Small Town

But that wasn’t what it meant at all. It was success itself, the fact of success, that gave rise to further success. The first cause of the initial success — the accomplishment, the lucky break, whatever it was — didn’t have anything much to do with it. If you were a success, the world threw laurels at your feet, your reward for... for what? For being a success, dimwit. What else?

Roger Delacroix, the Roger Delacroix, had made a point of coming to his table to shake his hand and congratulate him. He couldn’t really say he read Delacroix, but by God he respected the man’s work. (And there were other writers he didn’t respect, didn’t think much of at all, whose books he bought and read as soon as they came out.) Delacroix’s act tonight had been generous and selfless, but it was his seven-figure deal that had brought the man to his table. His success had drawn Delacroix and the others, and had fattened on their attention.

He carried his drink over to the window, looked out at the city. There were no lights burning in the building directly across the street, and only one, on the top floor, in the building to its immediate left. A bald man in a suit walked the careful walk of the man who does not want anyone to know he’s drunk. A woman walked her dog, an Irish wolfhound, an enormous galumphing creature. He recognized the woman, but wondered if he’d do so if she hadn’t had the dog with her.

The air seemed clearer than usual, his vision sharper.

Nothing succeeds like success. He’d finish the book, buoyed by the success it had already enjoyed. That would sweep the anxiety and self-doubt from his path, and he’d write it and polish it and turn it in, and Esther would love it because she’d come to it eager to love it. And the sales force, charged up in advance at the knowledge that they’d have this eminently promotable, eminently saleable book to push, would read it with great enthusiasm and make sure all their accounts loaded up on it. That would guarantee the stores had big piles of the books, and the publisher’s advertising dollars would further guarantee that the piles wound up on the front table at Borders and the front octagon at Barnes & Noble, so that you couldn’t walk in the door without it smacking you right in the face.

And so on.

The critics might like the book or they might not. But either way they’d give it more space than they’d ever given his previous work, and take it more seriously, and express their enthusiasm or distaste more fervently. It was the length and placement of a review, that and the heat it generated, that impacted sales far more than whether the critic did or didn’t like what was between the covers.

And the public would run out and buy it. In the chains, in the independents, from the online booksellers, they’d buy the book as enthusiastically as if Oprah had told them they had to. Enough of them would buy it to get it on the bestseller list, and then tons more of them would buy it simply because it was on the list, and — ready now?

Nothing succeeds like success.

And here was the capper, here was the one thing that made it all just perfect. All of this success, this wild hitherto-undreamt-of success, was on its way to him notwithstanding that no one, repeat no one, not his agent or his publisher or any of the wonderful fellows who’d been in such a hurry to shake his hand, no one on the fucking planet had read one fucking word of the book.

He’d been working away at it every day, and it was coming along just fine, thank you. Some days were diamonds and some days were stones, as John Denver used to sing, and there was a guy who had it all until his plane crashed, which showed that even success had its limits. And yes, some days were diamonds and some days were stones and some days were little better than mouse turds, but each day the book got a little bit longer, and it was going to be a good one. He knew that, and he’d told Roz, but nobody else knew a thing about it except for the fact that he was working on it.

So it wasn’t the book. That’s what the publisher would sell and that’s what the readers would buy, but that’s not what the success was about. They weren’t paying him three point one oh five because of what was in his computer. They were paying because of what was on his rap sheet. The whole reason, the sole reason for his success was that everybody was dead certain he’d strangled a woman.

Figure that one out. Go on, fucking figure it out.

He drank his drink.

And suppose they found him guilty?

That wasn’t something he wanted to think about. He was able to get up every morning and sit down at the computer and get work done because he was able to put the whole matter out of his mind. Denial, he figured, was given to man for a purpose. You were crazy if you didn’t make use of it.