I thought I was probably inviting another storm of grief — -maybe the worst storm — but I went ahead anyway . . . and our emotions always surprise us, don’t they? There was no weeping and wailing that night; I guess all that was out of my system. Instead there was a deep and wretched sense of loss — the empty chair where she used to like to sit and read, the empty table where she would always set her glass too close to the edge.
I poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up. ‘I’m done, Jo,’ I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. ‘So that’s all right, isn’t it?’
There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that’s worth repeating — there was no response. I didn’t sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.
I drank the champagne, put the glass back on the Coke tray, then filled the other one. I took it over to the Mac and sat down where Johanna would have been sitting, if not for everyone’s favorite loving God. No weeping and wailing, but my eyes prickled with tears. The words on the screen were these:
today wasn’t so bad, she supposed. She crossed the grass to her car, and laughed when she saw the white square of paper under the windshield. Cam Delancey, who refused to be discouraged, or to take no for an answer, had invited her to another of his Thursday-night wine-tasting parties. She took the paper, started to tear it up, then changed her mind and stuck it in the hip pocket of her jeans, instead.
‘No paragraph indent,’ I said, ‘this continues.’ Then I keyboarded the line I’d been holding in my head ever since I got up to get the champagne.
There was a whole world out there; Cam Delancey’s wine-tasting was as good a place to start as any.
I stopped, looking at the little flashing cursor. The tears were still prickling at the corners of my eyes, but I repeat that there were no cold drafts around my ankles, no spectral fingers at the nape of my neck. I hit RETURN twice. I clicked on CENTER. I typed The End below the last line of prose, and then I toasted the screen with what should have been Jo’s glass of champagne.
‘Here’s to you, babe,’ I said. ‘I wish you were here. I miss you like hell.’ My voice wavered a little on that last word, but didn’t break. I drank the Taittinger, saved my final line of copy, transferred the whole works to floppy disks, then backed them up. And except for notes, grocery lists, and checks, that was the last writing I did for four years.
CHAPTER THREE
My publisher didn’t know, my editor Debra Weinstock didn’t know, my agent Harold Oblowski didn’t know. Frank Arlen didn’t know, either, although on more than one occasion I had been tempted to tell him. Let me be your brother. For Jo’s sake if not your own, he told me on the day he went back to his printing business and mostly solitary life in the southern Maine town of Sanford. I had never expected to take him up on that, and didn’t — not in the elemental cry-for-help way he might have been thinking about — but I phoned him every couple of weeks or so. Guy-talk, you know — How’s it going, Not too bad, cold as a witch’s tit, Yeah, here, too, You want to go down to Boston if I can get Bruins tickets, Maybe next year, pretty busy right now, Yeah, I know how that is, seeya, Mikey, Okay, Frank, keep your wee-wee in the teepee. Guy-talk.
I’m pretty sure that once or twice he asked me if I was working on a new book, and I think I said
—
Oh, fuck it — that’s a lie, okay? One so ingrown that now I’m even telling it to myself. He asked, all right, and I always said yeah, I was working on a new book, it was going good, real good. I was tempted more than once to tell him I can’t write two paragraphs without going into total mental and physical doglock — my heartbeat doubles, then triples, I get short of breath and then start to pant, my eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of my head and hang there on my cheeks. I’m like a claustrophobe in a sinking submarine. That’s how it’s going, thanks for asking, but I never did. I don’t call for help. I can’t call for help. I think I told you that.
From my admittedly prejudiced standpoint, successful novelists — even modestly successful novelists — have got the best gig in the creative arts. It’s true that people buy more CDS than books, go to more movies, and watch a lot more TV. But the arc of productivity is longer for novelists, perhaps because readers are a little brighter than fans of the non-written arts, and thus have marginally longer memories. David Soul of Starsky and Hutch is God knows where, same with that peculiar white rapper Vanilla Ice, but in 1994, Herman Wouk, James Michener, and Norman Mailer were all still around; talk about when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Arthur Hailey was writing a new book (that was the rumor, anyway, and it turned out to be true), Thomas Harris could take seven years between Lecters and still produce bestsellers, and although not heard from in almost forty years, J. D. Salinger was still a hot topic in English classes and informal coffee-house literary groups. Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled onto the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
What the publisher wants in return, especially from an author who can be counted on to sell 500,000 or so copies of each novel in hardcover and a million more in paperback, is perfectly simple: a book a year. That, the wallahs in New York have determined, is the optimum. Three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every twelve months, a beginning, a middle, and an end, continuing main character like Kinsey Millhone or Kay Scarpetta optional but very much preferred. Readers love continuing characters; it’s like coming back to family.
Less than a book a year and you’re screwing up the publisher’s investment in you, hampering your business manager’s ability to continue floating all of your credit cards, and jeopardizing your agent’s ability to pay his shrink on time. Also, there’s always some fan attrition when you take too long. Can’t be helped. Just as, if you publish too much, there are readers who’ll say, ‘Phew, I’ve had enough of this guy for awhile, it’s all starting to taste like beans.’
I tell you all this so you’ll understand how I could spend four years using my computer as the world’s most expensive Scrabble board, and no one ever suspected. Writer’s block? What writer’s block? We don’t got no steenkin writer’s block. How could anyone think such a thing when there was a new Michael Noonan suspense novel appearing each fall just like clockwork, perfect for your late-summer pleasure reading, folks, and by the way, don’t forget that the holidays are coming and that all your relatives would also probably enjoy the new Noonan, which can he had at Borders at a thirty percent discount, oy vay, such a deal.
The secret is simple, and I am not the only popular novelist in America who knows it — if the rumors are correct, Danielle Steel (to name just one) has been using the Noonan Formula for decades. You see, although I have published a book a year starting with Being Two in 1984, I wrote two books in four of those ten years, publishing one and ratholing the other.
I don’t remember ever talking about this with Jo, and since she never asked, I always assumed she understood what I was doing: saving up nuts. It wasn’t writer’s block I was thinking of, though.
Shit, I was just having fun.
By February of 1995, after crashing and burning with at least two good ideas (that particular function — the Eureka! thing — has never stopped, which creates its own special version of hell), I could no longer deny the obvious: I was in the worst sort of trouble a writer can get into, barring Alzheimer’s or a cataclysmic stroke. Still, I had four cardboard manuscript boxes in the big safe-deposit box I keep up at Fidelity Union. They were marked Promise, Threat, Darcy, and Top.
Around Valentine’s Day, my agent called, moderately nervous — I usually delivered my latest masterpiece to him by January, and here it was already half-past February. They would have to crash production to get this year’s Mike Noonan out in time for the annual Christmas buying orgy.