“What
are you doing here?” I asked.
It was
a fair question. Necessary even, under the circumstances, as she had
appeared unbidden and unannounced and dressed in such a way as seemed
calculated to land me in hot water. I'm not talking about a short
skirt or low-cut blouse either. She was full-on exotic dancer
provocative in thigh-high leather boots and a thong—too much
make-up, too little fabric, and jewelry in places that would have
been uncomfortable had she made even the slightest attempt at modesty
by covering them up.
“Paul
asked me to stop by,” she said, as if that explained everything.
Now,
Paul is a man of the cloth—a born-again evangelical preacher of the
fire and brimstone variety. Paul has a take-no-prisoners approach to
the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and his sermons often leave the
blue haired ladies who sit in the front pews nodding their heads in
judgment while the rest of the congregation squirm in their seats as
their spiritual failings are recounted from the pulpit. Paul is not
the kind of man who would casually ask a stripper to “stop by,”
let alone to stop by wearing one of the costumes of her profession.
Paul
has his secrets to be sure—as do we all—dark thoughts and
unseemly proclivities and occasional passions that would chill the
bones of his associates if ever they were exposed. I know all of
Paul's secrets, or at least I thought I did, because I created them.
I gave them to him along with his sculpted hair, graying just so at
the temples, his twelve hundred dollar suits, his bottled tan, and
his honey timbered baritone voice. I gave Paul everything he has and
made him everything he is and settled him down to stir the currents
and confound the aspirations of the other characters in my next book.
Paul is a character in a work of fiction, my work of fiction. He is
not supposed to be making life choices I don't know about. He is not
supposed to be changing up the mix and adding new actors into my
narrative. He's not. He knows this . . . or should.
“What's
your name?” I ask.
“Elise.”
“Don't
you think you're a little . . . I don't know . . . tawdry for a visit
to a parsonage?”
“We're
not in a parsonage, silly. We're in your office—the same office
where you wrote your last book. What was it called? Speedster? You
know, the one that was full of strippers and kinky sex and ridiculous
cars and enough dead bodies to fill a good sized morgue. I really
don't think I'm too tawdry for the room that spawned that hot mess,
do you?”
“I
suppose not, Elise, but this is a different book. I like to think
I've got range as a writer. I want to demonstrate that range by
writing books that are different from the ones I've already written.
I don't want to feature exotic dancers in every book I write just
because I did it once.”
“Um,
who's the most successful author you know?”
“Well,
I don't actually know her, but that would be J.K. Rowling.”
“And
you think she showed a lot of range, as you call it?”
“Well
yeah, I do.”
“Jonah.
sweetie, she wrote the same book seven times. Same characters. Same
plot. Same audience. Same themes. Voldemort concocts some scheme to
get rid of Harry Potter. Potter goes out of his way to avoid
confrontation so he can wallow in adolescent angst and increasingly
hormonal pursuits. Dumbledore steps in to teach Potter a lesson about
destiny and perseverance. In the end, Potter triumphs over evil,
usually by accident. Somewhere in the middle there's a quidditch
match.”
“So
you don't think she's a good writer?”
“She's
brilliant. What I'm saying is you don't have to run a different race
every time you break out of the gate. You can be a good writer, and
successful too, writing the same stuff over and over and over. Once
you've found your audience, they're not going to get tired of your
schtick. That's what made Harry Potter popular. That's why there are
about a million girls my age writing vampire romance and a million
women of a certain age writing dirty stories about forbidden love.
People want the same thing over and over, and all you've got to do is
change the names to keep them engaged.”
“I'm
not buying it. You can't reduce literature to some repeatable
formula. It's all about bending rules and pushing boundaries.”
“So
now you're trying to tell me that Speedster was literature? Please!”
“No.
No. Of course not. I wanted to write something commercial. I felt
like I needed to make some money so I could afford the luxury of
writing something good.”
“And
how did that work out for you?”
It was
a revelation to learn at this point just how well a naked girl can do
smug. Her smile was textbook. She was right of course. I've sold
maybe 40 copies of Speedster in the four months since I published
it—not exactly keeping my muse in champagne and silks.
“Not
as well as I would have liked,” I admitted.
“So
you need to write at least one more commercial book, don't you? And
if that one doesn't succeed, you'll need to write another, and another, and so on until you can finally afford to be an artist. Tell me I'm
wrong.”
“You
know I can't do that, else you wouldn't even be here.”
“But
I'm not here for you. I'm here for Paul.”
“That
again? I may have allowed Paul a certain amount of freedom within the
book, but he can't dictate new characters and sub-plots to me. It's
just not done.”
“You'll
have to take that up with Paul.”
“Paul?
I'm the author here. You may be able to show up in my office, but you
don't get into the book unless I write you in. It's as simple as
that.”
Elise
was trying to look thoughtful or distracted as I said this. I
couldn't tell which. She probably would have adjusted an article of
clothing if she'd been wearing any. As it was, she just stared at her
fingernails like she was trying to decide if she needed a manicure.
“I
think you know it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that,”
she said at last. “If you don't write me in, Paul's not going to
show up. I'm a condition of his continued participation.”
“What
is this, some kind of work action?” I asked. “A character in my
book, a character who is wholly my invention, is going to strike if I
don't accede to his demand? And his demand is that I provide him with
a stripper? Really, this is too much.”
“Yeah,
well, at the risk of sounding flippant, you made him the way he is so
it's really on you, isn't it?”
And
so it is.
“It
seems you and Paul have me over a barrel,” I said.
“I
know,” she said, batting her eyelids to emphasize the irony. “So
you're going to write me in?”
“Sure,
but we both understand you're a product of my imagination, right?”
She
hesitated. Something like worry creased her forehead.
“Um,
yeah?”
“Then
I'm
afraid I'm going to have to give you breast implants.”
