Chapter 6
“What box are you working on now?” he asked when he called me the next day. It was around one in the afternoon and I’d been there since nine working.
“Rachel,” I said.
“No, Billy,” he teased.
“Ha. Ha. I’m working on the box with all the Rachel notes.”
“Rachel? I don’t have a Rachel.”
“I’m thinking she’s what Esme either started as or morphed into, or—”
“Oh, Rachel, that’s it. Yeah, I know her,” he said, like he’d just remembered the name of someone he ran into somewhere but hadn’t seen for a while. In a way, that’s exactly what it was. Going through his notes made me realize that these people, these characters, were real to him. Friends.
There would be innocuous items, like body type, race, coloring, that sort of thing, so he could keep the visual straight once he was writing.
But then there would be this random note like “When she was in second grade, she wanted fashion-y boots, but her mother made her wear her current, dorky snow boots because they were still in good shape. So she took a butter knife (the only kind she was allowed to handle—she might have been a bit of a rebel, but some rules she knew better than to break) and pierced her boots so her mother would have to buy her new ones.” And wrapped around that piece of paper was a cocktail napkin from some place I’d heard of in Manhattan with “don’t use this…
just for character development” scribbled on it with red Sharpie.
“So, I’m creating a ‘possibly Esme’ pile. That’s what I’m working on.”
“You can scratch the ‘possibly’ part. She was Rachel for a few months in there for sure.”
I looked at the box, nearly full except for the pieces I had piled in front—and to the side, and to the back—of me on the same spot on the floor I’d sat yesterday.
These were all notes he’d done on one character in a few months? Good lord, the man must have done nothing for the past five years but write plot and character notes.
And yet, no novel to show for all of the labor that sat around the room, surrounding me.
“So, you’re going with Esme? Rachel and Esme, same person?”
“Yes,” he said.
I hesitated too long, and he was starting to know me. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I quickly said. What I was thinking was not my place to say.
“What?” he said with exasperation in his voice.
“Well, it’s not really important.”
“Is it about my stuff? My work?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“Then spill.”
“No, really—”
“Come on, Syd. I hired you, I want any feedback you want to give.”
“I would never presume to give you…feedback.” Even the idea seemed preposterous to me.
“At least I’ve read your stuff, your papers—and liked them. Most of the feedback I get is from hack critics who couldn’t write a grocery list and so they have to bring others down.”
Huh. That sounded out of character for the person I’d gotten to know—albeit only in the last couple of days, three months of one-sided lectures, and one Seinfeld-bonding phone call.
He snorted, and added, “Or at least that’s what my agent and editor say to me.”
Yeah, that sounded about right. “And what do you say?”
Another snort. “Nothing. I just let them blow smoke up my ass until I am properly soothed.”
“Well let’s face it, there wasn’t a lot of negative feedback on Gangster’s Folly anyway, was there?” I mean, it had won a bunch of awards and still lingered at the bottom of several best-seller lists five years later.
“Oh, there were a few. But yeah, it was well received. My ruffled feathers were more recent as it seems more and more people in the New York literary scene are getting in some shots about the wait on my next book.”
He traveled in New York literary circles.
A vision of Dorothy Parker and her gang at the Algonquin popped into my head and I saw Montrose sitting amongst them in a smoke-filled room, throwing out bon mots and looking debonair. His tousled, tired, world-weary look fitting right in.
It was hard to imagine that he and I lived in the same country let alone the same city.
“But enough of that, I don’t want to get pissed, it’s the holidays.” He let out a little laugh. “Though the holidays seem to bring out the pissed-off-edness in a lot of people.”
A vision of my stepfather drunkenly knocking over our pathetic excuse for a Christmas tree flashed in my mind, but before I could agree with Montrose’s summation, he added, “Seriously. What thought did you have about the Esme/Rachel thing?”
“Well, it seems like Folly was compared a lot to Salinger, particularly Catcher in the Rye.”
“Yes?”
“How did you feel about that?” I’d wondered about that for a few years, but of course I didn’t mention that part.
A long sigh. I started to lie back, but stayed in my position, not wanting to take any chances that he’d ask if I was lying down and then feel weird and want to end the call.
Because I could talk books all day with Billy Montrose. And it seemed I was getting my chance.
“At first I was incredibly flattered. I mean, I love Salinger, you know?” I nodded, but of course he couldn’t see me.
He went on like he could. “And then it got kind of annoying. This was my book. My work. My ideas. I got a chip on my shoulder about it. Those were what I endearingly call my ‘prick years.’”
“When was this?” I asked.
“The last two years.”
“You don’t seem too much like a prick now. Are you out of that phase?”
“Depends on the day. That’s why I’m here. Well, not here, at my parents’, but at Bribury. I didn’t like what I was becoming.”
“A prick?”
“Oh, I had fully become a prick. The next stage I seemed to be careening toward was ‘self-entitled prick’, and it was coming hard and fast.”
“So, Bribury.”
“Yeah. I used the excuse that I needed a change of scenery to ‘get out of my head,’ in order to write the next book. And that’s true, but I knew I was just one martini-soaked, three-hour lunch away from being someone I didn’t want to be.
Because I had the sneaking suspicion that he couldn’t write for shit. ”
I laughed at that. And kind of marveled at his self-awareness. Given the chance, I’d probably be perfectly happy to become a self-entitled prick and enjoy all the perks that came with it.
“Anyway. You don’t want to hear all that.” Oh, I so did! “Why the Salinger question?”
“Well, if there were all the Salinger comparisons, why would you bait that by having your protagonist named Esme? Seems like you’re waving a red cape at them.”
An out-and-out chuckle from him now. “Is it possible that we really just ‘met’ yesterday? Are you sure you haven’t been organizing the files of my shrink?”
Ooh, he had a shrink—so Manhattan. There was a couch I’d like to lie on with him. And not in that way. Okay, in that way, too, but I’d love to hear the deep thoughts he spilled to his therapist.
“Yeah, that’s where Rachel came in. At first, always, she was Esme in my head. But…my own Esme if that makes sense.”
“It does.”
“And I loved her. I wanted to write her, to be her. I could easily spend a whole book with her. And then I realized I was playing into their hands and I’d be crucified if I used the name Esme.”
“So she became Rachel.”
“Right.”
“I’m not through everything here—obviously—but I think the dates on your notes show that you went back to Esme. Is that right?”
“Yeah, that was when the prick started rearing his head.” (I can’t even mention what visual that turn of phrase conjured up for me.) “And I was all ‘Fuck you, he doesn’t own the name. I can do great things with my Esme too.’”
“Wow.”
He let out a sigh, but I could see—hear—the smile on his face. “I know, right? Total prick.”
“Well…hubris at the very least.”
“Right. Exactly. Esme hubris.”
“The very worst kind.”
“Yes. But I couldn’t see it at the time.”
“Because you’d become a prick.” There was no question in my voice.
“Yes, as we’ve established. So that’s where we left off. With Esme.”
“The ‘fuck you Esme.’”
“Yes.” He let out a big breath, like he’d just told me a piece of gossip that he’d been dying to repeat. And maybe that was exactly what he’d done.
“Okay. One pile for all Esme or Rachel related notes. Future name to be determined,” I said.
I smiled as he laughed on the other end, then said goodbye.