And wasn’t it remarkable how each increase raised the threshold of his own greed? Weeks ago, before any of this had happened, before he had ever heard Marilyn Fairchild’s name, he’d really wanted only two things — to finish his book, and to find someone willing to publish it. He’d want a five-figure advance, certainly, because he had to eat, he had to pay the rent, but he wouldn’t expect much, and it wouldn’t have taken much to make him content.
Once they started bidding, once the numbers started to climb, he kept wanting more. Two million? Someone actually wanted to pay him two million dollars? That’s amazing, that’s wonderful, that’s miraculous — now how about two point five? How about three?
When it was over, when Crown had topped St. Martin’s, when even that price turned out to be higher than he thought it would be, all the delight he felt could not entirely silence one small voice. A voice of disappointment, wishing it didn’t have to be over, wishing somehow it could have been more.
An eternal truth, he thought. The more you get, the more you want.
For the first time he felt that he understood how a man could have a billion dollars and want more, how an executive could take his hundred-million severance package and use it to bankroll a new company. The more they had, the more they wanted — not because of what they could do with it, but for the sheer joy of getting it.
He took off his jacket, hung it in the closet. He turned on his computer, thinking he’d check his e-mail, then changed his mind and shut it down again.
He’d keep this apartment. He wasn’t sure how much three million dollars was, but Roz’s commission would come out of that, and taxes, federal, state, and local. He’d probably net somewhere between one and two million dollars, and that would come in over a period of a couple of years, with most of it deferred until he delivered the two books, and some payable on publication. It was still a lot of money, no matter how they paid it and how much the government skimmed off the top, but it didn’t mean he could go out and buy himself a penthouse on Central Park South.
Even if he could, he’d still stay here. He liked it, it suited him. It was only one room, but it was room enough for him and his things.
Maybe he’d travel more. See a little of the world, or at least the parts of it that you could still go to. Take a house in Sag Harbor for a season, spend a winter in the Caribbean.
Take more cabs, he thought. Eat in nicer restaurants. Buy top-shelf booze. Speaking of which...
He put a couple of ice cubes in a glass, poured some whiskey over them. They’d had that bottle of champagne at Stelli’s, and afterward she had an Amaretto and he had an Armagnac, and liked it well enough to have a second. And then, when he’d finally gone outside with Roz and put her in a cab, a writer who’d come over to the table earlier followed him out to the street and insisted he come back for a quick one. The quick one had turned out to be three or four slow ones, taken at Stelli’s long bar with eight or ten of New York’s brightest people, and nobody talked about his deal or anybody else’s deal. They talked instead about the Yankees and the Mets and the mayor and the governor and the affair a talk show hostess was having with the husband of a CNN anchor and the shake-up in the Catholic church and the shake-up in the FBI and the shake-up at the Daily News and, well, just about everything.
And nobody made a fuss over him, thank God, but nobody ignored him, either, and they listened to what he had to say and laughed at his better lines and treated him, all in all, as if he belonged there. And that was as it should be, because, now, he did.
What an incredible evening.
He hadn’t really wanted to go. He wasn’t exactly surprised when Roz had suggested — no, better make that insisted on — a celebratory dinner. And there’d been no way to refuse, not after the job she’d done for him. But he’d figured it would be at best anticlimactic and at worst uncomfortable. He’d been feeling self-conscious going down to the corner for a pack of cigarettes, so how was he going to like being out in public? And at Stelli’s, yet.
What he’d discovered was another eternal truth, the day’s second, right up there with The more you get, the more you want.
And it was a beauty: Nothing succeeds like success.
Like everyone else on the planet, he’d heard the line a million times, and it had always struck him as a tautology. What the hell was it supposed to mean? Nothing succeeds like something that is successful. Well, sure. Who could argue with that?
But that wasn’t what it meant at all. It was success itself, the fact of success, that gave rise to further success. The first cause of the initial success — the accomplishment, the lucky break, whatever it was — didn’t have anything much to do with it. If you were a success, the world threw laurels at your feet, your reward for... for what? For being a success, dimwit. What else?
Roger Delacroix, the Roger Delacroix, had made a point of coming to his table to shake his hand and congratulate him. He couldn’t really say he read Delacroix, but by God he respected the man’s work. (And there were other writers he didn’t respect, didn’t think much of at all, whose books he bought and read as soon as they came out.) Delacroix’s act tonight had been generous and selfless, but it was his seven-figure deal that had brought the man to his table. His success had drawn Delacroix and the others, and had fattened on their attention.
He carried his drink over to the window, looked out at the city. There were no lights burning in the building directly across the street, and only one, on the top floor, in the building to its immediate left. A bald man in a suit walked the careful walk of the man who does not want anyone to know he’s drunk. A woman walked her dog, an Irish wolfhound, an enormous galumphing creature. He recognized the woman, but wondered if he’d do so if she hadn’t had the dog with her.
The air seemed clearer than usual, his vision sharper.
Nothing succeeds like success. He’d finish the book, buoyed by the success it had already enjoyed. That would sweep the anxiety and self-doubt from his path, and he’d write it and polish it and turn it in, and Esther would love it because she’d come to it eager to love it. And the sales force, charged up in advance at the knowledge that they’d have this eminently promotable, eminently saleable book to push, would read it with great enthusiasm and make sure all their accounts loaded up on it. That would guarantee the stores had big piles of the books, and the publisher’s advertising dollars would further guarantee that the piles wound up on the front table at Borders and the front octagon at Barnes & Noble, so that you couldn’t walk in the door without it smacking you right in the face.
And so on.
The critics might like the book or they might not. But either way they’d give it more space than they’d ever given his previous work, and take it more seriously, and express their enthusiasm or distaste more fervently. It was the length and placement of a review, that and the heat it generated, that impacted sales far more than whether the critic did or didn’t like what was between the covers.
And the public would run out and buy it. In the chains, in the independents, from the online booksellers, they’d buy the book as enthusiastically as if Oprah had told them they had to. Enough of them would buy it to get it on the bestseller list, and then tons more of them would buy it simply because it was on the list, and — ready now?
Nothing succeeds like success.
And here was the capper, here was the one thing that made it all just perfect. All of this success, this wild hitherto-undreamt-of success, was on its way to him notwithstanding that no one, repeat no one, not his agent or his publisher or any of the wonderful fellows who’d been in such a hurry to shake his hand, no one on the fucking planet had read one fucking word of the book.