The Road Narrows As You Go (51 page)

She opened the morning papers and skipped past headlines—
Reagan's Credibility Shredded by Iran-Contra Link
;
Contra Plane in Nicaragua Reveals CIA Network; Ugly Face of Contras in Nicaragua's Secret War; Kravis, Arb, Latest Indictment for Insider Trading, a Coup for DA
—to the funny pages on F10, C9, D16. That's when she choked on her chocolate cereal.

Aw, crap, Wendy said, aw crap, this is good, this is
really
good. I'm in trouble now—gosh allmuggy. A shudder went up and down her spine and she clapped her cheeks twice hoping to wake up from a jealous dream.

She was not upset by the headlines, nor was she worried about her assistant Patrick Poedouce's debut in the funny pages with
Loch & Quay
. She'd known for months that was coming and was proud of him.
Loch & Quay
was a straight gag strip that poked fun at cryptids, henges, inquisitions, oneiromancy, secret societies, and other folklore. The debut was more of a ripoff of
Wizard of Id
, but soon the strip started to take on the absurdities of
The Far Side
but across three panels. A prison guard is commending the king on the latest increase in taxes, saying,
It all goes to health care
. The prisoner asks,
Oh, good, like what?
And the guard answers,
The important stuff: Hire more firing squads. Buy stronger nooses. Sharper guillotines.

She would go next door and congratulate him in a moment.

But Patrick's strip was nothing compared to the other debut that day.

It was called
Calvin and Hobbes
. And it was a beauty. She felt her jaw lock and grit.

You're going to be okay, Wendy, take a deep breath, she said. Calm down. She tried to look away. She pushed everything off the bed, food, pen, and papers, and put her head under the pillows and pictured herself at five sitting on the hide-a-bed and her mother pointing to the host of
General Electric Theater
on television and saying,
Look, there's your dad.

She walked across the lane to No Manors with her heart dragging behind her. Congratulations, Patrick, she said and lit a joint. There we were around the longtable attempting to celebrate for Patrick's sake the debut of
Loch & Quay
. But we had also read
Calvin and Hobbes
and so we drank to Patrick and talked about Bill Watterson. What else was there for us to do?

Calvin
was on a whole other level of goodness. Who could deny the inking's perfect? Augh, sublime. Study those backgrounds. Everything is in motion, even the legs of tables. The linework was dramatic, calligraphic, full of heartfelt, speedy movements, hurried and yet totally confident, unerring, comfortable in itself and totally individual. A multitude of expressions in the dots of their eyes. Perfectly funny noses and memorable hair, effortless elbows, flawless hands. As soon as you saw
Calvin
, you wanted to draw like that. The dialogue was hysterical and smart, eloquent, artful—they all had distinct personalities, their jokes had nuance. No corny puns. No rimshots needed. The humour was punchy, anti-authoritarian, but relatable, the subjects drawn from life, and funnier than pretty much everyone else on the page, including
Strays
, even
Peanuts
. Everything that counted in cartooning was done perfectly here. Wendy was discouraged from day one by the superb layout, expert flow and pacing, and the meaningful storylines. It only got worse as the weeks went along and
Calvin and Hobbes
got better and better. When the Sunday strips arrived, that was the worst feeling. Wendy chipped a mental tooth every weekend. In a funk for days after reading yet another weekend
Calvin
.
Strays
was not up to snuff now, she was sure of it—
Calvin
was so good, too good, she felt cowed. There were days when it sounded as if the inferiority complex
Calvin
gave her might abruptly cause her to quit. Out of total dejection. Give up. Retire. Move back to Canada.

I'm doomed, she said. She smoked another joint. In a year,
Calvin and Hobbes
toys are going to line the shelves of department stores. Every kid is going to want. I can see it now, there's two different Hobbes toys, one of the living imaginary Hobbes and one of the toy Hobbes. There's Calvin and all the Calvin accessories. This is a future of just Calvin and Hobbes toys—no more Buck, no Murphy, no Francis. This is the apocalypse. All my characters combined can't compete against this timeless kid. I'm going to go broke. I never should have donated all that money to charity this year. What was I thinking?

Calvin
was on her editor's radar, too. Newspaper editors routinely sent copies of the best and worst letters from readers to the syndicate editors. Correspondence regarding
Strays
went to Gabrielle Scavalda, and she was greedily grateful for any tidbits that might help her bargain with upper brass or her artist.

Gabby would call to tell Wendy her elderly fans couldn't read her lettering. She'd call on behalf of those readers who found Wendy's sense of humour too bleak or unsavoury, who thought her drawings were illegible, unprofessional, bland. You make parents feel guilty, she told Wendy, kids beg to adopt lost pets. After Death Valley, Gabby began to take a more serious look at the complaints and dismiss the cutest of children's panegyrics.
Calvin and Hobbes
exacerbated the insecurity and vertigo of
Strays
' success. Success seemed temporary, fleeting, undeserved if compared to
Calvin
. More often Gabby found valid points in the disgruntled, defending total strangers before her own artist. She used to call them breakfast table critics and morning morality monkeys. Adults who write letters to the editor to complain about something in the
funny pages should not be taken seriously, Gabby
used
to say. Now she called Wendy out on her clumsy mistakes and opaque, satirical jokes. Draw more Ping-Pong gags, Gabby would suggest. People love the Ping-Pong.

Come on, Wendy. Do it for the grampas. Slick up your look for the glaucomic who need magnifying glasses just to laugh at your comic. And by the way, around the office they're asking me what's the deal with your Christmas special? Is it happening?

It's coming. It's almost ready. Patience.

So you're really making it—this thing's been in the works for how long, four years?

Three. Okay, yes, four.

Coming up five. And how am I supposed to pitch how great it is if I haven't seen the thing? I need to see it. People are teasing me. If you're saying close to done I'll fly to San Francisco
tonight
to watch it if I
must
. You
know
me.

Come, then. You love San Francisco this time of year. Halfnaked tourists and bundled-up locals.

Why can't I have a
copy
?

I'm a protective mother, she said.

Did you see the New York DA's office indicted that guy who crashed our trip to Death Valley, whatshisname, Kravis? For insider trading? That's pretty far out, hey?

Yeah. Frank hates that goon. Hopes he goes to white-collar prison. What a trip. Two missing, and one criminal. Yeesh.

Cursed. Let's hope we remain unscathed.

Strays
isn't going anywhere. I can push for a legacy strip from here. That's my dream. How many papers am I in now? It's got to be two thousand.

You're closing in on nineteen hundred.

Closing in on nineteen hundred papers for like a year. What's the stall?

I'm as ambitious as you are. But there's only so many papers in existence, Wendy. It's not
uncommon
for American comics to
plateau
.
Tiger
was once in nineteen hundred papers.

Once? Plateau? Did you say plateau? I don't live on a plateau. I live on a steep hill that's impossible to reach the top of. Stoneman Street, that's my style. You have to climb to get to me. You know what Biz Aziz calls this kind of talk? Floccinaucinihilipilification!

Wakaflockawhat? What's got into you, did you win a Nobel Prize and not tell me? Where's the aw, shucks, gee willikers young girl I first signed on back when the only paper who wanted your cartoon was the
San Jose Spectator
? Look, I told you this, if you want me to sell your strip to more papers, Wendy, you got to polish up your subject matter and characters.

It's too late to clean up my strip. This is its look, this is the sensibility.

Not true. Not at all. It's never too late. Look at
Garfield
. Look at old
Doonesbury
. Which do you prefer, old
Doonesbury
or today's polish?

The unpolished.

Come on.

You used to cheer for my self-taught punkish style back when you pitched me to the syndicate.

That was years ago. You were green. I didn't want to push you.

Now you want my Christmas cartoon to be a cheap commercial puffball and my strip to be one of those clockwork machines that plops out dependable cuckoo jokes—so it makes your job easier. I don't want my newspaper receipts to
plateau
, and you can't blame
me
if you and your travelling polygamists can't sell a winner. My job is to draw the comic. Merchandise sales outpace my newspapers. How do you explain that?

Listen—

Alls I'm saying is, if we don't do something double fast, Gabby,
Calvin and Hobbes
is going to stomp us out of a gig.

The comics are
shrinking
, not growing. In the thirties, you might have six comics on a funnies page.
Six
. Now it's ten strips minimum and some papers subscribe to seventeen.

That doesn't sound like shrinking. The comics are smaller but there's more of them. I'm not with the argument a smaller panel is a bad thing.

Okay, good, because a smaller panel means it has to be
easy to read
. Get a sandwich board and a slogan, said Wendy. All I hear are doomsday excuses for why you can't break two thousand papers.

The option's there to fire Scavalda, said Frank that evening before bed with the television on to the top ten list of Manila Convençion positions on
Late Night with David Letterman
.

Number eight,
The flying wow-wa-wow-wa
.

Number seven, …
The Philip K. Dick
…?

Divestment as an option had never occurred to Wendy before. The thought gave her shivers. Could she fire the editor who launched her career, without whom she would be nowhere? The opposite thought used to frighten her, that Gabby would ditch her and get a cartoonist more qualified to draw her strip. She revelled in the horror of imagining Gabby telling those travelling salesmen who ploughed the highways of America selling Shepherd Media strips to take
Strays
out of their jackets and focus on
Loch & Quay
.

The way to kill a strip—let it shed papers at its own pace until it vanished from the public without hassle.

She thought again of how much more polished and legible
Calvin and Hobbes
was, how universal, how true. Handmade and love-worn, like a favourite shirt.

Wendy drank a final snort of wine and set the glass on her bedside table next to a copy of Huysmans'
Là-bas
, and contemplated life as she watched Letterman count down, and Frank shave. Had she seen him
without the hairpiece? Yes. She told him there was nothing wrong with his bald head the few times she'd interrupted him at the sink gluing it down. Did he sleep wearing it? Yes.

Number five,
My mother is
already
ashamed of me
.

She thought about shame and asked him, Didn't you and Sue want children? You were married for years and years.

Towel wrapped around his waist, hairpiece on, he stood in the doorway of their marble ensuite with a razor in his hand and half a beard frosted with cream. We didn't think about children. Problem was, Sue could not ovulate, or she got her period once a year. But no way of knowing when. Happened in her teens. She got ovarian cysts back when we first started dating. Freshman year of high school all but a few of her eggs were surgically removed.

Yikes. How sad. You guys were sad about that.

We were used to it. We were fourteen when it happened.

Sue must've been sad. Fourteen. Sheesh. Is it possible you mistook love for the span of time?

Maybe we weren't …, said Frank as he went back to the mirror to resume shaving. Or sometimes love is money in the bank and sometimes love is a bond of debt. We're in the bank. Sue and I, that was debt.

She rolled out of bed and tiptoed into the ensuite, dropped her silk kimono robe embroidered with Sam the snake chasing Francis across her back, and, naked, turned on the shower and tickled the water, testing its temp. She jumped in, then a moment after, jumped out again, bellydancing in front of him. Kissing his smooth face, she simultaneously pulled his towel off. He laughed.

You're crazy.

We could make kiddies. Nothing stopping us.

Right now? He put the razor on the countertop and touched her wet skin. What a scary thought, being a dad on top of everything else.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
You calling me a chicken?

She hopped up on the marble countertop, and sitting there, brought him between her legs and kissed him. He let her run her fingers through his well-glued toupée. You know what I decided? she said.

What's that?

Even if I can fire her, I'm still not going to fire Gabby for giving me the straight dope. It's not her fault there's
Calvin and Hobbes
. I'm just going to proceed as per and ignore her.
Strays
is my creation, I draw it.

That's good thinking, baby, said Frank, already in a pink heat.

I control the strip's look, not the doubters. There's a reason I ran away from Canada's chilly conditions.