“Give me more,” she says.
“More?” I say. My voice breaks a little, a whine. “But I don’t have more. I’ve given you what I’ve given you. It’s all I’ve got.”
“I need more,” she says. “Fifty thousand. Fifty thousand is the bare minimum. If you don’t have fifty thousand you don’t have anything at all.”
“Nothing?” I say.
My publisher shakes her head. “Nothing. No book.”
I jam my hands into my pockets and poke around. I’ve got some lint in there, a quarter and some pennies, my car keys, my wallet with my driver’s license and a couple of credit cards, a screw that I’d found lying on my son’s bookshelf. What had a screw been doing on his bookshelf? I don’t know. But he’s one year old and I thought I’d better put it in my pocket before he found it and put it in his mouth.
What I don’t have is more words.
No conjunctions, no prepositions. Not even a common noun, cow. I certainly don’t have any good words. Not a limpid, for example. My favorite word because it sounds so dirty, the opposite of what it means.
Not, of course, that I expected to find words in my pockets anyway. I’m not an idiot. Not really. But it’s not like I have all these extra words in my head.
The waitress comes back with our check. My publisher signs for our coffee and omelettes. She sighs. “Look,” she says. “Give me forty-five thousand. That’s only five thousand more than you’ve already got.”
But the words I already have, those forty thousand? Aren’t they good words? Good enough? I mean I think they’re okay. I chose them carefully, thought about them kind of hard, and put them into a deliberate order. I bet if you read them they’d do something to you. Make you feel something. Maybe you’d laugh a little or feel sort of sad. I bet you’d feel something at least half a dozen times. And six feelings from forty thousand words is actually pretty good alchemy. Ask anyone else who writes.
Not that anyone understands this. It’s not just my publisher. My sister’s like that too. She wants me to write something to say at her wedding, a speech. “I don’t know about what,” she says from Ohio on the phone to me here in California. “Something about love,” she says. “How hard can it be? You’re a writer. You’re good with words.”
I’m not that good with words, actually. My son has two words, maybe two and a half. He’s got mama and papa and sometimes it sounds like he’s saying hi. He’s way better with his words than I am with mine. Each time he uses his words he makes me feel something. One hundred percent of the time.
“Tell me something about love,” I say when it’s just the two of us. My wife’s at yoga and the dog is napping and we’ve played with all his toys and I don’t want to turn on Sesame Street.
He says, “Mama.”
“That’s good,” I say. “Wow you nailed it. Now tell me something else. Something funny, something that makes you laugh.”
He says, “Papa.”
I tickle him and kiss his head.
“Great,” I say. “Now tell me what you want. What do you want more than anything in the world? Sky’s the limit. Name it and it’s yours.”
He lifts his arms up for me to hold him.
He says, “Hi.”