Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

He was, to his amazement, forty-three years old.

He had a sense of time slipping past, faster than intended, like water spilling from a jug that no one notices has tipped on its side.

Now —that was the word that kept popping into his mind—and then Now is the time , almost like a voice speaking, and then he would ask aloud, “For what?” But there was no answer, only the rushing of the leaves, of the hours and days.

Stretched out in front of the fireplace at the Cohens’ after the other guests had gone home from one of Rachel’s fabulous chili and strudel bashes, Perry felt a welcome respite from the nagging, gnatlike doubts that lately were assailing him. This was his home away from home, was in fact the only place he had thought of as home before Jane came along and made one he felt was his own.

The evening had been especially gratifying, for the Cohens had brought together in the warmth of their hospitality the newest member of the department, a brightly idealistic young man named Ed Branscom and his pregnant wife, Eileen, who were still so new to the place they had not until now met old Professor Bryant, who lived alone in a room at the Faculty Club and was too often taken as a fixture of the place rather than as the honored colleague emeritus and friend he was treated as tonight. In bringing those guests together with Perry and Jane (who was now curled peacefully asleep on the couch) the Cohens had created a sense of a continuum as well as a circle, a feeling of everyone’s being a part of an ordered progression within a harmonious community.

“This is the way it s’pose to be,” said Perry, sipping his brandy.

“We’re all very fortunate,” Rachel said, lifting her feet up toward the fire.

“The most,” Perry agreed. “So why can’t I do my work and be grateful? Why can’t I stop worrying I ought to be somewhere else, doing something different?”

Al loomed up to put another log on the fire, looking like a big friendly sheepdog in the shadowy light.

“Maybe you’ve ‘had too much of apple-picking,’” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Perry asked.

“It’s Frost,” Rachel explained. “Don’t you know ‘After Apple-Picking’?”

“What the hell has Robert Frost got to do with anything?” Perry shouted, suddenly feeling on the verge of tears and wanting to strike out at someone or something, anything, as he scrambled to his feet and yelled, “We’re practically in the year two thousand and you people are quoting me Frost , on apples , for God sake?”

The next morning he called to apologize profusely to both Al and Rachel. He went to the room where he did his writing to try to think, to try to figure out what was happening to him. From his window he saw distant hills, tall pines, and a rutted dirt road. Sun and shadow, land and sky, were focused and held in the order of rectangular glass framed with wood. This quiet place was more than his study, in fact he sometimes thought of it as the closest thing he had to a soul, if such a thing existed, or had a tangible look. It was, at least, his chosen view of the world—or view of the world he had chosen.

Jane could be seen in it on her way to or from her expeditions to photograph the plants and trees, birds and insects, leaves and flowers of the nearby fields and hills. When she moved up from the city she became absorbed with the land and its everyday treasures, began to make it the subject of her work, not only in traditional pictures she sold to magazines but in the more original, close-up investigations of nature that she brought together in a highly praised exhibit in a Boston gallery that prompted one critic to call her “an upcoming Annie Dillard of photography.” The good reviews and sales resulting from the exhibit not only made Jane feel her work was understood and appreciated, but gave her professional status as an artist in her own right as Perry was in his, which made them both happy, being in reasonable balance in that way as in so many others.

Jane was a crucial element in the composition Perry saw from his window, and in fact had made the whole picture possible, not only emotionally, but practically. When she came up to live she found the old farmhouse and pooled her own savings with his so together they were able to buy it. Perry had never owned a place he had lived in before, and after the initial fears and panic arising from such unexperienced responsibility, he came to love it with a pride he laughingly admitted bordered on patriotism. The sense of ownership added to the tranquility he felt in the house, especially in this room, with its view of the shifting colors of the seasons, its ordered presentation of the world. But now he began to wonder and worry if the whole thing, this house and love, this very life he led, was too tranquil, was leading to nothing more worthy or noble than the snoozing peace of pipe and slippers.

He made himself sit at his typewriter every morning, but felt no inspiration or urgency. The new book of stories consolidated a certain cycle of experience in his life and art, and he did not yet see his new direction in this particular form. Ten years ago he would have felt driven to make another stab at the obligatory novel that custom and commerce required of writers of this time and place, but he had come to finally accept the fact that it was simply not his métier, and the security Haviland gave him, both financially and professionally, spared him that artificial compulsion.

Sometimes he toyed with the idea of writing a play because he so enjoyed devising dialogue, but the realistic thought of the odds involved in getting anything professionally produced seemed overwhelming. Worse still, the notion of ending up as one of those fuddy-duddy professors whose dramas are staged by the college Thespian Society was too depressing to even contemplate.

He wrote letters to friends, drank coffee, smoked his pipe, and left his study to pace through the house, poking into corners and rearranging pillows like an absentminded detective in search of a clue. Daydreaming often, he was startled by the voice of his wife in their own house.

“Hey—this guy is looking for you! ”

Jane had gone out one cold, windy night to make a magazine raid on the drugstore, and she was curled on the couch reading Time when she sprang up and pushed the article from the Entertainment section right under Perry’s nose.

NEW TUBE BOSS NO BOOB.

Skimming the story, Perry at first could not figure out why he should care that some hot young whiz had taken over the moribund television department of Paragon Films. Archer Mellis sounded much like any other depressingly young, outrageously successful show biz executive on the make and the way up, except for his fancy and far-ranging cultural credentials: Phi Bete from Princeton, Fulbright scholar, musical director of the Off-Broadway hit Matchbox Revue , special advisor on youth to the governor of New Jersey, producer of the low-budget film Cranks , which won honorable mention at Cannes, developer of the first holistic medicine cable TV network, and former vice-president of the New York office of I.S.I. (Inter-Stellar Images), the powerful worldwide talent agency.

In the latter position, while packaging colossal deals for his famous clients, Mellis had found time to dash off a provocative piece attacking the new television season that was published on the Op Ed page of the New York Times , and so shook up the major networks that the president of one issued a counterattack charging Mellis with “links to Third World rabble-rousers.” The other two networks offered him vice-presidencies. Mellis in fact was swamped with offers from nearly every segment of the industry he had so scathingly attacked, and chose the post at Paragon because it gave him what he called “freedom of quality.”