Foul Matter

by Martha Grimes

  He could go to the kitchen—it was only four steps away, for God’s sakes—and make a cup of coffee. No. He could make the coffee after he’d figured out what was happening to Nathalie at this moment, while she sat on a bench by herself in the dusty and somewhat decrepit gardens. (There was a tiny ragged zoo there. Nothing terribly interesting, an afterthought of a zoo. She had wandered around it sometimes.)

  No to the coffee. The bigger time increments—what writing he had to do before lunch or by dinnertime—were peppered with tinier ones, such as in twenty more minutes or after the scene in the Jardin des Plantes. Only in this way could he get through the day’s writing, by making small bargains with himself. It made surprisingly little difference that he was at the end of the book, rather than at the beginning. Every writing day was like the beginning; it was as if he’d never written a word in his life until that moment and didn’t know how the hell to go about it.

  In the Jardin des Plantes, Nathalie—

  She could walk around to the zoo, but that didn’t seem to fit her mood. Mood? Nathalie was always the victim of mood, of time, of place. Ned inspected his two pencils to see if the points were sharp. He used the pencils for making changes, for adding words above lines or in the margins. Was his pen running out of ink? He’d hardly written a dozen words, how could it be out?

  In the Jardin des Plantes, Nathalie’s face—no—Nathalie’s pale face lifted to the birds . . .

  Yes, he liked that phrase as he wrote it; he was pleased with it. That was before he recognized it was W. H. Auden’s: “. . . pale, no—child’s hands lifted to the birds.” He had always liked that poem, the sadness of it. “. . . of hands across the tablecloth . . .” Lines like that never failed to knife him in the gut. Auden’s poem was heavy with nostalgia.

  Nathalie. There would be, there would be—

  He put his head in his hands. How had he ever written his other two books? Of this one he had written 402 pages and still found himself in that same state of nervous suspension as he’d been in when he’d started. Why would anyone in his right mind choose this as his work when there were hundreds of people out there who were better at it? Saul, to name just one. There were thousands who were worse, of course, but that was no consolation.

  Nathalie sat on a little iron bench in the Jardin des Plantes. If it had them. If there were little iron benches in the Jardin des Plantes. Would that detail be in a guidebook? He doubted it. Here he’d been writing about Nathalie in the Jardin des Plantes as if there were no tomorrow and now it was tomorrow. Would he have to go to Paris? He hated to travel.

  He looked at the neatly stacked pages. The pages reproached him. Each one had burning eyes that watched him sink into his talentless bog of uncertainty and not one page would lift a finger. Not one.

  Not one single page. Just like them, he thought, just like a bunch of already written pages, thinking they had nothing else to do but relax and sit there. This was after all the care, all the trouble . . . From her black iron bench in the gardens, Nathalie watched the wrens wheel above the fountain, thinking, There is no telling, no telling at all.

  Ned got up and went the four steps to the kitchen counter to make a pot of coffee. While he was measuring grains into the filter, he thought of Hemingway in the Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard St.-Germain, which was not far from the Luxembourg Gardens. Nathalie spent some of her time in the Boulevard St.-Germain. He must stop being flippant about Nathalie’s plight. He was really concerned about her. It would all end badly; it had to, given the direction in which she was going. These affairs always did. He thought about this as he poured water into the well of the coffeemaker. He measured out coffee.

  Nathalie looked across the wide gravel path at the little metal tables where old men sometimes sat and played chess but where now a tall man was sitting, writing. She wondered what he was writing, sitting with his elbow on his knee, his head propped in his hand, and a pipe in his mouth. A letter? A book?

  Ned stared out of the window above the small kitchen counter, scarcely aware that it was dusk and the magnificent crown of the Chrysler Building was lighting up. Wispy layers of pink and blue and a bottom of molten gold. What he was making of this mise-en-scène was the little park below his window turned into the Jardin des Plantes or the Luxembourg Gardens (depending on which one Nathalie was sitting in). He remembered them from twenty years ago, the colors in the borders of flowers melting into one another, fusing with the grass and the walks. Sixty years ago, Hemingway was here, and Joyce and Gertrude Stein, whose lives Nathalie’s own would never touch, and yet be touched by, as if the air she breathed had drifted toward her from the places inhabited by these wondrous writers. He saw Nathalie below in the park, sitting on one of the benches. She was as still as a statue, thinking. Across the path, a man, real or imagined, rose from one of the benches.

  Patric’s other life. They did not talk about it; she was afraid to know about it, yet also afraid not to. Not knowing canceled out that part of his life; if she knew about his separate world she would be able to imagine it—his wife, his children and what they were like. It would expose that other side of his world that was now left safely in darkness, like one of those lamps with a turning cylinder one sometimes sees in a child’s bedroom that illuminates cut-out figures in the turning shade. Now, the cylinder didn’t turn and the other side of the shade lay in darkness.

  And it was, of course, much more than half his life, for she saw him only on Thursday afternoons and sometimes Tuesdays as well. Looked at one way she felt grateful, for there was regularity in their meetings. She could depend on Thursdays. But then it was difficult to ignore the weekend that followed. She reminded herself that it could be much worse; it could be a constant shuttling around among days and times so that she couldn’t enjoy the exhilaration of a day or even two preceding Patric’s arrival in the gardens—the Jardin des Plantes or the Tuileries or the Luxembourg Gardens—places where she spent much of her time even when he was not with her because in these places she could think of his sitting or walking beside her—

  And the cafés—

  Ned stopped writing. The cafés. He took up his pen again.

  Most of the ones they liked were on the Boulevard St.-Germain (the Brasserie Lipp, the Café de Flore) but sometimes they visited the Right Bank cafés when they’d been in the Tuileries. They would walk up the Rue de la Paix to the café of that name to look at Americans who had found this street that they’d heard of in that old wartime song about Mimi, Mimi on the Rue de la Paix. Patric liked Americans more than other foreigners because they were so much brighter, so much more enthusiastic, and, in Patric’s words, “starry eyed.”

  Ned listened to the water hiccup, hiss, and burp its way through the Braun system. “Starry eyed.” Was that too much of a cliché, even for Patric? No, he was like that.

  Paris, sixty years ago.

  Here it came again, that revenant, that sack of shadows, the past, lighting up like the tops of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, cascades of lights and colors, deceptive as a tinhorn fair. The past—there was hardly anything it wasn’t, or couldn’t be. It could aim straight as an arrow, or walk like a drunken lout, cavort, dissemble, deceive, seduce: anything to be let in. It could find him anytime, for he was always thinking about it in trying not to.

  The man across the path had gone; the sky eased from dusk into darkness. The huge hulk of the past lumbered on.

  Nathalie sat alone in the Jardin des Plantes.

  He left her there, he felt, at his peril.

  FIVE

  That’s his condition,” said Clive. “That’s it.” He seemed to be trying to convince himself even more than he was trying to convince Bobby Mackenzie.

  Bobby’s office was not a reflection of Bobby himself; it had an almost cabin coziness brought on by the big, soft sofa against one wall, the upholstered chairs, a couple of Audubon-like paintings of birds in flight, a very good and very worn Karastan carpet, and a zillion books. But the thing that separated publishers fr
om assistant editors in the pecking order was a view of Central Park that could be better seen only by one of those flighting birds.

  Bobby snorted. “That’s crazy.”

  Clive nodded. He usually did when he was talking to Bobby. So did everyone. “I said as much.”

  Bobby’s eyebrows danced upward. “You told Giverney he was crazy? Good career move.” Bobby wheeled his swivel chair over to the liquor cabinet, which was nearly within arm’s reach. He grabbed up the bourbon and a couple of glasses and wheeled back again.

  Now Clive snorted. “Not in so many words, of course not.” Christ, he wished Bobby would stop connecting everything Clive did to the furtherance of or the setback to his “career.” It was like blackmail. Why was he surprised? “I simply pointed out what would happen.”

  Bobby unscrewed the bottle with the finesse of a sleight-of-hand artist (which in many ways he was), raised one of the glasses in question to Clive, who nodded, and then poured a couple of fingers of bourbon into each glass. He sat back, rolled the glass between his hands across his chest as if to warm a frostbitten heart, and said, “Of course Tom would leave. Of course Ned would find another publisher. This is what would happen: Ned gets the heave-ho, Tom resigns, Ned waits to see what house Tom goes to, and then goes there himself. Giverney gains nothing—at least as far as we can see, Giverney being not only crazy but an egomaniac—and . . .” Bobby drank and shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “At least we’d get Giverney.”

  “Believe me, I intend to. But Isaly and Kidd, that’s not all we’d lose. Tom Kidd has the four best writers in this house. You know what would happen; they’d all follow Tom. Tom would get his own imprint, deservedly so, no matter where he went, and in that imprint would be included four of the perhaps dozen honest-to-God writers we or anyone else has.”

  Clive sighed. He hadn’t thought that far. Of course, Bobby was right. He usually was. Clive took another sip of the velvet bourbon and remembered he had a lunch date. He looked at his watch; he could still make it, but what on earth was the reason for it now? “To say nothing of there not being anything in that contract which would let us slide out smoothly.”

  Bobby was staring at some point over Clive’s shoulder, deep in thought. He shook himself and said, “Oh, that’s the least of it.”

  Least of it?

  “Isn’t the date for the delivery of his new book nearly up? He’s got another couple weeks, from what I remember.”

  How in hell did Bobby remember all of these details? “I think you’re right, yes. But, good God, we’ve never invoked that clause in the case of a writer as important as Ned.”

  “No, but we could. Or demand to see part of it and reject it. Though that wouldn’t go down well either with Tom. There are a lot of ways I can get out of a contract, but none of them private and none of them without repercussions.”

  Clive thought for a moment. “And we haven’t even mentioned the acrimony it would stir up in the publishing community.”

  “ ‘Acrimony’? I don’t think so. More like laughter. More like Mackenzie’s loss of face, a lot worse. We’re famous for publishing good books, literary books, not Giverney-style books. In the wake of getting him, we lose not one but four”—Bobby held up four fingers as if Clive couldn’t count—“writers. To say nothing of the best editor we or anybody else has.” Bobby shook his head and held out the palms of his hands as if to forestall an unbelievably evil image. “No, no.”

  “Then I’ll tell him it’s no dice. After all, we just signed Dwight Staines.”

  “Don’t remind me.” Bobby slugged back his drink.

  Bobby hated that science fiction-horror writing genre, except for Stephen King. Oddly enough, though, Bobby wasn’t a book snob; he’d read anything. And Dwight Staines, phenomenally popular, would have sales high enough to offset any triviality such as artistry.

  Clive was considerably disappointed in throwing the Giverney contract to the winds. He wanted to be the editor who signed him up. What was he going to tell his luncheon companions now? “I’ll tell Paul it’s a nonstarter, then.”

  “A nonstarter? Did I say that?” Bobby unscrewed the bottle again.

  “I certainly infer that’s what you’re saying; signing Paul Giverney wouldn’t be worth losing Kidd, Isaly, Eric Gruber—” He stopped.

  Bobby sat there, eyes closed, shaking his head. “No, Clive, what I said was breaking the contract wouldn’t do it.”

  “I must be dense.”

  Bobby leaned way back in his ergonomically designed chair. “Think about it, Clive.”

  Clive frowned. He felt the onset of a migraine. “I don’t—”

  Bobby sighed. “You remember that Bransoni snitch? We did his book—probably got his dog to write it—a couple years ago.”

  “Sure. Danny Zito. Actually, he did write it himself.”

  Bobby tossed back the rest of his bourbon. “Believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

  Clive smiled. “No, I’m telling you. Fallguy. It sold much better than we thought it would. Why?”

  “Well, you could look him up.”

  “ ‘Look him up?’ ” Clive gave a laugh that turned into a choke. “Zito’s been in the witness protection program ever since the trial. You know the way they do that. Change of name, change of home, change of everything; buried so deep he couldn’t find his own ass.” So what in hell was Bobby doing, bringing up Danny Zito?

  “Come on, all you have to do is put it out that we want another book from Zito. You can find anybody that way. If you were lost in an African jungle and said, ‘I’ve got a book contract here,’ half a dozen people would pop out of the bush to sign it. Wiesenthal should have come to us when he wanted to find Himmler. Make it known a publisher wants a book out of someone and suddenly”—Bobby rat-tat-tatted on his desk with his hands—“you’ve got them on the phone or the doorstep. Magic.”

  Clive rose, walked around the desk to peer out of the window, down at Central Park. Yellow cabs beetled along so slowly it was hard to believe these were the same death traps he took every morning and evening. He turned, brows knotted. Magic maybe, but why? “Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”

  “And what would that be?”

  Clive stared at the ceiling, doing a sort of little half-turn dance step as if this might shake off what could only be a bad dream.

  SIX

  The only thing Clive could do at lunch was to be mysterious. He had made the foolhardy gesture of insisting the meal be “on him” and “on him” at one of the more expensive restaurants in Manhattan. He had wanted so much to enjoy the sheer delight he could take in gloating. Now, of course, he had nothing to gloat about. Lunch would be a trial.

  His two companions were well-established editors at two other publishing houses. Nancy Otis was at Grunge. She was almost unfailingly right in the projects she signed on, purely on the basis of a skimpy outline, but more often nothing but the naked and unembellished “idea.” (“For God’s sakes, if you’ve got Tom Cruise saving the lives of an entire Nepalese village, do you have to see a fucking manuscript?”) Rarely, rarely was she wrong. But there had been those rare occasions, and Clive had basked in one or two of them.

  Bill Mnemic’s success was in getting his nose in other publishers’ bags of oats and then leading off their prize horses in what he called “a moonlight flit.” Bill was British; he was at DreckSneed (Sneed having been the once venerable British publishing house, now part of American Dreck, Inc.).

  Both of them (especially Bill, for raiding another house’s writers was his specialty) had put everything on hold when they’d heard about Paul Giverney’s wanting to make a move away from Queeg and Hyde, his publisher for the last decade. It started out as gossip and, as was generally the case in publishing, had not risen into verifiable fact, probably wouldn’t, until the deed was done. Folks in publishing rather preferred it that way; it led to much more interesting huddles over lunch. The three of them had, in a sense, “grown up” togethe
r in publishing. Nancy had been in the publicity department of Hathaway and Walker, long since embalmed and raised to life again by the Dracula of foreign conglomerates, Bludenraven; Bill had started out in marketing, at which he was brilliant; Clive had always been in editorial, had started out as an editor’s assistant. That was twenty-five years ago and the three of them had risen on the corporate ladder almost nose to nose. A competitive spirit was hard to avoid, then, and it had been at first a friendly one. But as the stakes got bigger and publishers were shelling out higher and higher advances to less and less deserving writers (nonwriters, most of them), the spirit had changed. Changed slowly, but changed. It became harder to conceal (and it had to be concealed) spite, rancor, enmity. But these three were good at such concealment.

  There were times when his memory turned to the lunches of twenty years ago, then held in whatever deli was nearby, and he felt threatened by sadness, a great wave coming over him that he barely managed to outrun before it crashed on an empty shore. Feelings like that were bothersome, and he didn’t really understand them.

  The waiter had come and taken their order for wine and food. All three of them always ate the same thing. Today, Nancy came down hard on the grilled swordfish, and, after wading around through the monkfish baked with ginger and the steak and shiitake mushrooms, both Clive and Bill had said, yes, they’d have the swordfish, too. They did not do this because they were so closely bound in temperament that they were bound in taste; no, each was afraid that a dish would be brought which was obviously superior to the ones the others had ordered. It was simpler to get the same thing.

  “Come on, Clive,” said Nancy, leaning toward him until her bosom nearly flattened on the table. “What?”

  Over the years the three of them had grown as cagey and monosyllabic as illegal aliens.