Megabride
Although stung by / the flipness of her tone // the sharpness of her critique /// her metaphorical crudity, you murmur to yourself, over and over, like a mantra, her promise-laden image of “the final revelation.”
I
I sat aghast! That H.Q. Silver manuscript the boys at UC sent me knocked the struts right out from under me. I get a little famous and Bingo! the woodwork starts crawling with con artists. Soon I’ll be walking around with a lawyer in front of me and a bodyguard in back of me. And the letter that character sent me! That takes the cake. Accusing me of stealing from him!
Slushpile paranoia never went so far. I’d be damned if I was going to answer the clown. If I start responding to nut-letters, when will I get my novels written? The problem was that this particular clown was something special. His manuscript of “Double Duplicity” was almost exactly like one of my earliest drafts of “The Fourfold Singularity.” It had all the verbal excrescences, all the metaphorical dribble and the psychological drool, that I permit myself during the masturbatory stage of composition. As soon as I blue-pencil an early draft and retype the tighter result, I toss the initial indulgence into the round file. God forbid that in generations to come some twerp with a Ph.D. should dig up my drafts and write an incredibly boring work called The Creative Process of C.K. Pompas.
Worse yet, what if some such scholar were to pronounce “for literary reasons” that the drafts were better than the final, published versions? Such things have been known to happen. You can’t yell “Bullshit!” from the grave. And then there are the psychoanalysts who take what you are and reduce you to a porridge of Oedipal fantasies—look at Dostoyevsky!—after which no reader will touch you without wearing rubber gloves.
So I was pretty damned interested in knowing how this H.Q. Silver came up with a version of my story that was as close as I could remember to my actual first draft. Thank goodness no editor had been stupid enough to publish such crap. That was probably because he hadn’t yet tried the literary magazines. Why should he? H.Q. was obviously on the make for the big bucks, and if he couldn’t earn them himself he’d try to squeeze them out of the pros who did.
For me, though, the immediate point was How do I avoid a scandal? I was doing well enough on my own, with Megabride edging toward the bestseller lists, so who needed any negative publicity? Did it do Alex Haley any good? To get to the root of the matter I was prepared to spend a few bucks. Preventive medicine. One thing for sure—I couldn’t afford to ignore this troublemaking slime.
How could he have gotten hold of an early draft of mine? I wondered. Could I solve the mystery myself? Surely I’d written enough detective/horror fiction to work out a likely “plot” to explain what had happened.
Cherchez la femme! Now that’s a useful place to start. What if that bitch of an Ida had managed to get her claws on some of my scraps before “opting for her freedom,” as she put it? The possibility was rather remote. She despised my published work and I never showed her my work in progress. Besides, hadn’t she left the apartment definitively before I started work on “The Fourfold Singularity”? Anyway, Ida had bigger ideas than peddling Pompas papers to keep her in champagne. She was angling for a hefty settlement. Her eye was on the megabucks that soon would be coming out of Megabride. So I put a real detective on her tail, the best in the business. If Merkouros failed to catch her in flagrante, then either she was as pure as the driven snow, or Merkouros should go back to that ridiculous dimension that he bores you by telling you he’s from. Why a hotshot like Merkouros needs a psychological retreat, I couldn’t say. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t hack it in 3D, your ass is up a tree.
Could Ida, though, in her smart-ass, intellectually superior way, have dropped a hint in that last letter of hers that she was up to something? I hated the thought of looking at it again—it was like walking over hot coals just to skim through it the first time—but I reached behind me into the left-most of my bank of three file cabinets and pulled it out anyway. She had the unmitigated gall to suggest that I had put out a feeler to reconcile with her (wishful thinking on her part induced by the $mell of approaching be$t-$ellerdom), and in the very same breath she could turn around and beat me over the head for the very same success that had caused her to write to me in the first place! I reread that snot-nosed letter carefully, gritting my teeth at the sound of that voice always nagging me to do better, better, better, to climb the heights of Parnassus, to break out of my slick little niche (I had long been banished from hers, God knows) and shoot for the acclaim of posterity. If posterity could fork up a big enough advance, I’d write for it. I’d write for any audience that paid me.
