Small Town

Right now it was exciting. He couldn’t work on the book, not even on polishing what he’d written. As edgy as he felt right now, he’d wind up changing things for the worse.

He stood up, paced the floor, went over to the shelf with his books, and took down a copy of Edged Weapons. He read the front matter — the dedication, the acknowledgments, and an epigraph quote from “The Death of the Hired Man,” by Robert Frost. He’d paid something like a hundred dollars for permission to use it — authors had to pay for permissions themselves, he’d been chagrined to learn — and, reading it now, he wondered why he’d spent the money. He loved the poem, he’d reread the whole thing not that long ago, but the lines he’d quoted didn’t seem to him to have much to do with his stories.

Maybe he’d just wanted Robert Frost’s name in a book of his, and maybe it was worth a hundred bucks to make it happen.

“John? How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I was just reading my favorite author.”

“John O’Hara, if I remember correctly.”

He laughed out loud. “Well, you’re right,” he said, “but I was reading a guy named Blair Creighton.”

“Ah, my favorite author. But not Simon & Schuster’s, I’m afraid. They decided to pass.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not surprised. Claire was hot to trot, but she didn’t get the support she wanted upstairs. Don’t be disappointed.”

“Okay.”

“Because I called Geoffrey at Little, Brown, and he didn’t have to go into a huddle, he knew what he was going to bid. You want to hear?”

“Do I want to hear? No, why on earth would I want to hear?”

“Two million dollars. John? Are you sitting down?”

“I am now.”

“That’s why I wanted to call him last, I figured he’d jump. My guess, that’s as high as we’re going, unless Esther exercises her topping privileges. Are you okay? You’re not saying anything.”

“I’m speechless.”

“You have a right to be. My next call’s to Putnam, but everybody’ll be at lunch now.”

“Is it lunchtime already?”

“It’s almost one o’clock. Make yourself a sandwich. Or pick up the phone and order something.”

“I don’t think I can eat.”

“Ha! Neither can I. If you go out—”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Well, if you do, be back by two-thirty, okay? And keep the line open.”

The acknowledgments page of Edged Weapons thanked the magazines in which each of the stories had previously appeared. He couldn’t remember what each had paid him, but one $5,000 sale to Playboy accounted for well over half the total. (They’d never bought another, and the one they took wasn’t particularly sexy or, he thought, especially strong. He guessed the editor had just liked it.)

He’d received a $5,000 advance for the collection, and it had earned that and a few thousand dollars more, between the hardcover and trade paperback editions. And there’d been some foreign sales, and every once in a blue moon someone would reprint one of the stories in an anthology, and he’d get a check for one or two hundred dollars.

Of course he got some reviews, he drew some attention. One of the stories, about a young man concerned about his sexual identity, drew several fan letters, all of them from young men with similar concerns. He hadn’t written back, or kept the letters, but he’d been glad to receive them.

“Putnam just weighed in with two point two.”

“No kidding.”

“They surprised me. I thought Geoffrey’s bump would knock Gloria out of the game. It’s not horse races or bridge anymore, did you notice? All of a sudden it’s poker.”

“And now it’s up to...”

“St. Martin’s. They’ll have to think about this one. Last thing they knew they were looking good at one point three, and that was a whole nine hundred thousand dollars ago.”

When he got to the contents page he remembered how he’d agonized over it, arranging and rearranging the stories, trying to put them in the perfect order. He’d first considered arranging them chronologically, but in the order they were written or the order they were published? Then it struck him that no one cared about the chronology, that there should be a flow to the collection. He’d shuffled the poor stories like a deck of cards, and couldn’t remember why he’d settled on the final lineup.

If he had it to do over again, he’d put them in alphabetical order. It was clear-cut, it was wonderfully arbitrary, and how could you argue with it?

That would have put “A Nice Place to Stop” first, if you counted the A, and a title like that on the book’s leadoff story was sort of a setup for the critics. Creighton’s first story is called “A Nice Place to Stop,” and believe me, you’ll be glad you did...

Of course it was the story he wanted to read, but he’d avoided doing so ever since he started work on the book, and didn’t want to change things now. He read the one Playboy liked, and followed it with the only story in the book that hadn’t managed to have a magazine appearance. Maybe it was the contrarian in him, but he liked the unpublished one better.

“Two point four.”