‘Did it make a difference?’
‘Well, the couple of times I suggested anything you went in the opposite direction.’
‘You probably stopped me goofing off all the time.’
‘There’s that last sentence, for example. Look at it.’ He had just given me a copy of Make Me.
The book itself, the hardcover, freshly minted, was a thing of beauty. Glossy. Acidfree paper. Real cuts in the cover. I was a bit choked up, to be honest. He had inscribed it, ‘Andy, thanks for a fun year.’
Obviously I was going to have to be cooler and more objective and more detached than ever if this stood any chance of coming out right, whatever this was. I flipped to the last page. ‘It’s sixtyseven words long! I’d been concentrating on the four-worders. So I’m guessing you did that deliberately, just to show you could do Proust if you felt like it.’
‘It felt right, at the time. Wanted to end with a flourish.’
‘Needle. Final word. My first thought was: something sadistic.
But there are all sorts of positive connotations. It has a point. Old record player. Sewing – I think Georges Perec’s old crew, Oulipo, were into that – the ‘Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle’. And then, a camel through the eye of. Rich man? Miracle? Transcendence?’
‘It’s one fucking word.’
‘It’s polysemic.’
‘It’s a wonder you didn’t completely screw me up, now I think of it.’
It was Labor Day and he was doing a breakfast TV show. Good slot. Great snacks and inexplicably beautiful women hanging about. But there was one other temptation on his mind. He was concerned lest, like some reality TV star, driven to madness and verbal diarrhoea by the camera lens, he might blurt out, accidentally, under interrogation, half the secrets of the book, in one spontaneous ill-thought-through sentence. He was working out how not to give it all away. ‘I’m thinking I ought to concentrate on the beginning. That should be safe enough.’
‘Famous last words,’ I said. Safe enough, straight out of the mouth of the bad guys in Make Me, signifying typical overconfidence …
‘Reacher is attempting to not get involved. That is the crux of it. Keep out of it. Spectator. Detached observer. But then there is a woman at the train station. Keeps looking out for a guy on the train. Who isn’t there. How could he not get involved?’
‘And then Mother’s Rest. Nowheresville. Hick town of all time. Nothing happens there, obviously.’
‘It’s the set-up. That’s what I need to focus on.’
‘You know one thing you’re good at.’
‘What?’
‘I’ve only ever known two people who were good at this. The other one was …’ I mentioned the name of a former Provost of King’s College, Cambridge. ‘He was a bastard, of course, dead now, but he had this skill. You’ve got it. Of taking dumb questions and kind of reconstructing them in some way so that the answer comes out interesting and the guy asking the question thinks that was a pretty clever question in the first place.’
He said nothing. Grinned.
‘And you’re pretty quick. Remember that idiot question when that woman was asking you about the time – you were only seventeen – when you were auditioning strippers. Incredible.’
‘Oh yeah,’ he recalled. ‘Were you a breast man or a butt man? That one?’
‘“I liked the one with snakes!” Come on, that was genius, the old Provost of King’s would never have thought of that.’
I guess it was thinking about Cambridge that made me mention how terrible I used to be at interviews. ‘I managed to combine terror and arrogance,’ I said. ‘I’m not recommending it. Until I discovered the trick.’
‘Which was?’
I showed him. It’s not very complicated. I sat there with my hands on my knees for once. Not something I did very often with Lee. I happened to be sitting in one of his armchairs at the time, which made it easier. ‘Look, if I lean forwards, it’s “Oh my god, maniac! Too keen, he wants it too much, he’ll be unbearable.” If I lean back,’ I leaned back, ‘it’s more, “Lazy bastard! he’ll never do any work.” But hands-on-knees … aha! a man of learning and moderation, so so reasonable, he’ll do …’
‘It’s all about the body-language,’ Lee said. He showed me his trick. He always used it in television interviews. ‘This is how I normally come across.’ He sprawled all over the couch. He was already sprawling, but he somehow seemed to sprawl a little more, like the ever-expanding favela around some Brazilian city. ‘This is how I fix it.’ He sat up some more. ‘Well, I can’t at the moment. But if I had a jacket on, I could. I actually sit on the tail of my jacket.’
‘Isn’t that a bit awkward?’
‘Serves two purposes. First, it stops the collar of your jacket riding up around your neck. The village idiot look. Secondly, it keeps me reasonably upright. It’s like having a leash on. But I still like to lean forwards a bit. Makes you look engaged, you know, interested in whatever pisspoor comments the interviewer is coming out with.’
Of course, it all depended on wearing a jacket in the first place. September in New York – strictly shirt-sleeves most of the time. But TV studios were over-air-conditioned anyway, so a jacket was fine. He had this Brooks Brothers charcoal two-button he pulled out regularly for the purpose. And he was really into what he called ‘forward movement’.
‘You’re just sitting there. You’ve got to have forward movement. You’ve got to have something going on. Of course,’ he said, reflectively (I sometimes forget – he used to be in television), ‘it’s possible to overdo it. Look at all these BBC guys. They’ve obviously received a memo.’
We had been talking about how the baristas in Starbucks tend to overdo the ‘Have a great day!’ I had estimated that one young woman serving had been saying it at least once a minute all the time I was there. She had received a memo (and she kept it up with the same even-handed enthusiasm too; it was impressive).
‘You stick them in front of the Houses of Parliament or the latest terrorist outrage and watch their hands. They’re all doing it.’ He came out with lots of different very plausible hand movements that instantly put me in mind of a BBC presenter. He was a great mimic. ‘It’s like watching the Karate Kid. It’s supposed to draw you in, humanize the talking head. Comes out like some kind of nervous disorder. Utterly ridiculous. I don’t want to do that.’
I wanted to know if he’d ever thrown a fit and stormed off the set. ‘It’s always so embarrassing when they forget to take off the microphone,’ he said, impersonating someone trying to storm off and then getting dragged back by a wire around his neck. Almost strangled. The closest he’d ever come to it was at the Cheltenham Literary Festival one year. Ian McEwan had one of his novels coming out on the same day and the BBC tried to set it up as a class struggle between the bourgeoisie (McEwan) and the proletariat (Child). A showdown, an agon. They were trying to wind him up. ‘I was fairly categorical and blunt. You know, forceful, verging on aggro. But it’s a win-win for me. I can’t lose if I answer like Reacher. They expect that, it’s what they want.’
‘They would love it if you head-butted someone.’
‘It’s got to happen one of these days.’
‘Yeah, the Provost of King’s was a bit like that too. Attack-dog.’
‘You know the new Erica Jong is coming out on the same day?’
He had always had a soft spot for Erica Jong. Had quoted her phrase about the ‘zipless fuck’ from time to time.