Small Town

And it had been the best sort of excitement, because the exhilaration of climbing higher and higher was not balanced by a fear of falling. Each bid brought another roll of the dice, but he wasn’t going double or nothing, he wasn’t risking anything. He was already a winner. The only question was the amount of his prize.

And wasn’t it remarkable how each increase raised the threshold of his own greed? Weeks ago, before any of this had happened, before he had ever heard Marilyn Fairchild’s name, he’d really wanted only two things — to finish his book, and to find someone willing to publish it. He’d want a five-figure advance, certainly, because he had to eat, he had to pay the rent, but he wouldn’t expect much, and it wouldn’t have taken much to make him content.

Once they started bidding, once the numbers started to climb, he kept wanting more. Two million? Someone actually wanted to pay him two million dollars? That’s amazing, that’s wonderful, that’s miraculous — now how about two point five? How about three?

When it was over, when Crown had topped St. Martin’s, when even that price turned out to be higher than he thought it would be, all the delight he felt could not entirely silence one small voice. A voice of disappointment, wishing it didn’t have to be over, wishing somehow it could have been more.

An eternal truth, he thought. The more you get, the more you want.

For the first time he felt that he understood how a man could have a billion dollars and want more, how an executive could take his hundred-million severance package and use it to bankroll a new company. The more they had, the more they wanted — not because of what they could do with it, but for the sheer joy of getting it.

He took off his jacket, hung it in the closet. He turned on his computer, thinking he’d check his e-mail, then changed his mind and shut it down again.

He’d keep this apartment. He wasn’t sure how much three million dollars was, but Roz’s commission would come out of that, and taxes, federal, state, and local. He’d probably net somewhere between one and two million dollars, and that would come in over a period of a couple of years, with most of it deferred until he delivered the two books, and some payable on publication. It was still a lot of money, no matter how they paid it and how much the government skimmed off the top, but it didn’t mean he could go out and buy himself a penthouse on Central Park South.

Even if he could, he’d still stay here. He liked it, it suited him. It was only one room, but it was room enough for him and his things.

Maybe he’d travel more. See a little of the world, or at least the parts of it that you could still go to. Take a house in Sag Harbor for a season, spend a winter in the Caribbean.

Take more cabs, he thought. Eat in nicer restaurants. Buy top-shelf booze. Speaking of which...

He put a couple of ice cubes in a glass, poured some whiskey over them. They’d had that bottle of champagne at Stelli’s, and afterward she had an Amaretto and he had an Armagnac, and liked it well enough to have a second. And then, when he’d finally gone outside with Roz and put her in a cab, a writer who’d come over to the table earlier followed him out to the street and insisted he come back for a quick one. The quick one had turned out to be three or four slow ones, taken at Stelli’s long bar with eight or ten of New York’s brightest people, and nobody talked about his deal or anybody else’s deal. They talked instead about the Yankees and the Mets and the mayor and the governor and the affair a talk show hostess was having with the husband of a CNN anchor and the shake-up in the Catholic church and the shake-up in the FBI and the shake-up at the Daily News and, well, just about everything.

And nobody made a fuss over him, thank God, but nobody ignored him, either, and they listened to what he had to say and laughed at his better lines and treated him, all in all, as if he belonged there. And that was as it should be, because, now, he did.

What an incredible evening.

He hadn’t really wanted to go. He wasn’t exactly surprised when Roz had suggested — no, better make that insisted on — a celebratory dinner. And there’d been no way to refuse, not after the job she’d done for him. But he’d figured it would be at best anticlimactic and at worst uncomfortable. He’d been feeling self-conscious going down to the corner for a pack of cigarettes, so how was he going to like being out in public? And at Stelli’s, yet.

What he’d discovered was another eternal truth, the day’s second, right up there with The more you get, the more you want.

And it was a beauty: Nothing succeeds like success.

Like everyone else on the planet, he’d heard the line a million times, and it had always struck him as a tautology. What the hell was it supposed to mean? Nothing succeeds like something that is successful. Well, sure. Who could argue with that?