Read Online Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 by A Likely Story (v1.1) - Free Book Online Page B

time he got drunk with John O’Hara, missed his train to Croton,
and had to take the 7:10.
                So Victoria Douglas is not the worst
possible disaster that could befall The Christmas Book\ she’s only the
second- worst.
                I have to do something. There’s
nothing to do. But I have to. I have to do something about this woman.
                 

          Monday, April 4th
     
                ANNIE phoned late this afternoon,
and said don’t worry. But then she said, “That’s bullshit, of course.” I have
been cursed with an honest agent.
                Last Thursday, after brooding about
Vickie Douglas for three days, I finally went to see Annie in her office. She
listened to my tale of woe, and shook her grizzled head and sighed a grizzled sigh, and said, “Well, Tom, it never comes easy.” (We were meeting
in the morning.)
                “I don’t ask it to come easy,” I
said. “I just ask it to come . ”
                “She has a good reputation, Vickie
Douglas,” Annie
                said .
                “Not with me.”
                “It was a first impression. Maybe
she’ll grow on you.” But immediately she pointed a gnarled finger at my nose:
“If you say, ‘Like fungus,’ I won’t represent you any more.”
                I had been deciding whether to say
“Like fungus.” I said, “If she grows on me, I’ll have her surgically removed.”
                “That’s not much better. More baroque, but not better.”
                “Annie, the woman spent two hours
talking about her mother. The only thing she said about the book was
that my celebrities were yesterday. The book bores her. I bore her.
Everything on God’s green Earth bores her except her goddam mother.”
                “She’s had her successes,” Annie
said doubtfully.
                “She doesn’t intend The Christmas
Book to be among them. ” .
                “Do you want someone else assigned?”
                “Oh, Christ,” I said. “Who? If I say I won’t work with that bitch, I’ll have a
reputation around the shop for being difficult and then nobody will be
on my side. Is Wilson on my side? Is there anybody over there who’s committed to this book?”
                “Well, Wilson did approve it.”
                “Why doesn’t he take it
over?”
                Annie smiled, shaking her head.
“Robert Wilson is an executive now,” she said. “He doesn’t have to work for a
living any more.”
                “My entire life is passing before my
eyes,” I said. “What does that mean?”
                “It means you’re self-centered.”
                “ I’m self-centered? What does
that make Vickie Douglas?”
                Annie sighed. “It is a problem,” she
acknowledged. “I’ll go along wdth you, it is a problem. I’ll have a quiet
conversation with Wilson , just see what he thinks of things.”
                “When?”
                “Well, this is the w r orst
possible time of year,” she said. “Worse than August. Tomorrow's Good Friday, so the Christians won’t be around, and the Jews are still contending with Passover.”
                “The rest of the year,” I said
bitterly, “they’re all atheists.”
                “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said.
“It’s hard to work in publishing without believing there must be a greater
Intelligence somewhere in the universe.”
                So it was agreed that Annie would
try to talk with Wilson on Monday, being today, and I went away to
hang on my own cross over Easter weekend.
                Actually, Easter is Passover,
plus additions, most of them pagan, starting with the name, which comes out