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.