Chapter 19

I slept for almost four hours, fully clothed on my bed. When I awoke I lay there and reviewed some of the high points of last night and this morning. I liked Nance, though I’m not sure if we’d ever be close friends because of the differences in our personalities. Still, she was smart and fun.

And I really liked Sara, and the more time I spent with her the better I liked her. Smart and sexy and funny and drop-dead gorgeous. I could almost see having a life with her. But part of me thought she was still figuring her life out, and the person she was now might not be who she’d eventually become.

I thought I ought to eat something, since I’d only had breakfast and I probably wouldn’t get fed at Ted’s party till almost eight. So I rummaged in the fridge and found ... a lot of nothing. Time to shop again. I located a can of tuna fish and mixed it with some mayonnaise and made a couple of sandwiches. Chez Halloran, gourmet dining on a budget.

With a few hours to kill, I took out Liz’s latest chapters and read them. I’ll read them again and make notes, but this time was just to get the flow and understand where the plot was going. I had to admire her. She really did have a talent for this, moving the plot in unexpected directions and integrating it with characters and events that had happened earlier. And now I was officially hooked. She’d better see this through to the end so I can find out how it turns out.

I read a couple of journal articles without much interest, more to kill time, and then it was about time to get ready. I shaved and changed my clothes to something more suited to a patio opening, and got in the car.

It was about a thirty minute drive, as he lived in the suburbs on the other side of town, but there wasn’t all that much traffic, and I was able to find a spot on his street close to the house. I’d stopped for a bottle of wine, even though he’d said they had everything.

My mother was really strict about that, you always bring some small gift when you visit someone’s house, and she taught it to me and my sister before we were teenagers.

I rang the bell, and Ted’s wife, Anna, opened the door. “Sam! How come you don’t visit? We never see you.”

“Well, you never had a patio before now. We scientists have standards, you know.”

“Of course you do. I discovered that the hard way the first time I bought the store brand cheese topping instead of Cheese Whiz. I never heard the end of it.”

I liked Anna, she tolerated Ted’s quirks and ours as well, by making fun of them, pointing them out as eccentricities that she tolerated and was amused by because she loved Ted. Ted was a lucky man.

“C’mon in. You know where everything is. Ted’s out back showing off his new patio. Make sure you take notes, there’ll be a pop quiz later.”

I laughed at that, because it had an element of truth in it. Ted might do that, just to make sure people had been listening.

I wandered out through the French doors to the back, and sure enough, new patio, and Ted looking like a first-time father. I didn’t recognize most of the people, they were probably Anna’s friends, or neighbors. Ted noticed me and waved, and I raised a hand in greeting.

I saw a cooler packed with ice and beer, so grabbed one. And there was a table with munchies, so a plate of nachos and chips and salsa. I found an empty chair and commandeered it, enjoying the weather and the chatter around me. Ted eventually got around to me and told me he was glad I had made it. I told him I hadn’t believed the patio story and was sure it was a ruse and had to see it with my own eyes.

“Ye of little faith. It cost me enough, so I’m gonna show it off, and even brag about it, no shame in that. We’ll start up the grill in a few minutes, so leave some room. Lots of food on its way.”

I assured him I would, and he wandered off to greet someone else. Art Birnbaum came out of the house and we chatted for a while, till he wandered off to get a beer, and I talked to someone who introduced themselves as a neighbor from down the street.

I sat there with my beer and wondered if or when I’d fall into the homeowner trap, maybe because I got married and wanted to start a family. Well, unlikely to happen any time soon, so no sense thinking about it now.

Ted had started up the gas grill and had burgers and hot dogs and chicken sizzling away. Anna started loading up another table with various salads, condiments and a big pot of baked beans and another of macaroni and cheese.

And in short order I had a plate with a burger and half a dozen sides and was happily stuffing my face. The sandwich I’d had for a late lunch had apparently not been enough. I finished what I had and got another beer. Anna had announced to everyone that desserts would be coming out shortly, so save some room. As I said, a smart woman.

There was an empty chair next to me, and a woman with both hands full of plates nodded to the chair and asked, “Is that available? I need a place to sit so I can free up one hand to eat.”

I said that it was, and asked if I could help, but she shook her head. She got organized, putting her drink on the ground and her plate on her lap, and said, “Much better. Thanks.”

She looked to be about fifty-ish, no longer slim, but fashionably dressed and nice hair. She had some jangly jewelry and a couple of rings with large stones that looked expensive.

“Sorry,” she said, “I was so focused on getting settled and fed that I forgot to introduce myself. I’m Deb Morrow, one of Ted and Anna’s neighbors. And you?”

I introduced myself, saying I worked with Ted at the lab.

“Oh, you’re one of those science geeks, too?”

“Guilty. Please don’t hold it against me.”

She laughed. “No, I didn’t make myself clear. I have a tendency to be a little flip, an occupational hazard I picked up at work, and it sometimes gets me in trouble. I meant that I’m in awe of what he does because it’s so far afield from what I know, so I sometimes get a bit snarky as a defense mechanism.”

“I know what you mean. I still have to explain myself to my mother, who can’t understand why I didn’t go to medical school instead of getting a Ph.D. She’ll say, ‘If people are going to call you doctor, why not be a real doctor?’ She can understand medical doctors, but all the other kinds are like not-quite-doctors to her.”

“Well, any kind of doctor gets my respect,” she said.

I sometimes played this game with myself where I’d try to figure out what a stranger did for work, and for her I was guessing she sold houses, so I asked her what she did for a living.

“I’m in publishing, I’m a book editor,” she replied. Oh, well. So far, I’m batting close to zero.

We talked about books, and I asked her who she was working with currently and she named several authors, a couple of whom I recognized. I’d had a couple of beers already so I was perhaps feeling a little less polite than I usually was, so I asked her about the book editing process and how she worked with her authors. Apparently this pushed a button which set her off.

“Authors have this public image -- they mostly have agents and even publicity teams who burnish it, promote it -- of an aloof, extremely intelligent and articulate outsider, methodically cataloging society’s quirks and idiosyncrasies from high atop their writer’s aerie, and setting them into colorful characters and plots, and that the process involves only his or her muse and the author, who finally delivers the finished work to the publisher, who sends it to the printer without revision and then distributes it to an adoring public.

“That’s all horseshit, pardon my French. Authors are mostly whiny, egotistical, narcissists, who may have a small talent for characters and plot and color, but it’s mostly buried under layers of tedious, self-indulgent drivel that needs to be cleared off with a shovel.”

I paused and tried to stop myself from provoking her, but the beers had the better of me. “Deb, I know that’s the happy message you probably tell the book clubs in your talks, but what do you really feel about authors?”

She looked at me for a moment, then she laughed out loud, spilling some of her drink on the new patio. I hoped Ted hadn’t seen that, he’d be out with a sponge and a scrub brush in a moment.

I liked her laugh. It wasn’t a polite giggle, it was a full-throated guffaw, a woman who truly found life funny. She wheezed, “That’s one of the reasons I still live out here instead of in the city, Sam, because out here I can still be in touch with the real world rather than surrounded by the sycophants and toadies that live in town. I’d shoot myself.”

She placed a hand on my arm. “I like you, Sam. Yeah, authors are mostly jerks, and that’s why I get paid so well, because most people can’t stand to work with them. It takes a certain set of skills to cajole an author into needed changes or suggest revisions, because most of ‘em think they’re incapable of error. So that’s my secret power, dealing with assholes.”

And that made me laugh. I raised my beer, “Here’s to assholes.” She picked up hers and said loudly, “To assholes!” Several people looked over, wondering what was going on.

I asked her how they found new authors, since there must be an overwhelming amount of doggerel buried in their unsolicited submissions pile.

I hadn’t been thinking of Liz specifically, but the more Deb and I talked, the more I felt that there was some information here that might be to Liz’s benefit.

Deb said, for the most part, they didn’t look at unsolicited submissions at all, just sent a rejection letter automatically. Most of their new work came from literary agents, who had a personal or business relationship with a publishing house. “Sometimes,” she went on, “if we have a college intern over the summer, we’ll pick something out of the submissions pile and throw it at them and tell them to read it and give us an analysis. Mostly it’s just to teach the intern how to recognize bad writing. We don’t often get anything useful back.”

I asked her if she’d ever tried to do any writing herself. “When I was young and foolish. Fortunately, I recognized my lack of creative skill early, and found that I was better at fixing other people’s words. That’s how I got here.”

We talked about the struggles new authors faced in learning the craft, in getting their work appreciated and published. I mentioned in passing that I’d been reading some of a colleague’s writing, and how her story captured me fully. I had told her, the author, that I admired what she was able to do because I knew I wouldn’t have the talent to even attempt it. Deb agreed it was a tough row to hoe, but encouraged her to keep at it and eventually she might get a break.

She saw a friend come in and waved to her, saying, “Excuse me, I haven’t seen Francine in months, gotta say hello,” and jumped up. I didn’t know if that was a brush-off because I had started talking about a ‘friend who was a budding author’ or because she wanted to see Francine. I did see her talking animatedly with Francine, but the two concepts weren’t mutually exclusive.

Dessert was out on the table, I saw, so I wandered over and found chocolate cake and some fruit salad, and a pot of coffee, and helped myself. Art swung by again and dropped into the chair recently vacated by Deb. We talked about nothing at length, both of us still with a little beer buzz, then he went off to find a bathroom.

And I started thinking about Liz again. Mostly I thought that the process for recognizing talent and getting one’s work published was so inherently flawed as to be unfair. There ought to be a better way to encourage new authors and poets. I thought about that for awhile and couldn’t even come up with the beginning of an idea of how to fix it, which left me frustrated. Scientists always think there’s a logical way to approach any problem, but it wasn’t true. You only had to think of racism, or religious bigotry, for a start.

I got another half cup of coffee, thinking I was going to have to drive home soon, so alert was better than beer buzz. Across the yard, under an ornamental tree of some kind, I saw Deb and Francine sitting together in lawn chairs, chatting happily. And as they talked I thought suddenly of the aerosol in my pocket.

Deb and Francine stood up, and they hugged and kissed each other on the cheek, and Deb called goodbye with a wave as Francine wandered into the house and presumably onward to home. Deb sat back down with her drink and a pleasant, half-asleep smile on her face.

I gave some thought to how I might do this. She probably wouldn’t stay there for much longer, so I’d have to move soon if I were to make a move. Deb was facing the back of the house where all the people were gathered, and there were a few scattered groups behind her. I noticed the light breeze was blowing toward us.

I made my way circuitously along the fence line as if inspecting the plantings, holding my coffee cup with the aerosol underneath it, and around behind Deb, approaching her from the rear. As I got within a few feet of her, I sprayed the mist in her direction, holding the cup with two hands as if to keep it from spilling. The breeze moved it toward her.