by Avery Corman
When he was back in New York, as promised, he called her. He suggested several restaurants for dinner. Ronnie didn’t like the idea of any of them; something about seeing someone who could afford to take her to places beyond her lifestyle, in her mind was a little like being kept—if not exactly kept, influenced.
“I can see sleeping with him because he’s great-looking and great in bed and intelligent and interesting, but I don’t like the rich guy thing getting into it,” she said to Nancy, the two talking by phone during the day.
“You have standards I don’t think have even been invented, but I vaguely know what you mean. He should be judged on who he is, not on his credit cards; although if you took a poll, I don’t think you’d come out in the majority on this.”
“That’s why the evening with the Bergman movie was so good. I could relate to it. I can’t relate to dinner that’s a couple or three hundred dollars for two, and then I sleep with him and what does that say?”
“I get it, sort of. Where is his money from anyway? The one book? Can’t be.”
“The articles and the lectures and honorariums for panels, I guess. I’m just happier being a cheap date.”
She suggested a bistro on Eighth Avenue and he was comfortable with the idea. She chose not to tell him about the road race victory; she didn’t think anything in the story was positive. I ran a race and don’t remember anything about it and won—that wasn’t something she wanted to promote.
The main theme for dinner was her apprehensiveness about the book, of being drawn deeper into the material with all the time required to do the subject justice, so that in terms of economics she would fall behind while working on it. Also she would risk losing her magazine article contacts along the way. Richard said he fully understood her anxiety. He thought she should estimate how long to work on the book and maintain that as a deadline. He also recommended that she could squeeze time out of her week to do a random short piece here and there, for The New York Times, for The Village Voice, to keep her name in view of the editors who bought articles. During dinner she had held off thinking about sex. Money anxieties, professional responsibility anxieties, will-I-be-able-to-do-the-work anxieties trumped the buzz of imagining herself in bed with him. And then they were in bed, and it was wonderful again for her, and when she woke early in the morning, the anxieties returned.
They went for breakfast at the neighborhood coffee shop.
“Should we talk about my worries about the book again?”
“As I said last night—”
“No, I was just kidding. I don’t really mean for us to talk about it nonstop. Let’s just say they’re healthy anxieties, work connected, as opposed to social life connected, which shows I’m a well-rounded person,” she said lightly.
Ronnie asked for a meeting with Jenna Hawkins and Nancy joined them. Hawkins concurred with Richard’s thinking. Ronnie should set a legitimate and firm schedule for completing the work. Eighteen months sounded like the outer limit to Ronnie, and Hawkins thought that was the way to proceed, to keep it as a deadline. If she wanted to, she could try to do a random short piece here and there for the exposure.
Ronnie then presented a draft of her proposal. It provided for material on the famous cases of possession through history, some of the lesser known but fascinating incidents, notable exorcists through the ages, the case that led to the fictional The Exorcist, a discussion of the impact of The Exorcist itself on the culture of possession, the professional exorcists performing exorcisms for a fee, the satanic ritual abuse conspiracy theories, the Protestant ministries specializing in exorcism for a wide range of modern-day manifestations, the current position of the Roman Catholic Church on possession, and the implications of possession—the ways in which belief in possession intersected with contemporary religious views. Hawkins gave her overall approval and Ronnie was going to polish and submit it.
After a six-day stay in New York, including two nights of being together, Richard was headed out of town again, this time to Munich. He had a foundation grant to research a cult that was gaining strength outside the city.
“Munich?” she said to him the morning they said good-bye. “Who goes to Munich?” teasing, but uncomfortable with the continued pattern. “If I stood in the middle of Times Square and yelled, ‘Is anyone here going to Munich?’ how many people do you think would say ‘I am’?”
“The place to ask is the gate at JFK where I’m boarding,” he said, laughing.
The finished proposal went in to Burris and he communicated through Hawkins that he was very pleased. He did have a few questions for Ronnie and asked to see her in his office. Excelsior Publications was located on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street, a high corner office with shelves of rare books, resembling one of the special rooms in the Forty-second Street Library rather than a publishing office. Burris sat behind a large oak desk with a library-style lamp. He swiveled in his chair, seemingly a bit high-strung now that she was alone with him.
“We look rarefied here and we publish unusual books, not mass market, but we still need to sell. Now what troubles me about the proposal—and I loved it—but what’s a problem for me is that you don’t let believers in sufficiently. There are many, many out there. The entire Roman Catholic Church is, so to speak, a believer in Satan, and Catholic priests have performed exorcisms, then and now. There are, as you know by now, hundreds of Protestant ministries today involved in ‘deliverance’ as they call it, ‘exorcism’ is the word for it, and that covers a substantial amount of people. You’re right on it, in the last chapter, where you’re going to talk about the intersection of believers and religion. I’d be looking for you to build that up.”
“In that chapter?”
“It might take more than one chapter. Some people do believe in satanic possession. I think you need to give us the reason people believe. What they believe. The Catholic Church position. The delivery ministries’ position. Of course, I’m thinking believers will buy the book and may even be the largest market for this book. You don’t want to do a book about satanic possession and not give adequate space to explain the reasons the believers believe, and to explain why and how. It doesn’t violate your integrity as an author or your personal beliefs. It’s a precinct you should be more fully reporting on.”
“I hear you. Let me think about that.”
Ronnie spoke on the phone with Jenna Hawkins, who agreed with Burris. A book about possession, to be properly rounded, needed to include more material about the true believers. She sent Richard an e-mail describing the meeting and Burris’s request. He responded:
Hey, it may even be the prime market for the book, believers in Satan and satanic possession, but Antoine is right, I think. It belongs.
She considered the suggestion for a couple of days. The people who thought they were possessed certainly believed in possession, but others did also, and she concluded that proper coverage of those beliefs did belong in a general book on the subject. She knew now that it wasn’t going to be easy to keep within the eighteen-month deadline; she would need to interview priests, exorcists, perhaps even some of those people who thought they were possessed, if it was possible to reach them.
An item on the legal side—would she be responsible for research expenses, travel to places in the United States or elsewhere to talk with exorcists or with “victims” of possession? Hawkins clarified the point. Burris was prepared to allow for travel expenses up to ten thousand dollars, which Hawkins thought was proof they really were behind the book.
Ronnie amended the proposal to include additional material on “the believers” and sent it to Burris. Jenna Hawkins called a few days later to say they were proceeding with a contract, she had a book deal.
Richard was on the phone from Germany, thrilled the contract was going through and offering to throw Ronnie a party in his place to celebrate. He asked her to e-mail a guest list, and this simple request made her uncomfortable; she didn’t know that many people for a party. She preferred
not to admit that, thanked him abundantly for the offer, and told him she would get back to him.
“If I can invite everyone I ever went out with back to high school,” she said to Nancy and Bob in the apartment, “maybe I’ll have a list that amounts to something, and if they can bring dates.”
“It doesn’t have to be a big party,” Nancy said. “There’s us and Jenna—”
“And the building staff,” Ronnie quipped. “And the man in the box.”
“And business people, editors at The Times and Vanity Fair and The Voice, those people. It’s even a good idea—to let them know you’re doing a book.”
“If they’ll come.”
“And I’ll invite everyone I ever dated,” Bob said.
“Thanks, pal,” Nancy responded.
“And the publisher, they must have people,” Ronnie said, “and Richard. He can bring his wife.”
“Ronnie!”
“I’m still not convinced a hundred percent. Anyone who travels that much has to have another port.”
“Say yes to the party,” Nancy said. “It’ll fill up. It’ll be fine.”
Richard was back in New York. They spoke by phone, she told him her list was a dozen or so people, and he said that would be perfect, cocktails and great hors d’oeuvres, three weeks from next on a Monday, and by then the contract should be signed. The publisher would probably invite people. And Richard, she wondered, would he be inviting anyone? From his end it would just be people he knew at the publishing house. He planned to be in the city for a while, was then going back to Vancouver and would return for Ronnie’s party; she needn’t worry about the arrangements. He knew a party planner who would take care of it all.
She began working on the book in earnest. Before Richard left the city again, over ten days’ time she spent three evenings with him; dinner, sex, a revival of East of Eden at the Film Forum, more sex, another dinner, more sex. Three evenings in a ten-day span was about as much contact as she would have with anyone she was going with, short of living together, and she had no complaint about his availability this round. She did wonder what he did the rest of the time. She tried to explore, in dinner talk and pillow talk, the landscape of his life, his early years as a foster child, the loss of his main foster parents, his high school years; did he feel like an outsider, did he have a girlfriend; what kind of jobs did he have after high school, how was it working for a small town newspaper, how long had he been in New York, where did he live before that as an adult, who were his friends, what did he do the other nights they weren’t together, basic things you would want to know from a man you are sleeping with. Over a several-day period she filtered these essay questions to him and he responded with short answers. He was cordial and either he was totally lacking in introspection about his life or there was a wall he had erected to deal with his childhood and she couldn’t get through. His position was clear—I’ll be supportive of you, as helpful as I can, but I live a life of professional responsibilities and I really don’t like to talk about my personal history. As to some of the specifics, he had reading and writing to do the nights they weren’t together, and his closest friend was Antoine Burris. Perhaps one day he would open up, she presumed, or perhaps this was the deal—he was reserved, remote. This still made him more interesting to her than the puppy males with their tongues hanging out of their mouths, panting about themselves. He was intelligent about a truly unusual area of life, and there was the sex. It was so extraordinary, every time, she wondered if this could become like a drug addiction, and counseled herself to keep a balance, to always have the work, now the book, to center herself so that she wasn’t just treading water waiting for him to show up.
“The man in the box” Ronnie alluded to as a whimsical possibility for her guest list was a derelict who set up quarters on Broadway and 111th Street in large appliance-sized cardboard boxes, and when rain destroyed the boxes, he sometimes cobbled together his living quarters out of multiple smaller containers. Ronnie guessed he was in his late sixties. He had unkempt graying black hair, a straggly full beard, was gaunt, six feet tall, usually dressed in a flannel shirt too large for him, baggy corduroy pants, and sneakers. In colder weather he wore an army fatigue jacket. He had a rather fine nose and pale brown eyes—a distant look in those eyes suggesting the possibility of another life he had lived, the facts of which would have been impossible to ascertain. He never spoke. He sat in his box staring at people in the street, as if studying them for a book he was going to write. A bowl was always in front of the box for people to give money and when they did he never acknowledged them, just as he never spoke. He didn’t take up a position in front of a store, rather on the sidewalk along 111th Street so vendors didn’t have a complaint he was blocking store traffic. And his silence meant passersby couldn’t complain he was insulting them or invading their space. He sat for hours, auditing the movement of people. Periodically, he was swept from view by the police based on the current mood in the department regarding the homeless. Sometimes he slept in his box and was there in the morning when Ronnie or Nancy went out to buy a newspaper. He would stare as they passed with the same flat expression he maintained for everyone. Once, Ronnie was passing when the police took him into a patrol car. He displayed no anger, no resentment. Intermittently the city authorities advocated not giving money to panhandlers on streets and subways, that there were social services for such people, and the giver would only be enabling their drug or alcohol habits. The man in the box seemed to be mentally ill, not an addict or an alcoholic, or that was the rationale Ronny and Nancy settled on, and they would sometimes drop a quarter or two in his bowl when they passed. They wanted to believe he used the money for food. Ronnie adopted her own policy. If she happened to be thinking about work or her career at the moment she passed him, given the disparities in their lives, and for good luck, she dropped a little extra in his bowl; a dollar, or all her loose change.
A couple of days after Richard left town Ronnie was walking to the supermarket and the man was in his place on 111th Street in one of his cobbled-together setups, a couple of cartons that once contained television sets. She was thinking about the book when she saw him, which qualified this to be a bonus contribution, and she took two dollars from her wallet to place in his bowl. He stared at her, not with his usual flat expression. He furrowed his brow and quickly scrambled deeper into the box. Under normal circumstances encounters with the man were odd New York exchanges; out of charity, or guilt, or for luck, or all of these, people gave money and food to him and he offered no acknowledgment. He had reacted to Ronnie with sudden antipathy. The peculiar social compact between the man in the box and people on the street had been broken. He had frightened her.
Richard Smith was a courtly host for the party attended by a couple of dozen people, with employees from Burris’s publishing company helping to occupy the space. Richard was dressed in Armani—blue suit, white shirt, light blue silk tie—the standout-looking man in the room. Nancy and Bob came in with Ronnie, and on seeing Richard for the first time, Nancy whispered, “This is People magazine stuff. He is amazing-looking.”
Ronnie made the introductions, Richard declaring he was glad to finally meet Ronnie’s friends. Bob was less cheerful than the others, trying to take the measure of this guy, while feeling, in his Brooks Brothers suit, severely out-tailored.
While Richard charmingly concentrated on the guests, Antoine Burris was serving as the co-captain for the event and he made certain everyone’s glass was filled and that the hors d’oeuvres were passed properly by the uniformed waitstaff of four people.
Jenna Hawkins arrived with her husband, Jeb, a former Broadway producer; in his seventies, silver haired, with a red W. C. Fields nose and alcohol on his breath, a man now supposedly engaged in writing his memoirs.
“Great place,” Jeb said to Richard. “So how do you make your money?”
Nancy and Ronnie exchanged smiles on his directness.
“I write, I lecture.”
�
��On what?”
“Cults, mostly.”
“Cults? We talking about the same thing, cults? People following some crackpot?”
“Right.”
“What’s the most interesting thing about cults?”
“I’d say the way people have a need to be in them.”
“And cults gets you a place like this?”
“Jeb—” his wife interceded. “This is supposed to be a nice party for Veronica Delaney and this is our host.”
“That’s all right, he can handle it.”
“I rent, I don’t own.”
“See, he gave me a good answer. You’re a good-looking guy. Ever act?”
“No, I never acted.”
“If you did, I’d put you right in a production of Private Lives. Know the play?”
“I do.”
“Put you right in it. But I’m not active just now.”
“Okay, Jeb,” and she pulled him away.
Laughing, Richard walked over to Ronnie and said, “I think I just lost my chance at another career.”
“Looks to me like you’re doing fine.”
“I’ll say,” and he kissed her on the lips, a proprietary kiss.
Richard made a toast thanking everyone for coming and congratulating Ronnie for her book contract. “To the girl of the moment,” he said, “and the moment is going to last for a very long time.” He introduced Antoine Burris, who told the group he was pleased and honored to be responsible for the first book by an exciting new literary talent. Her inquisitiveness combined with her sophisticated style was refreshing in someone so young, and they were going to do everything they could to put the book on the map.
Ronnie chatted with people from the publishing company as the party rolled on. The art director, a woman in her thirties, brought a date, an advertising account executive in his thirties, aggressive, confident of his own good looks, who took the opportunity when the woman was in the next room to try slipping his business card to Ronnie on the basis of how much he could help her with the book when it came out. He knew everything there was to know about advertising, and might they get together, he was really ending his other relationship. “I’m flattered, but I’m not available. Richard Smith and I …” He got the message although she couldn’t finish the thought.
