Дональд Уэстлейк - A Likely Story

Ginger is also being active on the project, but in a more useful way. She’s copy editor at Trans-American Books, a paperback house, and is a very good line editor; she’s rewritten my solicitation letter — the one to be sent to prominent noses — and I have to admit she was right with most of the changes she suggested.

For instance, she pointed out that it wasn’t until the third paragraph that I got to the point of the letter, asking for original material. “Until then,” she said, “it sounds like you’re trying to sell them a copy of the book.” So now, with some necessary adaptation, the third paragraph is the second and the second is the third.

Also, with Ginger’s help, I did a variant letter aimed at photographers, illustrators and graphic artists. (Other than Gretchen.) I’m hoping they’ll be cheaper than the writers.

The question is, when do I actually get to send out these letters?

A full week of negotiation, and I am not entirely happy at the result, but Annie says it’s the best we can do, and too late to try any other house this year, so this morning we said yes and Jack Rosenfarb messengered to Annie’s office a letter of intent outlining the agreement; that was so I could get started without waiting for contracts to be drawn.

Anyway, the deal. I get twenty-five thousand on signature, another twenty-five June first (dependent on yesses from those five celebs), and the rest August first. The full advance is on a sliding scale between seventy-five and one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars, with sixty percent going to the contributors and forty percent to me.

And, if the deal falls through, five thousand of the first advance is mine anyway, to pay for my time and effort. So no matter what happens, this idea has at least earned me five grand.

Annie, whose office is a janitor’s closet on a low floor of the Empire State Building, took me to lunch in her neighborhood and gave me a copy of Jack Rosenfarb’s letter, and I actually saw her smile a bit. She had a Jack Daniels and two glasses of white wine and became vague toward the end of the meal, calling me “Tim” and saying sentences that almost seemed coherent until you looked back at them. For instance, she allowed as how she’d been warming to the idea of The Christmas Book over the last week or so, from her initial negative reaction, and by now was quite fond of the notion. “The best books, like the best women, are all whores,” she went on. “Never trust an amateur at anything.”

“Okay,” I said.

I walked her back to her office, happy she wouldn’t be doing anything on my career’s behalf this afternoon, and then came home to start work. Yesterday Ginger ran off on the Xerox machine at work a hundred copies of my two solicitation letters, with a blank for me to type in the victim’s name, so I have just sent the writer’s letter to these forty people:

Edward Albee, Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Russell Baker, Ann Beattie, Helen Gurley Brown, William F. Buckley, Jr., Leo Buscaglia, Truman Capote, Jimmy Carter, Francis Ford Coppola, Annie Dillard, E. L. Doctorow, Gerald Ford, William Goldman, John Irving, Stephen King, Jerzy Kosinski, Judith Krantz, Robert Ludlum, Norman Mailer, James A. Michener, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard Nixon, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Puzo, Joan Rivers, Andy Rooney, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, Isaac Bashevis Singer (what the hell), Steven Spielberg, Sylvester Stallone, Diana Trilling, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Wambaugh, Tom Wolfe and Herman Wouk.

The illustrator’s letter went to these ten people:

Charles Addams, Richard Avedon, Jim Davis, Jules Feiffer, Edward Gorey, Robert Kliban, Jill Krementz, LeRoy Nieman, Charles Schulz and Andy Warhol.

I was just typing Carl Sagan when Hubert Van Driin called to say he thought we’d had a nice and productive chat on Monday, but on reflection he was deciding to say no to The Wit and Wisdom of Clint Eastwood. It’s probably just as well.

Back to a blizzard. It took three hours to get home from Kennedy Airport last night, during which Ginger and I finally had the big fight that had been brewing all week in Puerto Rico, and the cabdriver took her side! The son of a bitch. With the two of them ganging up on me, I gathered my dignity like the tattered cloak it is, stepped out into the storm, and swore to walk home.

Well, I stomped through the snow and the wind and the stalled traffic and the slush on the Van Wyck Expressway for about two minutes before realizing I could die out there, which was carrying hurt pride too far, so I went back to the cab — which, of course, hadn’t moved an inch while I was away — to find Ginger arguing with the driver. Hah- hah! I sat in my corner, silent, arms folded, a superior smile on my triumphant face while they squabbled, and my feet, in wet socks, slowly turned to marble and fell off.

Eventually the three of us made up, Ginger explaining to the driver that it was just that I was worried about money. I know her well enough by now to understand that statement as her form of apology. In changing the subject of the argument to something less volatile and dangerous, she was in effect saying she didn’t want to argue any more.

While it is true that I’m worried about money — we are spending Craig, Harry & Bourke’s advance before receiving it and without regard for the fact that I’m going to have to pay other people for contributions to the book — in truth that wasn’t what the fight was about. The fight was about children, hers and mine, but because that problem is too delicate and insoluble to deal with directly we tend just to gnaw at its fringes.

None of these kids are going to go away, and all of them are going to live with their mothers till they grow up, and this means that more and more men are going to be surrounded by children they aren’t to blame for. Meanwhile, their own kids are eating popcorn with other males. It all creates tension.

The specific of this fight was whether Ginger’s kids should come back from Lance right away last night, as soon as we ourselves got home, or should they come back today, after school. The fight had been poised for birth ever since the Saturday before last, when I took Gretchen and Joshua to their father’s apartment to stay while Ginger and I were in Puerto Rico, but neither of us had wanted to spoil our departure — nor our vacation — so the dispute merely seethed and bubbled beneath the surface, present but not active. The image of a volcano seems appropriate. Returning to New York amid a snowstorm and a monumental traffic tie-up had at last given the fight a soil in which it could grow (to mix my imagery just a teeny bit), and thus it all came about.

(What Ginger fought with the cabdriver about was Puerto Rico, he being an emigrant from there.)

That the rotten weather made the whole question of the kids’ return academic merely gave the fight added virulence. We would be lucky to get ourselves home on Sunday night, never mind the kids. Since I had been the one pressing the point of view that a brief overnight transition for the two of us between traveling and children would be a good idea, I was accused in the taxi of gloating over the storm, and off we went.

Well, it all calmed down en route, though it did threaten to blow up all over again when two of the messages awaiting us on the telephone answering machine at home were from Mary, and both about her kids. That is, our kids. Bryan having been given a clarinet for Christmas — don’t ask me why kids want this or that, I’ll never fathom it — (a used clarinet from a pawnshop on Third Avenue), it now seemed a potentially good idea to give him clarinet lessons, so one of Mary’s calls was about the thirty-five-dollar-a-month lessons available through the school. The other message was about the police wanting Jennifer to make a statement about her mugging, and did I think it was a good idea for the kid to involve herself in all that any further.