” It was what she knew, anyway.
“Sknd does your conscience bother you when you write?”
“When I write, there’s nothing I’d rather do except this,” I said, and rolled on top of her.
“Oh dear,” she said in that prissy little voice that always cracked me up. “There’s a penis between us.”
And as we made love, I realized a wonderful thing or two: that she had meant it when she said she really liked my book (hell, I’d known she liked it just from the way she sat in the wing chair reading it, with a lock of hair falling over her brow and her bare legs tucked beneath her), and that I didn’t need to be ashamed of what I had written… not in her eyes, at least. And one other wonderful thing: her perception, joined with my own to make the true binocular vision nothing but marriage allows, was the only perception that mattered.
Thank God she was a Maugham fan.
I was V. C. Andrews with a prick for ten years… fourteen, if you add in the post-Johanna years. The first five were with Random; then my agent got a huge offer from Putnam and I jumped.
You’ve seen my name on a lot of bestseller lists. . if, that is, your Sunday paper carries a list that goes up to fifteen instead of just listing the top ten. I was never a Clancy, Ludlum, or Grisham, but I moved a fair number of hardcovers (V. C. Andrews never did, Harold Oblowski, my agent, told me once; the lady was pretty much a paperback phenomenon) and once got as high as number five on the ’mes list… that was with my second book, The Red-Shirt Man. Ironically, one of the books that kept me from going higher was Sted Machine, by Thad Beaumont (writing as George Stark). The Beaumonts had a summer place in Castle Rock back in those days, not even fifty miles south of our place on Dark Score Lake. Thad’s dead now. Suicide. I don’t know if it had anything to do with writer’s block or not.
I stood just outside the magic circle of the mega-bestsellers, but I never minded that. We owned two homes by the time I was thirty-one: the lovely old Edwardian in Derry and, in western Maine, a lakeside log home almost big enough to be called a lodge—that was Sara Laughs, so called by the locals for nearly a century. And we owned both places free and clear at a time of life when many couples consider themselves lucky just to have fought their way to mortgage approval on a starter home. We were healthy, faithful, and with our fun-bones still fully attached. I wasn’t Thomas Wolfe (not even Tom Wolfe or Tobias Wolff), but I was being paid to do what I loved, and there’s no gig on earth better than that; it’s like a license to steal.
I was what midlist fiction used to be in the forties: critically ignored, genre-oriented (in my case the genre was Lovely Young Woman on Her Own Meets Fascinating Stranger), but well compensated and with the kind of shabby acceptance accorded to state-sanctioned whorehouses in Nevada, the feeling seeming to be that some outlet for the baser instincts should be provided and someone had to do That Sort of Thing. I did That Sort of Thing enthusiastically (and sometimes with Jo’s enthusiastic connivance, if I came to a particularly problematic plot crossroads), and at some point around the time of George Bush’s election, our accountant told us we were millionaires.
We weren’t rich enough to own a jet (Grisham) or a pro football team (Clancy), but by the standards of Derry, Maine, we were quite rolling in it. We made love thousands of times, saw thousands of movies, read thousands of books (Jo storing hers under her side of the bed at the end of the day, more often than not). And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.
More than once I wondered if breaking the ritual is what led to the writer’s block. In the daytime, I could dismiss this as supernatural twaddle but at night that was harder to do. At night your thoughts have an unpleasant way of slipping their collars and running free. And if you’ve spent most of your adult life making fictions, I’m sure those collars are even looser and the dogs less eager to wear them. Was it Shaw or Oscar Wilde who said a writer was a man who had taught his mind to misbehave?
And is it really so far-fetched to think that breaking the ritual might have played a part in my sudden and unexpected (unexpected by me, at least) silence? When you make your daily bread in the land of make-believe, the line between what is and what seems to be is much finer. Painters sometimes refuse to paint without wearing a certain hat, and baseball players who are hitting well won’t change their socks.
The ritual started with the second book, which was the only one I remember being nervous about—I suppose I’d absorbed a fair amount of that sophomore-jinx stuff; the idea that one hit might only be a fluke.
I remember an American Lit lecturer’s once saying that of modern American writers, only Harper Lee had found a foolproof way of avoiding the second-book blues.
When I reached the end of The Red-Shirt Man, I stopped just short of finishing. The Edwardian on Benton Street in Derry was still two years in the future at that point, but we had purchased Sara Laughs, the place on Dark Score (not anywhere near as furnished as it later became, and Jo’s studio not yet built, but nice), and that’s where we were.
I pushed back from my typewriter—I was still clinging to my old IBM Selectric in those days—and went into the kitchen. It was mid-September, most of the summer people were gone, and the crying of the loons on the lake sounded inexpressibly lovely. The sun was going down, and the lake itself had become a still and heatless plate of fire.
This is one of the most vivid memories I have, so clear I sometimes feelI could step right into it and live it all again. What things, if any, would I do differently? I sometimes wonder about that.
Early that evening I had put a bottle of Taittinger and two flutes in the fridge. Now I took them out, put them on a tin tray that was usually employed to transport pitchers of iced tea or Kool-Aid from the kitchen to the deck, and carried it before me into the living room.
Johanna was deep in her ratty old easy chair, reading a book (not Maugham that night but William Denbrough, one of her contemporary favorites). “Ooo,” she said, looking up and marking her place. “Cham pagne, what’s the occasion?” As if, you understand, she didn’t know.
“I’m done,” I said. “Mon livre est tout fini.