‘I don’t know. She just happened to get an extra idea this year, I guess. That does happen, I’ve been told.’
As a fellow who had taken his share of double-dips I knew it did, so I simply asked Harold what he wanted. It seemed the quickest and easiest way to get him to relinquish the phone. The answer was no surprise; what he and Debra both wanted — not to mention all the rest of my Putnam pals
— was a book they could publish in late summer of ’98, thus getting in front of Ms. Clark and the rest of the competition by a couple of months. Then, in November, the Putnam sales reps would give the novel a healthy second push, with the Christmas season in mind.
‘So they say,’ I replied. Like most novelists (and in this regard the successful are no different from the unsuccessful, indicating there might be some merit to the idea as well as the usual free-floating paranoia), I never trusted publishers’ promises.
‘I think you can believe them on this, Mike — Darcy’s Admirer was the last book of your old contract, remember.’ Harold sounded almost sprightly at the thought of forthcoming contract negotiations with Debra Weinstock and Phyllis Grann at Putnam. ‘The big thing is they still like you. They’d like you even more, I think, if they saw pages with your name on them before Thanksgiving.’
‘They want me to give them the next book in November? Next month? ‘ I injected what I hoped was the right note of incredulity into my voice, just as if I hadn’t had Helen’s Promise in a safe-deposit box for almost eleven years. It had been the first nut I had stored; it was now the only nut I had left.
‘No, no, you could have until January fifteenth, at least,’ he said, trying to sound magnanimous. I found myself wondering where he and Debra had gotten their lunch. Some fly place, I would have bet my life on that. Maybe Four Seasons. Johanna always used to call that place Valli and the Four Seasons. ‘It means they’d have to crash production, seriously crash it, but they’re willing to do that.
The real question is whether or not you could crash production.’
‘I think I could, but it’ll cost em,’ I said. ‘Tell them to think of it as being like same-day service on your dry-cleaning.’
‘Oh what a rotten shame for them!’ Harold sounded as if he were maybe jacking off and had reached the point where Old Faithful splurts and everybody snaps their Instamatics.
‘How much do you think — ‘
‘A surcharge tacked on to the advance is probably the way to go,’ he said. ‘They’ll get pouty of course, claim that the move is in your interest, too. Primarily in your interest, even. But based on the extra-work argument . . . the midnight oil you’ll have to burn . . . ‘
‘The mental agony of creation . . . the pangs of premature birth . . . ‘
‘Right . . . right . . . I think a ten percent surcharge sounds about right.’ He spoke judiciously, like a man trying to be just as damned fair as he possibly could. Myself, I was wondering how many women would induce birth a month or so early if they got paid two or three hundred grand extra for doing so. Probably some questions are best left unanswered.
And in my case, what difference did it make? The goddam thing was written, wasn’t it?
‘Well, see if you can make the deal,’ I said. ‘Yes, but I don’t think we want to be talking about just a single book here, okay? I think — ‘
‘Harold, what I want right now is to eat some lunch.’
‘You sound a little tense, Michael. Is everything — ‘
‘Everything is fine. Talk to them about just one book, with a sweetener for speeding up production at my end. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ he said after one of his most significant pauses. ‘But I hope this doesn’t mean that you won’t entertain a three- or four-book contract later on. Make hay while the sun shines, remember.
It’s the motto Of champions.’
‘Cross each bridge when you come to it is the motto of champions,’ I said, and that night I dreamt I went to Sara Laughs again.
In that dream — in all the dreams I had that fall and winter — I am walking up the lane to the lodge. The lane is a two-mile loop through the woods with ends opening onto Route 68. It has a number at either end (Lane Forty-two, if it matters) in case you have to call in a fire, but no name.
Nor did Jo and I ever give it one, not even between ourselves. It is narrow, really just a double rut with timothy and witchgrass growing on the crown. When you drive in, you can hear that grass whispering like low voices against the undercarriage of your car or truck.
I don’t drive in the dream, though. I never drive. In these dreams I walk.
The trees huddle in close on either side of the lane. The darkening sky overhead is little more than a slot. Soon I will be able to see the first peeping stars. Sunset is past. Crickets chirr. Loons cry on the lake. Small things — chipmunks, probably, or the occasional squirrel — rustle in the woods.
Now I come to a dirt driveway sloping down the hill on my right. It is our driveway, marked with a little wooden sign which reads SARA LAUGHS. I stand at the head of it, but I don’t go down.
Below is the lodge. It’s all logs and added-on wings, with a deck jutting out behind. Fourteen rooms in all, a ridiculous number of rooms. It should look ugly and awkward, but somehow it does not.
There is a brave-dowager quality to Sara, the look of a lady pressing resolutely on toward her hundredth year, still taking pretty good strides in spite of her arthritic hips and gimpy old knees.
The central section is the oldest, dating back to 1900 or so. Other sections were added in the thirties, forties, and sixties. Once it was a hunting lodge; for a brief period in the early seventies it was home to a small commune of transcendental hippies. These were lease or rental deals; the owners from the late forties until 1984 were the Hingermans, Darren and Marie . . . then Marie alone when Darren died in 1971. The only visible addition from our period of ownership is the tiny DSS dish mounted on the central roofpeak. That was Johanna’s idea, and she never really got a chance to enjoy it.
Beyond the house, the lake glimmers in the afterglow of sunset. The driveway, I see, is carpeted with brown pine needles and littered with fallen branches. The bushes which grow on either side of it have run wild, reaching out to one another like lovers across the narrowed gap which separates them. If you brought a car down here, the branches would scrape and unpleasantly against its sides.
Below, I see, there’s moss growing logs of the main house, and three large sunflowers with faces like have grown up through the boards of the little driveway-side. The overall feeling is not neglect, exactly, but forgottenness.
There is a breath of breeze, and its coldness on my skin makes me that I have been sweating. I can smell pine — a smell which is sour and clean at the same time — and the faint but somehow smell of the lake. Dark Score is one of the cleanest, deepest in Maine. It was bigger until the late thirties, Marie Hingerman us; that was when Western Maine Electric, working hand in hand the mills and paper operations around Rumford, had gotten state to dam the Gessa River. Marie also showed us some charming photographs of white-frocked ladies and vested gentlemen in canoes —
snaps were from the time of the First World War, she said, and to one of the young women, frozen forever on the rim of the with a dripping paddle upraised. ‘That’s my mother,’ she said, the man she’s threatening with the paddle is my father.’
Loons crying, their voices like loss. Now I can see Venus in the dark-sky. Star light, star bright, wish I may, wish I might . . . in these I always wish for Johanna.
With my wish made, I try to walk down the driveway. Of course I do. It’s my house, isn’t it?
Where else would I go but my house, now that dark and now that the stealthy rustling in the woods seems closer and somehow more purposeful? Where else can I go? It’s dark, and it will be frightening to go into that dark place alone (suppose been left so long alone? suppose she’s angry?), but I must. If the electricity’s off, I’ll light one of the hurricane lamps we keep in a kitchen cabinet.