Foul Matter (19 page)

“How come you have this rep?” Jimmy asked. “For being, well . . .”

“A son of a bitch?” Paul grinned. “Because that’s what I want people to think, some of them. You’d be surprised how it cuts through the crap, publishing being a particularly crap-filled occupation. Or maybe you don’t agree.”

This conversation had taken place a few days ago when Paul had suggested coffee. They’d gone to the coffee shop just outside the entrance to the massive building where Mort Durban had his suite of offices.

“I agree.” Jimmy poured another ounce of sugar in his coffee. “In the five years I’ve been doing this, I can count on one hand the people who didn’t make me want to head for the shower.”

“Why do you stay, then? You’re too good for this life; you’re too good to be working for a scumbag like Mort.”

“The money.”

Paul shook his head. “Uh-uh. Not you. You must be in hock to someone for something. Wife? Kids? Private schools? Barney’s? Mob? Tony Soprano?”

Jimmy laughed. “All those things except the mob and Tony. I guess it would be hard on the family to get along on a lot less.”

“Why would it? That’s what you’ve been getting along on.”

Jimmy was astonished that anyone, much less Paul Giverney, could see into him so well. He was silent, turning this over. Then he said, “I write poetry.”

“I know.” Paul pulled a narrow book out of the inside pocket of his mac. “My wife wants your autograph. Molly, that’s her name.” He slid the book across the table.

Jimmy was stunned. He opened the book and looked down at the title page, seeing it as if for the first time. He remembered that time, ten years ago, his spirit soaring when he’d opened the package that held the ten copies sent from the publisher. It’s why he could understand how important publication was to writers. It wasn’t money, or at least it didn’t start out to be. It was seeing your words in print. He took the pen Paul reached toward him.

“Molly loves poetry; she reads most of the quarterlies, the little magazines. She especially likes yours. A book of poetry published by FSG—that’s no small matter.”

“It seems small to me.” No, it didn’t, not really. Small only by comparison with novelists like Paul. He handed back the pen.

“It shouldn’t. You’re just too used to book publishing.”

“Where did she find the book, though? It’s been out of print for years.”

“From your publisher. She has a friend there. It’s one of the two or three really good publishers.”

“Why don’t you go there? Why Mackenzie-Haack?”

“FSG would never publish me. Too commercial.”

“FSG publishes commercial stuff. Best-sellers. Don’t they publish Scott Turow?”

“He’s not that kind of commercial. I’m more the John Grisham kind of commercial.” Arms folded on the dull Formica top, he leaned toward Jimmy. “What you should do, Jimmy, is go to a place like Yaddo or the MacDowell Colony. You really should.”

Jimmy’s shrug suggested the uselessness of this. “I wish I could.”

“You can. MacDowell’s stints go for as short a time as a month. Imagine not having anybody bother you—no claims on your time, you can write all day, no Mort, no wife, no one breathing down your neck. You can’t get away for one fucking month?”

“Somehow the bills have got to be paid.”

Again, Paul leaned toward him. “Listen to me: I have a wife and a seven-year-old daughter, both of whom I really love. But if I was trapped in a system that didn’t allow me to write, I’d leave. There’s a great line Robert De Niro got off in a movie a few years ago: ‘Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.’ That’s good advice, Jimmy.”

Jimmy stared. “
Hell
it is. You’re telling me you could leave your family in thirty seconds?” He shook his head. “No, you wouldn’t.”

“I would.” Paul nodded.

“That’s pretty damned ruthless.”

“I know. Could you understand it any better if I were, say, Salinger or Thomas Pynchon? Some writer we consider truly valuable?”

Jimmy thought about this. “I see your point. But I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do it. I don’t mean from some high moral plane, just that I’d have a failure of nerve.”

“Okay. But right now, there’s no heat”—Paul tipped his head backward—“around the corner. You still owe it to yourself.”

“Those places—you have to apply far in advance . . .”

“So apply. You can do that without ever leaving.”

There was a silence. Jimmy said, “Could we talk about your book? I think it’s enigmatic, to say the least.”

“Isn’t that what you’d expect of a thriller, for lack of a better genre?”

“No. I don’t mean in that sense. Maybe I should say ‘ambiguous. ’ My question is: Is her environment—like the pharmacy and the garden—unreal, or is she?”

Paul laughed. “That’s very good, Jimmy.”

Jimmy opened the book to the point he’d stopped reading it.

“Ambiguous, at least. I was going along with her until I came to this garden business. So is it she or the world around?”

Paul shrugged. “Are those the only alternatives?” At Jimmy’s frown, he went on: “They could both be.”

“Unreal, you mean?”

“Or, possibly, real.”

“Real? Come on, Paul.” Jimmy smiled, realizing he was no longer intimidated by Paul Giverney’s fame and fortune and felt thankful for it. “It can’t be both. How can it? In the beginning section, when she goes into what she had last seen as the drugstore and now finds is an old-fashioned pharmacy—it must be one or the other, mustn’t it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Read the rest of the book. It’s way too early to wonder about the nature of reality.” He leaned across the table. “You don’t want to be an agent; that’s obvious. I hate agents; they’re working both sides of the street. They want to retain the publishers’ goodwill, so they’re not working a hundred percent for their writers. It really makes me mad, that does. At least with real estate agents, if one advertises himself as a ‘buyer’s’ agent, he isn’t around sucking up to the seller the way agents keep sucking up to publishers. They should be acting as guides through this swamp; they should be monks, not pimps.” Paul stopped and took a sip of coffee. He held up the signed book,
Lapses.
“This is what you should be doing, Jimmy.”

“My wife—”

Paul was shaking his head the moment the excuse started out of Jimmy’s mouth. “It’s not down to her; you know it isn’t. Or your six kids. Or keeping your dog in Kibbles.”

“Yeah, well, that’s easy for you to say—”

“Oh,
come
on, Jimmy. Not that old dodge, that poor man, rich man shit. Imagine how you’d feel if I were, say, an oncologist telling you you had only a couple of months to live. You’d be shocked out of your mind not just by death but by the realization you’d squandered a big part of your life. Think about that. It’s my theory that none of us really believes he’s going to die. We think we believe it, given all the evidence, but we really don’t. Freud said a man can’t imagine his own death. Probably, we think there’s something more due us and maybe that’s the reason immortality is such a popular idea. What we really want is another chance, and we think we’re going to get it—the chance to straighten out everything, to get it right.”

“What about you? Wouldn’t you have any regrets? Such as being sorry you squandered your talent for so many years?” His voice was rising along with his anxiety at being found out, at having what he feared was his cowardice exposed.

This charge surprised Paul. “Have I?”

“Well, look at
Don’t Go There.
You know you’re one hell of a good writer. Why do you do this genre stuff?”

“You like this new book?”

“Hell,
yes,
I like it! It infuriates me that it’s going to be lumped with writers like Dwight Staines.”

Paul laughed. “Doesn’t make me very happy, either.”

“I’m not saying I don’t like your other books. But this one”—he held up the new book—“this one is beyond good—”

Paul interrupted. “Why aren’t you my agent?”

Jimmy, poised to continue his rant, fell back in the booth as if Paul had whipped out a gun and shot him. “Me?” He stared at Paul wide eyed, and then he laughed. “
Ha!
Mort would never let that happen.”

“He wouldn’t have any choice, would he?”

“He could make my life miserable.”

“Oh, really? You mean more miserable than you’re making it all by yourself?”

Jimmy reddened and smiled. Then he said, “He could just make up some excuse to fire me.”

“Good. Then you could go to Yaddo and write poetry. Or wait a minute: I just remembered there’s a writers’ retreat upstate that’ll let people go there for a weekend to see how they like it. Now, don’t tell me you couldn’t get away for one weekend.”

“I suppose I could. What’s it called?”

“Birches.” Paul was writing down the address.

Jimmy smiled. “Birches. I like that. ‘
When I see birches bend to left and right
—’ ”

Paul looked up.
“ ‘ . . . I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.’ ”

“You like Robert Frost?”

“Of course I do; who doesn’t? Do this, Jimmy. One weekend. If you hate the setup, that’s that. Tell you what—be my agent for a year, rake in enough money to quit for at least two years. I’ll tell Mort it’s only temporary, make up some reason as to why I’m doing it.”

“There is a reason: altruism.”

Paul snorted as he motioned to the waitress. He said, “No. I doubt I’ve ever done anything for that reason—at least not wholly, maybe not even largely. No. I want to see something.”

The waitress put down the check.

“I want to see how far you go.”

Jimmy regarded Paul quizzically. “How far I go?”

Paul nodded, putting a bill down for the check. “That’s right. How far you go.”

P
aul Giverney didn’t like the sound of it. He didn’t like the sound of it at all. He slapped his cell phone shut and slouched in one of the cheap molded-plastic chairs that were kept on the roof for tenants in case they wanted to party up there.

Sitting in his overcoat, Paul had been flinging darts at the dartboard he moved from living room to study to roof whenever the dart mood came over him. Darts were as good as any alcoholic’s booze: to celebrate success, to shore up failure, to be a live wire at a party, to be isolated on a beach, to—

In other words, anyplace, anytime. In a write-up in one of the newspapers or magazines—there were so many of them—the journalist had suggested darts might permit him to tap into his creative power and solve writing problems. Paul had told him that all darts did was keep your mind on the fucking board.

The dartboard was leaning against the roof’s balustrade and every time he got up to collect the darts he would treat himself to a view of Manhattan against the black sky. For Paul, it was always a treat; he was besotted with love of the MetLife and the Chrysler buildings. He couldn’t write if he didn’t have this knock-out view of Manhattan always at his bidding. It was especially strange since he had never set one of his books here. People, fans, were always asking him where he did most of his writing and he would answer (with a kind of pride) “right here in New York.” They thumbed this unexciting news through the book of places in their heads and came up disappointed. That wouldn’t inspire anybody. They wanted a destination more exotic to take away with the book he’d just signed (not to forget standing in line for an hour to get it). Yes, New York as an answer saddened them, saddened the smiles on their faces, so that he leaned closer across the little table, engaged their eyes, and told them the truth: “It’s the only place I can write.” But this clear admission of a New York neurosis didn’t get the smile back. The fan only took this metaphorically—the writer is New York—when he’d meant it literally.

He had even been forced to go to a psychiatrist whom a friend of Paul’s had recommended who wasn’t in any better mental shape after seeing this doctor for three years. He was still the way he’d been all of his preceding forty years. Paul’s friend swore by Dr. Nutley (despite the name), said he was downtown and down to earth. A great guy.

Nutley was downtown, all right (Twenty-second Street), but as for the “down to earth” bit, Paul could only wonder, what earth? And Paul would never have been able to describe him as a “guy.” Nutley, with his tweeds and his beard, his casual erudition, his quoting of learned books and articles, his determination that the transference must get under way tout de suite or what were they all here for? The good doctor was not one of the guys. Insofar as Paul’s problem was concerned, Dr. Nutley made no suggestions, no diagnoses, gave no advice. You could say that Nutley was the most perfect example of noninvolvement with another human being that you were ever likely to find this side of Transylvania. Paul went along with this for some months. Hell, he could afford it. He could probably afford making his own psychiatrist: putting some young swab through Johns Hopkins Medical School, then a four-year tour of duty in the psychoanalytical arena, then get him a duplex in the Upper Eighties, Eighty-seven, Eighty-eight, near the Metropolitan Museum—which Paul had often found very therapeutic, even if you couldn’t tell a Vuillard from a Monet. Get him established and then go to him for problems such as the inability to write outside of Manhattan.