Bag of Bones Read online

  Because things would get better, wouldn’t they? No one had terminal writer’s block, did they (well, with the possible exception of Harper Lee)? All I had to do was relax, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. And thank God I’d been a good squirrel and saved up my nuts.

  I was still optimistic the following year when I drove down to the Federal Express office with Threatening Behavior. That one was written in the fall of 1991, and had been one of Jo’s favorites. Optimism had faded quite a little bit by March of 1997, when I drove through a wet snowtorrn with Darcy’s Admirer, although when people asked me how it was going (“Writing any good books lately?” is the existential way most,m to phrase the question), I still answered good, fine, yeah, writing lots of good books lately, they’re pouring out of me like shit out of a COW’s ass. After Harold had read Darcy and pronounced it my best ever, a best-seller which was also serious, I hesitantly broached the idea of taking a year off. He responded immediately with the question I detest above all others: was I all right? Sure, I told him, fine as freckles, just thinking about easing off a little. There followed one of those patented Harold Oblowski silences, which were meant to convey that you were being a terrific asshole, but because Harold liked you so much, he was trying to think of the gentlest possible way of telling you so. This is a wonderful trick, but one I saw through about six years ago.

  Actually, it was Jo who saw through it. “He’s only pretending compassion,” she said. “Actually, he’s like a cop in one of those old film noir movies, keeping his mouth shut so you’ll blunder ahead and end up confessing to everything.” This time I kept my mouth shut—just switched the phone from my right ear to my left, and rocked back a little further in my office chair. When I did, my eye fell on the framed photograph over my computer—Sara Laughs, our place on Dark Score Lake.

  I hadn’t been there in eons, and for a moment I consciously wondered why. Then Harold’s voice—cautious, comforting, the voice of a sane man trying to talk a lunatic out of what he hopes will be no more than a passing delusion—was back in my ear. “That might not be a good idea, Mike—not at this stage of your career.”

  “This isn’t a stage,” I said.

  “I peaked in 1991—since then, my sales haven’t really gone up or down.

  This is aplateau, Harold.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and writers who’ve reached that steady state really only have two choices in terms of sales—they can continue as they are, or they can go down.” So I go down, I thought of saying… but didn’t. I didn’t want Harold to know exactly how deep this went, or how shaky the ground under me was. I didn’t want him to know that I was now having heart palpitations-yes, I mean this literally—almost every time I opened the Word Six program on my computer and looked at the blank screen and flashing cursor.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Message received.”

  “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Does the book read like I’m wrong, Harold?”

  “Hell, no—it’s a helluva yarn. Your personal best, I told you. A great ’!.’i… read but also fucking serious shit. If Saul Bellow wrote romantic suspense fiction, this is what he’d write. But… you’re not having any trouble with: the next one, are you? I know you’re still missing Jo, hell, we all are—” “No,” I said. “No trouble at all.” Another of those long silences ensued. I endured it. At last Harold.:iid, “Grisham could afford to take a year off. Clancy could.

  Thomas” Harris, the long silences are a part of his mystique. But where you are,life is even tougher than at the very top, Mike. There are five writers for, e’ ery one of those spots down on the list, and you know who they are—"hell, they’re your neighbors three months a year.

  Some are going up, the: way Patricia Cornwell went up with her last two books, some are going…:down, and some are staying steady, like you. If Tom Clancy were to go ’on hiatus for five years and then bring Jack Ryan back, he’d come back i. strong, no argument. If you go on hiatus for five years, maybe you don’t “Come back at all. My advice is—”

  “Make hay while the sun shines.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  We talked a little more, then said our goodbyes. I leaned back further I. . m my office chair—not all the way to the tip over point but close—and looked at the photo of our western Maine retreat. Sara Laughs, sort of like.the title of that hoary old Hall and Oates ballad.

  Jo had loved it more, i: true enough, but only by a little, so why had I been staying away? Bill. “Dean, the caretaker, took down the storm shutters every spring and put”, them back up every fall, drained the pipes in the fall and made sure the Pump was running in the spring, checked the generator and took care to… see that all the maintenance tags were current, anchored the swimming ttoat fifty yards or so offour little lick of beach after each Memorial Day. i Bill, had the chimney cleaned in the early summer of ’96, although there hn t been a fire in the fireplace for two years or more. I paid him quariterly, as is the custom with caretakers in that part of the world; Bill Dean, old Yankee from a long line of them, cashed my checks and didn’t ask why I never used my place anymore. I’d only been down two or three times since Jo died, and not a single overnight. Good thing Bill didn’t ask, because I don’t know what answer I would have given him. I hadn’t even really thought about Sara Laughs until my conversation with Harold.

  Thinking of Harold, I looked away from the photo and back at the phone.

  Imagined saying to him, So I go down, so what? The world comes to an end? Please. It isn’t as if I had a wij and family to support the wij died in a drugstore parking lot, if you please (or even if you don’t please), and the kid we wanted so badly and tried jr so long went with her, I don’t crave the fame, either—if writers who fill the lower slots on the Times bestseller list can be said to be famous—and I don’t fall askep dreaming of book club sales. So why? Why does it even bother me?

  But that last one I could answer. Because it felt like giving up.

  Because without my wife and my work, I was a superfluous man living alone in a big house that was all paid for, doing nothing but the newspaper crossword over lunch.

  I pushed on with what passed for my life. I forgot about Sara Laughs (or some part of me that didn’t want to go there buried the idea) and spent another sweltering, miserable summer in Derry. I put a cruciverbalist program on my Powerbook and began making my own crossword puzzles. I took an interim appointment on the local YMCA’s board of directors and judged the Summer Arts Competition in Waterville. I did a series of TV ads for the local homeless shelter, which was staggering toward bankruptcy, then served on that board for awhile. (At one public meeting of this latter board a woman called me a friend of degenerates, to which I replied, “Thanks! I needed that.” This resulted in a loud outburst of applause which I still don’t understand.) I tried some one-on-one counselling and gave it up after five appointments, deciding that the counsellor’s problems were far worse than mine. I sponsored an Asian child and bowled with a league. Sometimes I tried to write, and every time I did, I locked up. Once, when I tried to force a sentence or two (any sentence or two, just as long as they came fresh-baked out of my own head), I had to grab the wastebasket and vomit into it. I vomited until I thought it was going to kill me… and I did have to literally crawl away from the desk and the computer, pulling myself across the deep-pile rug on my hands and knees.

  By the time I got to the other side of the room, it was better. I could even look back over my shoulder at the VDT screen. I just couldn’t get near it. Later that day, I approached it with my eyes shut and turned it off. More and more often during those late-summer days I thought of Dennison Carville, the creative-writing teacher who’d helped me connect with Harold and who had damned Being Two with such faint praise. Camille once said something I never forgot, attributing it to Thomas Hardy, the Victorian novelist and poet. Perhaps Hardy did say it, but I’ve never found it repeated, not in Bartlett’s, not in the Hardy biography I
read between the publications of All the Way from the 7bp and Threatening Behavior. I have an idea Carville may have made it up himself and then attributed it to Hardy in order to give it more weight. It’s a ploy I have used myself from time to time, I’m ashamed to say. In any case, I thought about this quote more and more as I struggled with the panic in my body and the frozen feeling in my head, that awful locked-up feeling.

  It seemed to sum up my despair and my growing certainty that I would never be able to write again (what a tragedy, V. C. Andrews with a prick felled by writer’s block). It was this quote that suggested any effort I made to better my situation might be meaningless even if it succeeded.

  According to gloomy old Dennison Carville, the aspiring novelist should understand from the outset that fiction’s goals were forever beyond his reach, that the job was an exercise in futility. “Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.

  Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. If there is any more beautiful and haunting first line in English fiction, I’ve never read it. And it was a line I had cause to think of a lot during the fall of 1997 and the winter of 1998. I didn’t dream of Manderley, of course, but of Sara Laughs, which Jo sometimes called “the hideout.” A fair enough description, I guess, for a place so far up in the western Maine woods that it’s not really even in a town at all, but in an unincorporated area designated on state maps as RR-90. The last of these dreams was a nightmare, but until that one they had a kind of surreal simplicity. They were dreams I’d awake from wanting to turn on the bedroom light so I could reconfirm my place in reality before going back to sleep. You know how the air feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever? My winter dreams of Sara Laughs were like that, each leaving me with a feeling that was not quite sickness.

  I’ve dreamt again ofmanderley, I would think sometimes, and sometimes I would lie in bed with the light on, listening to the wind outside, looking into the bedroom’s shadowy corners, and thinking that Rebecca de Winter hadn’t drowned in a bay but in Dark Score Lake. That she had gone down, gurgling and flailing, her strange black eyes full of water, while the loons cried out indifferently in the twilight. Sometimes I would get up and drink a glass of water. Sometimes I just turned off the light after I was once more sure of where I was, rolled over on my side again, and went back to sleep. In the daytime I rarely thought of Sara Laughs at all, and it was only much later that I realized something is badly out of whack when there is such a dichotomy between a person’s waking and sleeping lives. I think that Harold Oblowski’s call in October of 1997 was what kicked off the dreams. Harold’s ostensible reason for calling was to congratulate me on the impending release of Darcy’s Admirer, which was entertaining as hell and which also contained some extremely thought-provoking shit. I suspected he had at least one other item on his agenda—Harold usually does—and I was right. He’d had lunch with Debra Weinstock, my editor, the day before, and they had gotten talking about the fall of 1998. “Looks crowded,” he said, meaning the fall lists, meaning specifically the fiction half of the fall lists.

  “And there are some surprise additions. Dean Koontz—”

  “I thought he usually published in January,” I said.

  “He does, but Debra hears this one may be delayed. He wants to add a section, or something. Also there’s a Harold Robbins, The Predators—”

  “Big deal.”

  “Robbins still has his fans, Mike, still has his fans. As you yourself have pointed out on more than one occasion, fiction writers have a long arc.”

  “Uh-huh.” I switched the telephone to the other ear and leaned back in my chair. I caught a glimpse of the framed Sara Laughs photo over my desk when I did. I would be visiting it at greater length and proximity that night in my dreams, although I didn’t know that then; all I knew then was that I wished like almighty fuck that Harold Oblowski would hurry up and get to the point. “I sense impatience, Michael my boy,” Harold said. “Did I catch you at your desk?

  Are you writing?”

  “Just finished for the day,” I said. “I am thinking about lunch, however.”

  “I’ll be quick,” he promised, “but hang with me, this is important. There may be as many as five other writers that we didn’t expect publishing next fall: Ken Follett… it’s supposed to be his best since Eye of the Needle… Belva Plain… John Jakes…”

  “None of those guys plays tennis on my court,” I said, although I knew that was not exactly Harold’s point; Harold’s point was that there are only fifteen slots on the Times list. “How about Jean Auel, finally publishing the next of her sex-among-the-cave-people epics?” I sat up.

  “Jean Auel? Really?”

  “Well… not a hundred percent, but it looks good.

  Last but not least is a new Mary Higgins Clark. I know what tennis court she plays on, and so do you.” If I’d gotten that sort of news six or seven years earlier, when I’d felt I had a great deal more to protect, I would have been frothing; Mary Hig-gins Clark did play on the same court, shared exactly the same audience, and so far our publishing schedules had been arranged to keep us out of each other’s way… which was to my benefit rather than hers, let me assure you. Going nose to nose, she would cream me. As the late Jim Croce so wisely observed, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t Ipit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger, and you don’t mess around with Mary Higgins Clark. Not if you’re Michael Noonan, anyway. “How did this happen?” I asked. I don’t think my tone was particularly ominous, but Harold replied in the nervous, stumbling-all-over-his-own-words fashion of a man who suspects he may be fired or even beheaded for bearing evil tidings. “I don’t know. She just happened to get an extra idea this year, I guess. That does happen, I’ve been told.” As a fellow who had taken his share of double-dips I knew it did, so I simply asked Harold what he wanted. It seemed the quickest and easiest way to get him to relinquish the phone. The answer was no surprise; what he and Debra both wanted—not to mention all the rest of my Putnam pals—was a book they could publish in late summer of ’98, thus getting in front of Ms. Clark and the rest of the competition by a couple of months. Then, in November, the Putnam sales reps would give the novel a healthy second push, with the Christmas season in mind. “So they say,” I replied. Like most novelists (and in this regard the successful are no different from the unsuccessful, indicating there might be some merit to the idea as well as the usual free-floating paranoia), I never trusted publishers’ promises. “I think you can believe them on this, Mike—Darcy’s Admirer was the last book of your old contract, remember.” Harold sounded almost sprightly at the thought of forthcoming contract negotiations with Debra Weinstock and Phyllis Grann at Putnam. “The big thing is they still like you. They’d like you even more, I think, if they saw pages with your name on them before Thanksgiving.”