A Likely Story

Tuesday, January 4th

“Never write a novel in the first person,” Jack told me.

“I know that,” I said. “And never write a novel in diary form either.”

“An you shoah got to keep out ub dialect.”

Oh, how we amused ourselves. Just a couple of old pals having lunch together, that’s all, good old roly-poly Jack Rosenfarb and the present speaker, Tom Diskant, chuckling over our sole Veronique and house chablis and letting the old real world just go hang. A comedy team at leisure, one skinny and the other stout, I Jack Spratt to his missus, Stan to his Ollie, André to his Wallace Shawn.

The reality, of course, was quite different. Good old Jack was an editor with the publishing firm of Craig, Harry & Bourke, the firm was picking up the check, and I was there, heart and sole in my mouth, to peddle a book.

“Well, the novel’s dead, anyway,” I said. “I wouldn’t come here to talk to you about a novel.”

“Bless you, Tom,” he said, his merry eyes crinkling. “You always know what to say.”

I hesitated. We both waited for me to tell him what book I wanted him to buy. This was the moment of truth — well, in a manner of speaking — and I hated and feared the upcoming instant of either acceptance or rejection. What if he said no? Time was pleasant now, in the predecision phase, wining and dining and making jokes. Outside, the world was black and white and wet with January slush under a sky piled with round gray clouds like full laundry bags, cars and buildings all were speckled with city mud on a Park Avenue so dark and desolate and grim one automatically looked for tumbrels, but here inside the Tre Mafiosi all was warm and good, gold and ivory and pale, pale green.

Oh, well; man does not live by lunch alone. “It’s a Christmas book,” I mumbled, and chugged chablis.

Jack’s merry twinkle faded. He looked puzzled, faintly troubled, as though afraid he was about to hear — or have to give — some bad news. “It’s a what?” he asked.

“Christmas,” I said. “A Christmas book.”

“Oh, Lord,” he said, laughing, but hollowly. “Haven’t we had enough of all that? We’re getting the damn tree out tomorrow, at long last. Twelfth Night. The fucking thing is naked, Tom, there’s green needles everywhere I turn, they’re in the fucking bed.”

“Christmas will return,” I said.

“Say not so.”

“But it will, Jack. Along about May, the folks at Craig are all going to start saying, ‘What’ve we got for Christmas? We need a Christmas book. A big glossy picture-full star-studded Christmas-gift coffee-table book, twenty-nine fifty until January first.’”

“Thirty-four fifty.”

“Whatever.” Talking, starting, under way, I was beginning to get my confidence back. “Look, Jack,” I said. “We have had Marc Chagall’s stained glass people flying upside down, we have had Dickens, we have had cats, we have had feminism through the ages, we have had gnomes, we have had cities photographed from the air, we have—”

“Please,” he said. “Not a history of American publishing, not while I’m eating.”

“I have the ultimate Christmas book,” I said modestly.

He thought. I watched him think, I watched him realize that yes, May would come, and with it the need to define the fall list, including one or more hot, pot-boiling Christmas books. Whether or not Christmas itself would ever return, or ever be asked back after its most recent behavior, May would certainly arrive, the need for a fall list was as inevitable as death and Garfield, and he who managed to think about tomorrow today would anon be a senior editor. “The ultimate Christmas book,” he murmured.

“Exactly.”

He shook himself, like a dog coming out of water or an elephant waking up. “It’s too late for marijuana,” he said, “and the world will never be hip enough for the Big Picture Book of Cocaine. Orphans will continue to be out until both Vietnam and Annie have receded a bit further into the mists of time. The big faggot book about the apostles all being gay would probably go well at the moment, but you’re the wrong guy to do it. So what’s your subject?”

“Christmas,” I said.

Tick. Tock. Tick. He blinked, very slowly. “You mean,” he said, “a coffee table book about Christmas. A Christmas book about Christmas.”

“Yes,” I said simply.

“Is this a wonderful idea,” he asked himself, “or is this a stupid idea?” Frowning at me, all attention, he said, “Show me this book.”

I pantomimed opening the huge book. “On this page,” I said, “we have a fourteenth century Madonna and Child. On the next page, we have a Christmas story by Judith Krantz, especially commissioned. On the next page, we have a nineteen-twenties comic Prohibition Christmas card. On the next page, we have an original reminiscence by Gore Vidal, Christmas in Italy, bedding the acolytes. On the next—”

“All right,” he said. “I see the book. You can get these people?”

“Not without Craig, Harry & Bourke letterhead,” I said.

“And money.” Jack waggled a playful finger at me, as though accusing me of being naughty. “You’re talking a very big advance here, buster.”

“I know it, Jack.”

“Excuse my saying this, Tom,” Jack said, his fingers walking gingerly among the silverware, to show he was pussyfooting, “but that isn’t your track record. The kind of advance you’re talking about here, you’ve never had anything like this before.”

Of course not. I am a journeyman writer; I will do a piece on repairing your own sink for Ms magazine, sexuality among female ministers for Cosmopolitan, the rapaciousness of football team owners for Esquire. I did the books Coral Sea and El Alamein for the “We Go To War!” subscription series. I did Golf Courses of America, subsidized by American Airlines and published by Craig, Harry & Bourke, which is how I met Jack in the first place, for whom I’ve also done The Ins and Outs of Unemployment Insurance and Hospitals Can Make You Sick.

Track record, that’s all these guys talk about. It’s one of their many ways to avoid original thought; if they can see what you’ve done before, they know what to think about you now. I had to get Jack past that bump in the road, and the only lever I could find was humility. “Sometimes, Jack,” I said, “a small guy can have a big idea.”

That shocked him into consciousness. “Tom, Tom,” he protested, “I never said anything like that. This isn’t you and me, this is the company. I’m thinking of the people I have to answer to, back in the office.”

“Don’t sell them me,” I suggested. “Sell them the idea.”

“There’s also execution of the idea,” he reminded me. “Tom, I know you can do whatever you set your mind to, but we’ve got Wilson to consider. Bourke himself. I’ll level with you, Tom,” he said, leaning close, looking at me with great sincerity. “If you were sitting there with a cute little idea, ten grand advance, maybe even twelve-and-a-half, one quarter on signature, we could do it in a flash. Within reason, I can close deals myself up to twenty-five grand, except even then they sometimes pull the rug out from under me. But this. You’re talking Judith Krantz, Gore Vidal, you’re talking money. And you need some for yourself, for God’s sake, you’re not doing this for charity.”

“Half,” I said.

He looked exceedingly blank. “What’s that?”

“I figured that’s the simplest way to handle it,” I said. “We treat it like a regular anthology. Half the advance goes to me, the other half goes to the contributors and the research assistants and so on.”

“Oh, come on, Tom,” he said. “For this page, we pay Gore Vidal and we pay you the same amount? Not on.”

“That’s not what you’re paying for,” I said. “You pay Gore Vidal for that page. Me you pay for that page and for the page with the fourteenth-century Madonna and Child and for having thought it up in the first place and for talking Vidal into doing it.”

“All right, possibly,” he said. “If we decide to go forward at all. If the company decides. Then we work out the details.”

“With my agent. I never talk details.”

“Still Annie?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she’s reasonable,” he said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I tell you what, Tom,” he said. “This is a very interesting idea, I won’t deny it. Let me take it back to the shop, talk to a couple of people, do you have a presentation on paper?”

“I can’t describe the contents before I send out my query letter,” I pointed out. “I could do you a two-sentence memo.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

“Jack. Jack, I came to you with this first. I did it for two reasons. I think you and Craig are absolutely right for it,” I lied, “and you’re almost the only person in New York I’d trust not to take the idea and run,” I lied again.

“Well, we’ll see.” Behind his jolly eyes, his brain was turning over like a submarine’s engines.

“And if I can start now,” I said, “we’re talking about this Christmas.”

“Tight. Tight schedule.”

“I know that. I’m up to it, Jack.” I smiled at him. “What the mind of man can conceive, this man can do.”

“I’ll talk it up around the shop,” he said. “And give you a call in a few days.”

And that was the end of the conversation. He didn’t seem wildly enthusiastic, but on the other hand he didn’t reject the idea outright. And at least I’ve let him know I’m thinking in terms of a tight deadline. I’ll give him till Monday. Or maybe Tuesday. But that’s the latest.

I came home from lunch too keyed up to sit still. Ginger was at work, the kids weren’t home from school yet, and I couldn’t think about any of the projects currently on my desk. There was nothing in my mind but The Christmas Book. Oh, if Jack would only come through!

I phoned Annie, my agent, and got her answering machine. “This is the literary agency of Annie Lecadeaux,” said the luxurious voice of Roger Brech-Lees, an English client, a writer of historical romances under various female names, and — I think — a closet queen. “Please leave your name and a phone number, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.” Beep.

Knowing how Annie hates hang-ups — unsatisfied curiosity eats at her vitals like the fox under the Trojan lad’s tunic — I hung up without leaving a message, to punish her. Finally, I came in here to the office and started to type out the story so far. Just recounting what’s going on.

I really need the money.