Limitless

When I got off the phone I started making some notes on a possible shape for the series and within about two hours had come up with a proposal for ten titles, including a brief outline and a list of key illustrations for each one. But then – what was the next step going to be? I needed to be commissioned to do this. I couldn’t just work in a vacuum.

Mark’s attitude and lack of interest was still bugging me, so I decided to call up Meltzer and put the idea to him. I knew Mark and Artie didn’t get along too well and that Artie would be happy for an opportunity to lean on Mark, but as to whether Artie would actually go for the proposal itself or not was another question.

I got through to him straightaway and started talking. I don’t know where it all came from but by the end of the conversation I practically had Meltzer restructuring the whole company, with the twentieth-century series the centrepiece of its new spring list. He wanted to meet me for dinner, but he and his wife had been invited to the Hamptons for the weekend, and he couldn’t get out of that – his wife would kill him. He seemed agitated, though, unwilling to hang up, as if he felt this great opportunity was already beginning to slip out of his hands …

Next week, I said, we’ll meet next week.

I spent the rest of the day copywriting the telecommunications manual for Mark and expanding on the notes for Artie – without seeing any contradiction in this, without giving any thought to the fact that perhaps, just maybe, by my actions, I might have endangered Mark Sutton’s job.

In terms of the MDT hit itself, though – on that Thursday and Friday – there was nothing markedly different about it, no particular pleasure thing going on, but there was – as before – what I can only describe as this unrelenting fucking surge of having to be busy. There was nothing for me to do in the apartment, because all of that had been done – unless of course I wanted to redecorate the place, change the furniture, paint the walls, tear up the old floorboards, which I didn’t – so I had no choice but to channel all of my energy into the copywriting and notes. And you must bear in mind what that kind of work normally involves. It might, for instance, involve watching Oprah, or sitting idly on the couch with a magazine, or even being in bed, asleep. Work did get done, eventually, but not in any way that you’d notice if you were only around for a day or two, observing.

I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.m., and lay in bed for about an hour before I finally surrendered and got up. I put on a pot of coffee and took a dose of MDT – which meant that by 5 a.m. I was back in full gear, but with nothing concrete to do. Nevertheless, I managed to stay in all day and occupy myself. I pored over the Italian grammar books I’d bought but never studied when I lived in Bologna. I’d picked up enough Italian to get by on, and even enough to get away with doing simple translations, but I’d never studied the language in any formal way. Most Italians I’d known wanted to practise their English, so it had always been easy to skate along with minimal skills. But I now spent a few hours picking through the tense system, as well as other key grammatical stuff – the subjunctive, comparatives, pronouns, reflexives – and the curious thing was, I recognized it all, realized I knew these things, found myself continually going Yeah, of course, that’s what that is.

I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I scanned the snippets about local politicians and fashion designers and soccer managers, and went through a lengthy article on Viagra, I could feel whole glaciers of passive vocabulary shifting loose and floating up to the forefront of my conscious mind. After that, I took down a copy of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi that I’d bought with the best of intentions but had never tackled, never even opened. I wouldn’t have had a hope of understanding it in any case, much like an elementary student of English trying to read Bleak House, but I started into it regardless, and was soon surprised to find myself enjoying its remarkably vivid reconstruction of early seventeenth-century life in Lombardy. In fact, when I put the book down after about 200 pages, I barely noticed at all that I’d been reading in a foreign language. And the reason I stopped wasn’t because I’d lost interest, but because I was continually being distracted by the notion that my spoken Italian might now be on a par with this – with my new level of reading comprehension.