk of Amy Lowell and the cape-and-tricorne wardrobe of Marianne Moore. David-Dante did not believe her, though, and demanded a truthful accounting. Then they’d go on to business matters, but not until.

Stevie described herself.

“Wonderful,” said David-Dante Maris. “You got me to a T, and you’re just as I imagined you from your voice. We could be in the same room together.”

“I don’t know. It’s not often a man in a cream-colored suit sits down in my kitchen.”

“Nor that a lady as pert and attractive as you comes into my office to talk about a book she’s going to do for us.”

“
Pert?
” said Stevie. But before David-Dante could reply, she hurried to add, “Are we really going to talk about my book? I was beginning to think this call was a hoax.”

“If that’s so, Stevie, you were a stupid fool to play along the charming way you did. Never mind that, though. How does a three-thousand-dollar advance with a ten percent royalty sound?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t? Listen, we’ll get copies into Rich’s and Davison’s, not to mention the mall bookstores, and we’ll arrange some autograph-signing parties around town. You’ll eventually clear another five or six thousand, more than that if we take
Two-Faced Woman
into a second printing.”

“I just meant I don’t know what’s standard, sir. What kind of advances did you give Rhonda Anne Grinnell for
Lester Maddox Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
and
Who’s Afraid of the Atlanta Braves?
, Mr. Maris?”

“More for the second than the first.
Lester
sold out its first printing in about four months. Rhonda Anne’s daily column in the Lyin’ ’Lanta Newspapers is a fine continuing ad for her books that the Briar Patch Press doesn’t have to pay a penny for. We stick in an occasional real ad to keep everything on the up and up, but
Two-Faced Woman
won’t sell as fast as Rhonda Anne’s stuff. Her books go like scented candles during a power outage at the sewage-treatment plant. They don’t cast much light, but the unusual smell seems to make people feel a little better. Her books, Stevie, make it possible for me to consider doing a sensitive collection of essays like the one you’ve just proposed.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Well, you called me Mr. Maris. And I
never
discuss one author’s financial arrangements with us with another author. If you can get Rhonda Anne Grinnell to tell you, that’d be fine. But that lady’s sort of an idiot savant at her newspaper’s video display consoles. She sits down and taps, and the papers automatically publish the result. Later the Briar Patch Press gathers these toodlings together, and her fans converge on the bookstores. I don’t
blame
her for not wanting to divulge the degree of her success—monetarily, that is. Recently she’s been receiving invitations to speak at sports clubs and civic meetings and psychiatric conventions. It’s embarrassing.”

“Okay,” Stevie relented. “Then tell me if what you’re offering is fair.”

“For a new writer? Yes, ma’am. You can hunt around here or even in the Big Apple for an agent, but I’m not going to budge for that person, and if you end up signing with us, anyway, Stevie, you can kiss ten percent of both your advance and all future royalties goodbye. Some of ’em want more than that. That’s a lot of groceries, a lot of Coca-Cola. Your decision, though.”

“Earlier you said —”

“Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“—something about ‘crafty editorial interference.’ What does that mean?”

“I’d insist on taking a part in imposing a structure on your collection. I’d edit some of your essays—just to improve their fluency and make ’em build to meaningful climaxes. I won’t put words in your mouth, and I won’t try to overrule you if you present a coherent case for leaving something alone. I bring all this up because some writers just
love
every comma they excrete. I try not to work with people like that.”

“Do you edit Rhonda Anne Grinnell?”

“What for?”

“Well, I —”

“Her stuff’s fine as is. Nothing’s gonna improve it—not until the day she splits open from forehead to belly button and the mortified Jane Austen inside her steps out to take charge. And Rhonda Anne, bless her, she’s just too loose and comfortable ever to split open like that.”