You're Married to Her? (18 page)

I don't know if alfalfa farmers scuttle from their combines with a stiffy and meet in the barn for a quick
one before lunch. It's hard to imagine the old couple in Grant Wood's
American Gothic
ever headed for bed after an afternoon harvesting garlic. But we do. I do not know why this is true but gardening makes us hot. My wife maintains that women are turned on by watching men fix things. However many times I've benefited from this peculiar chromosomal disorder, I find it difficult to imagine wanting to jump the plumber's bones. For my part I only know that working the dirt takes my mind off my worries, the bills, and politics. I know I like to watch the sweat drip down the small of her back when she's kneeling over tomato transplants. I know that as the daylight slowly increases after a dark New England winter, desire fills the pores of my body like sap and we both come alive to each other as the ground thaws and the wind carries the faint scent of new growth.

I know it's the opposite of the way romance is sold, with lithe slender bodies and enticing smiles. In the garden you get filthy, your face is caked with sweat, your muscles ache. You've tromped through manure, hauled a hundred-pound cartload of salt-marsh hay. You're as much a farm animal as a human being. So what is it about working in the garden together all afternoon that makes us both want to fuck? I don't know, frankly. It's a mystery. One I enjoy too much to care to solve.

 

The producer arrived in a rented Land Rover. She wore a Burberry safari jacket and knee-high pirate boots with stiletto heels. Although I gave her a hearty wave from
the top of the driveway she did not leave the front seat of her vehicle but kept peering perplexedly at her map as if having set out for a country estate and arriving at a pig farm.

As soon as she stepped out of her vehicle she began sneezing, slapping at imagined mosquitoes, and rooting through her purse for a handkerchief, which she plastered to her face as if preparing to wade through a roomful of smoke. Upon seeing the house she made a desperate run for the front door, her long thin heels getting stuck in the mud.

Once inside she begged me to lock down the windows and turn on the air conditioner. Composing herself with a cup of tea and a handful of pills from an array of pharmacy bottles, she managed a few words of conversation. “You live here
all
year?” as if taking stock of a deep dark well she had fallen into.

I explained what I loved about country life, the slow passage of time, the privilege of living amongst other species, the essential tension between humanity and nature, and above all, and here I drew her to the window, to the pleasure I got from the garden.

She nodded as if indulging a madman and took a long deep restorative breath of air-conditioned air.

But I couldn't help apologizing. “Of course, at this time of year, with the wet weather, weeds are inevitable.”

Like a victim forced to humor her tormentor, she forced a short, measured look before turning her back. “Oh, yes. They are very nice.”

Six weeks later I was fired, replaced by another screenwriter. My agent insisted they loved me, loved the project, but wanted to go in a different direction. She reminded me that Hollywood was all about relationships and that I had to think long term. There were too many coincidences in the second act, the producer had told her. The hero's arc wasn't fully developed. But I will go to my grave wondering if it wasn't the weeds.

N
ow I had proof. I was not paranoid. Here it was, exposed in black and white, what every writer knew deep down but didn't dare to think.

The article, in the newsletter of the National Writers Union, reported on an agent following up on a manuscript he'd sent an editor. The editor said that he liked the book well enough but asked, “What's the author like?”

“She's blonde, she's 30 years old and she's adorable,” the agent said and within a week the editor made an offer for the book.

Even famous writers, no matter how many books they've written or great reviews they've received, secretly feel like starter wives, fearful of being replaced in their publisher's eyes by the next big talent, the new young thing. When I was 35, my own first novel was published to wonderful attention. My publisher was ecstatic. “You're hot!” But not for long. Like the freshman girl
who did it under the bleachers with the captain of the football team, I couldn't even get him to return my calls.

Sooner or later every writer I know decides he can do a better job than his publisher. I have a friend who was one of America's best-selling authors, an Oprah's Book Club Choice. But when his books started selling thousands of copies instead of hundreds of thousands, he concluded his publisher was at fault. Reading a few how-to books written by former publishing industry publicists, he hired his own former publishing industry publicist to devise a marketing plan that his publishers might have come up with had they not been preoccupied by the new young thing on their list whose work was more “commercial”—a category of books that is anathema to serious writers unless it is used to describe their own.

I too thought I could do it better than my publisher. This is largely why I became a publisher. I had a business plan and a mission statement and above all the determination to treat writers with respect. I prepared for two years, telling everyone I knew that I could do it better than my publisher, reading every book I could find by former publishing industry publicists, interviewing publishers large and small, those who worked out of swank Manhattan offices and those who used an old barn as a warehouse; some who had entered the business with a strong literary vision and others who simply published books they liked. The New York publishers were cynical about the future of the book business. They trotted
out the usual suspects, the chains, the electronic media, the decline in literacy, and fondly reminisced about the years of six-figure advances and three-hour lunches. I asked one legendary editor how he saw himself in the changing milieu. “Once,” he said, “I felt like I was playing center field for the Yankees and now I'm Dilbert.” But I pressed on, pigeonholing anyone who had something to teach me and ten minutes to spare, searching for my own quiet corner of the book world and finding it in the midst of all-out chaos.

Book Expo America is a bloated media carnival of high tech booths and hyperbolic lit buzz, the largest book trade show in the world, the NASCAR of belles-lettres, a writhing monkey barrel of marketing professionals climbing over each other for attention. Indoor skyscrapers of polyurethane tubing frame pavilions as long as football fields with turf of plush red carpet. Backlit blowups of book jackets and writers with palsied smiles line the aisles like posters in a freak show midway. Librarians, booksellers, critics, authors, bloggers, and bobbing throngs of bookbiz junketeers push folding carts full of posters, baseball caps, tote bags, beach balls, ballpoints, t-shirts, mouse pads, and every manner of promo crap ever shipped out of the People's Republic of China. Bill Clinton signs books for a line of fans a quarter of a mile long. Richard Simmons in purple velvet running shorts does jumping jacks in the aisle. Strippers in pink satin garter belts hawk a celebrity madam tell-all in a mock nineteenth-century brothel erected
next to a fifty-foot-high Lego display. Three-hundred-pound Dixieland musicians wearing Hawaiian leis play the Muskrat Ramble while an Elvis imitator fumbles with the crotch of his rhinestone jump suit and poses for a snapshot with the assistant manager of a Barnes & Noble from Erie, Pennsylvania.

But far from the stacks of advance reading copies doled out by young publicity assistants in tight pinstripe pantsuits, beyond the sleek gray-carpeted booths of the academic presses and the garish hawkers of bookstore novelties, through the double doors of the satellite convention hall, to the right of the rest rooms and the left of the five-dollar-pretzel vendor, are the aisles of the independent publishers. Foot traffic is slower here, the lighting subdued, the freebies modest, the visitors cautious. They are offering penny candy here, post cards, book marks, bound galleys with titles promising sex and revolution. Their covers show full frontal nudes, brown-skinned peoples carrying rifles, a headshot of a gallant young Noam Chomsky. A librarian from Little Rock making her way from the ladies' room peers warily up the aisle. The owner of an Annie's Book Swap in western Massachusetts who spent all morning filling his cart with give-away books to sell back at the store furtively grabs a copy of
Going Down: Perfecting the Art of a Good Blowjob.

While the New York publishers wore suits from Barney's and Prada loafers, this was a dress-down world of turtlenecks and sneakers, peasant skirts and motorcycle
boots, prideful independents who sneered at the conglomerate giants. Literature was paramount; money beside the point. I had finally found my people. Or so I imagined.

Obscured by my romantic delusions was the fact that while the most cynical of these crusading independents were indeed strapped for cash, others were backed by an invisible fortune. The white-haired old hippie in John Lennon-style sunglasses was financed by an heiress who pumped seed money into any press that published her books. The overfed media hound dressed head to toe in black leather was the son of a world famous politician. A psychiatrist who left his practice after amassing a huge portfolio; the heir to a Brazilian industrial fortune (whom I had thought hearing impaired until I understood he had so much money there was no one he need listen to); a fundraising savant who played the foundations like a pinball wizard; the third son of the fourteenth Earl of Cricklade, simply had more to fall back on than book sales. I summoned the courage to ask the advice of an infamous counter culture publisher whose company had survived for decades and introduced some of America's best known authors—all of whom had gone on to publish with New York presses after making it big. A hulking bear of a man who wore an old flannel shirt and a leather sheath with a long hunting knife, he dropped a thick calloused hand on my shoulder and said, “Friend, you are what you owe.”

Having been inculcated by my forebears with a fear of
debt in any form, mortgages, bank loans, car payments—when my grandfather took his extended family out once a year to Ratner's, a dairy restaurant on Delancey Street, he paid the check
before
we ate—I continued my research with less enthusiasm. But by now my wife had grown exasperated and committed us to a point of no return, writing a letter to twenty-five well-known writer friends asking them to recommend manuscripts. Once the post office box began to fill there was no turning back.

I was obsessed with appearing legitimate. Who was I to claim to be a publisher? Why would critics review our books? Why would bookstores carry them? Did it matter that the title page of our books located us in a tiny Massachusetts fishing village rather than a big city? What would happen if agents found out our office was a one-room winter rental with no heat? I invented an editorial staff and put their bios on the website, hip young ivy-league grads in their twenties with cool names. Elvis Kahn was my favorite. He rose from the ranks of editorial assistant to acquisitions editor and was the point man for many negotiations, an amusing situation until I was asked to lunch by a book page editor with whom I had been talking via telephone, as Elvis, for over a year. But first and foremost was the mission to support writers.

When we first started the press we were so dedicated that we would read every submission that arrived—sometimes all the way through!—and write two-page letters full of editing suggestions. Soon word got out: we were the best place in the country to get rejected.
Even if they don't publish your book, they critique it! The slush pile grew to the height of a refrigerator and if you caught sight of it in just the wrong light it seemed to have eyes and fangs and sneer at you like the Thurber cartoon of a house morphed into an angry woman's face. It took me years to get Marge to stop reading every page of every book in the slush pile. I learned my own lesson after throwing a manuscript across the room.

It was late, I was tired, glossing over it in that kind of numb state in which you follow the credits of a movie when I realized it was not an erotic novel I was holding in my hands, but puerile, fetishistic pornography about red welts on bare buttocks and little girls' panties and pee, the infantile fantasy of a stunted child-man's mind. Nor did I pick up the pages but swept them into a plastic garbage bag. As the address on the return envelope was from a nearby town and I imagined being stalked for a reply, I scribbled, “Sorry, we don't publish this sort of thing,” taped it closed in lieu of licking it and washed my hands. Some days later I received an e-mail reply from the writer, “Thank you, Ira, for being so nice.”

Having been a writer before I was a publisher doomed me to be nice, like a former waiter compelled to overtip. Only once in ten years do I remember losing it, doing something blatantly nasty to a writer we published. Here was a guy whose career we had saved, who, if not dead in the water when he approached us, had a lot of trouble placing his work.

He had had one groundbreaking book that had been
a bestseller and many afterwards that sold in diminishing numbers. But he was a tireless self-promoter. He had a cable TV chat show, he hosted a reading series, he collected favors, he schmoozed. He submitted a novel that was almost published by a prestigious New York press, almost, but was missing something that no editor was able to pinpoint. If our little press, stranded on outermost Cape Cod, having upgraded its corporate headquarters to a grain warehouse with no windows, had proved itself adept at anything it was the resurrection of near misses: diagnosing the need for a new beginning, a tighter plot, a selling title; a publicity hook or simply an understanding of the mood of the country. (One of our most successful titles, a west coast bestseller, was rejected in New York during the early Bush years because no editor there could imagine that a hilarious comedy about a gay Jewish liberal trapped in a fundamentalist bible college could find a market.) The book by the self-promoter enjoyed respectable advance sales. The author and I spent a year together on editing and promotion; we were text messaging every day.