I’d like to say I considered what he was telling me, but I’m honestly not certain I could; there were too many thoughts misfiring across my alcohol-lubricated brain, so many flashing out of existence before I could fully discern them. One came fully, though: “Would I be trading just the fame?” Because maybe I’d just continue doing exactly what I’m doing right now, just writing all this down in a little room, and maybe I’d still be writing this for someone like you but you just wouldn’t exist, or I would never know you did. I’ll be honest and note that, even were that the case, I still wasn’t sure I could live with it, but still I had to ask.
Angus, however, merely shook his head.
“Either way, I’ll always wonder, won’t I?”
Angus smiled, but it seemed sad. “That’s just human nature, wouldn’t you say? You’ll try not to. You choose the writing, the work, the gift and the fame, I’d wager you’d convince yourself it was the right thing to do. You’ll think of her, but every time you do you’ll remind yourself there will be another girl along, because you know there are plenty out there.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You won’t, on the other hand, tell yourself none of them are her, because that minor bit of knowledge won’t make it any easier. That could destroy you, in fact, and so you’ll ignore it,” Angus told me, paused, then: “I had a young Jewish kid come in here once. Nervous little guy, stammered a lot. I made him much the same offer I’m making you now, a chance to be with the girl he was in love with. And he listened to my offer, but when he came back, he respectfully declined it. Said he’d thought a lot about it, but he kept thinking of his grandfather, who had once told him that women are like trolley cars, and there’s always another one coming along. Told me he’d just wait for the next one to stop at his platform.”
“So he turned you down.”
Angus nodded. “I’m not a salesman trying to convince you to buy something you don’t want. I’m just a guy offering some options.”
“So what happened to him?”
“The Jewish kid? My business associates are confidential, but let’s just say he went on to build a very successful film career on being nervous,” Angus said, paused again, then: “Look, a lot of choices have been made by people sitting in the very chair you’re sitting in now, and I’m not going to tell you they were all good. I’m not going to tell you every client I’ve ever worked with has been happy with the decision he or she made. Statistically, perhaps, I can say that I have a high rate of successful business happily done, but what that would neglect is that none were statistics. Every person has been real, with real dreams and real talents and real lives, and every one has chosen a real future, for whatever that’s worth. Some got exactly what they needed, and some took what they wanted, and some ultimately ended up with neither, but what I’m trying to get at is this: not every choice made in that chair has been made happily, or with excitement, but every choice had to made. Now it’s your turn. You’ve got two roads in front of you, here, both less traveled, and now you have to decide which one is yours. Either way, though, whichever road you choose, you have to make a choice, and you have to move forward, and you have to do it now.”
“Why can’t I just wait to see what happens?”
“Because it doesn’t move you forward, and because when it comes to what happens next, you’re about to find out,” he said, rising. I did, too, almost more out of instinct than anything else. He offered his hand, and I shook it again as he ushered me toward those giant doors. “You have a lot to think about over the next couple of days. Don’t make this decision lightly.”
“I won’t,” I told him as he opened those doors. “I won’t. I won’t,” I said twice more, as though was trying to convince him, but more likely I was trying to convince myself.
“Given how much you liked that beer, I’ll have Brigid send you off with a bottle for the road,” Angus said as our handshake broke, and then I was moving through the lobby, back toward the door in the waterfall. Brigid thrust into my dumb hand another bottle of that fine ale, and then, nearly before I knew it, I was back on the Village street, the sounds and scents and taste of the City dancing all around me, assuming me quickly into it, spinning me right round like a record baby, my head full of dancing and my heart scared of decisions as I found my way back to the subway, back to the PATH, back home . . .
Chapter Ten, in which certain things, which may or may not already have been obvious, are, if not revealed, at least made explicit
where I found waiting for me a letter. The envelope addressed to me in my own writing.
Crash course: back when the events of this story took place time, aspiring writers would query their aspiring manuscripts (whose dreams are to be bound into real, honest-to-goodness books that will be shipped to real, honest-to-goodness bookstores, where they will be placed on real, honest-to-goodness shelves from which they will one lucky day by plucked by real, honest-to-goodness readers) to prospective agents by mail. As I record this at this very moment, many agents have switched to using e-mail, and who knows what tomorrow will bring (hopefully this very story will have something to do with whatever happens next)? The first time I wrote all this, nobody’d ever heard of Kindle or digital distribution.
Nowadays, I can read books on my Android-powered smartphone.
Back then, however, was different. Back then, writers had to use the good ole’ United States Postal Service to send literary agents query letters, and given that many agencies received hundreds, if not thousands, of queries every week, they simply couldn’t possibly keep up with the price of return postage, so writers had to include self-addressed stamped envelopes with their paper queries.
(Quicker crash: a literary agent acts on behalf of authors to negotiate publishing contracts with publishing houses.)
I mention all this so you understand why I was so excited to receive a letter addressed to me in my own handwriting; I’d included that very same envelope in the query I’d sent to Merrilee Heiftetz only a week or so before.
It may not be possible to open one of those letters calmly. Too many of us writers associate too much of our identity with our words and the possibility of the publication, and each new letter brings with it the blackjack rush of a gambling high: not the euphoria of winning but rather the uncertain glee of going all-in on a straight flush. That gut-clenching, icy feeling of knowing how much rides on the current hand.
Me, my hands have always shaken. Every time I have one of those moments—which don’t come often—I try to remain calm but never succeed. I know they shook, then, as I withdrew from the envelope a single, twice-folded sheet of high quality paper, thick and off-white. Fountain pen letter head, business address, and, below—
A sidenote: I’ve gotten many rejections. All writers do. Rejection is part of the process, and ultimately, it often becomes a game of numbers and chance—what editors are looking for what type of story when, and how does yours fit?
I was lucky that my first ever rejection came as a personal letter from one of the most reputable agents in the entire industry, a note I received because my creative writing professor was a personal friend. I got it when I was a sophomore in college, and over the years have received hundreds more.
Besides that first letter, I’ve gotten mainly form letters addressed to someone named “Author,” as if that is my name, and often not signed at all. When from a literary magazine, they are often so generic as to be attributed not to any single person in particular but rather “the Editors,” as if their staff is some nameless, faceless—on my worst days I’d like to believe soulless—entity that exists for no other reason than to dash the dreams of the hopeful. I imagine every office of every editor and every agent in the world has a stack of prepared letters ready to send out to authors who submit work to them, and to be candid, that proposition can’t be far off from the truth. Like I said, they get hundreds of queries per week, often thousands per month.
I like to think they don’t like sending reject
ions. I like to believe there’s still a part of every agent and editor that yearns only for that next great read by an as-yet-undiscovered writer.
I’ve gotten forms from lots of places. I’ve even gotten personal notes from some of the best: Mike Curtis told me he liked my story and was sorry to say it wasn’t for the Atlantic Monthly. Same I heard from one of the editors at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—
Whereas on that day, I opened that envelope to discover that Ms. Heifetz, for her part, complimented the sample chapter I had sent her and requested the first fifty pages of my manuscript. This is known in the industry vernacular as a ‘partial.’ This is a very good thing. Awesome, in fact. If the moment of opening the letter was the equivalent of that precariously uncertain moment of yanking the arm and watching the cherries spin, that letter was hitting for a hundred bucks. Though I probably should have said the jackpot, if the whole point here to redeem my actions through honesty, the truth is I wouldn’t have called anything less than the promise of a publishing contract a jackpot. Yes, sometimes I’m fucked up like that.
As for that decision and my actions—
We’ll get there. Are you dying to know what I told Angus? Because standing there, with the beer Brigid had given me in one hand and that letter in the other, I certainly wondered.
As I put the beer in the fridge, I pulled out my cell to call Veronica with the news, but hesitated. Talking to Angus, hearing his offer . . . I’d become self-conscious about a relationship I’d had all my life. I was still thinking about what he had told me, and I may have been trying to ignore his proposition, because I didn’t know how to take it seriously, or what it would mean if I did. Then again, in ways, I had attempted to ignore my feelings for Veronica under the assumption that shelving them and continuing to talk to her as though nothing had changed might keep everything from changing.
Still, a large part of me didn’t consider my novel solely my own because it felt such great debt to the inspiration and encouragement that had carried me through to completion, and so I stopped hesitating and dialed the number of the girl with whom I had fallen in love, the girl to whom I had written that perfect letter—
(the girl who did not love me in return, a fact I bring up because it’s about to become extraordinarily relevant)—
Veronica Sawyer, who answered, slightly out of breath, after the third ring. “Hey, what’s going on?”
I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice; it pitched high as I told her the news.
“So does that mean you’re a client now?”
“Not yet. Just that she wants to read some more, which I get to send her now,” I said, and that was the moment I realized I didn’t want to just send it off. Getting a request for a partial manuscript is not an enormous deal, not a deal as big as selling a manuscript to a publisher, but it’s not a small thing, either, given that it’s not the usual way of things. Its not being the usual way of things, I decided then and there I wanted to do something to make it special, and I wanted Veronica’s help. “How busy are you tomorrow?”
“Not very. School’s a few weeks off, so I’m kind of climbing up the walls.”
“I want to send it off, and I want to take you to dinner. Tomorrow. Can you do that? Make a day of it with me?”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Awesome. Mind picking me up at the train station?”
“Call me when you’re here and I’ll swing by.”
And then I hung up and started revising.
***
Neither revising nor polishing is simple. The common aphorism—
Great art is never finished, only abandoned.—
makes many novels lonely as broken-down cars left by the side of the road, defeated orange flags fixed to their antennae. Most are hiccups in your afternoon commute, barely worth attention on the way home.
Even the most accomplished novel has a busted headlight or a loose belt—
A novel is merely a long work of fiction with flaws.—
and while writing is about cobbling together some strange form of transportation using every spare part at your disposal, revision is more nebulous; it’s about seeing what you just built and figuring out how to make it run better. You know it’s never going to run perfectly—what you begin with is less a Lamborghini than a go-cart made from a cardboard box and a couple of wheels cast off a shopping cart—so you pick up an entirely different set of tools, rev the engine, and grease up the parts you want to run more smoothly, tighten the belts that squeal, add air to a tire lacking pressure.
You do the best you can with what you’ve got. You know the first five pages are most crucial, while the importance of the first paragraph can’t be overstated and the first twenty pages are critical; an opening reveals a lot about how a book handles. To extend the metaphor, if the first five pages determine whether the car even starts, the first twenty are getting used to the clutch, setting the radio to the proper station, and adjusting the seat.
One reason for short stories’ appeal is they’re like a test drive. I think agents ask for the first fifty because that’s when you know whether you want to go anywhere. By then, your seat’s adjusted. The radio’s tuned, the mirrors set. Only two simple decisions are left: are you going to fill up the tank, and where is that tank going to take you?
A brilliant novel presents the same simple question Microsoft posed: where do you want to go today?
The most difficult part is that revising isn’t nearly so straightforward as any diagnostic a mechanic might run on a car. It’s not like you can kick the tire or hook the computer up to the muffler to check the emissions. It’s instinctual.
So I sat down with those first 50 pages, which was roughly the first act of my 100,000-word novel, and I polished them up as best I could. I tried to forget that I had built the car I was looking at and tried to decide how best it might provide a better ride for whoever chose to drive it. Some changes were minor—a comma here, semi-colon there—but others were more significant—puzzling over the chapter order, or whether to combine certain scenes, whether to keep certain characters or . . .
I printed it out, then composed a simple note to Ms. Heifetz, thanking her for the opportunity to send it to her, and then I set those pages carefully atop my printer, where they waited until the following morning, at which point I tucked them into a manila folder and hopped a bus hometown-bound for Veronica and queries.
***
Jersey January is cold and colorless, spindle treetrunks bare and shivery in the freezing wind, which comes often and sharp as a morning shave and leaves behind a windraw world like shorn skin. That was all I saw beyond the bus windows, and all the while I saw it I thought of that magical office in the Village and the offer I’d found there. I was still, in ways, trying to decide if I believed the proposition Angus had presented me; listening was one thing, and didn’t require commitment, but actually acknowledging it might in fact be true—if you’ve seen the third installment of the Indiana Jones trilogy and recall the moment when, during the final act, Indy stood upon the precipice of a yawning cavern, closed his eyes, held his father’s journal over his heart, and stepped forward to make literal the oft-mentioned metaphorical leap of faith, you will have some idea of how I felt.
I didn’t know if I wanted to well and truly believe my Grail awaited me on the other side of a stone bridge I couldn’t actually see but could easily traverse. Not least of all because the very idea of its existence terrified me.
Because, in all honesty: part of me thought believing might be a minor miracle, but there was another part of me, too, and it cowered in weakness. That weaker part of me perhaps understood that, were it true, I wouldn’t have the strength to resist the urge to drink from the cup.
I thought of Veronica the whole way, too. I knew I was putting her on a pedestal; I’d never been on a date with her, but somehow I had worked up in my head the idea that she was not just my ideal mate but a woman for whom I would have dropped everything to be with
. If Veronica had asked me then and there to marry her, I would have answered in the affirmative under the confidence that I could spend the rest of my life working out the little details. Nothing to me mattered so much as the idea of the commitment, the fantasy of the romance: I could even imagine the ceremony, out of doors and among the trees, full of green and lace and Vivaldi, with a kindly old preacher who would smile at each of us before pronouncing us husband and wife and permitting me to kiss my radiant new bride.
I know how that sounds, but remember I had known Veronica all my life. Tom would probably be the best man at my wedding regardless of whom I married, and the fact that I could so clearly imagine her in a white wedding dress with a veil like revelation might well have been simply because it was remarkably similar to the dress I’d seen her wear to her first holy Communion. Given that we had grown up together, and the fact that our families had remained, if not exactly close, certainly friendly . . . well, the idea didn’t seem so incredible. We were close enough, in fact, that had we eloped as a frivolous adventure during a sudden and drunken trip to Atlantic City, our families would have probably accepted the news easily enough and still thrown us a terrific reception.
I realized, too, I wasn’t sure if I was going to tell Veronica about my visit with Angus and what he had offered me. I think I felt I should know whether I believed him or not, first. That wasn’t going to be an easy thing to decide.
***
I wish for you a moment as exceptional and sublime as the moment I stepped off the train to find Veronica Sawyer—her thunderstorm coat, her cloud-fluffy grey scarf, her obsidian turtleneck and blue jeans and thick, black, Inuit boots—waiting for me. Her smile made the trip worthwhile; even if my novel was ultimately rejected, even if nothing else came of the trip, that smile would have been enough.
Meets Girl: A Novel Page 13
