A Likely Story

Monday, April 4th

Annie phoned late this afternoon, and said don’t worry. But then she said, “That’s bullshit, of course.” I have been cursed with an honest agent.

Last Thursday, after brooding about Vickie Douglas for three days, I finally went to see Annie in her office. She listened to my tale of woe, and shook her grizzled head and sighed a grizzled sigh, and said, “Well, Tom, it never comes easy.” (We were meeting in the morning.)

“I don’t ask it to come easy,” I said. “I just ask it to come.”

“She has a good reputation, Vickie Douglas,” Annie said.

“Not with me.”

“It was a first impression. Maybe she’ll grow on you.” But immediately she pointed a gnarled finger at my nose: “If you say, ‘Like fungus,’ I won’t represent you any more.”

I had been deciding whether to say “Like fungus.” I said, “If she grows on me, I’ll have her surgically removed.”

“That’s not much better. More baroque, but not better.”

“Annie, the woman spent two hours talking about her mother. The only thing she said about the book was that my celebrities were yesterday. The book bores her. I bore her. Everything on God’s green Earth bores her except her goddam mother.”

“She’s had her successes,” Annie said doubtfully.

“She doesn’t intend The Christmas Book to be among them.”.

“Do you want someone else assigned?”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Who? If I say I won’t work with that bitch, I’ll have a reputation around the shop for being difficult and then nobody will be on my side. Is Wilson on my side? Is there anybody over there who’s committed to this book?”

“Well, Wilson did approve it.”

“Why doesn’t he take it over?”

Annie smiled, shaking her head. “Robert Wilson is an executive now,” she said. “He doesn’t have to work for a living any more.”

“My entire life is passing before my eyes,” I said. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re self-centered.”

“I’m self-centered? What does that make Vickie Douglas?”

Annie sighed. “It is a problem,” she acknowledged. “I’ll go along with you, it is a problem. I’ll have a quiet conversation with Wilson, just see what he thinks of things.”

“When?”

“Well, this is the worst possible time of year,” she said. “Worse than August. Tomorrow’s Good Friday, so the Christians won’t be around, and the Jews are still contending with Passover.”

“The rest of the year,” I said bitterly, “they’re all atheists.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s hard to work in publishing without believing there must be a greater Intelligence somewhere in the universe.”

So it was agreed that Annie would try to talk with Wilson on Monday, being today, and I went away to hang on my own cross over Easter weekend.

Actually, Easter is Passover, plus additions, most of them pagan, starting with the name, which comes out of our dim half-forgotten Teutonic past. Just as the northern gods gave us Wednesday (Wodin-his-day; that’s why it’s spelled funny) and Thursday (Thor, of course) and Friday (either Frey or her sister Freya; don’t blame me), Easter is derived from a dawn goddess named Eostre or Eostur or Eastre or Ostara or some damn thing, the difference being that maybe she never existed. A double nonreality, that; a mythical goddess without a myth.

The problem is, the only reference to her is in the Venerable Bede’s (672–735) Ecclesiastical History, and Bede has taken some knocks recently from people who say he made her up by working back from the Anglo-Saxon name of April, which was Eostur-monath.

Maybe so, but I’m with Bede. I mean, otherwise he’s pretty reliable, and the name sounds right. Anyway, if there ever was an Eostur, in the old days, and I mean the old days, her feast day was the vernal equinox, when bonfires would be lit in her honor, which makes sense. Also, the sun would start that day with three leaps up from the horizon in a dance of joy, and maidens clothed all in white would appear on mountains and in the clefts of rocks. What these maidens did if you went over and said, “Hi, you come here often?” I do not know, but spring festivals used to be pretty sexy before they reformed and got mixed up with the Christians. The original emphasis on fertility and fecundity is still palely visible in our Easter eggs and Easter rabbits, but the pizzazz is pretty well gone now, and it has merely become the only time of year when you can sell an otherwise sensible woman a lavender coat.

A former Easter custom I wish was still with us was the Risus Paschalis, which started in Bavaria in the fifteenth century. The idea was, the priest would tell jokes and funny stories during Easter Mass, in order to make the parishioners laugh, the laughter supposed to be a good gift for the risen Christ. However, the jokes got to be a little sacrilegious sometimes, so in the eighteenth century the practice was banned by Pope Maximilian III.

Whenever they hear anybody laughing, boy, they sure put a stop to it.