Five Years

Five years Chuck and I worked together, and then came the day I was promoted, this time to a position of semiresponsibility. No longer could I say what I loved and what I didn’t. No longer could I work on something handed to me, or the occasional thing they let me buy. From now on I’d have to back up my taste with sales figures—I’d have to go to meetings and sales conferences. I’d have to admit that publishing was a business, not just a lot of laughter and excitement and fun. I would have to be cautious, and caution was never my strong suit. There I was, clinging for dear life to the bottom rung of the ladder and they were prying my fingers loose.

I found myself in a reflective mood. Goodness, I hadn’t read a book for pleasure in years. I missed it! How I missed it! The very act of reading had become not unlike the experience of having somebody’s brights in your rearview mirror all the time. I decided maybe I’d like to go to school and become a social worker, or a nurse, or a teacher, or a massage therapist, or . . . it was vague, but the upshot was I was going to beat it.

“How can you leave me here?” Chuck asked, but he was fine. He already knew everything I would never learn about the business end of things. I didn’t think of it as leaving him. We were best friends.

But we weren’t in each other’s pockets anymore. What had been effortless now took some doing. I was one hundred blocks uptown. We had seldom gotten together outside of work. I realized friendship required attention, like a houseplant. We talked on the telephone. We kept it going. And after weeks went by, when we returned to each other, the friendship was always there.

I spent the next six months working for a college counselor in a school for rich people’s children. I found myself asking them, all these young men and women who wanted to be lawyers and plastic surgeons, if any of them didn’t want to drop out of school and join a rock ’n’ roll band. Maybe start a little family? Their faces were blank.

Then an agent called Chuck for a recommendation. She was looking for someone to help with the reading, and he suggested me. The agent was someone I knew and liked and respected. I leapt at her offer. Yes, I said, yes, yes, yes.

A few years later I convinced Chuck that he should be an agent too. He came, after some discussion, and we were together again.

When the real agent went away for the summer, Chuck and I were left in charge of the office. We noticed after a day or two that the phone had stopped ringing. In fact the phone never rang from one day to the next unless it was our boss, checking in.

“Maybe this is what’s called ‘going out of business,’ ” Chuck said, and we laughed heartily.

We sat around inventing things. We invented desk ornaments like the little trolls some people had, only ours would be action figures incapable of action. “Inaction figures!” There would be Torpor and Languor and our favorite, Stupor. Our fortunes would be made! We even had one in honor of Stephen King called Bangor. It was a brilliant idea. But how to put them into production? Here we were stumped.

Then the real agent came back and the phone picked up again.