The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [23]
“Writers sometimes spend years and years.”
“I can see why.”
She weighed the script in her hands. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You could try reading it. And tell me if it’s any good.”
“What’s your phone number?”
“I haven’t got a phone. I’m only a block away, you could come over when you’re done. The address is on the first page.”
“I don’t even know your name. ‘One If by Land by Hugh Markarian.’ That’s you?”
“That’s me.”
He went crazy waiting. Three nights later she appeared and handed him the manuscript and four single-spaced pages of criticism tearing the book apart. She sat down on the edge of his bed while he read two of the four pages. Then he looked up and asked if he had to read the rest. “It’s obviously a piece of shit and I wasted fifteen months, so why read all this?” She told him to skip to the last paragraph if he wanted. He did, and in the final paragraph she told him that the book was rough and choppy and disorganized and cluttered and vague, and that it was also a better book by far than the one that started all this, and it needed work but that didn’t change the fact that he had written a great book and might be a great writer.
He asked her if she really meant it.
She said, “Jesus Christ, you think I’d break my neck typing all that if I didn’t?”
She spent the night at his place. In the morning she told him his apartment was terrible and he should move in with her. He did, but kept his place to work in. He thought it would take him another fifteen months to rewrite the book but he did it in six, cutting almost a hundred pages and reworking virtually every scene. The editor who saw it took Hugh to lunch and told him the book was great, truly great, but that his house was over inventoried with war novels and the public’s interest in World War II fiction was ebbing fast. “I’d like to scrap half the books we have scheduled and publish yours in their place,” the man said, “but I can’t do it.”
He went back to Anita dejected. He said, “I’m a genius and he loves the book and they don’t want it.”
“Well, fuck him,” she said.
The next editor who saw it took Hugh to the same restaurant, where he ordered the same dish he had had before. The editor started off the same way and spoke in the same prep school accent and Hugh was tempted to finish his sentences for him. But while he was picking at his food and barely paying attention the man was saying that there were a few changes he would recommend, nothing substantial and Hugh of course would be the final judge, and they would like to schedule the book for the following spring if Hugh thought he could make the changes by then, and they would pay an advance of thus and so many dollars, and—
The next afternoon they took out a marriage license. “I don’t know,” she said. “An Irish-Italian and a Scotch-Armenian. I know it’s the American way but my parents are going to shit.”
“Well, fuck ’em,” he said.
“It would help if you were Catholic. What exactly are you, anyway?”
“I’m an atheist.”
“Well, no kidding. So am I, but I mean a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist.”
“A Protestant atheist.”
“Yeah, I know. It would be so much easier all around if you were a Catholic atheist.”
“I could pretend to be one.”
“You could, couldn’t you? While you’re pretending, you could even leave out the atheist part.”
“There I draw the line.”
They were married and the book came out in the spring. It hit the charts three weeks after publication day and went straight to the top. There was a movie sale and dozens of foreign sales and reprint offers and all of a sudden it was raining money and he knew he would never have to eat spaghetti again. Which was unfortunate, because it was the only thing Anita knew how to cook.
The book was still high on the best-seller list when the baby was born. That was in 1953, eight years after the war had ended, seven years after he had started trying to write about it. They told each other that New York was no place to bring up a kid and they looked around