“If they were ever read in court, journals about this stuff would probably end us up in Oak Cove,” Herb said. “That's the nut-farm old Iron-Guts broke out of, just in case any of you forgot.”
“Better Oak Cove than Attica,” I said.
“That's comforting, John,” Sandra said. “That's very comforting.”
“Don't worry, sweetheart,” Bill said, reaching out and giving her ankle a pat. “I think they send the ladies to Ossining.”
“Yes,” she said. “Where I can discover the joys of Sapphic love with a three-hundred-pound biker chick.”
“Stop it, all of you,” Roger said impatiently. “It's a precaution, that's all. There's really no downside to this. Not if we're careful.”
It wasn't until then that I realized just how desperately Roger wants to turn Zenith House around, now that he has the chance. How much he wants to save his reputation now that there's a real chance to save it. I thought again of that rabbit general yelling, “Come back, you fools! Dogs aren't dangerous!”
I believe that, in the days and weeks ahead, Roger Wade will bear watching. The others, too. And myself, of course.
Maybe myself most of all.
“I think I'm ready for a little vacation in Oak Cove, anyway,” Bill said. “I feel as if I'm reading you guys' minds, and that's got to be crazy.”
No one said anything. No one really needed to.
Dear diary, we're past that point.
I spent the rest of the day recovering my more-or-less normal existence. I removed a long, dull dinner-party scene from Olive's latest Windhover opus and, mindful of the late great Tina Barfield, left in a rough-sex scene that really is rough (at one point a blunt object is inserted in an unlikely place with unlikely, ecstatic results). I tracked down a culinary consultant through the New York Public Library, and she has agreed, for the sum of four hundred dollars (which we can barely afford) to go through the recipes in Janet Freestone-Love's Your New Astral Cookbook and try to assure me that there's nothing poisonous in there. Cookbooks are invariably moneymakers, even the bad ones, but few people outside this crazy business realize they can also be dangerous; fuck up a few ingredients and people can die. Ludicrous, but it happens. I went to lunch with Jinky Carstairs, who is novelizing the lesbo-vampire piece of shit we're stuck with (burgers at Burger Heaven, how chi-chi) and had a drink after work with Rodney Slavinksy, who writes the Coldeye Denton westerns under the name of Bart I. Straight. The Coldeyes don't do diddly-dick in the U. S. market, but for some reason they've found an audience in France, Germany, and Japan. We share in those rights. Greedy-guts, greedy-guts.
Before meeting with Rodney—who is one gay cowpoke, pardner—I went back down to the mailroom, stepping over a twisted, twined mat of ivy branches and stems to get there. It's possible to do that without actually treading on any, for which I am grateful. The last thing I needed at three in the afternoon was the pained scream of a psychic ivy suffering a bad case of stompie-toes.
Mostly, Zenith appears to be growing up the wall on either side of the janitor's cubby, creating a complex pattern of green and brown, through which the cream-colored wallboard shows in pleasant geometric patterns. I didn't hear it sighing this time, but I could swear I heard it breathing, warm and deep and comforting, just within the range of audibility. And again there was a smell, this time not coffee but honeysuckle. I also have fond childhood memories of that smell; it surrounded the library where I spent a great many happy hours as a boy. And as I passed, one strand of ivy reached out and touched my cheek. Not just a touch, either. It was a caress. One great thing I have discovered about keeping a diary: I can be honest here if nowhere else, honest enough in this case to say that that leafy touch made me think of Ruth, who used to touch me in just that way.
I stood perfectly quiet while that delicate bit of stem slipped up to my temple, traced my eyebrow, and then fell away. Before it did, I had a very clear thought, and I'm positive it came from Zenith rather than from my own mind:
Find the purple box.
Find it I did, exactly where the Barfield woman—or her Ouija board —said I would, way back in the corner on the bottom shelf, behind a pair of huge padded mailers oozing out flakes of stuffing. It is the sort of box that medium-grade typing paper comes in. The sender—one James Saltworthy of Queens—simply taped the box shut and slapped a mailing sticker over the ragland bond brand name and logo. His address is in the upper left-hand corner, on another sticker. I think it's sort of amazing that the post office accepted such a package and managed to get it here, but they did, and now it's all mine. Sitting on the floor of the mailroom, smelling dust and honeysuckle, I broke the tape and lifted the box-lid. Inside is about four hundred pages of copy, I should judge, under a title page which reads
THE LAST SURVIVOR By James Saltworthy
And, down in the far corner:
Selling North American Rights Literary Agent: Self Approx 195,000 Words
There was also a letter, addressed this way: TO THE EDITOR—OR WHOEVER SENDS THESE THINGS BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM. As with the Tina Barfield letter, I have attached it. I'm not going to critique or analyze it here, and there's probably no reason to do so at all. Writers who have been trying to get their books published over a long period of time—five years, sometimes ten years, and once in my experience a full fifteen years which encompassed ten unpublished novels, three of them very long—share a similar tone, which I would describe as a thin coat of self-pitying cynicism stretched over a well of growing despair and, in many cases, hysteria. In my imagination, which is probably too vivid, these people always seem like miners who have somehow survived a terrible cave-in, people trapped in the dark and screaming Is there anyone out there? Please, is anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?
What I thought as I folded the letter back into the envelope was that if ever there was a name that sounds as if it should belong to a writer, that name is James Saltworthy. My next thought was to just put the top back on the box and leave whatever was under the title page, good or bad, until I got home. But there's a little Pandora in most of us, I think, and I couldn't resist a look. And before I knew about it, I'd read the first eight or nine pages. It reads that easily, that naturally. It can't be as good as it seems to be, I know that, or it wouldn't be here. And yet a part of me whispers that that might not be true. He is serving as his own agent, and writers who do that are like self-defending lawyers: they have fools for clients.
The pages I read were good enough so I have burned to read the rest ever since leaving the office; my mind keeps going back to Tracy Nordstrom, the charming psycho who is apparently going to be Saltworthy's main character. There's a war going on in my head, the armies of Hope on one side, those of Cynicism on the other. This conflict, I feel, is going to be decided in the two hours between now and midnight, when I really must turn in. But before leaving the typewriter chair in the kitchen for my reading chair in the living room area of my apartment, I must add one more thing.
When I stood up with Saltworthy's purple box under my arm, I noticed that Zenith the common ivy has burst through the wall between the janitor's closet and the mailroom in at least three dozen places. There are ten steel shelves mounted on that wall, plain gray utilitarian things which are now perfectly empty—in my post-Ruth orgy of work, I cleaned them out completely, without finding a single thing even remotely worth publishing. In most cases it's not even incompetency—boring narration and dull prose—but outright illiteracy. Not one but several of the manuscripts which filled those gray shelves were scrawled in pencil.