Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42 Read Online Free PDF Page A

“pretty” pictures, calendar art, so her work is stuck somewhere in
the middle: too knowing to be sentimental, too gentle to be striking.
                It used to bother me that she
couldn’t go anywhere without the cameras, because I knew she was just kidding
herself and wasting her time, but now that we’re apart she’s no longer my
problem, and I can see photography as merely Mary’s hobby. (If Mary herself
ever heard me use the word “hobby” in that context, she would take a gun and
shoot me. No fooling.)
                So, with pauses for Mary to take
pictures of interesting gutter-rubbish and amusing company names on truck
sides, we walked down into the Village and had cheeseburgers in a joint where
we could watch the trucks thunder down Seventh Avenue and I could have a bloody Mary. My Mary had coffee, and Jennifer had iced tea.
The waitress stared at her, stared at January outside the window, and said, “Iced tea?”
                “The cheeseburger’s hot,” Jennifer
pointed out. “And my father’s bloody Mary is cold.”
                By the time lunch was over and we’d
walked back up to 17th
Street Jennifer had
sufficiently rewritten history in her own mind as to believe she’d never
actually lost her cool through the whole experience. That belief was by now the
most important part of it for her, much more important than the lost
dollar-eighty or the capturing of the punks that did it. When, as we turned off Seventh Avenue , she said, “I figured, just so they didn’t panic, I was probably okay,” I knew the healing process was well under
way. What a terrific kid; tough and hip, like her old man.
                Mary invited me upstairs, but I said
I had things to do. Jennifer said, “Thanks for coming down.”
                “Hey,” I said, “what’s a father for?
Don’t answer that.” We kissed, and she said, “ You're okay.”
                “Here’s looking at you , kid.”
                Mary kissed my cheek and looked
deeply in my eyes and I came back uptown where Jack Rosenfarb’s voice greeted
me on the answering machine, saying, “Tom, please call me. Got your letter,
thought I had an exclusive on this. Give me a ring as soon as you can.” The
unsettled sound in his voice was music to my ears.
                So I gave him a ring and he said,
“Tom, you’re not putting me in a bid situation, are you?”
                “Of course not,” I said. There is
nothing I would love more than to have two heavyweight publishers bidding for
my idea, but since I can’t figure out how to arrange such a scenario I might as
well claim the high moral principle: “I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
                “Well, what’s with this ‘preliminary
discussion’?” He sounded actually aggrieved. “At lunch, you said I was the only
one you were talking to.”
                “That’s true,” I said. “It was true
last week, but you really didn’t sound that enthusiastic, Jack, not at lunch
and not on the phone Monday. You know, talking about my track record and all
that. And the time factor is—”
                “Tom, I was enthusiastic! But I had
to be sure the company would back me up. Tom, you don’t know what an editor has
to go through, they second-guess my judgment all the time, I could wind up with egg on my face, trouble with— Well. You don’t want to know
my problems,” he said accurately.
                “Jack,” I said, “I’m sorry if you
feel I’ve behaved in an underhanded way or anything like that. The instant I
spoke to another—”
                “You told me about it, I know that,
I know that. Just between you and me, who are you talking to?”
                If I were to answer Hubert Van
Driin , Jack might merely laugh and hang up, so I said, “I probably
shouldn’t say, Jack. I