(Sisyphus)

A year ago, in the early evening, Carla Solomon fell outside the New York Society Library on 79^th Street. A man and a young woman stopped to help her, one bending over her, the other gathering the library books she had spewed all over the sidewalk. The woman was looking at the titles as she picked them up, which annoyed Carla more than it should have.

“Are you all right?” both of them said.

Of course, she had taken out too many books as she always did. Even after a long day in her carrel upstairs in the stacks, riding the tiny lurching death elevator between floors, greeting and hating her fellow writers as they came and went and bent over their sad dry lunches, she could not let go. She felt compelled to bring home books for more, ever more.

With history, writing it and living it, there was never an end. Or rather, there were hundreds of dangling ends to investigate and each of them led her further into tangles. She was her subject’s detective solving all its crimes, peeping, parsing, spying, finding yet another source and going back over things until she could hear her characters of two hundred years ago speak, until her back cracked and her legs were wobbly. No wonder she had fallen.

“Just a little scraped,” she told them, looking down at her palm which was scored and bleeding lightly. “I’m fine, really thank you,” and they both began stacking her cradling arms.

“I see you are studying French history…”the woman said.

Immediately Carla was afraid, though the woman did not look at all the scholarly type. Still she was protective of her subject as she had been of her previous books and, long before that, her thesis. Her current topic was hers, it was original. She had given it years of her life and probably a disc or two of her back. Until it was published and she was free, NO ONE COULD KNOW.

“Thank you both so much, I’m fine.” Never engage, never engage. It was irrational she knew. They offered to get her a taxi but she trudged on east to her apartment, bent over the books like an ancient hod carrier with his prickly bundle.

It was times like this that she thought of her mother’s friend, the noble historian Barbara Tuchman. She had worked in the Society Library, maybe even in the carrel next to Carla’s. Somehow, Carla knew that Mrs. Tuchman, born into the important Wertheim family, did not carry home books at night.

When she was a girl she used to have dinner at the Tuchman house in Cos Cob, Connecticut with the Tuchman daughters. She could tell you something you didn’t know about Barbara Tuchman—her husband, Dr. Lester Tuchman, ate the cob of the corn and Carla always giggled when he did.

Carla Solomon remembered the date of her fall because Tracy Wilson, her agent, called when she got home and this was a rare occurrence.

“I sent it out to Andrew Sharp. He’s going to give it a quick read over the weekend. He’s already quite enthusiastic.”

“I thought we were going to wait until I checked a few things…”

“Carla, you are finished. It is ready. It has been…

“Eight years,”

“Carpe diem,” this was one of Tracy’s useful expressions. It was a typical call. Tracy Wilson never talked for more than three minutes. She had never taken Carla to lunch at Michael’s, trotting her through the room like a handler at Westminster leading her top dog, dolloping out the treats with each introduction. Never, not even when her Russian edition was a best seller and she was big in Estonia. Carla felt Tracy Wilson did not believe in her, had never believed in her, had never liked her writing, at least not enough.

And yet her call made Carla very happy. Carla had hopes for this one and so did Tracy. Her book had gone out to the top editor at the top house. True, her dog had once, long ago, bitten Andrew Sharp on the nose and they had gone to the emergency room together but–to use another of Tracy’s expressions–that was then and this is now. She was full of hope as she ran her bleeding palm under the faucet and poured an enormous Famous Grouse.

For a few minutes, she dared to imagine success, a book that would be widely read, a By the Book page in the Sunday Times book review quizzing her tastes.

What are the books on your night stand? Carla did not have a night stand nor did she read before bed. She watched dumb TV or TCM. She read around three in the morning and her tastes were distinctly low. The writers The Times profiled always had something esoteric to hand. Or they had something safe, books by writers dead a few centuries or by their friends, books so obscure no one knew them. She had a feeling some of them were invented. What was the last book that made you cry? That was easy, her own, her current work, that made her cry and drink. That was also the last book that made you furious. These writers all lied. She did not believe a single thing on that page. Ever.

For three weeks she heard nothing.

“Andrew said it would have been much better as non-fiction. I told you that a long time ago, Carla.”

“I can’t believe you are saying this again, now. It is non-fiction, however it’s labeled or else what did eight years of research mean? Everything in it is completely historically accurate. Anyhow, the parts I like best like are fiction. It’s called what I wrote, the way they speak, the way the air is…

“Speaking of which, I always told you too much weather. Weather is over. I’m sending it to Sybil Litauer at Tantalus next. She likes your work.”

After the weekend, Sybil Litauer, obviously a quick reader of dense historical fiction, wrote “As much as I admire Carla’s elegant writing…”

“It’s going to Drew Hult at Cerberus. You must stay calm…”

“Maybe it’s better if I don’t read what they say…even if I always did before.”

“So, ultimately, it has to be a pass” Drew Hult wrote after two weeks “There’s a book here but…”

“’The more you hurt, the better the song,’ as Loretta Lynn says,” Tracy told Carla.

“Are you talking about the next book? I don’t think there will be another one.”

Quickly, Tracy outlined her plans to continue to dole out the book to one publisher at a time and wait for each to answer. She felt Carla should read all the responses. She hung up as quickly as she could.

Carla Solomon had inherited a little beach apartment on a Florida island. That night, she booked her ticket and the next afternoon she was out on the sand in her flipflops.

She walked north on the beach to where John Grisham had built two houses. Not for the first time she thought of tossing her manuscript over his gate: Her familiar rescue fantasy was that he, though no historian, loved it and wanted to give her a selling blurb. She looked up his steps to the quiet gray house and the side house where he sat inside writing and succeeding, being widely read, amply paid and loved, if not quite revered in historical circles.

“Please, please,” she said to the sun and the waves, gray that morning. “I am so tired.” Right then, Amy Blake of Midas, might have been at her screen, scrolling through the book, smiling, making notes.

She remembered her old publisher and how it used to be before books were sent out by email, when there were horizontal and vertical stacks of manuscripts in shelves in the halls, whole corridors of manuscript boxes, such a comforting messiness. She had glimpses into the offices as she passed by—the precarious towers of paper piled on desks, on chairs and tables. Paper, not screens.

Carla, who sort of believed that cell phones caused brain cancer, had told Tracy to call her neighbor and friend Mike if there was news. He would know where to find her. He would go out on his terrace and wave. Every day she walked, chewing a few Tums, looking up at John Grisham’s gray house spiked with lightening rods and, as she walked back, scanning her building for Mike on the terrace, his arm arcing through humid air that shimmered like the haze over a desert caravanserai….(Tracy said her similes were weak.). She knew exactly how Mike would be smiling and pumping his fist. Every day she looked up, squinting hard in the diminishing glare and no one was ever there.

Carla Solomon knew then that the process would never end, that, like the waves, this book would go out and keep coming back forever. She would be condemned to read each email until there was nothing left of her and her book drifted into the untrustworthy ether of cyberspace or the bottom of a drawer and yet, helpless, she would begin again because writing was what she did.

Outside, on her terrace, she sat and bounced on a long plank of yellow pine painted the almost black of Charleston green.

Years ago, when she was a journalist, she had visited Mickey Spillane in Murrells Inlet and he had shown her his joggling board and told her where to order one. In those days, before history took her over, she had lived easily with her young success.

Carla bounced gently on the pliable board and remembered the kindness of Mickey Spillane. She saw him at the airport, a small chunky man, full of religion, waiting for her. She saw him in the southern cafeteria, treated as another misplaced old guy carrying a tray. She saw him in his house, in his writing studio with all his foreign editions on the shelves. She sat together with him on the porch by the water, the long board bending with their weight. He gave her two of his comic books and she forgot to have him sign them. As she left, she heard Mickey Spillane in his studio typing on his old machine, the same machine, ever renewed.

All right, she would start again, rewrite, maybe another whole draft.

Up and down, her bare feet touching the warm concrete, up and down, joggling, listening to the waves reminding her to continue. Yes, Carla, they love you in Russia, and still, Carla, you’re big in Estonia.

(Sisyphus, in Hades, is condemned to roll a boulder to the top of a hill. Whenever he nears the top, it rolls back down and he must start again.)

 

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