CHAPTER 15
Fred moved back in with Marion a few months later. Many of his friends were surprised. His career seemed to be in the second stage of a stellar flight: the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild were both interested in his novel; Town magazine had hired him, on Tom Lear’s recommendation, to write a monthly interview with a sports personality; and Bob Holder had proposed an idea to him for another novel. He had lifted off, it seemed to Fred’s friends, and had a clear trajectory to a new planet; why head back for the tedium of Earth?
“I’ve grown a lot,” Fred answered them, looking shyly away from his interrogators. “Marion and I have been through too much stuff not to give it another try. First I discovered how much resentment I felt toward her — then I learned how much I loved and needed her.” He appeared more fragile than anyone had suspected. He grew more modest, almost timid, as the publication of The Locker Room neared.
In the summer he and Marion rented a house in East Hampton with Tom Lear. She came out on the weekends; Fred stayed at the beach, palling around with Tom, playing in the chic softball game where his skills as a pitcher and clutch singles hitter were highly prized. He went everywhere with Tom: the pleasant friend who smiled a lot, spoke little, made self-deprecating comments about his work, and was always available for favors or chores.
In late August they held a barbecue to repay others for all the parties they had gone to. Fred found himself the center of everyone’s attention when Bob Holder arrived beaming with news — Book-of-the-Month had bought Fred’s novel as a featured alternate for a guarantee of thirty thousand dollars. To his bitter surprise, he was asked all over again by everyone the subject of his book, although he had explained it all before — as though the sale had somehow made it a real novel. He saw something he had never seen before in the eyes of the other well-known writers — a flicker of worry and envy. He drank a lot, consciously asked about their work, and kept Marion at least within view, if not actually close by. Despite these precautions, he still managed to make a fool of himself.
“What are you gonna do with your first million, Fred?” Holder shouted at him when they were all quiet for a moment after serving themselves dessert and coffee.
“Think it’s gonna be that big?” a senior editor of Town magazine asked Holder.
“The book of the season. This year’s Carp.”
“Give him a break,” Marion called out cheerfully. Fred was grateful, but he worried anyway that her comment was wrong. He shook his head at her.
“Have you started on your next book?” Paula Kramer asked. She was one of the hottest writers in the country, successful as a journalist, screenwriter, and novelist. Her personal life was as famous as her written words, she had been married to two powerful and influential men, her life had been as glamorous as Fred’s had been dreary. During the course of the summer he had been in her presence a dozen times; he had nodded pleasantly at many of her observations, but this was the first question she had ever addressed to him.
And he blew it. He stared at her for a moment. Her black eyes seemed alive with intelligence, her long narrow face with its full lips and strong chin loomed at him in the red glow of sunset. He was drunk. He had trouble keeping her in focus. He looked down at his paper plate resting unevenly on the grass. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
There was explosive laugher from the crowd. Someone, away from his area, said to Holder, “Haven’t you told him yet. Bob?” And there was another round of guffaws.
Fred looked up, shocked, at all of them. There was foreknowledge in their reaction to the joke that Fred wouldn’t know if he was writing unless his editor told him. Holder shook his head at the laughter, his eyes closed, his head shaking, a parent irritated by misbehaving children — but a parent who seemed to confess they were right, that their fault was tactlessness, not stupidity. Is that what he had told them? That he had created the book, not Fred?
“I meant …” Fred stammered and most of them suppressed their amusement, looking with exaggerated solemnity at him. He was frozen by the horrible feeling that he had been naked all along and everyone had been too polite to say so.
“I know exactly what you meant,” Paula Kramer said in a kindly soft voice. She addressed the crowd. “It’s the worst feeling in the world. You worry so much about what you’re going to do next.” She returned her glance to Fred and put out a hand sympathetically, touching his knee. “My worst depressions are right after finishing a book. Now you know what postpartum feels like.”
She had covered for him, rewritten everyone’s motivation by misidentifying his confusion. He assumed she had done so consciously, that it was an example of the skillful manipulation of people that the successful always seemed capable of. God, he wished he had that talent. He knew that Paula Kramer would somehow make Holder’s bragging (obviously his editor must be telling everyone he wrote Fred’s book) seem like self-aggrandizement, whereas everything Fred tried, such as his summer tactic of being self-effacing, worked against him. He had abandoned his previous habit of talking about his work to every stranger (having learned that unless you are famous, no one really cares) just when he should have begun such narcissistic ramblings — just when the world would feel he was justified. Now his modesty seemed like incompetence. The summer had been hell, an endless suppression of natural urges, and now it seemed it had been for nothing.
He let his ice cream melt while Holder went on about the idea he had suggested to Fred to write. “Fred’s great at doing contemporary stories. And he’s done great sportswriting, You know,” he said, gesturing to the Town editor for whom Fred was supposed to do his interviews, “I want to get inside the head of a top woman tennis player. Do a novel about, say, Billy Jean King’s life. What a great story!” Holder slapped his leg as though these thoughts were just now coming to him.
There were murmurs of agreement, again the rumble of worry and envy from people who once wouldn’t even have known Fred was there.
“You should do it,” the wife of a bestselling novelist said to Fred. He nodded back at her. Now it was established that it was Holder’s idea. If Fred did it, no matter how well, it would forever be Bob Holder they’d think of as the force that made him. The news brought to him before the party, the utterly amazing information that the Book-of-the-Month Club had picked his novel, that in one swoop his advance had been paid back, that obviously not only would his novel have an ad campaign, but it would be big, all of the various implications that added up to the fact that The Locker Room would make money, guarantee him another contract, probably many more, that he had a real chance to have a bestseller, that he was there at last, out of the dark waters onto the main deck of the luxury liner, strolling in first class— this great moment in his life was sickening, churning in the stomach like rich food wolfed down by a starving peasant.
“He’s hard to take,” Paula Kramer whispered to Fred over the sound of Holder listing the new idea’s commercial potential.
Fred nodded at her stupidly. He couldn’t open his mouth to complain about Holder, afraid somehow he would be caught at it. He felt so grateful to her, that she paid attention to him, that she seemed to be on his side.
“I’d love to read your book,” she said.
“Really?” he blurted out.
“Yes,” she said with a smile. “Do you have a copy you can spare?”