Now, why would that be? The nearest phone was in the kitchen. He went in there, pulled one of the ash-blond stools over from the island, and made the call: “Jack? It’s Bryce.”
“Oh, good. Listen, I don’t know if this is awkward or not, but I thought you ought to know.”
“Yeah?”
“Our director, Janet Higgins, is a friend of Lucie’s.”
The idea that Lucie could have friends never ceased to amaze. Bryce said, “Oh. You mean, she’s invited.”
“I’m sorry, Bryce, you know I want you there, but if it’s a problem . . .”
“Well, yeah, it is,” Bryce said. “I’ll come the second night, all right?”
“I’m sorry, I know what you’re going through.”
No, you don’t, he thought, but then he had another thought, and sat up straighter on the stool as he said, “Wait. Jack? Will you wait a second? I have to go get something, I’ll be right back.”
“Sure.”
Leaving the phone, he dashed next door into the dining room, grabbed the manila envelope the manuscript had come in, with its Priority Mail stickers on it, and carried it back to the kitchen.
“Jack?”
“Here.”
“There’s a guy I’d like to see the play, I think he’d be interested in it. He doesn’t know Lucie, so there’s no problem there. Could I ask you to invite him instead of me?”
“Well, sure, if you want.”
“Not instead of me, I don’t mean it like that. I’d just like you to invite him.”
“Fine. Who is he?”
“He’s a writer, a novelist, named Wayne Prentice.” He read Jack the return address from the envelope.
Jack said, “Do I know his work?”
“Maybe from some years ago. He’s been blocked for a while, poor guy.”
“Ooh.”
“Maybe you’ll inspire him.”
Jack laughed. “You mean, he’ll say, Christ, I can do better than that, and there he is, unblocked.”
“That’s it. Thanks, Jack.”
“No problem.”
“And thanks for the warning.”
“May you have better days soon, Bryce.”
Bryce looked at that name and return address on the envelope. “Maybe I will, Jack, thanks,” he said.
There was a Manhattan White Pages kept in the kitchen, under the phone. Wayne Prentice was in it, at the address on Perry Street. He dialed, listened to Wayne’s voice on his answering machine, and after the beep he said, “You’ll meet her. Accept the invitation to Low Fidelity.”
That night, the pill worked. He slept through until morning.
Four
When Susan came home, Wayne kissed her, but he was distracted. “I want you to hear something,” he said.
“What?”
She followed him into the kitchen, where they kept the answering machine, while he said, “I went out to the deli to get some lunch, and when I brought it back there was one message.”
He pressed Play: “You’ll meet her. Accept the invitation to Low Fidelity.”
“That’s Bryce Proctorr,” he told her. “That’s his voice.”
“Play it again.”
He did, and she listened with pursed lips, narrow eyes. “He sounds arrogant,” she decided.
“He isn’t arrogant,” Wayne said. “He could be, with his success, but he isn’t, not really. He’s just sure of himself.”
“Play it again.”
After the third time, she said, “It isn’t arrogance, it’s nervousness. He’s tense, and trying to hide it.”
“He doesn’t know if I’ll do it or not. He should have The Domino Doublet by now, that’ll tell him, at least, that I’m thinking about it.”
“What’s Low Fidelity?”
“I looked it up in New York,” he said, and gestured at the magazine he’d left on the kitchen table, propped open with a carving knife. “It hasn’t opened yet, it’s going to be in this neighborhood, over on Grove Street, opening next Thursday.”
She stood over the magazine to read the pre-opening notice. “A new comedy. Never heard of Jack Wagner.”
“Around three-thirty,” he told her, “I got a phone call from the theater. Nu-Arts, it’s called.”
That surprised her. “They called you?”
“I guess she was the cashier or a secretary, I don’t know. She said I’d been added to the guest list for the opening night at the request of the author, and I’d be getting an invitation in the mail, but since time is short they wanted to be sure I knew about it.”
“Bryce Proctorr waves his magic wand, and you get invited to the opening of a play.”
“Off-Broadway.”
“Still.” She looked at the notice in the magazine again, then gave Wayne a quirky smile as she said, “Do you suppose that’s his pen name? Jack Wagner?”
“Who, Bryce?” Wayne laughed. “No, why would he?”
“It sounds like a pen name.”
“Bryce Proctorr doesn’t use a pen name,” Wayne said, certain of that. “Besides, if it was something he wrote, she wouldn’t be on the guest list.”
“I suppose.”
The pre-opening notice offered very little, no plot summary, no previous history of the author or anybody else connected with the play, but Susan kept going back to it, as though it contained the answer to a problem that was puzzling her. Wayne watched her, then gestured at the answering machine: “Do you want to hear it again?”
“No. You’d better erase it.”
“Right.”
That was a strange feeling. You always pushed the Delete button to get rid of old messages, but this time it felt different, like being in a spy movie. Or a murder story, getting rid of the evidence.
Beep, said the machine: Your secrets are safe.
She was still frowning at the magazine, but after that beep she transferred her frown to him. “It’s so weird,” she said, “that he can just do that. Reach out and pluck someone.”
“He knows people, that’s all. Susan, we know people, too.”
“Well . . . You told her you’re going.”
“We’re going. The invitation’s for the both of us, or, you know, I can bring a guest, so I said I would.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “You do this on your own. Next Thursday? I’ll have dinner with Jill.”
Jill was a longtime friend, now divorced, a sweet, rather vague woman, with many small unimportant problems. Whenever Wayne had to be away or wasn’t available, Susan had dinner with Jill. Wayne’s equivalent was a friend from college called Larry, who’d been a crotchety old bachelor from the day of his birth, but whose sardonic sense of humor made him fun to be with, in small doses. Wayne and Susan had kidded a few times about getting soft Jill and hard Larry together, and what a disaster that would be!
But Wayne didn’t like the Jill idea now. “Why?” he asked. “Don’t you want to see this famous Lucie?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “And I don’t want to meet Bryce Proctorr, and I don’t want to know any more details about what you’re, what you’re going to do than you absolutely have to tell me.”
“What is this, deniability?” he asked. He was grinning, but he wasn’t amused.
“No, of course not,” she said. “Wayne, this is your decision, because it’s your burden, whichever way you choose. If I’m part of the decision, it isn’t yours any more, and you’ll never trust it. Years to come, you’ll still have doubts.”
“But you are part of the decision. You say our marriage won’t last if I take a teaching job at some college, and goddam it, you’re probably right. So you are part of it.”
“Not the decision making,” Susan insisted. “I’m not copping out, Wayne, but I don’t want to have my own opinion of Lucie Proctorr, or whatever she calls herself. My opinion doesn’t matter. My opinion could only complicate things for you, and if I go see her, you’ll have to ask me what I think, and I’ll have to tell you, and I don’t want us in that position.”<
br />
He said, “So you want me to go on my own.”
“You have to. In this, you are on your own.”
“But we do everything together, Susan.”
“Not everything,” she said.
Five
Early Friday afternoon, before leaving town for the weekend, Bryce stopped in to see his lawyer, having called for an appointment. Not lawyer Bob, the divorce man, but his real lawyer, Fred Silver. Fred and lawyer Bob—who thought of himself as Robert Jacoby—were both with the same firm, with offices in the Graybar Building, upstairs from Grand Central. Perfect for Bryce, who’d be taking Metro North into Connecticut.
Fred Silver’s hair was silver, and everything about him seemed to flow from this conflux of name and hair. Smooth, gleaming, controlled, expensive. He gave Bryce the same smooth handshake as always, gestured with his clean plump hand at the leather chair where Bryce always sat, and took his seat across the desk from him to say, “Bob tells me things are moving along.”
“Now ask me,” Bryce said.
Fred chuckled. “The client always thinks these things take too long. Wait till it’s over, you’ll be glad Bob dotted the i’s.”
“What a lot of i’s you have, grandma,” Bryce said. “But that isn’t why I’m here.”
“No, of course not.”
“I need a contract written,” Bryce said. “I need it as soon as possible, and I need it in absolute secrecy.”
Fred gave him a startled and curious look; Bryce Proctorr was not a client who normally came up with surprises. “Whatever you tell me, you know,” he said, and waved a hand to suggest the rest of the sentence.
“Yes, naturally. Is private.” Bryce rubbed his left hand over his face, as though brushing away cobwebs. It was a gesture that had become frequent with him this last year, though he wasn’t yet aware of it. “You know,” he said, “this divorce, all this dotting of i’s, it’s been a real distraction.”
“Of course it has.”
“I haven’t been able to work.”
“I know it’s hard to concentrate with—”
“No, Fred, I haven’t been able to work. Not at all.”
Once more, Fred was surprised. “You haven’t said anything.”
“I haven’t exactly been lying,” Bryce said, “but I haven’t been admitting the truth either. Joe asks me—you know, my editor—how’s the new book coming along, I say slow. Well, zero is slow, isn’t it?”
“Zero? Bryce, honestly, you aren’t working at all?”
“I don’t like to go into the room with the computer,” Bryce told him. “I’ll let a week go by without even looking to see if I have any E-mail.”
Fred now looked very worried. “Are you seeing anybody?”
“What do you mean, therapy? Fred, I know what the problem is. I have this buzzing in my ear and it’s called divorce, and until it goes away I can’t concentrate on anything else. All therapy would do is give me one more thing to be impatient about.”
Fred, who naturally believed there was a professional of some sort to be hired for every one of life’s many problems, spread his hands, saying, with palpable doubt, “You’ll know best, Bryce.”
“I hope I do. Anyway, it can’t go on. I owe a book, and I need money. So what I’m doing is, I’m taking on a collaborator.”
“You? Bryce, everything you say to me today is out of character.”
“I have to do something, Fred. This guy, I’ve known him a long time, he’s a good writer in his own right, he’s published some books, but he’s hit on hard times. So he’s gonna plot the new one with me, and write it with me, but it would be very bad news commercially if the word got out. So it has to be absolute secrecy.”
“And you can trust this other fellow.”
“Completely. He wants this as much as I do. And it wouldn’t help his career if the word got around he was becoming a ghost. It would be like people finding out he was writing novelizations.”
“I don’t know what that is,” Fred admitted.
“Oh, the paperback form of a movie, written from the screenplay.”
“And it’s not considered a very high level of occupation, I take it.”
“Hackwork.”
“I understand.”
When Fred was getting down to business, he would lean forward and put both forearms on the desk, right hand near his pen and yellow pad, and that’s what he did now. “You’ve worked out the details of the agreement with him?”
“The contract will say he’s being hired as an editorial consultant,” Bryce said, and paused while Fred wrote that down. “It won’t say anything about his doing any writing or plotting. It says his work is confidential, and that if he breaks confidentiality the contract is null and void and he doesn’t get paid.”
“And if he does get paid?”
“Five hundred fifty thousand dollars, out of the first earnings of the new book.”
This time, Fred was absolutely astonished. “That’s an amazing amount of money, Bryce!”
“It’s half the advance,” Bryce pointed out. “I told you, it’s a collaboration, so he has to get half. But after that, any future moneys, foreign sales, movie sales, anything like that, he gets a quarter.”
“Not half ?”
“No, a quarter.”
“Will he agree to this?”
“I’m sure he will,” Bryce said, because he wanted to be sure. “He’ll understand, any additional income like that, it would all be coming in because of my name anyway, not because of any specific thing he might have put into the book.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” Pen poised, Fred said, “And what is this collaborator’s name?”
“Tim Fleet. Like the street.”
Fred wrote it down. “And who is representing him?”
“No one. This is just between the two of us.”
Fred put down his pen. “Are you sure, Bryce? He really should have representation. If there are questions later—”
“There won’t be questions,” Bryce assured him, knowing this was merely once again Fred’s liking for everybody to be surrounded at all times by a magic circle of professionals. “Tim and I worked it out,” he said, “and we shook on it, and now we just need it done in proper legal format.”
“And what’s the time frame?”
“As soon as possible. Some time next week?”
“No,” Fred said, “I meant the term of the collaboration. Deadline, you call it?”
“Oh, no, we’ll leave that open,” Bryce said. “Neither of us wants to add pressure.” Grinning, he said, “The book doesn’t even have a title yet. It’s just being worked on.”
* * *
It was being worked on, in fact, and so was the title. In the Danbury train, on the way to his stop, Bethel, the last before the end of the line, he found a dual seat to himself, since he was leaving early enough in the afternoon, ahead of the real rush, and settled down to read the book again, make notes, and think about titles.
The book was good, certainly good enough to become his own. This weekend, he’d scan it into his computer and start the rewrite. He’d keep the basic storyline, but there would have to be changes. There needed to be alterations in tone and mood, differences in language to make the book read like a Bryce Proctorr novel, and also a general tightening to increase the tension, since it seemed to him that one of Wayne’s failings was a tendency to write flat, as though it were just a report he was making and not incidents ripe with drama.
Also, the main characters would have to be recast. The senator, for instance, who was our hero’s main problem, would have to become someone else entirely. Wayne had written him sort of like a college dean, academic, tough but with gloves on, while Bryce would make him more of a movie director type, more obviously tough and self-assured, and a showboat as well. He’d be fun to write.
The first time through the manuscript, though, he’d concentrate on language. He noticed, for instance, whenever the characters reacted to something they di
dn’t like, they “winced.” “Winced” wasn’t a word he liked, nor would ever use, so an early order to the computer would be to change every “winced” to “twinged.”
The other question was the title. Even if he liked The Domino Doublet, which he didn’t at all, he wouldn’t be able to use it, because Wayne’s agent and his former editor had both seen the work under that title. His own third book had been called An Only Twin, which would be perfect for this one, given the relationship between the businessman and the senator; too bad he’d already used it up.
A lot of people got off at the two Wilton stops, and then the countryside in the late afternoon light began to look more and more familiar, more and more comfortable. Isabelle would already be there, at the house, when he arrived, and they’d have the weekend.
He felt himself relaxing. He wasn’t even thinking now about whether Wayne Prentice would do, he was only thinking about whether his novel would do, and the answer was yes.
Two Faces in the Mirror. He made a note.
Six
Wayne had been trying to work on a new novel. He had an idea about a man whose brother disappears in Central America, and he goes looking for him. The brother was supposedly a stockbroker in New York, but as the hero searches, more and more ambiguities arise. Was his brother really CIA? Was he a money launderer for the drug cartel? Was he involved with right-wing generals? Wayne hadn’t decided yet, and felt the character of the hero would eventually lead him to the character of the missing brother. He was calling it The Shadowed Other, but he was having a hell of a time getting into it.
In the first place, what was it for? Who was it by? Would he spend all the time and research and effort, and then sell it to some minor house for five thousand dollars? Or to nobody at all? Would he try to create a third name? The effort seemed too much, and what good would it do?
Was he a hobbyist now? Was he one of those people who do their writing on weekends and spend ten years finishing a novel and then nobody cares? Even if . . .
Well. Even if he got the money from Bryce and The Domino Doublet was published under Bryce’s name, what good would that do him in the long run? Bryce wouldn’t be blocked forever, and wouldn’t need a ghostwriter any more. Sooner or later, the money would be gone, and then what would Wayne do?
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