sweat. Not natural, not healthy. “What a sad loser you are!” he sighed. “I think I can help you.”
Lockwood stared at the receiver and hung up. When the phone rang again a minute later, he grumbled a tentative “Hello?”
“Hang up on me again, and I’m done with you.”
“What do you want?”
“I didn’t pay for the book. But I am interested in your career. Which is not going anywhere, unless you get professional help.”
“That would be you?”
“Yes. Take down my number. Just in case you feel like exploring some ideas.”
“Shoot.”
“One, 900, Dr. Phone.”
“A 900 number?”
“Yes. 24/7, $3.99 a minute.”
“That’s $240 an hour.”
“I do charge more than a regular psychiatrist on account of the convenience. You don’t have to schedule your dreams, your phobia attacks, your crises to correspond to Tuesday—Thursday appointment days. I’m here for you, day or night, help at hand. And you don’t have to pay for a fifty-minute hour. The moment a crisis hits, dial 1-900-Dr Phone.”
“Sure, maybe sometime.”
“You need help now, you idiot.”
“Why do you keep calling me names?”
“My active therapeutic style is suited to your passivity.”
Lockwood sighed unhappily. “Fine, don’t call me. I’ll call you.”
“Remember, I believe in you,” the voice was saying seductively as Lockwood disconnected.
He kept writing through the years. The thin notebook in his shirt pocket was full of tantalizing beginnings and provocative themes. He rose at four in the morning and sat at his desk until it was time to go to work as a copywriter at the Freidl and Perez advertising agency.
In the dark misty mornings, the fog from the sea crawled inland. It softened the silhouette of the hills and seemed to carry the sounds of the waves crashing on the rocks. Lockwood thought of it as the dreamer’s time, the moment for poetry, the space of the imagination. After a cup of strong French roast and a slice of baguette spread with Bonne Maman strawberry jam, he would open the small window beside his table and let in a rush of air, imagining he could smell the tide’s deposits of weeds and mollusks and rotting driftwood.
Brimming over with the warm well-being that came to him for doing the virtuous thing, for getting up in the morning, for doing the important work of his life first, Lockwood would prepare to write: three deep breaths. Ten fingers wriggle above the keyboard like hungry baby snakes. The back is straight for attack. The gift that goes unused will atrophy. He writes in order to write. Write first, think later. Appease the unseen reader. Hands up! Your words or your life. If the Muse betrays you, shoot the bitch. He considers the possibility that the 72,349 words of Two Loaves may be all he was born with—the cool sparks from two happy planets rubbing against each other during a cosmic nanosecond back there at the Workshop in the middle of the corny prairie, in his very own Year of Great Promise. He buries the thought. Somewhere there are reserves that can still be tapped, like the last precious organ cells that keep an anorexic alive.
“Who are you talking to, anyway?” Claire calls up again. “Your dinner’s getting cold.”
He waits until he is seated at the table. The steam from a bowl of pea soup clouds his glasses. “She’s dead, Claire. I can’t get over the reality that she’s gone.”
DARLING, DON’T GET PUSHY.
The regal one was a sight. She had wrapped herself in a black-and-gold lamé caftan, punctuated by her tomato-red hair, her strands of amber and pearls and gold coins, fingers ringed with diamonds and rubies and emeralds, her small feet bunched up into silk pumps with three-inch heels. And all the time she sat, smug and queenly, and stared at her ghostwriter with a mix of suspicion and amusement.
“When was the last time you sang, Señora?”
“Just last week. A little of the Brahms ‘Lullaby’ for my neighbor’s granddaughter. Her name is Esther. She is ten months old but already quite discriminating. I sang very, very softly, so that only she could hear me.”
“In public, Señora. The last time you sang before an audience.”
“Darling, don’t get pushy.”
“It’s just that there are certain things your book must talk about. We can’t go on and on about trivia for five hundred pages. People will expect to get something of substance for their $29.95. Actual events in your career.”
“That story has been told a hundred times.”
“I haven’t heard it.”
“Every performance has been documented, reviewed, analyzed, praised, or lambasted in the world press. Get thee to a library.”
“We use the web now, Señora. But that’s not the point.”
“And what would the point be?”
“That this book is your own story. In your words.”
“We are talking in circles.”
“Only because you don’t want to go forward.”
“I do, Mark. It’s you who wants me to look at the past. Let’s talk about the future. I may not be up to a full production of Tosca, but even now I’m making plans for a series of recitals. I have contracts and proposals on my desk. They want me for master classes at Juilliard. The Japanese need me to inaugurate their new concert hall in Hokkaido. There is a recording of Catalan folk songs being planned.”
“Your first Tosca at La Scala. You were twenty-two.”
“I was so scared, my stomach kept churning. Imagine that, a Floria with belly rumblings. Are you going to put that in? I truly hope not. I’m telling you just for your understanding.”
“You were cheered.”
“I was hissed. I was replacing Callas of all people.”
“You won them over. From ‘Vissi d’arte,’ the hisses had turned to bravos.”
“It’s a grim play, isn’t it?”
“You sang it beautifully.”
“How would you know?”
“All the papers said so.”
“There. That proves my point. I don’t need to talk about all this. You can go to your computer and get the facts.”
“I need your words,” he insisted.
“Turn that thing off. And please, please go home now. I need to think.”
“Writing is not about thinking, Señora. If it gets thought but not written, it’s as if it never happened. The hired gun is the purest kind of writer; he places another’s head over his own, lets another’s heart beat within his chest.”
“You give yourself too much importance,” she said.
“But look,” Lockwood might say now, if Mercè Casals were still alive. “Read this sentence, this passage. It’s about you. It sounds like you. I am speaking in your voice.”
. . . ENDURING RICHES.
The Señora was anxious about how she and Lockwood would work. She wanted to set rules, limits, options. There would be confidences he would have to respect, words and thoughts that must be left out of the published version.
“Fair enough,” Lockwood said amiably. “And