Their affair was on-again, off-again. She knew Alf would never marry her—he wouldn’t offend his two sons. Because Alf, despite the poetic last name, was a Boronkin, not a Byron. The joke was he’d dropped his old friends along with the “kin.” He’d adopted the name when he left Cincinnati and set up shop in New York. But he kept close to his sons and was a Jew who refused to marry a shiksa. No matter how successful either of them became.
Susann looked at him now, earnestly talking to the director. Somehow Alf had not adjusted to success. He had fought his way to the top with her, but once there, he continued to fight. What was that called? A bunker mentality? Sometimes Susann thought that if Alf didn’t encounter difficulties, he considered it his job to create them. Just so he had an obstacle he had to overcome that day. But Susann was tired of obstacles. Though she appeared ten years younger than her fifty-eight years, she felt ten years older. She looked down at her hands, swollen from arthritis. She’d do everything she could to keep them off camera. Her hands did not look happy or satisfied. She supposed she wasn’t either.
She had met Alf when she was forty-three. She had felt young then—although she probably hadn’t looked as good. Still, she’d had lots of energy and enthusiasm, despite the lousy job and the failed marriages. Life seemed an adventure. Alf had been older and, it seemed, wiser. He’d had his own insurance agency and had invested a little in Cincinnati real estate. His first wife had died, and his two sons were grown. He had half-romanced, half-adopted Susann.
It had been a lovely time. Alf had thought of her writing as magical, not a business. He’d read every word breathlessly. And just as her writing had rescued her from a mundane life, it had given him a new and exciting second career. Alf was more entranced with the glamour of the entertainment world than Susann had ever been. It was he who kept the scrapbooks, dusted the shelf of her books, and had the first of each of “our new editions” bound in blue calfskin and stamped with gold.
Now, somehow, Alf felt like a burden, along with all the other burdens Susann felt she was carrying. He had insisted on this last contract—for two new books—in addition to the other new one they already had to deliver on. And he’d pocket almost a quarter of a million dollars in fees, while she was saddled with delivery. Finally, she and Edith had finished the first draft of the new book, but Susann knew it was flat. It was a funny thing: Back when she was penniless and living from paycheck to paycheck, when she didn’t have time to be a good mother to Kim, she had written about success and wealth, family love, and the glamorous life with a lot more passion and clarity than she did now, now that she was living it. There was an irony there, but Susann was not the type to ferret it out. And she was too tired.
Alf had proudly and overaggressively negotiated the blockbuster twenty-million-dollar contract, but the pressure that had put on her seemed to Susann almost unbearable. After all, money wasn’t everything. He’d made her leave the publisher she had been with from the beginning. He made her leave her editor, Imogen.
In the old days, she had gotten relatively small advances and her enormous sales had meant big royalty checks. The publisher had treated her like a fine piece of jewelry. Imogen never forgot a birthday. But Alf had insisted that it was bad business to let the publisher sit on the money until—twice a year, and then reluctantly—it paid out the royalties she was owed. “Why should we let them be our bankers?” Alf asked. “They don’t pay interest.” He had gotten bigger and bigger payments up front, but when her publisher balked, he had shopped her around to a new house—Davis & Dash—where she had been given a huge advance. Susann was afraid that neither this new book or the next one would earn out the advance money. She couldn’t bear having Gerald Ochs Davis, her new publisher, looking at her like she was a bad investment instead of a jewel in the crown. She had been a winner, and every bit of success had been a thrill and a surprise. Now, behind the eight ball of the two contracts, she was expected to perform at the very highest commercial level; anything less would be considered failure. And one thing Alf Byron would not tolerate was failure.
“We’re ready for you now, Mrs. Edmonds,” the unbelievably young assistant director told her. Susann came out of her reverie, depressed and dissatisfied. But that’s not what she was allowed to be right now. What she had to be was happy, with an air of complete satisfaction. And that is what she would be.
“I’m ready,” Susann said, and gave the boy her best smile.
I’m not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he’s not in the mood and doesn’t feel the juice. I don’t think discipline equals creativity.
—Bret Easton Ellis
Daniel Gross sat in his small office, his back to the door, his shoulders hunched over the notebook he was writing in. The typewritten copy of Judith’s latest chapter—well, his chapter, really—was secreted under the flap of the back cover. As he copied the chapter carefully into his notebook, he made a few revisions and cross outs. But Judith had done a good job typing up his ideas, and there was really very little—surprisingly little—he had to change. Too bad her typing was so lousy. He looked at the name on the title page. “Jude Daniel.” Perhaps he should have picked a different nom de plume: something more commercial like Paige Turner of Bess Cellar or E. Z. Reid. He corrected another one of Judith’s mistakes.
Judith could sit down every day and pound it out. That’s how he knew she wasn’t truly sensitive, not really an artist. For him it was necessary to feel the creative urge. The muses did not dance to your command, he thought. Who had written that? Perhaps he had. He jotted it down in the margin of his notebook.
Each time Daniel finished copying a page, he tore Judith’s typewritten version into many strips and, instead of throwing them in his wastepaper basket, put them into his pocket. It was better to be safe than sorry, as his grandma used to tell him. Safe from what, or sorry about what, he wasn’t exactly sure.
And the fact is, he didn’t feel safe and he might indeed be sorry. He hadn’t received tenure last year, but then how could he reasonably expect to after being caught in adultery, breaking up his marriage, and marrying a student? Eleanor, his first wife, had been well liked in the department. Although it wasn’t illegal, leaving your no-longer-so-young-looking wife for a much younger student certainly was not approved of. A definite frost had descended upon the women professors in his department, and Daniel wondered if now, despite his good work, he might never achieve tenure. No, he certainly wasn’t safe.
But sorry? Was he sorry he’d married Judith? Well, he surely was sorry that her father had taken it so badly, the anti-Semite. The old bastard was loaded, and if Daniel hadn’t exactly counted on living off some of the Hunt glassworks fortune, he had at least looked forward to the possibility. He had already played the we’re-young-and-in-love-and-poor-as-college-students game once with Eleanor, and he no longer found it amusing. But Judith might, in the end be his ticket out of here. Daniel looked around the cramped cubicle that was his office. It was painted a shiny khaki color, God knows how long ago. Sometime after the Korean War? Or World War II, or maybe even World War I? The paint was flaking in more than half a dozen places. If he ever wanted to commit suicide, Daniel reflected, he probably had enough lead in the available paint flakes for effective poisoning.
Daniel looked out the drafty window. The room was so badly heated that he